Gentrification and landscape change

This chapter seeks to foster greater reflection on the significance of landscape within the study of gentrification. It begins by highlighting claims that landscape is a central, even a defining, feature of gentrification. A feature that has arguably been taken-for-granted. Then four distinct understandings of landscape are identified and discussed: landscape as material/physical world; landscape as space of social life and social relations of power; landscape as a symbolic text or ways of seeing; and landscape as lived space. The chapter concludes that landscape, as much as gentrification, can be viewed as a 'congested and contested concept' and it is hence unsurprising that a range of tensions have surrounded the definition and employment of both of these; but tensions have often been used productively to drive both theory and praxis into new terrains.