Gentrification is the continuous cycle of generations in which higher income households displace lower income residents of a city neighborhood. Although this process takes decades to change the demographics of the urban development, it changes neighborhood travel characteristics and transportation planning/infrastructure requirements. Should transportation engineers care about gentrification while designing roads, bridges, highways, freeways? If we (transportation engineers) build it would they have to leave? Are transportation engineers creating the cycle of gentrification by developing master plan of a city? There will be many concerns that we as a transportation engineers do not take in to account when we start the first phase …show more content…
The term gentrification came from British sociologist, Ruth Glass. She coined the term “gentrification” in 1964 to describe the influx of middle-class people displacing lower-class worker residents in urban neighborhoods. Her examples include London city, and its working-class districts such as Islington.
What is Gentrification?
Gentrification, a pattern of change in which current resident are forced to move out because they cannot afford to stay in the gentrified neighborhood. The recent studies have found that the rising economy is not the reason of displacement throughout the highly dense neighborhood. The demographic composition of gentrifying neighborhoods can be reversed through the process of successive or replacement driven by accelerated housing stocks. This housing stock prices are marked both by unequal retention of existing residents and migration of wealthy/rich people to neighborhood. Families of people who have been living for generation at one place are being forced out due to expensive property land is the serious concern for future generations to face. This situation will have sever effect on future generation and they will have very few/expensive options to …show more content…
The good news is that a growing share of U.S. neighborhoods are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, both because fewer neighborhoods deliberately exclude minorities entirely and because recent immigration has made the population more diverse (Turner & Rawlings, 2009). But progress in creating racially and economically diverse neighborhoods has been slow, so forces that threaten to bring gentrification and displacement to neighborhoods that are currently racially and economically diverse are of concern.
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How transportation development creates gentrification in an urban area?
There are many factors (such as major construction development, highway development, commercial zone development, transit development) that forces lower-class people to force out from their homeland to outer skirt of the city.
In an urban setting, virtually any large public infrastructure project is likely to have at least some impact on the demography of surrounding neighborhoods. New transportation infrastructure simultaneously creates disseminates, such as noise and traffic congestion, and amenities, such as increased mobility and accessibility (Kilpatrick et al., 2007). The interstate highway system provides one example of how transportation investment impacts metropolitan demography. From the 1950s through the 1990s, the extension of the