关键词: 商业绅士化, 文化创意产业, 城市更新, 文化消费, 阶层置换, 隔离

Abstract:

Commerce is the most active and one of the most important functions of a city, which significantly influences the urban development and urban restructuring process. Though gentrification has becoming a hot topic of urban studies since 1960s, much less attention has been focused on the commercial changes compared with the residential counterpart. Commercial gentrification is the phenomenon of class displacement caused by retail up-gradation, which has become a generalized transformation of commercially utilizing urban space that mostly catering to middle and up-class consumers. In recent two decades, increasingly evident commercial gentrification phenomenon emerges with the rising of cultural and creative industry, as well as retail-oriented revitalization practices in many countries. So, it attracts worldwide academic attention, and specific studies on commercial gentrification becomes more than before, which also due to multiple sources of big data and new quantitative analysis. Although several Chinese geography researchers have already made academic reviews on gentrification studies, there is nothing on commercial gentrification specially still now. This paper firstly traces back the process of commercial gentrification researching, which has undergone a transit from being overlooked to being emphasized gradually. Secondly, it summarizes the contents of these papers, according to the background of neighborhoods commercial changes, the characteristics, the promoters and mechanism of commercial upgradation, as well as the social effects in displacement and segregation. It argues that the concept of commercial gentrification coined by Zukin should be expanded, and majority studies are restricted to a narrow explanation of empirical researches, which to some extent due to the limiting of available data and wide-used methods in a long time. Thirdly, it puts forward some gaps of commercial gentrification studies based on the trend and characteristics of urban revitalization and consumption transformation in current China, which will contributes to the understanding of the complexity of gentrification geography. At last, it suggests that multiple urban policies should be established in order to strengthen the survivability of longtime local small businesses and to protect the right of displaced low-income residents. This paper will enrich the literature of gentrification research and provide the basis for urban policy making for high-quality development.

Key words: commercial gentrification, cultural and creative industry, urban revitalization, cultural consumption, class displacement, segregation