Right-of-way gentrification: Conflict, commodification and cosmopolitanism

Abstract

As gentrification processes accelerate in American cities, how do newcomers become solidly in-place while longtime residents become hopelessly out-of-place in neighbourhood public spaces? Bringing focus to the often-overlooked public right-of-way – streets, sidewalks and alleys – I examine social rhythms comprising this network of public spaces when used as an everyday infra-structure of transportation and socialisation or when configured for special events. Using the notion of symbolic economy to link the social production of public space with the municipal regulation of public space, this essay approaches gentrification from three perspectives: conflict, com-
modification and cosmopolitanism. Focusing on Highland, a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood in Denver, Colorado, I first delve into skirmishes over street legitimacy. I then unpack quiet workaday measures used by cities to regulate the public right-of-way, namely parking policy and liquor license issuances. I move on to the commodification of ethnic culture by those who ultimately benefit from the displacement of Latino families from North Denver. Lastly, I engage with the concept cosmopolitanism, arguing that diversity discourses, both in the academy and on the street, obscure important relationships between asymmetrically positioned symbolic economies and low-level regulation of public space. Foregrounding routine urban governance over neoliberal
agendas, this study critiques gentrification as a commonsense urban policy.

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Urban Studies
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DOI: 10.1177/0042098015583783
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Right-of-way gentrification: Conflict,
commodification and
cosmopolitanism
Sig Langegger
Akita International University, Japan
Abstract
As gentrification processes accelerate in American cities, how do newcomers become solidly in-
place while longtime residents become hopelessly out-of-place in neighbourhood public spaces?
Bringing focus to the often-overlooked public right-of-way – streets, sidewalks and alleys – I
examine social rhythms comprising this network of public spaces when used as an everyday infra-
structure of transportation and socialisation or when configured for special events. Using the
notion of symbolic economy to link the social production of public space with the municipal regu-
lation of public space, this essay approaches gentrification from three perspectives: conflict, com-
modification and cosmopolitanism. Focusing on Highland, a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood in
Denver, Colorado, I first delve into skirmishes over street legitimacy. I then unpack quiet worka-
day measures used by cities to regulate the public right-of-way, namely parking policy and liquor
license issuances. I move on to the commodification of ethnic culture by those who ultimately
benefit from the displacement of Latino families from North Denver. Lastly, I engage with the con-
cept cosmopolitanism, arguing that diversity discourses, both in the academy and on the street,
obscure important relationships between asymmetrically positioned symbolic economies and
low-level regulation of public space. Foregrounding routine urban governance over neoliberal
agendas, this study critiques gentrification as a commonsense urban policy.
Keywords
diversity, gentrification, public space, street legitimacy, urban governance
Received September 2014; accepted March 2015
Public space is something predictable that
has been consecrated by a community as a
place where they can simply be themselves.
(Father Jose
´Lara, Former Pastor,
Our Lady of Guadalupe)
What happens a lot of the time is all that
ethnicity goes with the people, which is sad.
(Paul Tamburello, Real Estate Developer)
To inform me about neighbourhood change
in a rapidly gentrifying North Denver neigh-
bourhood called Highland, real estate
Corresponding author:
Sig Langegger, Faculty of International Liberal Arts, Akita
International University, Okutsubakidai-Tsubakigawa, Yuwa,
Akita, 010-1292, Japan.
Email: slangegger@aiu.ac.jp

developer Paul Tamburello suggested I
interview him while he drove me around. A
businessman with long-term personal and
economic knowledge of the area, he pointed
out former crack houses remodelled by
urban pioneers, a service station repurposed
an eatery, and even bullet holes in apartment
buildings – reminders of the violent turf
wars fought by Black and Latino gangs dur-
ing the 1980s and 1990s. He told me a story
of surreptitiously kicking a hypodermic nee-
dle out of the sightline of prospective home-
buyers, who saw him do this and bought the
property regardless. During much of the
tour, he pointed out struggling Mexican pan-
darias, taquerias and pin
˜ata stores.
Tamburello told me how numerous long-
standing family-owned restaurants have
closed, their spaces reopened as hip bistros
that, according to him, ‘take away the his-
tory and soulfulness of Highland’. To com-
bat Highland losing its character – its soul,
as he put it – he imagines a ‘bodega tour’, a
walking tour highlighting Highland’s disap-
pearing ethnicity. Clearly, such a tour would
place ethnicity on display and run counter
to Father Jose
´Lara’s insistence that Latinos
require a space ‘to be themselves’. It would
compel them to perform rather than simply
be. Framing this study are the complex ten-
sions between economic development and
neighbourhood soul, between practicing cul-
ture and consuming culture. I foreground
the central role public right-of-way plays in
neighbourhood change. Importantly, I shed
light on how the production of social spaces
along streets and sidewalks is both facili-
tated and frustrated by parking policy, licen-
sing procedures, informal work, children at
play, strolling and church festivals. Changes
to these activities alter tempos and rhythms
of neighbourhood life.
Theoretical lens
This study grapples with the following ques-
tion: As gentrification processes accelerate,
how do newcomers become solidly in-place
while longtime residents become hopelessly
out-of-place (Cresswell, 1996) in neighbour-
hood public spaces? I focus on streets and
sidewalks and how they are used as everyday
infrastructures of transportation, everyday
socialising and what happens when they are
configured for special events. After a brief
neighbourhood history and discussions of
my theoretical framework and research
methodology, this article approaches gentri-
fication from three perspectives: Conflict,
commodification and cosmopolitanism.
Focusing on conflict, I delve into skirmishes
over street legitimacy. Who belongs? When?
Doing what? Concentrating on obscure yet
quotidian measures used by cities to deter-
mine who belongs in the public right-of-way
and what behaviours are legitimate there, I
discuss the evolution of parking regulations
and the issuance and denials of liquor
licenses in Highland. I then move to the
commodification of ethnic culture by those
who ultimately benefit from the elimination
of ethnic culture from public space. Early in
gentrification processes, public spaces
become more socioeconomic and culturally
diverse. Celebrations of diversity positioning
marginalised communities in danger of dis-
placement contribute to gentrification.
Not only can public practice be out-of-
place, it can be out-of-time. Public space,
though marked by surprising diversity, is
stabilised by ritualised rhythms. Each neigh-
bourhood has unique temporal patterns and
spatialised rituals. Being comfortable practi-
cing one’s culture in a neighbourhood pre-
supposes being comfortable with its daily
and weekly tempos. For Lefebvre (1996a),
any analysis of society that does not incor-
porate these ritualised and normalised
rhythms will come up short of decoding
2Urban Studies

social space. Extending this theory, Edensor
(2010) suggests that a host of shared tem-
poral reference points and shared spatial
habits concretise cultural practices. This
sense of a shared synchronicity orchestrates
our movements within the city and in rela-
tion to others. Temporalised practices in
public space provide a ‘a communal way of
seeing the world in consistent terms’
(Edensor, 2010: 8), thus facilitating cultural
reproduction (Calhoun and Sennett, 2007).
The notions of localised time and tempora-
lised space bring objective scholarship closer
to the reality of everyday urban experience.
In what follows, I show how the temporality
of Highland’s public spaces ceased to be
comfortable for longtime residents, most of
whom share Catholic religiosity and Latino
ethnicity. As gentrification advanced these
public spaces become more comfortable
more of the time for the predominantly
white, middle-class and secular newcomers.
At home in Highland, newcomers work to
reproduce their cultural norms in public
space. In a word, this is how the gentrifica-
tion of space operates; the rhythms of public
space are changed to reinforce and repro-
duce gentrifier norms and practices, while
the cultural practices of longtime residents
become freighted with touristic eroticism.
Understanding the subtleties of this process
and how it relates to residential gentrifica-
tion requires a solid theoretical groundwork,
to which I now turn.
A source of images and memories, a lan-
guage of exclusion and entitlement, and
therefore a powerful tool for framing and
thereby controlling urban space, the notion
of symbolic economy (Zukin, 1995) provides
a robust framework for thinking through
neighbourhood change under neoliberal
governance. A dominant component of the
symbolic economy is discourse comprising
the creative city (Florida, 2002, 2004), which
draws civic leaders into orbit around ‘extant
neoliberal development agendas’ (Peck,
2005: 740). To fuel economic development
cities work hard to attract and maintain
vibrant art scenes, research-oriented sectors
and hip retail zones. Here the devil is indeed
in the details, particularly in workaday eco-
nomic development policy, land use and
building codes, business licensing proce-
dures, transportation planning and parking
regulations. Business practices, cultural atti-
tudes, bureaucratic protocols and consumer
behaviours work in concert to normalise
neoliberal accumulation processes (Jessop,
1995; MacLeod, 1997; Peck and Tickell,
1992). Enmeshed in city documents and
business plans, symbolic economy changes
public spaces.
Different cultures produce different sym-
bolic economies. In Highland, two symbolic
economies – one rooted in Latino urbanism,
the other in what can be termed Anglo
urbanism – work to produce profound
neighbourhood diversity. On one hand, reg-
nant notions of the city as a corporation
constructed to facilitate profitable commerce
and protect property rights emerged in
Northern Europe from the late Middle Ages
(Frug, 1999). On the other hand, cities estab-
lished in the New World and planned
according to the Laws of the Indies by the
Spanish Empire foregrounded community
and religion (Diaz, 2005). In a word, com-
munity and Catholicism produce and are
products of a symbolic economy that
diverges radically from one centred on
Protestantism and capital accumulation.
Unchallenged discourses about the benefits
of this type of diversity veil profound dis-
agreements about neighbourhood character.
These discourses reveal disconnects between
rights to the city and property rights (Berrey,
2005; Medoff and Sklar, 1994; Valverde,
2005; Zukin, 2010). Finally, they cloud how
racial and ethnic prejudice sequester in
workaday governance. Terms such as blight,
development and revitalisation are freighted
with moral judgement, exposing power
Langegger 3

asymmetries between Anglo and Latino
urbanism. Highland resident Marty Roberts
insists ‘Highland was ‘‘vital’’ before it was
revitalized’. Blomley names this rhetorical
dynamic ‘semantic smoothing’ (Blomley,
2007). Defining neighbourhood conditions
in terms of the dominant symbolic economy
disrespects marginalised communities. It also
obscures a divide between governance at the
level of the state, concerned with rights of
the individual, and urban governance,
centred on property rights.
Different cultures produce different pub-
lic spaces. Everyday public space has signifi-
cantly different meanings when viewed
through different cultural lenses (Young,
1990). My argument is that the gentrifica-
tion of Highland’s public right-of-way
results from the successful cultural reproduc-
tion of middle-class norms in these everyday
working-class spaces. More than a claim to
legitimate presence in diverse public space,
the gentrification of public space occurs
when middle-class presuppositions and pre-
dilections become commonsensical public
practices. By privileging low-level municipal
governance concerned with property rights
and human conduct over economic and ethi-
cal philosophies comprising notions of per-
sonal qualities and human rights, I add
important nuance to scholarship orbiting
the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1996b). By
contrasting rights-claims based in property
with those based in culture, what Lefebvre
calls ‘meander[ing]s through nostalgia and
tourism’ (Lefebvre, 1996b: 157), this study
exposes bureaucratic processes that, depend-
ing on one’s position in the economy and
often one’s ethnicity and race, facilitate or
frustrate cultural reproduction in public
space.
Methods
After the recession of the 1980s, a third wave
of gentrification marked by public/private
development projects advanced (Wyly, 2002;
Wyly and Hammel, 1998; Wyly et al., 2004).
Gentrification is simultaneously embedded
in local scales and has become a ‘global
urban strategy’ that is ‘densely connected
into circuits of global capital and cultural
circulation’ (Smith, 2002). The microgeogra-
phies of public space matter too (Blomley,
1997). What helped me disentangle everyday
urbanism was to focus on right-of-way man-
agement (Blomley, 2007, 2011), neighbour-
hood aesthetics (Blomley, 2005a, 2005b),
business licensing (Valverde, 2003), land
use zoning (Valverde, 2005), and the raft of
laws, policies and guidelines that shape
architectural, economic and social fabrics of
street life (Valverde, 2009). By foreground-
ing low-level governance, this study critiques
gentrification as a commonsense urban
policy.
I agree with Fairbanks who insists that
ethnography is a particularly useful metho-
dology for the study of urban governance
and governmentality (Fairbanks, 2012).
Combining ethnographic and archival meth-
ods, I moved between regulatory policies
and business practices as they are conceived
and how they are experienced. This study
draws from 60 narrative interviews and
many spontaneous discussions with longtime
Highland residents, newcomers, real estate
developers and brokers, community acti-
vists, business owners and city employees
over the course of five years. Using these
perspectives, I gained insight into how differ-
ent people, often with divergent worldviews,
interpret and sanction public behaviour.
Using unobtrusive, participant and mobile
observation techniques, I gained additional
perspective on spatial practices constituting
the publicness of North Denver’s public
rights-of-way during both daily interaction
rituals and special events. A North Denver
resident myself, I went on many long walks,
bike rides and drives. Meandering at differ-
ent speeds throughout the day, observing
4Urban Studies

Highland’s avenues, streets and alleys, dee-
pened my understanding of neighbourhood
rhythms. During the coding process I wove
together interviews and field notes, uncover-
ing thematic consistencies between intervie-
wee points of view and the perspectives
gained through observation. Selected resi-
dents and experts read drafts and verified
and/or clarified my preliminary findings and
conclusions.
Triangulating ethnographic findings with
archival research helps tease out causal
mechanisms of dense social systems (Low,
1981; Low et al., 2005) and helps quantify
gentrification. Starting with census data I
found a rapid decline in North Denver’s
Latino population – from 67% in 2000 to
37% in 2010. Pursuing tax assessor files, I
learned that in the course of these 10 years,
real estate prices skyrocketed and that
numerous small, single-family homes were
scrapped and replaced with large expensive
houses and condominium complexes. In tan-
dem with a shift in neighbourhood ethnicity,
business license data showed an early 20th-
century shift from Mexican jewellry stores
such as Joyeria de Alfredo Acevedo to hip-
ster locales such as True Blue Tattoo, and
from Mexican restaurants such as Aztec Sol
to French bistros such as The Squeaky
Bean. Transportation planning archives
reveal that many Highland streets were
reconfigured from high-volume, one-way
thoroughfares to two-way, low-volume
neighbourhood streets lined with traffic-
calming, parallel parking. Public space is a
social process occurring within and in rela-
tion to a complex web of city bylaws, what
Staeheli and Mitchell (2008) call tissues of
regulation. In addition to researching munic-
ipal codes, permitting procedures, city and
neighbourhood planning documents, and
parking policies, I also pursued liquor board
hearing documents and transcripts. These
small levers of governance influence who
occupies the right-of-way, what they do
there and how long they remain. Who is
present in public produces public space. And
public space is an undertheorised component
of gentrification (Langegger, 2013, 2014).
Finally, my key informants proved vital.
Father Lara served as the pastor of Our
Lady of Guadalupe Church from 1967 to
1979. During this time he was constant wit-
ness to both ordinary and extraordinary his-
torical events and processes. Additionally,
his deep personal and spiritual connections
with the predominantly Catholic community
helped me bridge cultural divides between
my secular worldview and Latino religiosity.
Pastor of the Our Lady of Guadalupe
Church during the 1980s, Father Marshal
Gourley offered invaluable insight into pub-
licly celebrated liturgical festivals. Rudy
Gonzales, a native of North Denver, former
Denver city planner and Highland restau-
rant owner frequently reminded me that
rational city planning often has conse-
quences as irrational as they are longstand-
ing. This study would not have been possible
without Martha ‘Marty’ Roberts. A neigh-
bourhood activist since the early 1970s, she
was active in early street improvement cam-
paigns, Highland’s urban gardens, the con-
struction of a neighbourhood park on a
vacant lot and the neighbourhood’s success-
ful battle against a freeway interchange. Not
only was she an eager interviewee, she gra-
ciously allowed me access to her personal
archive in which she keeps the details of 40
years of neighbourhood activism.
Highland history
Like Gotham (2005), I feel that gentrifica-
tion should be considered in terms of neigh-
bourhood history and historical patterns of
social tension. Many Irish immigrants,
unable to find housing in Denver’s openly
anti-Catholic neighbourhoods, settled in
Highland in the late 1800s. As Highland
shifted from an Irish ethnic enclave to ‘Little
Langegger 5

Italy’ in the 1920s and then to a Latino bar-
rio in the 1940s, microgeographies of ethnic
religiosity, undergirded by stereotypes and
lingual barriers, framed its social and cul-
tural history (Goodstein, 2011; Hunt, 1999).
This history is visible in Highland’s built
environment (Figure 1). Between Pecos
Street and Kalamath Street stand three
Catholic Churches: the Irish Saint Patrick’s
Mission – located at Pecos Street and 33rd
Avenue; the Italian Our Lady of Mount
Carmel – located at Navajo Street and 36th
Avenue; and the Mexican Our Lady of
Guadalupe – located at Kalamath Street and
36th Avenue. As each ethnic group became
dominant in the neighbourhood, they were
compelled to build their own church. This
was never a congenial process. Father Lara
shared a story with me, often told to him by
his Latino parishioners of their parents’ and
grandparents’ attempts to organise the sale
of the Italian church to a rapidly growing
Hispanic Catholic congregation. In 1944,
Italian church officials bluntly refused an
ostensibly fair offer, unceremoniously stat-
ing, ‘Before you get this church, the Japs
will’. The wound of this racially charged
rebuffing stung for decades, fortifying bar-
riers within the neighbourhood.
Many longtime residents I interviewed
indexed neighbourhood change by referen-
cing who they encounter in local businesses
and in public parks as well as who they see
walking a dog or jogging on the sidewalk.
Park usage is strongly contingent upon park
maintenance (Harnik, 2010). Zukin (2010)
uses the term terroir to capture social and
physical factors contributing to the vibe
along commercial corridors. A change in ter-
roir is therefore an indicator of neighbour-
hood change. Analysing business license
data between 1970 and 2010, I noted a
Figure 1. Eastern section of Highland referencing streets, highways, and structures explored in this study.
Source: Map by author composed in QGIS using shape files from the City of Denver.
6Urban Studies

profound change in retail mix. Throughout
my fieldwork I met many longtime residents
who experienced this change. Along West
32nd Avenue and Tejon Street, dive bars
such as the Mahogany Lounge, Pic’s
Corner, The Dog House and The Junction
were notorious for underage drinking, gam-
bling, drug trafficking and fistfights that fre-
quently spilled into the streets. During the
1980s, much neighbourhood organising in
Highland worked to shut down these disre-
putable establishments by utilising small
levers of city governance. Community acti-
vists such as Marty Roberts compelled the
city to enforce liquor codes and noise ordi-
nances as well as any criminal laws these
establishments had violated. Ironically,
entrepreneurs are now busily repurposing
these long-shuttered dive bars into trendy
wine shops, coffee bars and eateries.
In many ways street design (Bosselman
et al., 1999; Zavetoski and Agyeman, 2014)
and geometrics (Appleyard B, 2005;
Appleyard D, 1981; Dumbaugh, 2005) deli-
mit and potentiate a host of different types
of neighbourhood terroir. In the end, chang-
ing streets changes neighbourhoods. City of
Denver transportation planning documents
indicate during the 1950s and 1960s neigh-
bourhood streets were reconfigured to carry
thousands of vehicles every day from white
collar jobs downtown through Highland to
Denver’s growing suburbs. Consequently,
service stations sprang up along these newly
configured high-capacity streets. Starting in
the 1970s, community activists began lobby-
ing the city for safer streets. ‘First we con-
centrated on fixing the sidewalks and
painting street crossings, then we started
petitioning for streets to be changed from
one-way collector streets to two-way neigh-
borhood streets. We worked to have stop-
lights replaced with stop signs to make
Highland a safe place for families, a safe
place for kids to play’, recalls Roberts.
Changing the right-of-way indeed changes
neighbourhoods; the process however is nei-
ther immediate nor predictable. To illus-
trate, Osage Street was changed from a
high-volume arterial to a local serving street
in 1983. Consequently Johnies’ Texaco, a
service station on 33rd Avenue and Osage
Street, went out of business in 1985. The
structure sat vacant for 20 years.
Surprisingly, though designed as a gas sta-
tion, it now houses one of Denver’s most
creative and popular eateries, Root Down
(Figure 1).
A repurposed service station is not the
only irreverent redevelopment in Highland.
On the corner of Boulder Street and 16th
Street stands the former Olinger mortuary,
where according to neighbourhood lore the
body of Buffalo Bill was embalmed in 1917.
Today this former industrial complex houses
three trendy, critically acclaimed restaurants
– Lola, Vita and Linger – as well as a coffee
shop, hair salon, yoga studio and the popu-
lar Little Man Ice Cream stand. Linger,
embodying the new neighbourhood vibe,
inventively transformed the enormous, ico-
nic Olinger Mortuaries fluorescent sign to
now advertise, ‘linger eatauries’. The com-
plex’s redevelopment and much of its funky
irreverence was Paul Tamburello’s brain-
child. He saw development potential not
only in Highland’s ethnic history but also in
its abandoned mortuary.
Conflict, commodification and
cosmopolitanism
Conflict
Ostensibly open to a diverse public realm, a
place wherein the Other is both encountered
and performed, public space is necessarily
conflicted space (Lofland, 1998; Sennett,
1990, 2001; Watson, 2006). Public space in
these terms must be considered as an amal-
gam of cultural territories, constantly
shaped and reshaped by symbolic boundary
Langegger 7

work. Changes to the contours of these
boundaries inscribe cultural spaces and serve
to index neighbourhood change. Michael
Miera, a North Denver resident and City of
Denver employee notes, ‘Fifteen years ago
Highland was a working-class Mexicano
and Chicano barrio; now all you see on the
street is hipsters with money to spend’.
Scholars note that Latino communities often
blur boundaries between private, familial
and public spaces (Crawford, 2008; Diaz,
2005; Richardson, 1982). My fieldwork cor-
roborates this claim. One longtime resident
waxed nostalgic about earlier times when,
‘all you needed to do if you wanted to hear
neighborhood gossip was open your window
or sit on your front porch and listen’.
Walking down predominately Latino blocks
I often noted toys spilling from front
porches onto front lawns and into sidewalks
as I entered the aural spaces of street-
spanning conversations between neighbours.
In contrast to these diffuse boundaries, driv-
ers of gentrification such as art galleries and
festivals (Shaw and Sullivan, 2011), boutique
shops and trendy restaurants represent sym-
bolic boundaries that sharply demarcate
space (Deener, 2007; Zukin, 2008; Zukin et
al., 2009). As entrepreneurs opened trendy
establishments along 32nd Avenue and
Tejon Street, stark symbolic borders of com-
merce overlaid once blurry neighbourhood
boundaries. As such, a symbolic economy
rooted in irreverent development and hip
vibes delegitimised Highland’s long-standing
Latino cultural practices.
Conflicts between symbolic economies
are often less noticeable. For example, many
Latinos are lowrider enthusiasts (Chappell,
2012). By the late 1990s men had stopped
displaying their cars on Highland’s streets
(Langegger, 2014) ‘in order to avoid hassles
with the city’, recalls one longtime resident
who had been warned by the police several
times he was in violation of the noise ordi-
nance. I noticed a similar dynamic learning
that a number of mechanics working out of
their home garages (compare Venkatesh,
2006) were shut down by the city when new
neighbours, unhappy with the noise and
activity in back alleys, reported these infor-
mal operations as violations of business and
zoning codes. Vital to consider here is that
in cases such as these the city enforces pri-
vate nuisance law, concerned with violations
impeding the enjoyment of private property,
not criminal law, concerned with violations
against the sovereign state. The former is
concerned with conduct, the latter with indi-
viduals. The city is obligated to protect
property rights and stop nuisance activities.
The state is obligated to convict and reform
criminals. This is the reason it remains diffi-
cult to conceptualise neighbourhood-scale
conflicts between symbolic economies in
terms of critical or cultural geography.
Economic and cultural theories are con-
cerned with people and their decisions. The
enforcement of most municipal bylaws –
simple zoning code or noise ordinances here
– is aimed at general behaviour, not at peo-
ple. Nonetheless people are affected, in turn
affecting neighbourhood character. This the-
oretical blind spot is significant because
small levers of city governance, largely
ignored in gentrification literature, are in
fact what dominate workaday city manage-
ment (compare Valverde, 2009).
Today conflicts along Highland’s right-
of-way primarily orbit on-street parking.
The following skirmishes over the use of the
public right-of-way, can be understood in
terms of de Certeau’s (1984) strategies and
tactics. Part of Denver’s economic develop-
ment plan is the implementation of time-
restricted parking zones along mixed-use
streets. The city also manages the microgeo-
graphies of permit parking to increase avail-
able parking for restaurant and retail
customers. These policies can be read in
terms of use and exchange value, revealing
the city’s priority to increase retail revenues
8Urban Studies

by commandeering reliable parking from
neighbourhood residents. The wording of
Denver’s Highland parking policy clearly
places customers over residents, intending to
‘change the parking habits of Highland resi-
dents’ in order to free up street parking
space for restaurant customers. In response
to this strategic policy Highland residents
employ guerilla tactics. One resident uses
traffic cones to save the parking space in
front of his house; another boasted of once
deflating an offending car’s tires as ‘payback
for stealing my spot’. I spoke to elderly resi-
dents who, even though they don’t drive,
applied for handicap spaces in front of their
residences along Pecos Street to, as one put
it, ‘make sure the hipsters ‘‘doing’’ brunch at
Root Down can’t find a parking spot on my
block’. These tactics and claims to personal
ownership of the public right-of-way make
sense when we consider the blurred bound-
aries of residential territory. Particularly in
inner-city neighbourhoods, Anderson (1990)
argues a car parked on the street in front of
one’s residence is a peculiar public state-
ment, serving as a vacant extension of self
and identity into public space. This common
inner-city practice thus blurs boundaries
between public and private ontologies while
appropriating public space for private iden-
tity management. Deprived of this personal
space, many residents become frustrated;
some openly vent their vexations.
Paradoxically, the legitimate presence of all
residents, both longtimers and newcomers,
in the public right-of-way is usurped by pri-
vileging short-term parking for transient
retail and restaurant clientele. Consequently,
parking rhythms change from drawn out
workdays and weekends to bursts of happy
hours and weekend brunches. Inserting
Lefebvre (1996a) here, we see that gentrifica-
tion can be understood as not merely a spa-
tial but also a rhythmic process.
Who parks, residents or customers, and
when they park are related facets of the
conflict over legitimacy in the public right-
of-way. The issuance of liquor licenses con-
stitutes another facet, one that clearly
reveals elements of opposing symbolic
economies during neighbourhood change.
After all, the same people who wait in long
lines on sidewalks and amble back to their
parked cars are those who drive to Highland
specifically to eat, drink and socialise. Not
only did working-class informants broadly
resent changes brought about by gentrifica-
tion, they begrudged that Highland’s new
restaurants are primarily marketed toward
people who live outside the neighbourhood.
Analysing liquor license hearing transcripts
and discussing neighbourhood change with
business owners and newcomers, I noticed
terms such as ‘revitalisation’, ‘positive
energy’ and even the word ‘everyone’ used
as proxies for middle-class, trendy and
desired. Foregrounding this hip new terroir
over ethnic character serves to validate and
even valorise gentrification.
Colorado liquor license hearings place the
onus on the applicant to establish neigh-
bourhood need for any additional business
that will be licensed to serve alcohol. As
Highland gentrified, exactly who constitutes
this neighbourhood need, residents or visi-
tors, became increasingly important. Most
new restaurants in Highland are sited in
locations once occupied by bars and restau-
rants, so changes to zoning and building
codes or parking requirements were typically
unnecessary. However, all changes to restau-
rant concept and ownership requires
approval by the liquor tribunal. In the early
2000s the tone of most new restaurant liquor
license hearings was hopeful. Phrases such
as ‘the neighbourhood is undergoing devel-
opment’ and ‘the expected revitalisation of
Highland’ dominated testimony in favour of
new restaurants. A few years later, extant
conditions rooted in cosmopolitanism such
as ‘diverse pulse of the neighbourhood’ and
‘eclectic neighbourhood buzz’ dominated
Langegger 9

testimony in favour of still more license issu-
ances. By 2007 Highland’s ethnic diversity
had been semantically smoothed with touris-
tic terms such as hip, diverse and eclectic.
With the application in 2011 for Williams &
Graham, a speakeasy concept restaurant,
the focus shifted away entirely from neigh-
bourhood residents toward gastronomical
tourists. In this case, testimonials included
statements such as ‘Highland is now a desti-
nation for people who would frequent a
speakeasy!’ and ‘everyone seems to be
excited about a bar moving into the neigh-
bourhood’. The symbolic economy of a mid-
dle-class, consumption-based ethos apparent
in this temporal reading of liquor license
hearing transcripts illuminates how rhetoric
came to privilege urban vibe, eclectic mix
and diversity as a profitable community
asset (Berrey, 2005) over the ethnic diversity
of the neighbourhood.
In the preceding cases favouring a mod-
ern ‘vibe’ over Highland’s ethnic past was
merely implied. Liquor license hearings for
ethnic restaurants expose the sharper edges
of the boundaries between symbolic econo-
mies. Licensing and excise should be a mat-
ter of evenhanded rather than prejudicial
rationality. On the surface, each establish-
ment must ascertain two things: neighbour-
hood need and its ability to responsibly
serve alcohol. In every single case of the new
establishments I reviewed there was a sense
of purpose and possibility from both appli-
cants and hearing officers. However the case
was altogether different for long-established
Mexican restaurants. The tone of Rosa
Linda’s, Aztec Sol’s and Patzquaro’s liquor
board hearings were openly confrontational.
Each restaurant wanted to serve alcohol or
augment their existing bar in order to vie
within the increasingly competitive neigh-
bourhood. Unlike hearings for the new res-
taurants, the tenor of these transcripts was
outright patronising. Clearly not satisfied
with the establishment of neighbourhood
need, the hearing officers demanded proof
of economic necessity, essentially forcing
applicants to argue for their ability to stay
afloat in Highland’s rapidly expanding res-
taurant scene.
Rosa Linda’s serves as an instructive case,
mostly because of the timing of the applica-
tion, right when new applicants and hearing
officers were exhorting the ‘diverse pulse’
and ‘eclectic mix’ of Highland. At their
liquor license hearing on 6 June 2006, Rosa
Linda’s manager Oscar Aguirre testified,
‘More and more customers are leaving the
restaurant because they can’t order margari-
tas’. Their current license only allowed the
sale of beer and wine, not mixed drinks; he
was seeking a hotel/restaurant license, under
which hard liquor can be served. The pro-
ceeding began with the hearing officer stat-
ing he did not ‘see a compelling reason to
change this license’. Only after Rosa Linda’s
demonstrated neighbourhood and economic
need in addition to strong community invol-
vement over the years evidenced by thou-
sands of donated meals distributed over the
holidays, did the hearing officer reluctantly
grant the change. Ostensibly neutral, pro-
found power asymmetries drive low-level
governance. Consequently, while the gears
of municipal governance barely grind into
alignment for longstanding establishments,
they shift smoothly into motion for new res-
taurants that align with creative city dis-
courses. Looking closely at liquor tribunals,
we see neoliberal rhetoric not only embedded
in the dominant symbolic economy but also
normalised by city bureaucracies.
Commodification
Cities increasingly use entertainment as a
driver of commercial viability and gentrifica-
tion (Lloyd, 2010; Zukin, 2010), which tends
to commodify neighbourhood character
(Deener, 2007; Mele, 2000). In line with
Tamburello’s ‘bodega tour’ as a means of
10 Urban Studies

celebrating Highland’s ethnic character, his
anchor business in the Olinger redevelop-
ment grew out of the desire to profit from
maintaining Highland’s ‘soul’ (see Figure 1).
By repurposing a mortuary he commodified
death. In Marxian terms, commodification is
simply changing a use value into an exchange
value, in other words altering something so
that it can be bought and sold. Often the
only thing altered is perspective. In leasing
Olinger’s first restaurant space to Lola
Mexican Fish House, Tamburello changed
the perspective on death from the business of
embalming, cremation and burial to one
framed by a tourist gaze (Urry, 2002). Lola
is a concept ‘coastal Mexican restaurant’,
based in an openly touristic view of Mexican
culture, one that in Tamburello’s words ‘cele-
brates fiesta and captures the spirituality of
death’. Lola’s Jamey Fader of the Big Red F
Restaurant Group notes ‘I want Lola to feel
like a Mexican grandmother’s house; when
you walk in, it’s modern and hip, with a
reverence for the sacred’. Sipping aged
tequila and enjoying red snapper tacos, Lola
patrons consume simulacra of the spirituality
of death.
Catholicism socially and physically marks
Highland. Tucked into the upper east corner
of the neighbourhood sits Our Lady of
Guadalupe Church located along the inward
curve of Interstate 25, separated from down-
town by the formerly industrial Platte River
Valley (Figure 1). This predominantly
Latino pocket surrounding the church does
not appear on the mental maps of newco-
mers, many of whom shared stories of stum-
bling across this ‘unexpectedly quaint’ space
while strolling through the neighbourhood.
For them, finding this unanticipated concen-
tration of Latino culture, an enchanting
surprise for many, legitimates their decision
to move to a gentrifying, if still slightly edgy,
neighbourhood. But for the Latino
residents, this church, its parking lot, and
the surrounding streets and sidewalks are
places they have long been comfortable
practicing their religion in public.
Particularly during festivals the physical-
ity and social practices in and around Our
Lady of Guadalupe reveal rifts of cosmopo-
litanism. Events held in the public right-of-
way such as church bazaars, Ceremonia
Tonantzin and el Dia de los Muertos are
components of Latino symbolic economy.
These street festivals ensure that cultural
norms and meanings are passed between
generations, sustaining and intertwining reli-
gious, linguistic and social practices. For
newcomers stumbling upon these festivals
the experience of culture is necessarily tour-
istic, amounting to enchanted voyeuristic
moments. One Highland newcomer men-
tioned that while out on an afternoon walk
not far from her house she ran into ‘a
Mexican street fair’. She continued, ‘I felt
like something magical happened, like I was
in a dream’. Other newcomers used phrases
such as ‘it’s like walking back in time’ and
‘it’s like walking down a street in Mexico’
and ‘all you hear around is Spanish being
spoken, it’s definitely a different type of
experience’. Here temporality and rhythm
are important. For newcomers, cultural fes-
tivals and Sunday masses are things one vis-
its on weekends, experiences one has
occasionally. These instances are individu-
ally consumed and do not, as they do for
Latino neighbourhood residents, sustain a
sense of community. The rhythms of these
festivals reassure newcomers that they
moved to a cool, hip, and culturally diverse
neighbourhood. They also draw new resi-
dents. Watching ‘cute little kids dressed up
in traditional Mexican costumes, dancing,
and running around’ reinforced one couple’s
decision to move to Highland. Turning into
performative objects of the tourist gaze
Langegger 11

(Urry, 2002), people simply practicing their
culture (Calhoun and Sennett, 2007) become
neighbourhood amenities.
The tenor of festivals has changed consid-
erably during gentrification. In the span of
two decades Our Lady of Guadalupe’s litur-
gical spaces changed into consumable ame-
nities. Not simply the festivals themselves
but the permeability of the boundaries
between public and private, sacred and secu-
lar, and familial and communal constituted
the shapes of this cultural space. Remarking
on the constant permeability of sacred and
public space in Highland, and the vital role
that everyday public rights-of-way played in
cultural reproduction, Father Gourley
recalls that in the mid 1980s:
We had a lot of street theater for holy week;
we would reenact the Passion of Christ
inside the church. We didn’t just read it.
We acted it out, with nails and blood and
screaming, the whole thing! It was just
incredible! We’d continue this procession
for blocks beyond the church. And after
parading through the neighborhood we’d
come back around to the Church. It was a
way of using the neighborhood streets to tie
the community together.
According to Father Gourley and Latino
residents, who insist that because of ‘com-
plaints from new neighbors’ and ‘potentially
worrisome homebuyers’, a subdued Passion
of the Christ performance is now confined
within the walls of the church. Tellingly, the
Our Lady of Guadalupe Bazaar, a yearly
fundraising festival celebrated on the streets
surrounding the church, has become a yearly
tourist destination, now even mentioned in
real estate brochures. Incrementally, by
socially regulating the boundaries and tem-
porality of public space while passively con-
suming the spaces of religious festivals,
newcomers change streets that once knit the
community together into conduits for pene-
trating and exploiting indigenous culture.
Cosmopolitanism
The manifestation of racially, ethnically,
socially and culturally diverse actors sharing
urban space can be termed a cosmopolitan
turn. Much recent work in human geogra-
phy celebrates this current trend, observed
in both public spaces during festivals and
private spaces by means of inclusionary zon-
ing measures. A chorus of urban scholars,
notably Sennett (2001) and Amin (2008,
2012), claim this is a welcome change to the
white-flight, ghettoisation, concentrated
poverty and social injustices that marked
mid-century cities. Following this arc of
scholarship, increased diversity leads to the
celebration of, or at minimum a tolerance
for, other ethnicities, genders, ages, religions
and practices, culminating in a greater
potential for less divisive cities. This essay
has charted a more discouraging path
through the management of public space,
arguing that low-level governance aids and
abets socially unjust gentrification pressures.
I now address cosmopolitanism directly to
illustrate how gentrifiers articulate these
concepts as levers of neighbourhood change.
Scholars note that diversity in gentrifying
neighbourhoods can be a hotly contested
topic (Berrey, 2005). Whether with art walks
foregrounding gentrifier aesthetics (Shaw
and Sullivan, 2011) or commercial corridors
hawking images of diversity and tolerance
(Deener, 2007), inner-city neighbourhoods
are reconfigured in terms of an urbane sym-
bolic economy rooted in white middle-class
worldviews (Zukin, 2008). For example, a
City of Denver farmers’ market zoning code
authorises Highland’s farmer’s market to be
held along Boulder Street every Saturday
during the summer. This is a middle-class
public space event in which few longtime
residents have the inclination or the finances
to participate. The growing absence of long-
time residents from public space does not go
unnoticed by Highland residents. Often
filled with vastly divergent social, religious
12 Urban Studies

and career-oriented worlds, the public right-
of-way remains one of the few places newco-
mers and longtime residents come into con-
tact. Acknowledging that their presence was
altering neighbourhood patterns of diversity,
many newcomers puzzle as to how to use
streets and sidewalks to build cultural
bridges, what Anderson (2004, 2011) would
term cosmopolitan canopies, to foster inter-
ethnic contact within Highland’s diverse cul-
tural landscape. Two efforts, conceptualised
by newcomers and occurring along the
right-of-way, expose how cosmopolitanism
actually reinforces a thin notion of diversity.
Well-meaning newcomers eager to make a
positive impact on their new neighbourhood
proposed ideas for a First Sunday Stroll and
the LoHi White Table Cloth Dinner at
HUNI (Highland United Neighbors Inc. –
Highlands official registered neighbourhood
organisation) meetings.
Operating out of a 28-foot tall, 14,000-
pound metal dairy can, the Little Man Ice
Cream stand is a neighbourhood phenom-
enon. Located on the former Olinger
Mortuary’s loading dock, this space was
what newcomers mentioned most frequently
when I asked them what they consider pub-
lic space in Highland. On warm weekend
afternoons and evenings, its long, slow-
moving line up 16th Street is the place to see
and be seen for Highland newcomers and
visitors. It was also the starting point of the
First Sunday Stroll. This event was an
attempt to construct a cosmopolitan canopy,
a scripted space in which people assume
non-threatening roles of casual contact and
public eavesdropping. Proposed as a diverse
event, it rooted nonetheless in a decidedly
white middle-class notion of strolling and
talking. It was intended to get as many peo-
ple out meandering the streets of Highland
as possible, meeting and chatting with neigh-
bours, introducing children to potential
playmates, and, importantly mixing Latinos
and whites on the same streets at the same
time doing the same thing. By all accounts,
the event, which started and ended in the
summer of 2010, was a failure. Not many
people showed up and most of those who
did opted to hang out near Little Man Ice
Cream. Out in the neighbourhood, residents
simply sat on their front porches waiting for
people to meander by. Not many did.
Importantly, yet perhaps not surprisingly,
no Latinos took part.
Another cosmopolitan canopy con-
structed in the right-of-way was the LoHi
White Tablecloth Dinner. Envisioned as ‘the
whole community coming together for a
beautiful dinner on a lovely summer eve-
ning’, as one of its organisers shared with
me, the event was planned and articulated as
a means to use a meal shared in public space
to build common ground for the entire
neighbourhood. Focused around a white
tablecloth, the affair appealed to middle-
class notions of fine dining. Establishing the
event as a collection of diverse individuals,
the LoHi White Tablecloth Dinner invita-
tions requested attendees bring ‘dinner and
drinks for your family, a dessert to share,
plates, cups, utensils, and a family candle’.
This way the dinner would feature ‘different
candles lighting the individual faces of
diverse people at the table’. To ensure a level
socioeconomic diversity, neighbourhood
food stamp recipients were invited. Mixed
income became a proxy for racial diversity
(compare Berrey, 2005). The night of the
dinner was beautiful; participants enjoyed
the food and conversation. The setting was
certainly unique – a long table draped in
white stretching down tree-lined Bryant
Street in the western section of the neigh-
bourhood. Of note, this event not only pub-
licised newcomer culture, it was generally
derided by longtime residents who tend to
disassociate themselves from anything to do
with the realtor-coined ‘LoHi’ nickname for
(lower) Highland. One Latino informant
thought the event was ‘too fancy for the
Langegger 13

street’, another said it was ‘too sophisticated
for el barrio’. In effect, the LoHi White
Tablecloth Dinner and the First Sunday
Strolls worked toward the public display of
components of a newcomer symbolic econ-
omy along streets used less and less as physi-
cal components of a Latino symbolic
economy.
Temporary use of public streets for festi-
vals works toward establishing and stabilis-
ing neighbourhood solidarity (Staeheli and
Mitchell, 2008). By organising events, new-
comers privilege middle-class notions of cul-
ture and articulate notions of diversity and
inclusiveness. By inviting the entire neigh-
bourhood, ‘making concerted efforts to
include Latinos’, one HUNI member told
me with no apparent irony, ‘we’re trying to
tell them: it’s your neighborhood too’.
Additionally, newcomers openly support
Latino public events as efforts to ‘be
accepted in the neighborhood’, as a former
president of HUNI shared with me. New
Highland residents tend to see their neigh-
bourhood as Denver’s newest ‘hip, happen-
ing place’ and want to share this energy with
longtime residents. However, those con-
certed efforts to be accepted in the neigh-
bourhood remains, to many longtimers,
reminiscent of the Spanish colonisation their
ancestors experienced. Just as newcomers
attempt to be accepted in Highland, so too
did colonial Spanish settlers seek acceptance
in the American Southwest by making deter-
mined efforts, frequently invoking the
Catholic Church, to syncretise native and
Christian religiosity and change Aztec cul-
ture practices through the infusion of
European worldviews. ‘It’s odd’, shared a
former Chicano activist, ‘it feels like we’re
being colonized, again’.
Discussion
On the surface this study revolves around
cultural notions of diversity and the
appropriation of this slippery concept by
various architects of neighbourhood change.
Tamburello’s unrealised bodega tour, the
LoHi White Tablecloth Dinner and attempt
to establish a First Sunday Stroll serve as
examples toward this end. While diversity
factors into right-of-way gentrification, dis-
entangling its consequences and mapping its
contact points with more effective levers of
neighbourhood change required that I exam-
ine not only the intricate fabrics of cultures
but also the fine threads of municipal gov-
ernance. Doing so, I revealed how the spa-
tial contours of gentrification emerge from
frequently invisible power asymmetries
embedded in right-of-way socialising, park-
ing policy and business licensing. Blomley’s
(2007) term semantic smoothing is instruc-
tive here. Ignorant of past and present social
injustices and the lasting benefits of white
privilege, discourse that equivocates diver-
sity cloaks power asymmetries in equality.
This study exposes how difference is simulta-
neously celebrated as a diverse pulse and
flattened onto an even playing field, then
honed into a powerful gentrification tool.
Peering under the cloak, we find race and
ethnic discrimination woven into the arbi-
trary subtexts of commonsense urbanity
(compare Modan, 2007). Elsewhere, I argue
that in facilitating the gentrification of
North Denver neighbourhoods, the City of
Denver essentially policed out of existence
lowrider cruising (Langegger, 2014) and the
cultural significance of a neighbourhood
park (Langegger, 2013). Here I showed that
the gentrification of public space is often
subtle, relying not on police power but on
the little understood power of low-level city
bureaucracies. And I mapped this vector
back to the symbolic economies at play in
neighbourhood gentrification.
During Highland’s dramatic demographic
shift, unassuming, local-serving pizzerias
and tacquerias lost street legitimacy to hip
restaurants with taglines such as ‘farm-to-
14 Urban Studies

table’, ‘world street food’ and ‘Asian com-
fort food’. Without exception, these new res-
taurants align with the creative city rhetoric,
in that they are conceptualised, advertised
and managed in ways to attract customers
from the greater metropolitan region and
simultaneously to lure talent and investment
to Denver. In Highland, at first impercept-
ibly then strikingly, the critical mass of din-
ing patrons shifted from locals grabbing a
taco and a beer after work to culinary tour-
ists willing to drive to the neighbourhood,
hunt for a place to park, then wait in line
to sample ‘steamed buns with fried green
tomatoes, miso mayo, pimento, and Thai
basil’ or ‘honey-sriracha duck wings with
salted cucumber and togarashi ranch’.
Contemporaneously, social codes regulating
the boundaries and rhythms of Highland’s
public right-of-way shifted, privileging lunch
hour and night-out touristic consumption
over Latino everyday urbanism. Other street
rhythms changed too. Festivals, vital to the
reproduction of Latino culture, gradually
transformed into places to be gazed upon
and consumed as a neighbourhood amenity.
Territory is more than a spatial
concept; it has temporality and rhythm.
Commonsensical notions such as play,
work, rest and celebration have strong cul-
tural foundations. Looking closely at liquor
licensing hearing transcripts, I found that
middle-class symbolic economy is part and
parcel of the regulation of the city’s right-of-
way. Who parks, when, and why they park,
and whether their pedestrian movements
along sidewalks are driven by sporadic
bursts of consumption or the sustained,
intertwining movements of groups of friends
and families, directly impacts the rhythms of
everyday public space. Additionally, the
type and tenor of the restaurant scene is
directly connected to who waits in line for a
table and who, after a meal, strolls down
neighbourhood streets to their house or car.
I have shown that low-level municipal
bylaws matter. Using parking regulations,
the city of Denver intends to habituate resi-
dents to new temporal orders. ‘After all’,
insists transportation planner Cynthia
Patten ‘streets are public, not private prop-
erty’. An unintended consequence of these
regulations is the fortification of public–
private divides, boundaries that each long-
time resident mentioned was far more
permeable before ‘the hipsters started mov-
ing in’. Multiple scholars have noted that
Latinos practice a patently public culture
(Betancur, 2011; Davis, 2000; Diaz, 2005;
Rios, 2010; Rojas, 2010; Valle and Torres,
2000); others note that the boundaries
between public and private spaces for
Latinos is more blurred than for mainstream
society (Crawford, 2008; Hood, 2008). As
Highland gentrified, the rhythms of this per-
meability changed and as they did, so chan-
ged everyday spaces. Playing in the streets
and audible conversations between houses
gave way to closed windows and the open
admonishment of children playing on side-
walks and in alleys. More than one intervie-
wee informed me that the construction of
this boundary was enforced with police vio-
lence. ‘Who’ asked one longtime local, ‘calls
the cops on kids playing in the street?
Hipsters, that’s who!’ he answered.
Rhythmic shifts are also apparent with the
march of seasons. As Father Gourley noted,
rhythms of religiosity and celebration tied to
calendrical Catholic and Aztec traditions
changed as the focus of these festivals shifted
indoors to accommodate the gazes and com-
plaints of newcomers.
In Highland, a touristic cosmopolitanism
implies excitement over and tolerance of dif-
ference, rather than the amelioration of
injustice, and thus dislocates discussions of
rights from the mechanics of gentrification.
Extending Valverde (2012), I further insist
that this disconnect between rights to the
city and gentrification is woven into the fine
layers of municipal governance. This study
Langegger 15

shows how euro-centric notions of the city,
specifically those reproduced by parking pol-
icy and in tribunal procedures such as busi-
ness licensing, work to facilitate
gentrification pressure while frustrating indi-
genous claims to public space. We shed light
on this complex and essentially invisible pro-
cess when we consider rights to the city in
terms of urban governance rather than state-
level governance. States are structured
around constitutional legal canons; these
canons root in notions of human rights that
arose during Europe’s Enlightenment.
North American and European civil law is
therefore concerned with individual prosper-
ity, criminal deviance and penal reform.
Valverde (2012) helps us understand that
unlike civil law, municipal laws are con-
cerned with rights attached to property, not
to persons. I bridge this divide by showing
how licensing and right-of-way manage-
ment, intended to simply regulate private
and public property, affects individuals.
This brings us back to conflicting sym-
bolic economies. The euro-centric notions of
the autonomous self (Taylor, 1989) inter-
laced with those of real property and city
planning undergirding North American
urban governance (Valverde, 2012), dishar-
monise with Latino urbanism particularly in
the American Southwest (Davis, 2000; Diaz,
2005; Rios, 2010). Newcomers and longtime
residents often share overarching goals of
neighbourhood revitalisation; however, the
means of attaining these objectives are often
widely divergent. Considering the architec-
tures of low-level governance, this study
exposed how the regulation of the public
right-of-way frustrates the symbolic econ-
omy manifest in ethnic neighbourhoods by
favouring the symbolic economy of gentri-
fiers. Finally, I argued that in deconstructing
neighbourhood change, the type and tenor
of diversity must be carefully considered.
Put simply, conflict over street legitimacy,
cosmopolitanism and the commodification
of diversity are integral elements of the gen-
trification of public space. This article pro-
vides multiple perspectives to help scholars
reframe the often discussed yet seldom
empirically pursued relationships between
asymmetrically positioned symbolic econo-
mies and low-level regulation of public
space. Further research unravelling legal
geographies of urban governance will help
us recognise why longtime residents feel
increasingly excluded from public spaces in
gentrifying neighbourhoods.
Acknowledgements
This article would not have been possible if it
were not for my informants who took time out of
busy schedules to allow me to learn from their
experiences and insights. Many thanks to Jeremy
Nemeth, Stephen Koester, Anna Janes and the
three anonymous referees, all of whom provided
feedback and encouragement on this argument
and/or earlier drafts. Any mistakes, errors and
omissions are my own.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-
for-profit sectors.
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