national register nomination for boulevard park historic

Responses to Gentrification from Architects and Planners
Geographers Neil Smith and Peter Williams, seeking to present alternatives to
mainstream discussions on gentrification, collected essays on gentrification’s effects on
British and American cities in Gentrification of the City. 37 In their introductory essay,
Smith and Williams invoke Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” stating that
gentrifiers’ return to the city occurs despite Americans’ traditional anti-urbanism because
inner cities are perceived as the wilderness. Gentrifiers thus become “urban pioneers,”
and, in a manner similar to Turner’s, their effects on the population where these pioneers
have expanded is largely ignored or discounted. 38
The gentrification process is not just a social formation according to Smith and
Williams. Despite the general decentralization of urban space, resulting in job centers
away from the urban core, major corporate headquarters still tend to be located in urban
centers. The people who work in these centers, typically executives and upper
management, benefit from proximity to their urban core offices and thus have more need
to locate near the city center than office workers who can live nearer suburban branch
offices. In addition, the cyclical nature of capital markets, with its boom and bust cycle,
was expressed in urban centers by the decline of cities and the resulting era of slum
clearance and urban renewal. Because urban renewal projects often created artifacts like
corporate office towers, this suggests a direct connection between urban renewal and
37 Smith, Neil, and Peter Williams, ed., Gentrification of the City. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986
38 Smith and Williams, Gentrification of the City, p. 16
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