Gentrifying Scenes

Why are romantic comedy and creative-class dramedy cities often assumed to be safe for their protagonists? How do touristic image itineraries become charged with gentrifying the cities they depict? And how do nostalgic representations of working-class pasts operate within the glossy, genericized aesthetics of contemporary television? In Gentrifying Scenes, Kim Wilkins offers a new understanding of how gentrification has become both a material process of displacement and a powerful cultural language for making sense of contemporary urban life. As Wilkins shows, gentrification is not only a process of urban change that increasingly affects larger portions of society, but has also come to form a particular narrative in the popular imaginary and, in turn, a term of cultural critique. This book explores the space between these understandings of gentrification, the political affordances and frictions they create, and the mediated visions of urban life they produce.Wilkins argues that registering a screen city as gentrified, un-gentrified, or gentrifying is more than a matter of locating a film or television series in a particular neighborhood or under the conditions of class-based urban change. Gentrification draws and redraws borders across our screen cities, mapping and rerouting trajectories for places and people---it divides characters, styles, and narratives as apparently belonging within or bound to particular types of cityscapes. As a result, it shapes assumptions about where certain stories can be told, who belongs in particular urban environments, and which spaces appear desirable, authentic, safe, or threatening.Through analyses of texts ranging from Berlin-set romantic comedies to British crime dramas, from Amélie and Emily in Paris to Netflix's Heartbreak High, Wilkins investigates why some screen cities are so readily understood as gentrified. Exploring how these representations both feed into and are fed by the expanded use of gentrification as cultural critique, Gentrifying Scenes demonstrates that reading screen cities through the lens of gentrification means coming face to face with who and what we have come to expect to find where and when. The result is a compelling account of how screen culture shapes our understanding of cities, belonging, and urban change.