Kitsos, Tasos, Nathan, Max and Gutiérrez-Posada, Diana (2025). Don’t Shoot the Pianist: Creative Firms, Workers, and Neighbourhood Gentrification. Economic Geography, 101 (1), pp. 60-85.
Abstract
We examine links between creative activity and gentrification at the neighbourhood level. These dynamics are both complex and important to understand. Artists may help ‘upgrade’ inexpensive neighbourhoods before being displaced, including by higher-paid creative service workers. Alternatively, creative activity may follow patterns of high-income customers and locales. Many city leaders hope creative industries can drive urban growth, while worrying about these highly localised impacts. However, outside case studies, these links are poorly understood. Drawing on urban theory and recent creative industries debates, we frame neighbourhood ‘upgrading’ in larger processes of competition for urban space, then identify distinct creativity-gentrification channels for firms, workers and arts / service activities. We explore impacts on neighbourhoods in England and Wales, via rich microdata on firms and workers between 2001 and 2021. We test aggregate links between creative activity and subsequent gentrification, then explore channels across actors, activity types, level of clustering, the urban hierarchy and property types. Largely, we find very small associations between creative clustering and gentrification in the following decades. Links are larger for creative workers than firms, though less stable. Links are stronger in London and larger cities; in neighbourhoods with denser clusters of creative firms, changes in gentrification scores are three to seven times larger. Overall, arts workers and businesses are most implicated in gentrification, though the former lead and the latter follow neighbourhood change. The findings have important implications for urban economic development and urban planning policy.
Publication DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2025.2470721 |
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Divisions: | College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Economics, Finance & Entrepreneurship College of Business and Social Sciences College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Centre for Personal Financial Wellbeing Aston University (General) |
Additional Information: | Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, on behalf of Clark University. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | creative industries,gentrification,Cities,housing markets |
Publication ISSN: | 0013-0095 |
Last Modified: | 01 May 2025 08:41 |
Date Deposited: | 11 Feb 2025 15:43 |
Full Text Link: | |
Related URLs: |
https://www.tan ... 95.2025.2470721
(Publisher URL) |
PURE Output Type: | Article |
Published Date: | 2025-03-24 |
Published Online Date: | 2025-03-24 |
Accepted Date: | 2025-01-21 |
Authors: |
Kitsos, Tasos
(![]() Nathan, Max Gutiérrez-Posada, Diana |
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