Don’t Shoot the Pianist: Creative firms, workers, and neighbourhood gentrification

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.