GENTRIFICATION OF MARGINALIZED NEW-WHITE CLASS: CONTENTS, THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND THE FUTURE
WU Qi-yan1, LIU Chun-hui2
1. School of Geographic and Oceanographic Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China;
2. Department of Geography, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210093, China
Abstract：The gentrification is a phenomenon of urban and social space change that was found and researched by Glass firstly in 1964. She found that the declined inner city began to revitalize with the renovation of the residential and the beautification of the living environment. Then the middle class invaded the original working class occupiers, the class of community structure was changed, which conclusively led to reconstruction of the social characteristics. It is not just an inhabitation problem or community phenomenon, but also causes the process of social space changes in the production activities and pattern of the inner city, such as creative industry, housekeeping, retail trade and etc. With the process of furthering geographical unevenness after the financial turbulence in 2008, new-white class either in the developed countries or in the developing world has been to suffer its consequence. So, the marginalization tendency of them who graduated from higher institutions is inevitable. As the result of that, their trajectory of gentrification would differ from the predecessors' in social-spatial traits, mechanism and consequence. In order to further complement and improve the general gentrification theory, this paper is trying to bring this topic into the traditional framework of gentrification studies, explores the new-white class characteristics of social space, the mechanism and consequences of new-white class gentrification, and then builds the research framework. The comprehension of impact of globalization on social space of Chinese cities will be assisted deeply by the research. Finally, author hopes that the paper can offer some new ideas for further research about the re-urbanization, updating and development in the inner city of Chinese big cities that are facing a new transition after "China's 12th Five Year Plan".
