Gentrification and Resistance

Based on ethnographic research in Hamburg Sternschanze and utilizing the cultural criminological perspective as an underlying theme, this work explores the contested spaces of gentrified inner city neighborhoods. It examines the complex and sometimes paradox interplays of urban revaluation, criminalized anti-gentrification resistance and urban control. The main focus lies on the spatialized commodification of urban counter-culture and its incorporation into the process of gentrification. It is shown that by these processes, "authentic" anti-gentrification resistance becomes increasingly sanitized: blurred and hardly distinguishable from commodified rebellion it eventually loses its subversive power and political vigour, and - unwillingly - turns into an integral of the process of urban revaluation it is originally meant to defend.

Laura Naegler has a degree in Social Work and a M.A. in International Criminology. She is currently working as a lecturer of criminology at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf.