Bushwhacking: accounts as symbolic violence in the arts-based gentrification of Bushwick, Brooklyn

A sizable body of research on arts-based gentrification has documented how artist residences have been strategically deployed by developers to kick-start capital reinvestment and lure so-called creative class professionals into formerly disinvested neighborhoods. Yet researchers rarely investigate how actual occupants of such residences perceive their role in neighborhood change. Addressing this gap, this article examines how residents of CastleBraid-a controversial luxury apartment complex designed for artists in Bushwick, Brooklyn-mediate tensions between their espoused preferences and the well-known negative consequences associated with gentrification. Drawing on the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that CastleBraid residents meaningfully account for gentrification through the practical logic of a particular group habitus which reinforces a shared identity and validates their presence in Bushwick. Moreover, I argue that these gentrification accounts constitute a form of symbolic violence which obscures underlying patterns of spatial inequality through misrecognition and the denial of gentrifiers' privilege. Throughout, I argue that a renewed engagement with Bourdieusian theory may facilitate insights into gentrifier meaning-making that transcend the usual stylized typology of gentrifiers.

Automated summary

This article examines how residents of the CastleBraid luxury apartment complex in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood mediate tensions between their preferences and the negative consequences associated with gentrification. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's cultural sociology, the study finds that residents make sense of gentrification through a group habitus, which obscures underlying spatial inequality patterns.