Is Gentrification a Crime?

The destruction of cultural heritage is a war crime. Should peacetime destruction or displacement be a crime too?

Civil society is understandably horrified by catastrophic loss of cultural, societal and historically important architecture and communities during wartime. But when this happens more piecemeal or by less visibly aggressive means in peacetime, we seem able to ignore it, even where it occurs at scale. Ian Cooper argues that greater protection needs to be provided to built environment and to the people who live there to avoid their displacement.

Mass destruction in wartime

In February 1945, the UK Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Forces dropped 3,900 tons of high explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city of Dresden. The resulting firestorm destroyed more than 6.5km² of the city centre, killing 25,000 people. In March 1945, the US military delivered the single most destructive bombing raid in human history. An area of 14km² in central Tokyo was destroyed with 100,000 civilians dead and over one million left homeless. Both raids have been described as ‘war crimes’ because they used indiscriminate area bombing, targeting civilian infrastructure resulting in mass loss of civilian life (Addison & Crang 2006; Rauch 2019). Yet no allied war leaders were prosecuted for these raids even though there has long been a requirement that an attacker must attempt to discriminate between military targets and civilians and their property or be guilty of the war crime of ‘indiscriminate attack’ and ‘wanton destruction’ (Gutman et al. 2007).

In the context of conflict, the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property (UNESCO n.d.) offers protection to historic buildings and only those “of great significance to the cultural heritage of every people”. There is ambiguity about the extent to which non-historic buildings are protected from mass destruction where they have mostly social rather than historical significance even though the destruction of homes, towns and villages extinguishes the record of the lived experience of groups of people, resulting in the eradication of their cultural inheritance as a legacy to be passed on to coming generations. Resolution 2347 of the UN Security Council (2017) “deplores and condemns the unlawful destruction of cultural heritage … in the context of armed conflicts”. The protection afforded by the Hague Convention does not go far enough. According to the UK’s Imperial War Museum (2019), destroying cultural heritage often goes beyond the destruction of culturally significant monuments and buildings to strike at the heart of communities: “places, art and artefacts have been attacked by those who wish to exploit or even erase whole civilizations from history.”

The need for protection has pressing contemporary relevance. Recent conflicts in Kosovo (Herscher & Riedlmayer 2000), Syria (The Syria Institute 2020; NDTY World 2012) and Gaza (UNDOS 2023) have seen significant destruction of the physical and social infrastructure of groups of people, specifically the destruction of whole towns and neighbourhoods, that currently sit outside the protections provided for historic buildings with cultural significance in war time. For instance, the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been accused of ‘demographic engineering’ for using a ‘siege and destroy strategy’, first in Homs and then in Aleppo and Darayya (The Syria Institute 2020). His intention was, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy said, to "wipe Homs from the map" (NDTY World 2012). More recently, destruction of more than a third of Gaza’s homes through Israeli bombardment in pursuit of Hamas has led legal experts to apply the label ‘domicide’ – the mass destruction of dwellings to make a territory uninhabitable. But, while this concept is said to be increasingly accepted amongst academics, it is not recognised as a distinct crime against humanity under international law (Wintour 2023).

Large scale destruction in peacetime

Clearly war is an extreme catalyst for cities to lose cultural and architectural heritage. However, in peace time, egregious destruction of the built environment also occurs. Though often decried, it is not framed as a crime.  For instance, in Britain, after WW2, Comprehensive Development Areas were designated under the UK’s Town and Country Planning Act (1947). This allowed local authorities to acquire property in designated areas, using powers of compulsory purchase, to replan urban areas suffering from war damage or urban ‘blight’. In Glasgow, for example, such redevelopment between 1957 and 1975 was responsible for huge changes in neighbourhoods in the inner city. The Gorbals and Hutchesontown, for example, fell from nearly 45,000 inhabitants to just over 19,000 as people were moved out of their communities to peripheral developments on the city’s boundaries so making space for urban motorways.

Mass housing demolition again came back on to the UK’s agenda at the turn of this century. Central government funding for the demolition and redevelopment of post-war estates and Victorian and Edwardian terraced housing was made available through the New Deal for Communities programme, started in 1998. A subsequent formal evaluation of that programme found that “increasing proportions of owner-occupiers will help achieve outcome change and will dilute the scale of problems in regeneration areas; but existing residents in social housing schemes are unlikely to be able to purchase new owner-occupied dwellings" (Batty 2010). What the programme had achieved was gentrification.

Smaller scale change in peacetime

Gentrification increases the economic value of neighbourhoods. It is controversial because it changes their demographic composition through the potential displacement of incumbent residents (Finio 2022). Gentrification results from increased investments in a neighbourhood and its infrastructure by some combination of property development businesses, local government, or community activists, resulting in economic and social improvements for those who remain or move in. Disadvantaged groups are excluded because rents and sales prices increase (The Uprooted Project, 2024). The negative effect of displacement by gentrification are disproportionately experienced by the poor, the elderly and ethnic minorities (Dawkins 2023).

Gentrification is commonly described as involving displacement – the replacement of one set of people by those more able to pay as the costs of living in an area rise. But it can also be recognised as dispossession – a form of robbery where some social groups are deprived not just of their present environment but of the cultural heritage that it embodies These are handed over instead to other social groups for whom they may have no intrinsic value and so may be blindly replaced. As a result, gentrification has been described as ‘social cleansing’ (Lees & White 2019). Most planning decisions do not currently consider the dispossession caused by gentrification in terms of this wider significance. Yet it can result in the eradication of a (poorer) people’s ways of life, depriving them not just of where they live (Qiang et al. 2021), but impacting on their health (Delong 2023), as well as robbing them of their tangible and intangible cultural inheritance (Curry 2019) as a legacy to be passed on to their next generation.

Retaining cultural and architectural heritage for future generations

Wartime bombardment, urban planning policies and gentrification can all cause significant change to a city’s character, with potential for cultural heritage loss. The loss caused by the first is abhorred. While the nature of the destruction caused by the latter two is less catastrophic, it can still be traumatic. And yet they are deemed acceptable. Why is this? And how can built environment professionals respond to these issues raised here?

In conflict situations, we can use our professional expertise to assist, for instance, in the provision of bomb-proof neighbourhood safe spaces - as architects sought to do in WW2 (Cole, 2024). After conflicts, we can use our expertise to produce architectural evidence about assaults on the built environment which can be presented in juridical and political forums to investigate state and corporate violence (Weizman, 2019).

Outside of emergency situations, we can confront the significance of tangible and intangible components of cultural heritage of the built environment and their roles in giving meaning not just to people’ immediate lived experience but to how they hand on the baton (of their values and beliefs) from their parents to the next generation and beyond. To do this, we need to recognise that the built environment is about much more than land values or the performance characteristics of buildings. It tells us who we are (or aspire to be).  It is also crucial not just to our sense of place but to our self-identities and physical and mental well-being too.

The built environment is vulnerable to rapid destruction. Once it has gone, its meaning can only be built back slowly. An understanding of this fragility should be embedded in the initial training of would-be built environment professionals, especially planners and architects. The profound consequences of our own roles in the protection or destruction of the built environment needs to be understood and accounted for, whether as practitioners or researchers.

References

Addison, P. & Crang, J.(eds) (2006). Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden. Pimlico Press.

Batty, E. (2010). The New Deal for Communities experience: a final assessment. London: Department for Communities and Local Development.

Cassese, A. (2013). Cassese’s International Criminal Law, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cole, R. (2024). Sheltering at home: surviving the London Blitz and navigating a warming climate. Vancouver: School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of British Columbia.

Cooper, S. (2016). The “Forgotten Blitz” In WW2 that left hundreds dead and thousands homeless. War History Online. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/forgotten-blitz-scotland-left-thousands-dead-x.html

Curry, M. (2019). What we’re getting wrong about gentrification and cultural heritage, Rethinking Redevelopment (letter to the editor). The Architect’s Newspaper. https://www.archpaper.com/2019/01/gentrification-cultural-heritage-milton-curry/

Dawkins, C.J. (2023). On the injustices of gentrification. Housing, Theory and Society, 40(3), 261–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/14036096.2023.2181863

Delong, S. (2023), Urban health inequality in shifting environment: systematic review on the impact of gentrification on residents’ health. Frontiers in Public Health, 11:1154515, doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1154515

Finio, N. (2022). Measurement and definition of gentrification in urban studies and planning. Journal of Planning Literature, 37 (2): 249-264.

Gutman, R., Rieff, D. & Dworkin, A. (2007). Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know. New York: Norton & Co.

Herscher, A. & Riedlmayer, A. (2000). Monument and crime: The destruction of historic architecture in Kosovo. Grey Room 1(1): 108–122. https://doi.org/10.1162/152638100750173083.

Imperial War Museum. (2019). What Remains exhibition. https://www.iwm.org.uk/events/what-remains

Lees, L. & White, H. (2019). The social cleansing of London council estates: everyday experiences of ‘accumulative dispossession’. Housing Studies, 35(10), 1701–1722.https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2019.1680814

NDTV World. (2012). Sarkozy says Assad wants to 'wipe Homs from the map'. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/sarkozy-says-assad-wants-to-wipe-homs-from-the-map-477670

Qiang, A., Timmins, C. & Wang, W. (2021). Displacement and the Consequences of Gentrification.

Rauch, J. (2002). Firebombs over Tokyo. The Atlantic, July/August issue. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/07/firebombs-over-tokyo/302547/

The Syria Institute. (2020). No return to Homs. https://paxforpeace.nl/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/import/import/pax-tsi-no-return-to-homs.pdf

UN Department of Operational Support. (2023). No place is safe in Gaza says UNRWA chief. https://operationalsupport.un.org/en/un-security-council

UNESCO. (no date). Cultural heritage and armed conflict: 1954 convention. https://www.unesco.org/en/heritage-armed-conflicts/convention-and-protocols/1954-convention

United Nations Security Council. (2017). S/RES/2347. https://main.un.org/securitycouncil/en/s/res/2347-%282017%29#:~:text=Condemns%20the%20unlawful%20destruction%20of,sites%2C%20notably%20by%20terrorist%20groups.

Weizman, E. (2019). Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. New York: Zone Books.

Winton, P. (2023). Widespread destruction in Gaza puts concept of ‘domicide’ in focus, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/07/widespread-destruction-in-gaza-puts-concept-of-domicide-in-focus

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