Looking ‘for a fight rather than a cause’: (De)legitimization of resistance to gentrification in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Negative implications of gentrification have been continually recognized over the past several decades, prompting varied forms of resistance in cities around the world. However, gentrification has also been more recently framed in public discourse as a beneficial and constructive process, grounded in examples of ‘revitalizing’ centres. These contrasting positions introduce underexplored tensions in how different interests approach gentrifying environments in an urban area, particularly with respect to the impact of resistance movements. Using Hamilton, Ontario as a case study, I consider how acts of resistance to gentrification and displacement are perceived and (de)legitimized by local residents, business owners, and others, focusing on the recent emergence of direct action tactics across the inner city. Applying concepts of antagonism, hegemony, and transparent space, I explore dominant values in a context of municipal-led revitalization as portrayed through discourse on resistance to gentrification in central Hamilton. This analysis draws primarily on news articles and Twitter responses pertaining to prominent instances of gentrification-related resistance in Hamilton between 2016 and 2018, supplemented by interviews conducted in early 2018 with representatives from local community organizations. The paper finds three discourses through which antagonistic relations emerge and the (de)legitimization of gentrification-related resistance occurs: violence, entrepreneurship, and productivity. The dismissal of certain acts of resistance in residents’ and others’ responses can be connected to their contestation of dominant ideals of revitalization and the contrived simplicity of gentrified space. Importantly, this delegitimization includes the invalidation or minimizing of underlying concerns and imperatives. These findings have implications for mobilizing collective responses to address inequities of gentrification.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".