Urban Succession and Neighborhood Change

Abstract

Abstract

ABSTRACT We argue the idea of “urban succession” provides an instructive lens through which to understand how cities change over time. We show how this model illuminates phenomena important to urban policymaking and reform, and we highlight several upshots that challenge conventional thinking about healthy cities’ constitutions. First, valuable urban conditions may be difficult or impossible to realize without allowing them to “grow” from prior conditions. Second, even when achieved, these conditions may be inherently unstable, predictably giving way to other conditions. Third, unwelcome urban phenomena can arise without being deliberately pursued and thus effective remedies must go beyond neutralizing or reforming the bad actors at the heart of theories from critical urban studies. Finally, when valuable urban conditions represent intermediate stages in succession‐like processes, this may illuminate new strategies for sustaining these conditions—as well as the folly of certain popular approaches to urban development, reform, and theorizing. We focus special attention on issues of gentrification and neighborhood decline, showing how our model helps contextualize these as predictable stages in long‐term processes of urban flux.