Blue Gentrification: Water as a Resource and Risk in Urban Transformation

Abstract

This article centers on the role of open water bodies in the creation and/or destruction of value in urban settings. This dialectic is increasingly pressured in urbanized deltas across the world, because climate change presents new risks on closing value gaps. To date, however, environmental gentrification literature lacks a systematic assessment of the role of water bodies. This review argues that we draw our attention to blue gentrification to understand how surface water bodies are used to close value gaps. It combines three literatures: (a) longstanding political-economic and cultural understandings of gentrification, which present water as a resource in value creation, (b) emergent climate gentrification studies, which cover the flood risks and subsequent impacts on value gaps, and (c) recent more-than-human perspectives on gentrification, which argue that urban blue spaces, and the species that rely on them, are lively entities with agentic capacities impacting value gaps. The integrative discussion of literatures demonstrates how blue gentrification entails a dialectic of resource and risk formation, in which both human and other-than-human actors invest capital and labor. We conclude with defining six key features of blue gentrification and a research agenda.