Community, Aesthetics, and Authenticity: The Retail Curatorship of a Rapidly Gentrifying Australian Streetscape

Abstract

While change to the retail landscape is a vital component of the gentrification narrative, most literature engages with the gentrification of retail from an objective position. In this article, we explore the process of rapid gentrification of Boundary Street, West End in Brisbane, Australia through the eyes of retailers themselves using photo elicitation. Retailers to varying degrees see themselves as custodians of the street and a disappearing public realm. We explore their narratives of change and authenticity in a rapidly changing spatial environment, driven by top-down capital-led gentrification. We use the perspective of retailers as newcomers, “voyeurs”; or more longstanding players, “curators,” to argue that the transformation of retail in a gentrifying neighborhood can be used to signify moments in the shift of the “authentic” from community to aestheticization and then to outright commodification.