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Produced and published by the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne
Published July 2008
Published July 2008
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Gentrification is an overseas term for the process of socio-economic displacement, or the movement of high-status social groups into areas traditionally associated with low-income residents. It has been used especially from the 1970s onwards to describe the process of professionals moving into the inner suburbs and occupying and upgrading workers' cottages and terraces, and it carries mild pejorative overtones. It is not used where the buildings are actually removed and the sites physically redeveloped. It applies only inexactly to Melbourne because it assumes that the wealthier displace the poorer, which is not necessarily true, and that the wealthy are gentry, which in Australia is almost always untrue.
Melbourne has had fashionable and unfashionable suburbs, and residential and non-residential suburbs, from the beginning. To a large extent they have remained the same, subject to expanding radially with the growth of the city. But the concept of land-use zoning dates from after World War II, and before that time all suburbs were more mixed than one can conceive today. Laundrywomen and other service providers had to be in the same suburb as their customers, albeit in the meaner streets. Factory hands would, if possible, be within walking distance of their work.
The early suburbs of Richmond and South Yarra were very similar. Both contained some gentlemen's estates. Both contained some humbler housing. Both contained industries, especially river-dependent ones, like brickyards and tanneries. Both contained quasi-rural activities such as dairying. The apparent gentrification that ensued in South Yarra can be understood as a secondary phenomenon, resulting from the fact that industrial development and workers' housing began to concentrate in Richmond and other more convenient suburbs.
A substantial distinction between the two suburbs was not apparent until the mid-1850s, when the proletariat had begun to dominate Richmond and the bourgeoisie South Yarra. But if this was a question of buying power, it was that of the workers, for land values and rents were, if anything, higher in Richmond. The workers occupied less land and paid more for it per square foot, and they used this leverage to choose sites close to their work, and to avoid having to cross the river, which was difficult for those without their own transport. It was also true that the workers were not adversely affected by gentlefolk in their street, but gentlefolk were embarrassed by workers, so it was the latter who were more likely to displace the former.
In more recent times much of the concept of gentrification has been in conflict with accepted social theory. Urban sociologists tend to derive their understandings from Burgess and the Chicago school, which postulates a central city zone, an inner ring of change and decay, the 'zone of transition', and an outer ring of suburbia. This concentric arrangement gradually expands as the innermost suburbs decay, enter the zone of transition, and in due course are redeveloped into higher economic uses of the central city. In other words the innermost suburbs are on this model being successively degentrified.
But in Melbourne the zone of transition has never followed the American model. There is a zone of transition, but it has barely moved. The inner ring of suburbs has remained in a continuous state of transition. West and North Melbourne, southern Carlton and Fitzroy, Collingwood, Richmond and South Melbourne, have acted as a safety valve for demographic pressures - they have absorbed successively the poor of the 1890s and 1930s depressions, early migrant groups such as Italians and Jews, postwar refugees, the nurses and students of the baby boom, subsequent migrants including Greeks, Turks, Lebanese, Vietnamese and Cambodians, and the upwardly mobile affluent classes, usually referred to at the time as 'trendies'.
Thus the process, better called trendification than gentrification, is only a further phase in the history of these suburbs. In the 1960s and 1970s the trendies did not so much force their way in as get sucked in to fill the vacuum left by the declining boarding house population. The definitive instance occurred in the 1950s when Lord and Lady Casey moved into East Melbourne, which then consisted overwhelmingly of boarding houses, and spearheaded the change of image whereby the suburb was to become one of the most desirable in Melbourne. During the following decades Melbourne's total boarding house population continued to decline, and suburbs such as Carlton saw high vacancy rates and declining property values. Opportunistic young professionals took advantage of the low prices and saw it as an adventure to establish households in previously undesirable areas. The popularisation of cast iron and of terrace housing, through the photographic essays of Dr E.G. Robertson, played a major role in this. As that generation of adventurous interlopers has aged, what was at first a bohemian melange has become more bourgeois in character.