Symbolic Violence in the Urban Space as a Result of Gentrification

Abstract

It is believed that the process of gentrification, defined as the process of introducing the working social categories to the areas affected by long-term unemployment, results in the improvement of the situation of the poor. In theory, neighborhood interactions between the working and the unemployed should result in easier access of the unemployed to the labor market and also in changes of their attitudes and behavior. However, in practice, it appears that due to cultural differences gentrification does not initiate the interaction between representatives of different social categories and does not influence the situation of the unemployed positively. Instead, cultural differences determine the impossibility to share the public spaces and breed the conflicts for space, which are manifested in various forms of symbolic violence analyzed in this article.