Remaining living downtown: resistance and resilience to gentrification in four European capital cities neighbourhoods The metropolisation process is often associated with social and spatial homogenisation of working class historical centres transformed by gentrification. If an important body of literature describes gentrifiers and the dynamic they impulse on the housing market, far less has been said about those who decide to resist. In several European capitals, poor and migrant population remain in central neighbourhoods, together with newcomers, and develop capacities to withstand the dynamics of gentrification. An international comparative approach between four European capitals (Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, and Vienna) reveals neighbourhoods affected by similar changes (globalization, metropolisation, transformation of national and local governance) and similar form of local policies inspired by a ‘soft planning’ approach combining government decisions and strategies of the private sector. In this context, the consequences are relatively similar, or at least comparable: a loss of cheap and uncomfortable housing and a threat to the migrant related commercial activities, leading to a range of ways of “coping”. First hand ethnographic material from each of these four European capitals describes the residents and users of public space’s representations and practices, their reception and resistance to urban planning and management and the way the cohabitation is lived and organised. Strategies mobilised by the previous inhabitant to remain in city centre seems connected to physical and human characteristics of the place, the shape of urban fabric, the types of housing supply and their ability to mobilise specific amenities and commercial activities as a mean against gentrification. In mobilising cutting edge researches from various fields (sociology, anthropology, architecture and geography) in four European capitals (Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, and Vienna), this panel allows a broader understanding of those who choose to resist gentrification process.

--

metropolisation; remaining downtown; resilence; social perceptions of space;