Chapter 5 Residents, interviewees, class representatives? Reflections on the use of qualitative interviews in knowing the worlds of gentrification

For policymakers and academics alike, gentrification – the renovation of socially and economically marginal inner-city areas by higher status social groups – has become an issue of rising importance in the changing social structures of developed-world cities (Smith, 1979; Rose, 1984; Hamnett, 1991). In the regeneration of deprived inner-urban areas, it is seen as a double-edged sword, its potential to reinvigorate local property markets and provide much-needed investments of social capital matched by its tendency towards displacement of ‘less desirable’ extant populations and social division between middle-class newcomers and incumbent working-class residents (Smith, 1992; Blokland, 2002; Butler, 2003).