The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City

Taking as its focus six large Canadian cities, the author identifies a distinctive cultural new class of urbane social and cultural professionals inspired in part by the critical youth movements of the 1960s for whom old inner city neighbourhoods served as oppositional sites to assail the bourgeois suburbs. The study looks at their close links with reform movements, neighbourhood activism and a welfare state that often provided their employment, in a progressive aesthetization of central city spaces since the 1980s. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City offers the first detailed and comparative study of gentrification which locates the phenomenon in broader historical and theoretical contexts.