Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Who Produces Urban Space?: Gentrification And Contestations Over Urban 'Authenticity', Daniel Kudla

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The main purpose of this work is to explain how urban authenticity has changed as a result of different social agents taking control of urban production. I will establish a framework of authenticity by combining the ideas of William Sewell’s theory of structure, Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, Erich Fromm’s theory of freedom, Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the ‘total man’, and Herbert Marcuse’s theory of an advanced capitalist form of production. This framework of authenticity will allow me to argue that urban authenticity has been recently co-opted by multinational developers, real estate commodity, private corporations, and entrepreneurial municipal governments. The starting point …