Modalities of the New Middle Class
I came across an article of David Ley’s, an urban geographer at the University of British Columbia, where he tests the assumption that newly gentrified neighborhoods should experience a shift in transporation modes. The idea is that gentrifiers (educated lefties that they are) should theoretically be more likely to travel by bicycle. He finds that this is definitely the case in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, the three cities he looks at in his analysis (though, interestingly, the use of public transportation is lower in these gentrifying districts).
I find his results particularly interested in light of recent conversations I’ve been having on neighborhood transition, gentrification, and ‘hipsters’. Wanting to examine the role of hipsters in urban spaces in more detail, I was thinking about variables that could be used to approximate where hipsters live and have lived. Bicycle ridership may be the closest thing there’s good data on. Ticket sales data and hair salon locations were other suggestions.
