Engaging Gentrification as a Social Justice Issue in HCI

Gentrification-the spatial expression of economic inequality-is fundamentally a matter of social justice. Yet, even as work outside of HCI has begun to discuss how computing can enable or challenge gentrification, HCI's growing social justice agenda has not engaged with this issue. This omission creates an opportunity for HCI to develop a research and design agenda at the intersection of computing, social justice, and gentrification. We begin this work by outlining existing scholarship describing how the consumption side dynamics of gentrification are mediated by contemporary socio-technical systems. Subsequently, we build on the social justice framework introduced by Dombrowski, Harmon, and Fox to discuss how HCI may resist or counter such forces. We offer six modes of research that HCI scholars can pursue to engage gentrification.

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