Tone Huse
Street Life
Gentrification told from the ground up

The key theme of the book is gentrification, a term that designates the process of urban change that takes place when residents of higher social status begin to move into areas traditionally populated by the working class. The book explores how this process unfolds through interviews with a broad range of urban users who share an affinity to Tøyen Street, which lies in the inner east of Oslo, the capital of Norway. Through the biography of this street and the changes it has undergone in the wake of three decades of gentrification, the book addresses several key debates in Urban Studies. It engages with these debates through a well-written, in-depth study that both addresses current debates in urban research (on the relationship between gentrification and displacement) and raises new issues (on ethnicity and gentrification). Its bottom-up approach covers ground that urban scholars have been criticized of overlooking, and it provides a rich account of how gentrification can affect the complex social-, ethnic- and cultural geographies of the city. The book concludes by pointing to what a citizen-oriented, socially sustainable urban development strategy may look like. With this, it takes up the legacy of Henri Lefebvre (1996), his notion of the city as an oeuvre, and further, of the right to the city as a right to take part in its creation.

Tone Huse

Carsten Aniksdal

Dr. Tone Huse works at the Centre for Technology, Culture and Innovation at the University of Oslo. She holds a PhD in Social Planning, and a Master of Human Geography. She is interested in the geographies and materialities of politics, in how policy is made and what its effects are. Important research fields are here the relationship between science and politics, and how politics is produced by use of specific governmental technologies. She has studied these processes through various topics, like political activists’ use of public space, gentrification, integration, post-colonial urbanism, urban climate politics and the political subject. In her current position as post doctor she is working with marine economics and politics, with a particular focus on markets and how nature objects may perform as a commodity.