Measuring Gentrification Processes in Barcelona and Madrid: A Methodological Proposal

Abstract

Western cities are witnessing first-hand significant transformations in their socio-spatial configuration. On the one hand, exclusive areas are expanding rapidly from the metropolitan centers due to an increasingly qualified immigration and the resurgence of central spaces linked to the location of new productive activities and the concentration of cultural, creative and innovative enclaves. On the other hand, recent studies show that low-income residents are displaced and concentrated in the most peripheral and deprived spaces, with less access to all kinds of services. As a result, different social groups would be moving away territorially. In line with the first process, gentrification is the most local and visible example to define the transformation of a neighborhood. The common element among the many interdisciplinary definitions that have been given to gentrification processes is that of population replacement, understood as a sociodemographic substitution resulting from the arrival of upper-middle class population that contributes to the expulsion of previous residents, usually with fewer resources. Although this process was conceptualized more than five decades ago, the quantitative approach to the process of substitution and displacement of the population has been less developed than its theoretical approach. Academics and public institutions at local and regional level have tried to measure gentrification from a quantitative perspective. These approaches have sought to categorize neighborhoods according to the intensity of the process using population, geographic and / or urban variables. However, the diversity of sources in each country and the complexity of measuring displacement and substitution processes through data, explain the lack of a common and standard methodology to measure these processes at an international level. In the Spanish case, the geographic limitations of the last population census, as well as its distance in time, was carried out in 2011, have contributed to the lack of a quantitative approach to the most recent gentrification processes.

In this paper, we propose a methodological and conceptual exercise to calculate a composite indicator measuring the intensity of the sociodemographic transformation processes linked to gentrification that the neighborhoods of Barcelona and Madrid have experienced from 2011 to 2017. The indicator includes seven theoretical dimensions associated with different axes of neighborhood socioeconomic transformation: (1) population rejuvenation; (2) changes in the origin of the population, understood as the growth of population born in countries with a high Human Development Index; (3) changes in the family arrangements/values, associated with the growth of single-person adult households; (4) attraction to population with university degree; (5) population substitution, understood as the loss of population without university studies due to the effect of migration and changes of residence; (6) speed of change, which introduces the transformative capacity of migratory and residential flows to alter the composition of the population; (7) transformations in the housing market, measured through price increases. One of the innovations of the indicator is the diversity of the data sources we have used, since it includes stock data (Population Register), flow data (migration and residential flows, including a socioeconomic variable such as level of education), characteristics of households and housing market indicators.

The final values of the indicator have not only allowed us to identify which neighborhoods of Barcelona and Madrid have experienced gentrification processes in recent years, but also, and probably more interestingly, to measure its intensity. The indicator has been calculated based on common parameters, granting us not only to compare the indexes of the neighborhoods of both cities, but also to trace the main axes of expansion of the gentrification processes.