Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Gentrification is the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants. In Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, the neighbourhood of Beasley has historically included working-class people employed in the industrial sector in the city's North end. Beasley residents have been shown to experience worse health and social outcomes, and stressful neighbourhood conditions. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, gentrification has been increasing in Beasley, particularly impacting long-term renters. Smart Citizens Enabling Resilient Neighbourhoods (SCERN) is an academic-community partnership that has developed a digital participatory mapping (DPM) tool for identifying and characterizing stressful and supportive neighbourhood places, along with a resilience planning framework that guides the use of the tool in community-centred way. The project team includes an interdisciplinary research team (social epidemiology, spatial geography, planning, community psychology, information science) working with the City of Hamilton. A graduate student working with SCERN recently used DPM to engage renters living in Beasley in resilience planning, including guidance from a community advisory board (CAB) of renters. An end-of-project resilience planning meeting with Beasley renters led to several concrete proposals about mobilizing the project findings to strengthen resilience for renters to gentrification. This includes a series of collaborative events: neighbourhood walks, planning meetings involving people with lived and living experience (PWLLE), decision-makers, and organizations serving underserved groups, as well as policy brief writing sessions. These events will strengthen multi-sectoral partnerships, facilitate priority-setting for future research, and mobilize SCERN research into practical strategies for benefitting renters impacted by gentrification in Hamilton.