Does a developed tourism area also have a high level of gentrification? Evidence from Shanghai, China

Tourism gentrification, as a new path of regional spatial reconfiguration and social restructuring, has triggered local social change on a global scale. However, spatial quantitative analyses that have examined the relationship between gentrification and tourism development in the major metropolitan areas of developing countries have been lacking in the literature. Through geographic spatial analysis and canonical correlation analysis (CCA), we identified spatial distribution characteristics of gentrification levels and tourism production service elements, revealing the internal interactions between the two. Our findings reveal high spatial consistency between tourism-driven urban gentrification and key tourism development elements 2–12 km from the metropolitan city center, identify four distinct gentrification typologies shaped by core tourism amenities, and confirm the preeminent role of restaurants, hotels, malls and tourism enterprises in driving urban gentrification. This study establishs an “element-space-gentrification” analytical framework, providing microlevel quantitative evidence for tourism-gentrification linkages in developing country metropolitan contexts.