From Toxic Wreck to Crunchy Chic: Environmental Gentrification through the Body

This paper takes up the challenge of extending and enhancing the literature on environmental gentrification by considering bodies and embodied practices as significant dimensions of this process. In considering the question of how a polluted past can be mobilized as an asset for neighbourhood rebranding and gentrification, this research suggests that the conflation of both pollution and ‘health’ with different kinds of urban bodies and practices is an important strategy for solidifying a clean and green neighbourhood future. I argue that some bodies are constituted as ‘dirty’ by the symbolic and substantive displacement of environmental pollution onto those bodies, in ways that allow the neighbourhood to redefine itself as clean (whether it is environmentally clean or not) once those bodies are displaced, contained, or made invisible. This perspective requires us to consider the radically coconstitutive character of representations and materiality, bodies and cities, nature and social relations. Based on a case study of Toronto's Junction neighbourhood, this paper maintains that bringing bodies to the foreground attends to the power of embodiment in producing and reproducing urban change and, critically, urban inequalities.