The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by
Richard Florida
Published 9 May 2016
Districts that a decade ago were blue collar are now ghettos for young urban professionals, who have spawned a consumptive economy in which one highly successful new chain mass markets croissants,” is how one critic put it back in 1985. “The change has created a new vocabulary: Yuppification, croissantification, Manhattanization.”22 Techies and tech startups are just the latest players in a much longer running battle over urban space. That said, the incredible wealth generated by tech startups can and does contribute to the growing gaps between the advantaged and less advantaged. It’s not just lefties and activists who are raising concerns.
The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography
by
Stephen Fry
Published 27 Sep 2010
The CDs, cappuccinos and croissants were the acme of sophistication and symbolic of the great social and political sea change that was coming. The process of gentrification that was already beginning to remodel the seedier parts of Islington and Fulham was being contemptuously described as ‘croissantification’ by those alarmed at the incoming tide. The Falklands Conflict had transformed Margaret Thatcher from the least popular prime minister in fifty years to the most popular since Churchill. A surge of patriotism and confidence was beginning to swell in the political seas. It would soon enough become a tsunami of conspicuous spending for the lucky ones who rode high on the wave and a deluge of debt and deprivation for the victims of ‘the harsh realities of the marketplace’, as Keith Joseph and the Friedmanites liked to call monetarism’s collateral damage.