Scholarly research into film, television and the city has traditionally focused on screen representations of the city, its residents, and urban change; as Charlotte Brunsdon puts it, such images have been “central to the apprehension of cities and how they are inhabited.”1Charlotte Brunsdon, Television Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 23. The Wire unfolds a systemic analysis of Baltimore;2Marsha Kinder, “Re-writing Baltimore: The Emotive Power of Systemics, Seriality, and the City,” Film Quarterly 62, no.2 (2008): 50–57; Stanley Corkin, Connecting The Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). the “alarmist” representation of struggling neighborhoods have a political agenda;3Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). sitcoms such as Friends and Seinfeld present a “glorious” image of New York City and contribute to tourism and gentrification.4William J. Sadler and Ekaterina V. Haskins, “Metonymy and the Metropolis: Television Show Settings and the Image of New York City,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 29, no. 3 (2005): 195–216. Visual representation of cities in films and television series have both promoted and critiqued the gentrification and rebranding of the post-industrial city.
Looking beyond questions of representation, this reading list also considers how film and television series filmed on location contribute to gentrification processes. Much of the scholarship we outline below locates film and television within specific cities and neighborhoods and pays attention to the local impacts of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception practices. We feature our own work in this area, while we also highlight work that has influenced our own thinking on urban precarity as it relates to gentrification anxiety and fears of displacement. The following reading list traces works on screen and gentrification from the early 2000s to the present day.
Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Towards a History of Empty Spaces.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 4, no. 2 (2007): 219–234. https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2007.4.2.219
Charlotte Brunsdon’s article on the allure of film and TV shooting in “empty spaces” does not explicitly address gentrification, but it develops an important discussion about how derelict sites and post-industrial spaces attract screen productions, paving the way for the imagination of redevelopment. Brunsdon contends that film crews find it attractive to work in bombsites, demolition areas, construction sites, and derelict warehouses due to their “unregulated, liminal quality,” which gives filmmakers a sense of being in a location “where ordinary rules don’t quite apply” (224). These spaces are approached as empty for fictional purposes so that they can accommodate diverse narratives: “It is usually easy to film in these locations, and the space can often be dressed without restriction, sometimes so that its original qualities disappear completely” (219). The article establishes parallels between film narratives, media production, and urban redevelopment schemes, emphasizing how films fill in a vacuum with their narrative, just as redevelopment schemes do. What is considered as “empty” may easily be rendered as open to unmaking and remaking, a dynamic which is at the core of gentrification.
Mathews, Vanessa. “Set Appeal: Film Space and Urban Redevelopment.” Social & Cultural Geography 11, no. 2 (2010): 171–190. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360903514400
Vanessa Mathews provides an illuminating case study of the pioneering role of screen industries in the gentrification process. The article explores the culture-led gentrification of Toronto’s Distillery District, showing how film production led the transformation of a postindustrial site into an arts, culture, and entertainment center. As Mathews shows, screen production not only increases the visibility of such sites during the planning stage but also offers a compelling reimagining of these transitional spaces. Through a wide range of cinematic images, screen production reshapes perceptions of devalued or derelict locations, highlighting their capacity to accommodate creative and cultural industries. The Distillery District, which had once been characterized by the sounds, smells, and sights of industrial labor, was later populated with film crews, bright lights, and temporary sets, transforming it into various historical and contemporary locales for films such as nineteenth-century London in Dracula 2000 (2000), 1930s New York in Cinderella Man (2005), and World War II-era Poland in X-Men (2000). Through this process of spatial and temporal reimagination, cinema has been instrumental for suggesting alternative uses and futures for these sites, revealing their economic potential for redevelopment and gentrification.
Webb, Lawrence. The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2014.
The Cinema of Urban Crisis provides a historical, multi-city background to how screen images and industries promote gentrification. Focusing on the late 1960s and 1970s, the book analyzes films that both reflect (in their narrative) and engage with (during production) urban crises from New York and Los Angeles, to Rome, Milan and Frankfurt, exploring sources from city and film archives including production records, promotion materials, and planning documents. Webb argues that urban governments promoted location shooting on the city streets as part of a neoliberal agenda for regenerating postindustrial cities. The ensuing films often captured cities in the midst of urban crisis, yet even when these images were dark, they “did not necessarily work against the city’s managerial and financial elite, but rather counter-intuitively helped to legitimate … restructuring … by presenting the city as a problem to be solved” (138). Key case studies for gentrification include New York, where films such as The Landlord (1970) and Desperate Characters (1971) engaged with neighborhood redevelopment in Brooklyn; and San Francisco, where Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope both used derelict spaces for location shooting and was among the first to invest in them, creating a path towards gentrification. Tracing the parallel history of films, production practices and urban redevelopment, the book shows how filmmakers not only created narratives about gentrification but were also complicit in its growth.
Mayer, Vicki. Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans: The Lure of the Local Film Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.
Vicki Mayer’s book also explores the historical connection between film production and real estate speculation by focusing on New Orleans and its historical and contemporary efforts to brand itself as a capital of film economy. The book traces early initiatives of the city to promote screen production, revealing how the ruling elites have always seen screen economy as a path to land speculation, “which is ultimately more profitable than films themselves” (39). Through sources ranging from archival records from the early twentieth century to interviews with local Treme fans today, the book shows that screen production is not necessarily an economic blessing for its location, as it creates short term jobs, disturbs the quotidian rhythms of neighborhoods, and most of the benefits are allocated to major production companies. As the book shows, much needed public funds after Hurricane Katrina have been invested in film production rather than education, health and other social services. Yet Mayer also demonstrates the dilemma faced by the city and its residents: the need for positive images of the city. The city’s elite’s desire to promote New Orleans’s “unique and worthy culture” (69) aligns with residents’ hope for authentic images of the city, reflecting their wish to “wrap troubles in dreams, and dream troubles away” (71).
Morgan Parmett, Helen. Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2019.
The centrality of New Orleans in studies of screen and gentrification can also be observed in Helen Morgan Parmett’s study of television production on location. This book focuses on David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s Treme (HBO, 2010–13), which sought to authentically portray New Orleans and the opportunistic forces that threatened to erase and displace its distinctive culture and marginalized communities during the city’s post-Katrina crisis and redevelopment. The book is organized into five meticulously researched chapters that explore media representations of New Orleans, the role of film commissions and film policy, location shooting practices, televisual tourism, and the connection between prestige TV and urban branding. Parmett’s key argument is that the series contributed to the urban change it sought to represent. As Parmett writes in the book’s introduction, “Understanding Treme requires a consideration of how television participates not only in the production of images and representations of New Orleans, but also for how it participates in implementing practices of urban planning, zoning, land use, tourism, gentrification, historic preservation, philanthropy, city and network branding, community building, and global and local activism in more direct and material ways” (17). Down in Treme provides a clear methodological framework that has already proven invaluable for those of us studying the relationship between media industries, televisual representation, and urban development.
Andersson, Johan and Lawrence Webb, eds. The City in American Cinema: Film and Postindustrial Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
The third section of The City in American Cinema features work by Brendan Kredell, Erica Stein, Johan Andersson, and Martha Shearer that directly addresses how media production, representation, and exhibition reflect and contribute to gentrification processes.
In “Gentrification by Genre: Desperately Seeking Susan and the 1980s Screwball,” Johan Andersson likens the commodification of independent cinema to the transformation of New York’s “downtown” art culture into a marketable scene that led to the hyper-gentrification of the Lower East Side and SoHo. The chapter builds on Andersson’s article “Landscape and Gentrification: The Picturesque and Pastoral in 1980s New York Cinema,” which argues that films like Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985) and Downtown 81 (Edo Bertoglio, 1981) aestheticized and romanticized New York’s downtrodden landscape in the 1980s in ways that contribute to a present-day nostalgia for the pre-gentrified city.5Johan Andersson, “Landscape and Gentrification: The Picturesque and Pastoral in 1980s New York Cinema”, Antipode 49, no. 3 (June 2017): 539–556. “Gentrification by Genre” expands on this premise to consider how Seidelman’s invocation of Hollywood “screwball” comedy “turns subculture into mass commodity” (330). Significantly, Andersson’s work shows how the “mainstreaming” of downtown cinema enhanced the area’s appeal to a national audience, suggesting that cinema has played an underrecognized role in the gentrification of downtown Manhattan, similarly to the art and music scenes that are more frequently credited and blamed for the area’s rapid redevelopment.
Erica Stein’s “Ebbets Field and Other Monuments: Outer Borough Neighborhoods and Revanchism in 1990s Cinema” argues that a “nostalgia for modernity” emerged in several New York City films in the 1990s.6“Nostalgia for Modernity” is a reference to Mark Shiel, “A Nostalgia for Modernity: New York, Los Angeles and American Cinema in the 1970s,” in Screening the City, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London: Verso, 2003), 160–179. In contrast to New York’s industrial era, with its iconic landmarks, the postindustrial era was marked by loss — of manufacturing, public space, and, according to Stein, “a city easily imagined by its populace” (305). Stein analyzes Abel Ferrara’s King of New York (1990) and Wayne Wang/ Paul Auster’s Smoke and Blue in the Face (both 1995), showing how they fetishize landmarks and monuments like the Triborough Bridge and Ebbets Field as “signifiers of the industrial city,” coded as white, male spaces (320). Proposing that “the fetish of the imageable city drives revanchism” (324). Stein shows how these films valorize markers of an imagined, authentic past to reclaim and recodify territory for white men who see themselves as the rightful heirs to the city.
Martha Shearer’s chapter “Frances Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Gender, Crisis, and the Creative City in Frances Ha and The Giant Mechanical Man” expands the conversation on gender, genre, and gentrification film to “argue that indie cinema has reframed the romcom in terms of crisis, expressing anxieties about urban conditions, yet also reconstituting the romcom’s concerns with professional life through an embrace of creative femininity and evading any meaningful critique through valorization of the creative city” (355). Finally, Brendan Kredell turns to film exhibition as a site for exploring the industrial relationship between cinema and gentrification in his chapter “For Whom are the Movies: The Landscape of Movie Exhibition in the Gentrified City.” Kredell reveals the connection between movie theatres and intended audiences to assert that “as the geography of consumption changes, so too do the audiences for these urban representations” (299).
Patton, Elizabeth. “Portland at the Intersection: Gentrification and the Whitening of the City in Portlandia’s Hipster Wonderland.” In Media Crossroads: Intersection of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures, edited by Paula J. Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, 155-166. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
Elizabeth Patton’s chapter on Portlandia’s “hipster wonderland” offers a detailed analysis of the direct and indirect ways that the IFC comedy series (2011–18) benefited from and contributed to Portland’s rapid gentrification, while denying culpability both extratextually, through interviews with the series showrunners Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, and representationally, by depicting Portland as a “postracial utopia” (159). Patton shows how Portlandia’s satire of the city as hipster mecca failed because the series, like the white progressivism it claimed to mock, celebrated multicultural difference yet removed the context of oppression — a process Kimberly Crenshaw calls “intersectional erasure” (157). In its colorblindness and its refusal to acknowledge the violence that underpins Portland’s whiteness — from colonization to anti-Black racist policies — Patton demonstrates that the series fails to subvert white privilege, even though white privilege is central to the kinds of precious lifestyle preferences that drive the show’s comedy. Patton argues that by presenting the gentrifying city without providing intersectional context, or acknowledging that the popularity of the show also drives tourism and real estate interest in Portland, the series and its creators participate in the neoliberal logic that treats unequal development as “just the way things are,” a rationalization that denies racist histories of “intimidation, violence, and discriminatory laws” (162–166). This erasure, Patton contends, allows for guilt-free, “comfortable” viewing, “because viewers see themselves as onlookers and not implicated in social practices that keep racism and economic disparity thriving” (166).
Griffis, Noelle. “‘What am I Supposed to do with all These White People:’ Fifty Years of Gentrification Anxiety on Screen.” In The Routledge Companion to Media and the City, edited by Erica Stein, Germaine R. Halegoua, and Brendan Kredell, 284–94. London: Routledge, 2022.
In my chapter for the Routledge Companion to Media and the City, I focus on the growing number of twenty-first century films and television series that grapple with the complexities of gentrification from diverse and often semi-autobiographical perspectives. The characters in these series often experience gentrification anxiety — a feeling driven by economic precarity and affordable housing shortages that causes urban residents to simultaneously experience the threat of displacement and the fear of displacing others in a competitive and unfair housing market. I trace the emergence of gentrification narratives from Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970) to contemporary series such as Insecure (HBO, 2016–2021) and High Maintenance (HBO, 2016–2020). These cases illustrate how representation has developed in relation to different phases of gentrification. I argue that during this fifty-year period, filmmakers and showrunners have become increasingly aware of the ways media production not only represents urban change onscreen, but also contributes to gentrification processes by increasing tourism and real estate speculation — constructing a gentrifier’s gaze. This paradox is particularly acute for progressive media creators who seek to address issues like economic precarity and displacement. The chapter interrelates behind-the-scenes discourse and onscreen representations to investigate whether gentrification anxiety is an inevitable part of the contemporary urban experience, or if media creators and urban dwellers alike can find productive ways beyond the bind.
Celik-Rappas, Ipek A. Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location. Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2025.
My book traces the relationship between film, television and gentrification from the perspective of labor, using interviews with screen professionals in Athens, Berlin, Belfast, Istanbul, and Paris. I examine the invisible labor of screen workers and residents to make a location aesthetically appealing and suitable for filming. My research demonstrates that the labor of creating a shooting location includes that of scouts, who find affordable and attractive locations; crew members, who travel distances to work in marginal sites; art directors and line producers, who dress them up; screen commissioners, who draw productions to distant spaces; and local residents, whose traces make a location authentic. I emphasize that screen professionals not only show awareness of how their work contributes to the culture-led gentrification of filming locations, but also constantly grapple with the challenges posed by gentrification in European capitals. Location professionals in Athens and Paris, for example, struggle to navigate complex property regimes and dispossession in these increasingly segregated cities, which attract international property investment. At the same time, crews in Istanbul devise creative solutions on a daily basis to survive in a media capital marked by rampant speculative urbanism, where locations are frequently demolished and rebuilt.
Notes
| ↑1 | Charlotte Brunsdon, Television Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 23. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Marsha Kinder, “Re-writing Baltimore: The Emotive Power of Systemics, Seriality, and the City,” Film Quarterly 62, no.2 (2008): 50–57; Stanley Corkin, Connecting The Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). |
| ↑3 | Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). |
| ↑4 | William J. Sadler and Ekaterina V. Haskins, “Metonymy and the Metropolis: Television Show Settings and the Image of New York City,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 29, no. 3 (2005): 195–216. |
| ↑5 | Johan Andersson, “Landscape and Gentrification: The Picturesque and Pastoral in 1980s New York Cinema”, Antipode 49, no. 3 (June 2017): 539–556. |
| ↑6 | “Nostalgia for Modernity” is a reference to Mark Shiel, “A Nostalgia for Modernity: New York, Los Angeles and American Cinema in the 1970s,” in Screening the City, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London: Verso, 2003), 160–179. |
İpek A. Çelik Rappas is Associate Professor of Media and Visual Arts at Koç University, Istanbul. She is the author of In Permanent Crisis: Ethnicity in European Media and Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location (Cornell University Press, 2025). Her research, supported by grants such as the ERC Advanced Grant WALLS2BRIDGES, focuses on the intersections of media, incarceration, race, and urban space. She investigates how carceral communities become media producers, and explores sustainable, non-extractivist modes of media production across Europe and Turkey.
Noelle Griffis is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Marymount Manhattan College. Her research on location production, film policy, urban development, and media activism has been published in JCMS, Black Camera, and several edited volumes, including The Routledge Companion to Media and the City. Noelle co-chairs the SCMS Urbanism, Geography, and Architecture SIG.
