Gentrification-induced displacement made visible: shop displacement and tourism gentrification in Reykjavík

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates commercial displacement in the context of tourism gentrification. Tourism gentrification refers to the process by which tourism-related activities result in the displacement of long-term residents in favour of capital investment focused on tourism. While research on displacement induced by tourism gentrification has mainly focused on the residential displacement of long-term inhabitants, its impacts on local shops are poorly understood. Yet, commercial displacement is key to tourism gentrification as it involves the displacement of local shop owners and acts as a pressure of displacement on residents. This paper aims to measure the extent of shop displacement and to explore its causes and effects on shop owners by examining the experiences of shop owners as a category of those displaced, using Marcuse’s theoretical framework on displacement and the city centre of Reykjavík (Iceland) as a case study. It combines the quantitative measurement of commercial displacement with interviews with displaced shop owners. It argues that understanding commercial displacement, which is inherently much more visible than residential displacement, can provide urban geographers with valuable insights into understanding broader processes of gentrification-induced displacement.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism gentrification
• displacement
• shops
• Reykjavik

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the interviewees, the project managers at Rannsóknasetur Verslunarinnar who provided me with the shop database, and Reykjavík City Hall. I am grateful for the helpful comments of the two anonymous reviewers and the editor of the journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It provides thousands of new customers for some shop owners and, as I have shown in another paper (Mermet 2022), it can also provide additional income for local homeowners.

2 It is worth noting that gentrification-led commercial displacement is not limited to post-industrial cities, but has also occurred in the Global South (see, for instance (González 2017)).

3 Source: Icelandic Tourism Board, 2023, https://www.ferdamalastofa.is/en/recearch-and-statistics/numbers-of-foreign-visitors (last checked: May 2023).

4 The span of the research has been guided by data availability (the first version of the RSV database dates back to 2015).

5 The quantitative part of the paper deals with shop changes between June 2015 and June 2020. To consider the impact of Covid, figures from June 2019 are also provided.

6 The Icelandic Yellow Pages.

7 This category mostly gathers travel companies.

8 It is worth noting that this shop moved to Grandi in 2020.

9 These financial holdings are mostly Icelandic, but they are closely linked to the global capital.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Reykjavíkurborg (Reykjavik City Hall).