If gentrification didn’t exist, it would have to be invented. Because otherwise an entire generation of socially-minded city watchers would be without a topic of conversation. At the many parties that preferably take place in gentrified old buildings. The basic contradiction has often been described: The gentri-critic has driven out of his old building apartment those workers whom he now sorely misses. He transforms this pain into a blissful scolding of capitalism. In this way, gentrification becomes a constant topic close to his heart, a kind of G-point of globalization criticism.
Of course, there is something tragic about gentrifier self-hatred. How do you escape this tragedy? Quite simply: you paint a very accurate picture of the real, true, truly evil gentrifier and then tell everyone that you really aren’t like that. A journalist from the Süddeutsche Zeitung is now demonstrating this brilliantly. He talks about a piece of urban housing construction in Munich’s Glockenbach district (the epicenter of the gentrification empire, so to speak). The “Glockenbachsuites” by Allmann Sattler Wappner are the object of his astute observation. The gentrifier demon is spreading on their roof. The critic spies men there in “freshly polished leather shoes”. Thousands of them. And then they’re also wearing “elegant chino pants”! Only the devil can be in them. To make matters worse, the shirts are also “freshly starched”, as the analyzer found out. (Presumably he even got up close and personal? Did he grab the evil by the scruff of the neck? The devil by the freshly starched horns?)
But he is not only a daring tamer of evil. He is also an incredibly cool pig, as he himself thinks and emphasizes at the end of his text. He imagines himself with a bottle! Beer sitting by the Isar and watching the gentrifiers in the room. What a cool guy! And creative too – he’s found out that he can watch soccer on their flat screens from there for free. A really clever counter to this cold, unfeeling world of big business, in which such sinister objects dominate our homes as – televisions! As if the starched shirts weren’t enough. This is where the good guy really separates himself from the bad guy.
Or – from the parvenu. The SZ’s little style critique culminates in this term. Wikipedia knows that a parvenu is a person who has become wealthy in the first generation and is accused of being unable to adapt to the manners and conventions of so-called better circles. Of course, all of this applies to the Chinese faction. Our clever author recognized it from their shirts.