From Edgy(US)/Nouveau-ditch(UK) to Poncy(UK)/Snobby(US)

Yesterday, as my taxi driver was foiled by a road closure in Shoreditch, due to the construction of the new East London Line(1), I got to thinking about the regeneration of neighbourhoods. In particular, the fact that this process brings on an inevitable blood transfusion for a hood - out with the sickly mullet-haired blood cells, and in with the suited-and-booted nouveaux riches cells - presto chango! (1:East London Line: the sneaky orange line that you never take unless you live in pretend parts of London that don't exist, with strange names like Canada Water, or Wapping - who do they think they're fooling?)

In the gentrification process, someone is always going to feel like they've been pushed out of "their" hood - be it by rising prices, or the fact that they spontaneously turn inside out when within a range of 3m from a Louis Vuitton bag or a blackberry, and there are suddenly significantly more of these around (don't even ask what happens if the blackberry is in a Louis Vuitton bag). So gentrification seems to involve bad blood...but for why like this?

I should know why, I've been there (though that reasoning will soon prove spurious). And in fact I was there again yesterday, in the taxi I mentioned, but that is geographically there, that's different. I mean there, like on the crest of the wave, philosophically in the now, a face full of real politik, on the cutting edge!! Or, that is where I thought I was, when I lived in an edgy, up-and-coming hood, at a time I thought not that many others were doing the same. But as you will see, it's all subjective, this concept of "others".

At any one time, there is a neighbourhood in a city somewhere on our little planet, somewhere on the spectrum between nouveau-ditch/dodgy (edgy for you americans) and poncy (snobby; the things I do for you yankee doodlers, eh?). Which implies that at any given time, there are people somewhere in cabs, driving by, going "this place used to be real *sigh* and people who live here are such wanker-bankers now". BUT the wanker-bankers think they themselves are cool, and so do their friends. And the artiste-hipsters that are being squeezed out by rising prices and coordinated attacks led by sentient blackberries riding Louis Vuitton handbags around think that they are cool too - in fact these populations walk around with self-reflecting halos of coolness. But they feel mutual uncoolness vibes towards each other.... It's basically a chicken and egg question of coolness.

However, it is clear that if neighbourhoods were only full of people who wandered around patting each other on the back, mutually appreciating each others' mullets, or taking their blackberries for walks down to the cappuccino bank to mingle with other brokers, they would slip into a self-congratulating mire of compliments, ego and superlatives, to the point where everyone there would be so annoying that traffic would have to be diverted around said hood because of passers-by wretching in their cars, and eventually resources would no longer get to the shops and houses of said hood (except email, but that can't feed you) and everyone would eventually die (while checking their last email). Also not cool.

So the moral of the story somehow seems to be that we need this mix of people - we need to have square people in round holes, and so on. And I think we can basically close the case on the age-old question of "why can't we all just get along?" - it is in fact a red herring, exposed in all its irrelevant glory, by the much more important "for why like this"?