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Sharon Zukin
Thinkers

Sharon Zukin

1946

American sociologist who showed how culture — galleries, cafés, markets — becomes the economic engine that makes a neighbourhood expensive.

Zukin studied New York's SoHo when it was still an industrial district occupied by artists, and found the mechanism that has since repeated across half the world: first come those looking for cheap rent and space, then those looking for the atmosphere the first group created, and in the end the price pushes out both.

Her most uncomfortable contribution is the concept of «authenticity». A neighbourhood's character — the old bakery, the mural, the market — stops being a way of life and becomes a selling point. Zukin argues that is the moment the neighbourhood is lost, even if the buildings are still standing.

An American sociologist, professor emerita at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Zukin published in 1982 Loft Living, the study that explained how the industrial lofts of SoHo became artists' homes and then luxury products, and that anticipated everything written since on culture and gentrification. Landscapes of Power (1991) followed the shift from the industrial city to the city of consumption, and The Cultures of Cities (1995) defined the symbolic economy: culture as a resource with which cities compete.

Naked City (2010) is her most widely read book: the search for authenticity in Williamsburg, Harlem or the East Village destroys what it sought, because the cafés and shops that attract new residents push out the old ones. Point of Purchase (2004) studied consumption and The Innovation Complex (2020) New York's tech city. Her method, an urban ethnography attentive to culture and capital, has trained generations of urban sociologists.

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