Sensory regimes of gentrification: urban transformation, embodied experience, and neoliberal spatial production in Cihangir

Abstract

Gentrification has predominantly been examined through economic restructuring, demographic change, and spatial reorganization, while its sensory and embodied dimensions remain underexplored in urban sociology. This study reconceptualizes gentrification as a multi-layered urban transformation regime operating not only through material and economic change but also through the reconfiguration of sensory urban experience. Addressing the visual bias in urban research, it develops a multi-phase sensory-ethnographic framework to examine how market-driven transformation shapes everyday sensory environments and lived experiences of place. The empirical design combined structured group and solo sensewalking with local residents in Cihangir and a supplementary couple sensewalking with Istanbul-based architects academically familiar with the neighborhood's transformation. The later field encounter followed a different route and expanded documentation through photography, video, sound recording, and an in-walk walking interview. The field encounters were analyzed as related but non-equivalent forms of situated knowledge. Resident-based findings identified curated cafe clusters, differentiated soundscapes and smellscapes, nodal sensory intensity, and selective forms of belonging. The photographic and walking-interview material documented the persistence of commercial curation while also revealing steep topographic transitions, unexpected views, residual artistic memory, social heterogeneity, preserved shopfronts, historical traces, intensified media visibility, and the coexistence of everyday sociability with waste, traffic, crowding, and movement friction. These materials refine sensory homogenization as a partial and uneven process produced through selective intensification rather than complete neighborhood-wide standardization. The study argues that gentrification should be understood not only as spatial displacement but also as sensory displacement, through which familiar environments are perceptually reorganized while residual material and sensory traces continue to structure attachment. By integrating embodied, temporal, multimodal, and participant-narrated field encounters, the study shows how spatial production, classed belonging, and urban inequality are reproduced through everyday sensory environments under neoliberal conditions.