Placemaking and the Gentrification of Kakaʻako: Exploring Alternative Pathways for Sustainable Futures
Date
2020
Authors
Contributor
Advisor
Department
Instructor
Depositor
Speaker
Researcher
Consultant
Interviewer
Narrator
Transcriber
Annotator
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Volume
Number/Issue
Starting Page
Ending Page
Alternative Title
Abstract
This thesis critically examines how narratives of neighborhood identity and boundaries
become manufactured, reinterpreted, and commodified by corporate-led urban development in
Kakaʻako by engaging in critical discourse analysis, narrative research, and phenomenology by
examining discursive literature and conducting interviews with community stakeholders. In
critically examining the production of space, this project addresses how such processes are tied
to a broader structure of inequality and shape how neighborhood identities and boundaries
change or remain. The prevalent anxieties within the public discourse of Hawaiʻi is that
Honolulu is increasingly experiencing gentrification and becoming “a playground for the rich.”
Such notions reflect David Harvey’s argument that, within the predominant neoliberal economic
structure of capitalist economies, capital is allowed to shape cities and the urban landscape as a
whole through the process of “accumulation by dispossession” (Ley, 1994). Consequently, such
processes superimpose settler-colonial geographies upon the landscape, thereby rendering
Indigenous geographies disenfranchised. While gentrification is a predominately economic
process, its development is reinforced by consumption-oriented patterns toward urban space,
which, within the intermodal process of consumption-oriented gentrification, reflects David
Ley’s (1994) observation that socio-cultural characteristics and motives are vital toward
understanding the gentrification of the post-industrial city. In recognizing gentrification’s
inherently violent processes of dispossession and erasure as a result of the uneven production and
consumption of space, this project aims to critically examine the neoliberal structuring of cities,
which facilitates the commodification and consumption of space in Hawaiʻi, using the district of
Kakaʻako as a site of inquiry.
Description
Keywords
Citation
Extent
164 pages
Format
Geographic Location
Time Period
Related To
Related To (URI)
Table of Contents
Rights
All UHM Honors Projects are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission from the copyright owner.
Rights Holder
Local Contexts
Collections
Email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.