Alternatives to gentrification: exploring urban community land trusts and urban ecovillage practices

The intention in this chapter is not to champion or prescribe certain models or practices as ideal types or as cure-alls for gentrification, but instead to explore current progressive community-based alternatives to housing provision and land ownership and stewardship as methods to challenge local scale gentrification processes and encourage community self-determination. Through the study of community land trusts and ecovillages in cities, the chapter demonstrates how individuals and communities, largely at the neighbourhood scale, can engage in alternative practices of everyday urban living and how these may act as aspirational spaces for community-based empowerment and for shaping new urban futures. While not all urban community land trusts and ecovillages identify their rationales and mandates as resisting gentrification, the work of these organizations inherently challenges dominant relations of production and consumption through the de-commodification of housing and land and by acting as collective, participatory spaces for cultivating social and environmental justice and change in everyday life.