Gentrification, Urban Interventions and Equity (GENUINE): A map-based gentrification tool for Canadian metropolitan areas.

Abstract

Background: Researchers, policy makers, and urban planners require tools to better understand the complex relationship between gentrification and health. The Gentrification, Urban Interventions and Equity (GENUINE) tool is an open-access, map-based tool that allows users to explore measures of gentrification for Canadian cities and incorporate them into their work.

Data and methods: The phenomenon of gentrification has manifested differently across cities. The GENUINE tool was developed to include four distinct gentrification measures that have been used in the United States and Canada and that rely on different combinations of change in census indicators related to income, housing, occupation, education and age. The measures were computed for all census tracts within the 36 Canadian census metropolitan areas to identify gentrifiable areas in 2006 and those that gentrified between 2006 and 2016.

Results: Depending on the measure, by 2016, 2% to 20% of census tracts had experienced gentrification, corresponding to between 2% (418,065 people) and 17% (4,266,434) of the Canadian population living in gentrified areas. Generally, metropolitan areas with populations over 1 million people had a greater proportion of their population living in gentrified areas (2% to 18%) compared with metropolitan areas with fewer than 250,000 residents (1% to 14%).

Discussion: With attention on healthy cities only expanding, GENUINE provides pan-Canadian indicators of gentrification, which can be an integral part of solution-oriented research and advancing cities toward designing healthy and equitable communities.