Gentrification Reorganizes How a Neighborhood Sounds, Smells, and Feels

Gentrification has long been measured in property values, census data, and shifting demographics, but a new study argues that the process is also experienced through the body — in the sounds, smells, atmospheres, and rhythms of everyday street life. Researchers from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and Istanbul Technical University examined Cihangir, a neighborhood in Istanbul that has undergone substantial market-driven transformation since the 1990s, and found that gentrification operates as what they call a sensory regime: a patterned, uneven reorganization of perceptual environments that reshapes how people belong to, remember, and inhabit urban space.

The study, published in Frontiers in Sociology, reconceptualizes gentrification as a multi-layered urban transformation regime operating simultaneously at material, symbolic, and sensory levels. Rather than treating Cihangir merely as an empirical case, the researchers approached it as a temporally layered sensory field in which market forces, cultural production, historical continuity, and everyday practices become perceptible in urban experience. The work addresses a persistent visual bias in urban sociology, where cities have historically been studied through maps, diagrams, and observable spatial forms while the embodied and non-visual dimensions of urban life remain comparatively underexplored.

To capture these dimensions, the team developed a multi-phase sensory-ethnographic framework centered on sensewalking, a qualitative mobile method that engages participants in structured walking through specific urban environments. Unlike conventional approaches that prioritize visual analysis, sensewalking foregrounds the olfactory, auditory, tactile, atmospheric, and kinesthetic qualities of urban space, with walking itself serving as both a mode of data production and a form of experiential immersion. The method draws on phenomenological and urban ethnographic traditions, treating sensory experience as the result of individual stimuli integrated into broader sensescapes rather than isolated perceptions.

The first field phase took place in June and July 2025 and involved structured group and solo sensewalking with 20 local residents aged between 25 and 69. Fifteen participants walked in groups, enabling collective recognition of recurring sensory patterns, while five conducted solo walks that allowed more individualized attention to subtle transitions and perceptual discontinuities. The route followed a loop through dense residential streets, cafe clusters, and small-scale commercial nodes, beginning and ending at Cihangir Park and passing landmarks including Sadik Pasha Mansion, the Rainbow Steps, Alçakdam Yokuşu, Pürtelaş Street, Başkurt Street, and Sirkeci Mustafa Aga Mosque. Participants recorded multisensory observations, took photographs, and completed written templates with open-ended reflections.

The findings revealed a neighborhood organized around nodal sensory intensity rather than uniform transformation. Participants evaluated places more positively when they perceived olfactory conditions as pleasant, particularly in cafe and food-oriented areas, and higher sound evaluations often coincided with positive place responses when acoustic activity was interpreted as social vitality rather than overload. Yet neither relationship was linear; place experience remained multisensory and depended on the interaction of sound, smell, rhythm, crowd density, movement, and atmospheric transition. Rainbow Steps emerged as a strong visual-atmospheric node, Alçakdam Yokuşu intensified bodily experience through slope, Pürtelaş concentrated sound, smell, and commercial activity, while Başkurt provided a quieter transition. Residential areas were generally described as slower and less acoustically intense.

The strongest ethnographic descriptions emerged when participants tried to explain why certain commercial environments felt attractive and strangely repetitive at the same time. One resident described the sensory work of curation in explicitly commercial terms: many places feel carefully designed to create a particular atmosphere, so that even the smells and sounds seem part of the experience being sold. Another observed that the neighborhood still carries a bohemian image, but much of that identity now appears organized around consumption and lifestyle branding. Belonging was experienced as a bodily negotiation with social codes and expectations; some participants described places where they felt welcome and others where they felt expected to conform. One participant captured the temporal disjunction at the heart of the study: the buildings may still be here, but the feeling of the neighborhood has changed.

The second field phase, conducted in July 2026, extended the study through a couple sensewalking with two Istanbul-based architects academically familiar with Cihangir’s transformation. The paired walk lasted approximately two hours between 18:00 and 20:00 along a second route through Siraselviler Street, Firüzaga Camii Street, Susam Street, Güneşli Street, Kumrulu Yokuşu Street, and Bogazkesen Street, among others. Documentation expanded to include 106 photographs, video recording, sound recording, and a walking interview conducted in motion. The researchers treated this later encounter as a complementary temporal and expert-informed extension rather than an equivalent replication, analyzing the two phases as related but non-equivalent forms of situated knowledge.

The 2026 material complicated any reading of Cihangir as a fully homogeneous sensory field. The photographs and walking interview documented the persistence of commercial curation alongside steep topographic transitions, unexpected Bosphorus 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. One architect described how stepped streets slow movement and change posture, turning the sea view into something reached through effort. Another reflected that the neighborhood was once a place where people from the arts could actually afford to live, but rising property values from the mid-2000s onward transformed it into a social-status symbol, so that what once developed organically as an artistic habitat has gradually become something closer to a simulation of one.

Reading the two phases together, the researchers found continuity of mechanism rather than simple linear intensification. In both phases, market-oriented sensory production concentrated at particular nodes and interfaces while being interrupted by quieter residential, historical, infrastructural, or topographic conditions. The comparison refined sensory homogenization as a partial and uneven process produced through selective intensification rather than complete neighborhood-wide standardization. Old shopfronts, worn facades, religious structures, mature vegetation, cats, stepped streets, and mixed social presence coexist with curated commercial interfaces, sometimes becoming part of the very authenticity through which Cihangir is valued. Media production, including recurring film and television shoots and continuous photographing of stairs, views, and facades, extends the neighborhood’s symbolic circulation, so that Cihangir is repeatedly used as an image of itself.

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. Displacement can occur through a reweighting of the perceptual field: familiar cues remain, but their relative prominence, meaning, and social ownership change. By integrating embodied, temporal, multimodal, and participant-narrated field encounters, the research shows how spatial production, classed belonging, and urban inequality are reproduced through everyday sensory environments under neoliberal conditions. The findings call for urban policy frameworks that consider sensory diversity, everyday accessibility, and the coexistence of commercial vitality with non-commercial forms of urban life.

Subject of Research: Gentrification Reorganizes How a Neighborhood Sounds, Smells, and Feels

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

Article References: Kartal, H. B., & Kartal, A. N. (2026). Sensory regimes of gentrification: urban transformation, embodied experience, and neoliberal spatial production in Cihangir. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1871741. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1871741

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1871741

Keywords: Sensory, regimes, gentrification, urban, transformation, embodied, experience, neoliberal, spatial, production, Cihangir, scientific research