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Family Gentrifiers: Challenging the City as a Place Simultaneously to Build a Career and to Raise Children

University of Amsterdam/AME, Nw. Prinsengracht 130, 1018 VZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands. c.j.m.karsten{at}uva.nl

Suburbanisation by families with children can be considered as a dominant factor in determining the structure of a city's population. However, due to urban restructuring programmes, a modest counter process can be observed. Some families who could afford to buy a house in the suburbs decide instead to stay in the central areas of the city. In so doing, they form a relatively new category of gentrifiers: middle-class families with children. In this paper, they are identified as 'yupps': young urban professional parents. They combine the next step in their life cycle—having children—with continuing their career and their preference for an urban lifestyle. The Amsterdam study, reported here, gives some insight in the personal characteristics of yupps, their motivations to live centrally, their activity patterns and constraints. An analysis of their daily lives reveals the significance of the neighbourhood as a crucial factor in the daily integration of such contrasting demands as building a career, caring for children and keeping up with cultural pursuits and social contacts. It is further argued that—in a class-specific context-changing gender relations lie at the root of family gentrification, resulting in the construction of new male and female identities.

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