Gentrification has become a widespread form of urban transformation during the last decades. While gentrification has been vastly theorised and studied from the point of view of its economic, sociological, cultural or geographical underpinnings, the psychosocial implications of gentrification have been seldom explored. In this chapter, we argue that changing senses of place implicated in gentrification processes can be interpreted not as a mere, even less neutral, effect of capitalist logics of creative destruction of the city, but as one of its main subjective catalysers. Based on the empirical analysis of a study conducted in the neighbourhood of Gràcia (Barcelona, Spain), we discuss the symbolic mechanisms that renew senses of place, transforming them while re-creating them, to channel, re-produce and capture place-based profitable value, i.e. the creative destruction of senses of place. The study advances empirically based knowledge on the ‘semiocapitalist’ processes that reshape sense of place by capitalising on place-related meanings, affect, desire and identification with the urban symbolic environment.

We opened this volume with sobering stories of the dire global challenges before us. Indeed, one would not be hard pressed to find stories of the urgency of our various environmental and social crises. While we wrote this book, the COVID-19 pandemic raged, towns in the Arctic reached unprecedented temperatures, countless hectares of forests fell while fossil fuels continued to be violently extracted from the earth, and Black, Indigenous and people of colour continued to be exploited and oppressed. Yet, despite all this, or rather because of it, we wish to begin our conclusion with hope and determination. Drawing on Solnit (2016), we believe that there is a spaciousness in the uncertainties posed by the challenges before us in that they offer new possibilities for being, thinking and acting – for renewal and purposeful redirection in our trajectory – and it is through a reawakened awareness of our rich and dynamic relationships to place that we can find a better way forward.

It is now well established that humans are the most powerful influence on the environment. The scale, pace and intensity of human activity is fundamentally altering earth’s climate system (IPCC, 2014) and driving global biodiversity and ecosystem decline (IPBES, 2019). Simultaneously, new forms and patterns of mobility are emerging and accelerating in a world driven by globalised market forces, new technologies, media transformations and related cultural trends of late modernity (Stokols, 2018; Boccagni, 2017; Cresswell, 1996). Indeed, during the final stages of preparing this volume we are experiencing a global pandemic of COVID-19 that is reshaping society – from the way we travel to how we relate to one another (see the Preface). While many of the global challenges addressed in this volume are not new, they are accelerating to such a degree that they are challenging our sense of ‘ontological security’ in the world, a concept that has been useful in international relations research, and most recently climate change research, to articulate relationships between identity and security (Farbotko, 2019; Kinnvall, 2004). Our expectations for the stability and continuity of our habitats and lifestyles are increasingly being challenged.