Long before a single resident is priced out, a neighbourhood's meaning has usually already been displaced — reframed in listings, articles and word of mouth as 'up and coming', 'undiscovered', 'authentic', language that quietly recodes an existing community as raw material for someone else's discovery narrative. This symbolic displacement precedes and enables the material kind: capital follows the new meaning, not the old one, and by the time physical displacement is measurable in rent data, the interpretive groundwork has been laid for months or years. DiscourseRefraction names the way a place's lived meaning gets bent, like light through a different medium, as it passes through real-estate and media discourse before that discourse ever produces a physical consequence. Gentrification studies that begin counting only at the eviction notice have already missed the opening act, where the neighbourhood's story was rewritten by people who did not yet live there.
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