Worth the Wait and Hype? Gentrification, Anxiety, and the Hipster Geographies of Boutique Ice Cream

In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, gentrification continues to upscale city fabrics, including their retail landscapes, beyond recognition. The ongoing expansion of boutique shops and aestheticized commerce displacing longtime stores and ordinary services increasingly signals new geographies of hipster retailing dominating the marketplace of local shopping streets in old inner-city areas. The qualitative analysis of this Master’s thesis traces the socio-spatial articulation of new hipster geographies within retail gentrification processes by offering a cultural critique of an ice-cream boutique located on Ossington Avenue in downtown Toronto, attending to material and digital dynamics of urban production and consumption. At the same time, this Master’s thesis locates the presence of anxiety within contemporary urban change. Shedding light on the phenomenon of 'queuing' outside of the independent ice-cream shop, my research reveals how anxiety underpins popular identity performances on Instagram and animates the experience of actors on the gentrifying street.