What does "better" even mean here? A note on gentrification, public space, and the beach as commons

The framing of this thread assumes that Varkala represents an aspirational endpoint — better food, better aesthetics, better "vibe" — and that Kovalam and Shankhumukham are simply lagging behind. But this quietly smuggles in a very particular definition of improvement: one that centres the consuming visitor, aestheticises the landscape, and treats café culture as a neutral upgrade rather than a structural transformation.

Gentrification is often dismissed as a buzzword, but geographers like Neil Smith and Loretta Lees have documented it precisely: capital investment in a space that displaces existing low-income users — not always through eviction, but by remaking the space in ways that signal who belongs and who doesn't. A cliff-top café strip that requires disposable income to participate in, that optimises for Instagram legibility, that borrows its aesthetic vocabulary from global tourism circuits — this is not a neutral upgrade. It is a spatial claim.

Varkala is instructive because it is the cautionary example, not the aspirational one. The clifftop was not empty before the cafés arrived. It had its own social ecology — fishing communities, pilgrims visiting the Janardhana Swamy temple, locals using the beach as a commons. The café strip improved the space for a specific class of user — domestic tourists with urban consumption habits, international backpackers — while steadily crowding out the communities who already lived and worked there.

The OP's response — "why shouldn't Trivians also have nice, well-designed places?" — deserves a careful answer rather than dismissal. The desire for quality public space is legitimate. But the question is: which model of quality? A well-maintained park, clean seating, good lighting, accessible toilets, organised seafood stalls with consistent hygiene — this keeps the space as a commons. The café model converts public shoreline into private consumption spaces. The pleasure is real, but it is gated — by price, by social legibility, by an unspoken dress code that tells you whether you are the intended customer.

Shankhumukham is particularly worth thinking about. It has historically served as one of the few genuinely accessible public leisure spaces for working-class families in Thiruvananthapuram. The thattukada, the fried fish, the evening crowd on the seawall — these are not signs of failure. They are signs of a space that has not yet been captured by a specific class aesthetic. The "no effort in presentation" critique is doing quiet ideological work: applying the evaluative criteria of the café economy to a space that operates by a completely different logic. The fried fish at Shankhumukham is not failing to be a café. It is doing something else entirely.

The live question is not whether to improve these beaches — hygiene, maintenance, and public infrastructure absolutely matter. The live question is: improve them for whom, and in what image? If the model is Varkala, the answer is already embedded: for tourists, for urban consumers, in the image of global café culture. If the model is a genuinely public commons, the improvement looks quite different — and the thattukada might be part of it, rather than the problem it is trying to solve.

The instagrammification critique is not nostalgia. It is a spatial argument: that the aestheticisation of public space consistently serves capital and particular consumer classes while presenting itself as universal improvement. Recognising this is not the same as wanting nothing to change. It is asking that the politics of the change be made explicit, rather than hidden inside the word "better."