Spiritual gentrification amid the rise of platform urbanism: “Wanghong temples” and emerging Buddhist cultural economies in Tianzhu Road, Hangzhou, China

This study scrutinizes how the Tianzhu Road in the Lingyin Community – a peri -urban area in Hangzhou ringed by a cluster of temples that constitutes a distinct spiritual enclave – has been reworked through a two-phase gentrification process driven by the spiritual aesthetics and platform logics. Drawing on a two-month ethnography and media content analysis, this study conceptualizes spiritual gentrification as a spiritual aesthetics and culture-oriented recalibration of urban space in which spiritual elements operate as symbolic capital, attracting culturally motivated entrepreneurs and aligning the spiritual atmosphere with slow-life values as an alternative to urban modernity. In particular, platform urbanism constitutes a high-velocity circuit whereby digital platforms translate spiritual elements into viral commodities, inserting this spiritual enclave into attention-driven regimes of value. Since 2020, short-video platforms have extracted and circulated visual elements of Buddhist spaces, thus blending this spiritual enclave into China’s wanghong economy. Hence, temples became youthoriented “check-in” destinations, accelerating rental inflation, symbolic displacement, and the erosion of avant-garde gentrifiers’ spiritual aesthetics. It argues that visual circuits on platforms selectively extract, visualise, and replicate the gentrification aesthetics, transforming spiritual elements into rent-generating spectacle while destabilizing the moral economies that first enabled spiritual settlement. By bridging geographies of religion, platform urbanism, and gentrification aesthetics, this study reveals how the symbolic capital of religious spirituality is revalorised through platform logics and translated into socio-spatial fabrics of cities. Meanwhile, it contributes to enriching gentrification scholarship beyond secular taste cultures and extending the debates on platform urbanism with a unique spiritual dimension.