Gentrification

Studies on gentrification have seen a significant resurgence in recent years and much of the current work on gentrification has been integrated with other important areas of urban research. Gentrification has thus come to be a valuable lens for examining a variety of intersecting urban phenomena. However, the concept has a contesting nature too: first, it poses a major challenge to the traditional theories of residential location and social structure; second, it is a political and policy relevant issue as it is concerned with regeneration at the cost of displacement; third, it currently represents one of the key theoretical and ideological battlegrounds in urban planning and geography.

The book is structured around these contesting elements. Chapter 1 describes the birth of gentrification, the coinage of the term by the British sociologist Ruth Glass and the first research on the topic conducted in London and New York in the 1960s. Then, as now, it can be defined as a transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city into middle-class residential and/or commercial use. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the two main antipodes of gentrification theory. Chapter 2 looks at the supply-side theories, which explain gentrification as a product of capitalist uneven development and its associated forms of monopoly rent accumulation. Neil Smith’s rent gap thesis claims that differential “potential” and “capitalized” ground rents create a huge potential surplus profit for developers, thus gentrification takes place where and when the rent gap offers better conditions for its accumulation at the hand of developers and state policies. Chapter 3 considers the demand-based explanation of gentrification and suggests that the changes in the occupation structure in post-industrial cities of high-income countries are the main drivers for gentrification, with all the cultural and social changes involved. Chapters 4 and 5 suggest that while gentrification has currently stepped into a third “global” phase, the phenomenon seems largely under-theorized in relation to the roles of financial capital, and national and local states. Furthermore, forms of “rural gentrification”, “new-build gentrification” and the more recent “super-gentrification” have been detected. Chapter 6 addresses the questions of whether gentrification is a positive or negative neighbourhood process. As such, while policymakers and the political mainstream in general claim innumerable positive outcomes from policies of “social mixing”, recent research proves that these outcomes are hardly observable in cities of the world. Chapter 7 envisages the future of gentrification within a social justice agenda, which is first and foremost about resisting gentrification, when and where necessary. Three case studies from North America reveal attempts to resist gentrification through different tactics and strategies that low-income communities have developed to gain more control over, and ownership of, housing and neighbourhood space.