Under contemporary capitalism the extraction of value from the built environment has escalated, working in tandem with other urban processes to lay the foundations for the exploitative processes of gentrification world-wide.
Global gentrifications: Uneven development and displacement critically assesses and tests the meaning and significance of gentrification in places outside the ‘usual suspects’ of the Global North. Informed by a rich array of case studies from cities in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Southern Europe, and beyond, the book (re)discovers the important generalities and geographical specificities associated with the uneven process of gentrification globally. It highlights intensifying global struggles over urban space and underlines gentrification as a growing and important battleground in the contemporary world.
The book will be of value to students and academics, policy makers, planners and community organisations.
According to Richard Florida, the self-styled urbanist who has made his fortune off the back of creative gentrification, New York City (NYC) and London are still buys – ‘This is not the end of cities’, 1 he recently proclaimed. Indeed, he sees the pandemic (and Black Lives Matter) as presenting an opportunity to ‘reshape cities in more equitable ways’. He seems to want his cake and to eat it too? In this chapter we consider two debates over the future of gentrification in the Anglo-American post-COVID-19 city: de-gentrification versus disaster gentrification
329 SEVENTEEN Gentrification in China? Julie Ren Introduction Urban China is experiencing tremendous change, inspiring an intensification of academic attention. While there is an emerging body of literature on gentrification in China (eg He, 2007, 2009; Song and Zhu, 2010), there is concurrently a wave of urban researchers critiquing the nature of ‘parochially derived’ urban concepts (Robinson, 2011, p 19). Similar to other researchers interested in theorising urban China (eg Fainstein and Logan, 2008), I have also struggled with the selection of urban
441 TWENTY-TWO Conclusion: global gentrifications Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales This edited collection has been like a leap onto a moving train, not quite knowing where it might lead, and having only a vague sense of where it has been. It has been exciting and we have learnt a lot. What the different chapters offer is a wider and deeper view of ‘gentrification’ from around the globe than has been managed to date. However, here, the editors and contributors have done more than merely offer a large number of empirical accounts of the
453 Afterword The adventure of generic gentrification Eric Clark “Oh, no, we don’t have any gentrification here”, said this eminent researcher of the rise of the Taiwanese middle class. On only my third visit to Taipei, I was not inclined to challenge his reply, though the ongoing and newly completed large redevelopments I saw as he drove me around Taipei some 10 years ago did stir doubt. Gentrification cannot be simply read off the urban landscape as if visible in a momentary view. So, who was I to jump to conclusions? Nevertheless, I imagined that these
75 FIVE Age and gentrification in Berlin: urban ageing policy and the experiences of disadvantaged older people Meredith Dale, Josefine Heusinger, Birgit Wolter Introduction Berlin is a young city in the German context. It attracts people from all over the world, and is a magnet for German, European and international migration. Population growth and investor-friendly legislation are creating growing pressure in the housing market: rents have risen sharply and the signs of displacement processes forcing less affluent groups to the city’s outskirts and
419 TWENTY-ONE The place of gentrification in Cape Town Annika Teppo and Marianne Millstein Introduction Consider these events in Cape Town in 2009: • Gugulethu: A gleaming new mall is built in the township approximately 20 kilometres from the city centre: the developers are interested in attracting black middle-class clientele to the area. However, this means that the local merchants, many of whom had traded in the area for more than a decade, are displaced far from Gugulethu’s best trading sites. • Central Business District (CBD): Right before the 2010 FIFA
1 ONE Introduction: ‘gentrification’ – a global urban process? Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales To what extent is gentrification a global phenomenon, with diverse causes and characteristics, or a phenomenon of globalisation, conceived as a process of capital expansion, uneven urban development and neighbourhood changes in ‘new’ cities? (Atkinson and Bridge, 2005, p 2) Introduction: moving beyond the usual gentrification suspects Gentrification has been a major focus of several (inter)disciplinary literatures for many years, including
233 FIFTEEN The impossibility of gentrification and social mixing Mark Davidson Introduction Social mixing, less segregation and more ‘socially balanced’ neighbourhoods all seem like inherently positive policy ambitions. Why, then, have a raft of urban policy programmes that have placed the goal of social mixing at their core been subject to, at times, condemning criticism (N. Smith, 2002; Slater, 2006; Lees, 2008)? The answer proposed here is that the current policy-led push to generate social mixing and socially mixed neighbourhoods through ‘social
