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
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.
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
In the 2010s, London’s LGBTQ+ scene was hit by extensive venue closures. For some, this represented the increased inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in society. For others, it threatened the city’s status as a ‘global beacon of diversity’ or merely reaffirmed the hostility of London’s neoliberal landscapes.
Navigating these competing realities, Olimpia Burchiellaro explores the queer politics of LGBTQ+ inclusion in London.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with activists, professionals and LGBTQ+ friendly businesses, the author reveals how gender and sexuality come to be reconfigured in the production and consumption of LGBTQ+ inclusion and its promises.
Giving voice to queer perspectives on inclusion, this is an important contribution to our understanding of urban policy, nightlife, neoliberalism and LGBTQ+ politics.
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
Introduction Gentrification as a concept has not been easy to define. The concept was first introduced by sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe “working class quarters [that] have been invaded by the middle class” ( 1964 : xvii). Glass first defined gentrification as a process of change in the social structure of deprived working-class neighborhoods due to the moving in of middle- and upper-class citizens, and the subsequent requalification of the housing stock and displacement of incumbent residents. I notice her use of the same words used by E
fieldwork conducted after the redevelopment project’s ultimate approval to think about the temporalities of inclusion and gentrification, and the revolutionary potential of pubs as sites for the making of alternative (queer) futures. The first version of this chapter – which I wrote for my PhD – reflected on what can be gained by engaging with promises of inclusion to expand their terms, affirmatively sabotage them from within, and more broadly on how to use commitments to inclusion to fight for queer(er) uses of space and time. Yet, just as promises of inclusion can be
project to be granted approval. Despite the promise of reinclusion, the campaigners nevertheless remained sceptical and opposed to the redevelopment, arguing that the forms of queerness the agreement catered for marked a departure from the ‘joyful sin’ which once characterized the Joiners Arms. For the next five years, campaigners would struggle to articulate this form of queerness amid the celebratory rhetoric of LGBTQ+ inclusion, revealing the class politics of inclusion as well as some of the limits of doing inclusion within a broader context of gentrification
