Blind Man's Buff, or Hamnett's Philosophical Individualism in Search of Gentrification

Abstract

As a Scottish undergraduate from a small town in the mid 1970s, I was plied with urban land use models in which half of the ideal city seemed to be submerged under Lake Michigan. Naturally I was sceptical. Upon coming to the United States my scepticism proved well founded, for in no city I visited did I find the eastern sector submerged, and in no city either did Park's and Burgess's concentric rings apply to the western sector occupied by land lubbers. I did however come across the quite novel process of gentrification and began researching it in Philadelphia and Baltimore, intrigued by the realization that this was not at all what the models predicted. With the enthusiasm of a second year graduate student, I thought to theorize what I was looking at, and after many late nights and a very furrowed brow, I gave birth to a short paper with a tentative title: 'Toward a Theory of Gentrification'. Long after it was dispatched to an interested editor, my advisor delivered his own verdict on the paper: 'It's OK', he muttered, 'but it's so simple. Everybody knows that'. So much for nurturing one's students. Today I am certainly gratified that the hypothesis of a rent gap has been taken seriously and empirically tested by various colleagues, but I have always suspected that my advisor was not entirely wrong about its simplicity and modesty. In its content no less than its title, Chris Hamnett's 'The Blind Men and the Elephant' was a disappointingly stale intervention in ongoing gentrification debates.2 A roguish stomp through recent and not so recent writing, it is more likely to flatten the terrain than elevate the debate. His central argument is that discussions of gentrification have entertained 'two main competing sets of explanations. The first ... has stressed the production of urban space', the second 'the production of gentrifiers' (p. 175). Myself and David Ley are identified as the respective proponents of these positions the blind men while Chris plays intellectual clean-up, clearing a space for the perennial middle ground. My disappointment stems not just from the lack of anything new being said, but from the fact that I had discussed the paper extensively with Chris and I thought we had ironed out a lot of misunderstandings. On reading the published version, however, I find that too much inaccuracy has survived and his ideological assertions have become too brittle for the paper to pass without comment. We are left, I suspect, more muddled than middled. I have several objections to the way Hamnett poses the debate and to the way his analysis proceeds. First, although David Ley and I have certainly differed over explanations of gentrification and I expect still do, there is also a lot about which we agree for example about the centrality of class in any explanation of gentrification. Hamnett's dualistic depiction of the debate is much too simplistic. It excludes the very significant contributions of many other writers and perspectives, a point highlighted by the fact that Hamnett's piece was followed by Liz Bondi's much more useful, original, and critical reassessment of gender and gentrification.3 Second, the discussion is very dated. It addresses the far cruder state of debate almost ten years ago and ignores or misconstrues the evolution of different