Abstract
In response to the five commentaries on our paper ‘Comparative approaches to gentrification: lessons from the rural’, we open up more ‘windows’ on rural gentrification and its urban counterpart. First, we highlight the issues of metrocentricity and urbanormativity within gentrification studies, highlighting their employment by our commentators. Second, we consider the issue of displacement and its operation within rural space, as well as gentrification as a coping strategy for neoliberal existence and connections to more-than-human natures. Finally, we consider questions of scale, highlighting the need to avoid naturalistic conceptions of scale and arguing that attention could be paid to the role of material practices, symbolizations and lived experiences in producing scaled geographies of rural and urban gentrification.
Highlights
Our article aimed to stimulate discussion of how framings other than the urban might contribute to comparative studies of gentrification, as well as considering the impact of comparative research on conceptualizations of gentrification
We would question Nelson’s illustration of how scale can inform understandings of the ‘geography of the concept of rural gentrification’, which implies that the presence of studies of gentrification within London acted to produce ‘heightened awareness’ of gentrification in the surrounding urban and rural areas, while in the United States scholars preferred to make use of concepts such as ‘“counterurbanization” or “amenity migration”’ (Nelson, 2018: 4–5)
We have recently made use of indices of low-population density and low-connectivity to urban centres of employment to identify areas of wilderness gentrification (Smith et al, 2018), stressing that while these indices connect to popular representations of wilderness as places devoid both of the presence of and connections to centres of large scale human settlement, these locations are symbolized in a range of ways and people can find wilderness experiences in areas relatively proximate in abstract space
Summary
Our article aimed to stimulate discussion of how framings other than the urban might contribute to comparative studies of gentrification, as well as considering the impact of comparative research on conceptualizations of gentrification. Halfacree provides arguments as to why the term might have been resisted by rural researchers, suggesting that reservations might stem from uncertainties relating to the presence of displacement as well as the concept’s perceived connections to urban space discussed above, and the postmodern and cultural turns discussed in our paper.
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