The geography of gentrification

Abstract

Over the past decade we have seen the rapid and visceral emergence of state-led gentrification in the Global South – processes of gentrification are now changing the centres of cities in China, India, Pakistan, South America and South Africa. Gentrification began to take off in the Global South at the turn of the 21st century but even then the geographies of a global gentrification presented all but omitted the Global South in any meaningful way. Future comparative work on gentrification needs to attend to the issues around comparative urbanism more critically. Gentrification is embedded in what Peck calls an emergent regime of ‘fast’ urban policy formation. A postcolonial perspective might help collapse the myth of the linear development of gentrification as travelling from the Global North to the Global South, replacing it with an ontology of relational multiplicity and an epistemology of multiple forms of knowledge in continual construction.