Revanchist City Research Articles

From Urban Entrepreneurialism to a “Revanchist City”? On the Spatial Injustices of Glasgow’s Renaissance

Recent perspectives on the American city have highlighted the extent to which the economic and sociospatial contradictions generated by two decades of “actually existing” neoliberal urbanism appear to demand an increasingly punitive or “revanchist” political response. At the same time, it is increasingly being acknowledged that, after embracing much of the entrepreneurial ethos, European cities are also confronting sharpening inequalities and entrenched social exclusion. Drawing on evidence from Glasgow, the paper assesses the dialectical relations between urban entrepreneurialism, its escalating contradictions, and the growing compulsion to meet these with a selective appropriation of the revanchist political repertoire.

Looking at the "North American City" Through the Lens of Gentrification Discourse

This paper introduces a new way of thinking about gentrification, by showing how two discourses of gentrification, the "revanchist city" (an American construct) and the "emancipatory city" (a Canadian construct) are produced and articulated in their national contexts. I demonstrate that such an approach allows to us to rethink the critique of "continentalism" vis-à-vis the "North American City" first posited by Goldberg and Mercer (1986). Following an explanation of why a consideration of discursive formations is important for the construction of a "geography of gentrification," the paper discusses the debate over continentalism before analysing the two gentrification discourses to illustrate the poetics and politics of representation which underpin them. The central argument is that our understandings of both gentrification and continentalism could be furthered by a new direction for gentrification research which is sensitive to context and takes onboard these academic discourses, examines the interplay which exists between them, and finds evidence to accept or reject the discourses in gentrifying neighborhoods throughout Canada and America.

Sex and the Revanchist City: Zoning out Pornography in New York

This paper is an investigation of the social, economic, legal, and cultural factors underlying the move, in New York City, to regulate the sale of pornographic materials through the promulgation of zoning laws. The campaign to zone out pornography, a point of solidarity around which a number of disparate and often hostile interest groups have rallied in order to reclaim public space in the name of community (as though the term itself were transparent and monovocal) is linked to both gentrification and the socioeconomic dynamics underlying the emergence of what Neil Smith has characterized as the revanchist city. ‘Quality of life’ issues stand euphemistically for the domestication and sanitization of an urban landscape whose perceived unruliness is emblematized not only by the presence of large numbers of homeless people, but also by the outré display of sexually explicit imagery associated with XXX-rated businesses. By focusing on the discursive strategies that seek to identify sex shops with so-called ‘secondary impacts’ such as increased crime and decreasing property values, I aim to uncover the social biases and economic motivations that work to shape the urban landscape. I argue that the move to zone out pornography in New York City is imbricated within larger spatial practices that operate both to maximize the productivity of social space and to reproduce the social values of the majority.

Review: Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, The US Paper Industry and Sustainable Production: An Argument for Restructuring, the New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Gentrification and the Middle Classes, Measuring Sustainable Development: Macroeconomics and the Environment, Environment and Technology in the Former USSR: The Case of Acid Rain and Power Generation

Review: Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, The US Paper Industry and Sustainable Production: An Argument for Restructuring, the New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Gentrification and the Middle Classes, Measuring Sustainable Development: Macroeconomics and the Environment, Environment and Technology in the Former USSR: The Case of Acid Rain and Power Generation

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article: Environmental management: readings and case studies Lewis Owen and Tim Unwin (eds) Process and form in geomorphology D R Stoddart (ed) Contesting space: power relations and the urban built environment in colonial Singapore Brenda S A Yeoh Mediterranean desertification and land use C Jane Brandt and John B Thornes (eds) The Earth transformed: an introduction to human impacts on the environment Andrew Goudie and Heather Viles The new urban frontier: gentrification and the revanchist city Neil Smith The new middle class and the remaking of the central city David Ley Gentrification and the middle classes Tim Butler