Gentrification Theory Research Articles

Rethinking the geography of gentrification: From a scale perspective

This article proposes that the lens of scale may potentially yield fresh insights into the comparative research on gentrification. First, the flows of capital, people, and knowledge in re-scaling furnish a point of departure for a holistic theory of planetary gentrification and a vital reference point for comparison. Second, to harness upscaling and downscaling in tandem, comparative studies should adequately connect gentrification with similar regional/local ontologies to obtain greater ontological power. The disadvantaged should take advantage of a loose and shifting alliance among the pro-gentrification forces to find a “real choice” (instead of a “perfect choice”) for those affected. Moreover, a pragmatic solution is opprobrium against predatory flows, particularly the flows of capital, whose nature is defined by local peculiarities.

The COVID-19 pandemic: power and privilege, gentrification, and urban environmental justice in the global north

ABSTRACT Planetary urbanization exacerbates the spread of infectious disease and the emergence of pandemics. As COVID-19 cases continue to swell in cities around the world, the pandemic has visibilized urban health inequities. In the Global North, emerging trends show that lower income residents are often at greater risk for infection and death due to COVID-19, due in part to inequitable living, working and environmental conditions. We explore the underlying causes and potential long-term implications of the health inequities exemplified by outbreaks of COVID-19 in the context of evolving patterns of urban development, drawing from theories of urban environmental justice and gentrification.

The Real Estate Frontier

AbstractAfrica's major cities are experiencing dramatic transformation as a result of growing real estate investment. This article explores whether existing theories can explain the dynamics of urban redevelopment in an African context, and how African cases can inform new theorizations of real estate driven urban transformation. Examining the utility of theories of gentrification and speculative urbanism for understanding urban redevelopment in Accra, Ghana, it argues that urban redevelopment in this city has been shaped by its particular (post)colonial history of state land acquisition and urban planning. Rather than simply identifying empirical variation on established theories, however, the article draws on recent research on commodity frontiers to propose an original theorization of urban redevelopment in Accra in terms of the production of a ‘real estate frontier’. This real estate frontier is characterized by the incremental and contested commodification of state land to enable the growth of the real estate sector in the city. The article concludes by calling for a comparative research agenda to better understand real estate frontiers globally.

Gentrificação, modelos teóricos e estudos de caso: ensaio de crítica historiográfica

Diante das diversas transformações pelas quais as cidades modernas passaram ao longo da história, surgiram variados modelos teóricos que buscam explicar o que é, como e por que ocorre um dos fenômenos mais marcantes das grandes metrópoles urbanas na contemporaneidade: a gentrificação. O objetivo deste ensaio é discorrer sobre alguns destes modelos, apresentando e comparando estudos de caso: o do bairro Le Marais em Paris, na França; o do bairro Soho em Nova Iorque, nos Estados Unidos; e o Centro Histórico de João Pessoa, no Estado da Paraíba, Brasil. Com isso, objetivou-se esboçar um ensaio de crítica historiográfica a respeito das teorias da gentrificação em relação ao caso brasileiro. Concluiu-se com a hipótese de que no Brasil os próprios modelos teóricos que serviriam para explicar o fenômeno são apropriados na forma de políticas públicas que reforçam o próprio processo de gentrificação.

After Gentrification: Social Mix, Settler Colonialism, and Cruel Optimism in the Transformation of Neighbourhood Space

AbstractSocial mix policies have emerged as a prominent mechanism to legitimate neighbourhood redevelopment efforts across the US. Despite integrationist rhetoric, results often disabuse marginalised communities of their claims to the city. This paper employs a hybrid spatio‐temporal analysis at the intersection of political‐economic theories of gentrification and post‐colonial and Black geographies literatures to examine underlying cultural logics and affective experiences animating such processes of neighbourhood transformation, contestation, and succession. Reflecting on 15 years of experience researching Over‐the‐Rhine (OTR), Cincinnati, we contribute a stylised distinction between the foundational, mature, and ongoing legacies of urban settler colonial relations. Our account discloses the power geometries shaping neighbourhood space by illustrating the impact of the discourses, tactics, and strategies employed by pro‐development actors and neighbourhood activists as OTR's socio‐political landscape shifted over time. In conclusion, we engage the thorny questions these dynamics raise surrounding how inner‐city neighbourhoods are theorised and struggled over after gentrification.

Unbounding gentrification theory: multidimensional space, networks and relational approaches

ABSTRACTThis paper argues for an unbounding of approaches within gentrification theory with a renewed and broadened focus on the intertwined dynamics of uneven development and socio-spatial formation. This is carried out through a critical engagement with recent debates within gentrification theory along with concurrent debates over suburbanization, vertical urbanization, networked urbanism and relational approaches in the analysis of urban social space. The paper concludes by calling for a transgression of epistemological boundaries in order to understand the intertwining of uneven development and socio-spatial formation at different scales.

Comprehending the gentrification of a suburb: the case of Mulund, Mumbai

The process of gentrification in recent times has ventured beyond the inner city into territories that are not accounted for in the conventional wisdom associated with the phenomenon. Such has been the case of gentrification in Mulund, a suburb of Mumbai in India, where the occurrence of gentrification challenges the traditional understanding of the process. Mulund once used to be an industrial suburb where engineering and pharmaceutical industries were operational. Today, the suburb is gentrified with most of the old industrial structures replaced by high rises, malls, and multiplexes. Gentrification has brought about a revolutionary change to the suburb and has significantly redefined its characteristics. Yet, unlike the process of gentrification in the inner-city areas of Mumbai, that has been studied far and wide; the suburban gentrification of Mulund has been overlooked. This calls for studying the process of suburban gentrification in Mulund. Accordingly, the study has been undertaken to comprehend the gentrification of Mulund by dwelling on its causes, nature, and implications. The study questions the applicability of the existing theories of gentrification in the context of Mulund and attempts to answer it by applying both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The results of the study reveal that the conventional theories are only partially applicable to the case of Mulund’s gentrification; therefore, requiring a renewed theoretical understanding to suit the changing nature of the phenomenon. The study further brings to light a series of changes brought about to the suburb by the occurrence of gentrification, such as the decrease in housing affordability, growth of retail and business, and growth of urban amenities, ultimately resulting in its urban spatial transformation.

The real estate foothold in the Holy Land: Transnational gentrification in Jerusalem

Gentrification theory blames the widening and transnationalisation of the phenomenon on the global commodification of housing and the emergence of a ‘planetary rent gap’. This article draws on fieldwork in the UK and Israel and argues that while transnational gentrification is economically driven, in the sense of an unequal global division of labour, we need to reinstate the cultural context into the core of gentrification theory and pay more attention to what motivates people to purchase homes in particular foreign locations. I argue that these motivations can be emotional, and adopt the concept of the ‘real estate as foothold’– a way of holding onto an emotionally laden space through the acquisition of property. Tying together gentrification and lifestyle migration literatures and using the case study of British Jews with second homes in Israel, I explore such motivations and connect them with Israel’s political and economic quest to attract diaspora Jews. Israel’s neoliberalisation made it a second-home destination for wealthy Jews, part of the second-homes trend, who favour Israel due to emotional, national and religious ties. I focus on the case of Jerusalem, the Israeli city most affected by the phenomenon, to explore the intersecting outcomes of top-down policies and bottom-up lifestyle demands on the upscaling of the inner city and the displacement of Israeli residents. Residents’ displacement results in their replacement in cheaper areas, often beyond the ‘Green Line’ in the Occupied Territories, a problematic outcome to any peace negotiations, but one that follows the agenda of municipal and state-level policymakers.

Reversing the dominant directionality: Evidence of the East Asian model of gentrification in LA's Koreatown

Reversing the usual directionality of gentrification theory and process emanating from Anglo‐American models, we work from an East Asian model of gentrification via Seoul to see whether it has been emulated in the Global North, in this case Koreatown, Los Angeles. Focusing on the style, density, scale, scope and pace of the East Asian model and using interviews with 25 Korean gentrifiers and 10 key informants alongside secondary data, the results showed a mix of explicit emulation (density, new‐build) and no emulation at all (slow pace, small‐scale, punctuated scope), yielding a distinctly hybrid, Los Angeles‐style model that builds up a wider geography of gentrification.

Does the Starbucks effect exist? Searching for a relationship between Starbucks and adjacent rents

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to test the popular perception that the storefront location choices of premium brands are positively related to adjacent rents. Focusing on the case of Starbucks, a popular international coffee chain, the authors examine the association between Starbucks locations and rents in Manhattan, New York.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use a multi-year data set for average rent per square foot for office and multifamily residential properties within 1/10th of a mile of several hundred coffee shop locations in Manhattan, controlling for vacancy, job density, overall amenity density (WalkScore), coffee shop density, transit accessibility, neighborhood and the Starbucks brand. The authors take two different methodological approaches to isolate potential statistical evidence for an association between Starbucks locations and adjacent rents: the authors run a pooled-cross-sectional model and apply propensity-score matching.FindingsThe authors find a statistically significant positive relationship between the presence of Starbucks and average office rents when applying the authors’ pooled-cross-sectional model and applying propensity-score matching. This finding is consistent with several potential causal hypotheses: Starbucks may be attributed to higher rent office locations; the “Starbucks effect” may cause higher rents in adjacent locations; or there may be a mutual reinforcing of positive feedback between Starbucks locations and office rents. The authors find no strong association between Starbucks and residential rents (one model indicates an effect of 2.3 percent on residential rent at 10 percent level of significance), which challenges the direct linearity of the consumption theory of gentrification popularly called the “Starbucks effect.”Originality/valueIn the literature, the existence, causality and directionality of a relationship between Starbucks locations and neighborhood change have been largely unstudied. In this paper, the authors test the hypothesis that there is a positive correlation between Starbucks locations and rents.

The Evolving State of Gentrification

AbstractHackworth and Smith’s ‘Changing State of Gentrification’, published in 2001 and focused on New York City, is a definitive landmark. As you read these words, ‘New York City 2001’ might seem distant coordinates in the accelerating time‐space of knowledge production, but it’s not very far when understood in the time horizon of humanity’s urban evolution. Hackworth and Smith’s work helps us rethink today’s theoretical frontiers (especially postcolonial attacks on gentrification theory as a neocolonial imposition on the Global South) as well as long‐forgotten traditions. Ruth Glass’s critique of gentrification in 1964 was already a global, postcolonial challenge to the imperial epistemic violence that consolidated the West – neoliberal doctrines of human competition premised in nineteenth‐century social Darwinism and eugenics. Understanding the changing state of gentrification today requires confronting the planetary politics of urbanised human competition and hijacked theories of human evolution, and deciding what kinds of humans we wish to become.

Greening Displacements, Displacing Green: Environmental Subjectivity, Slum Clearance, and the Embodied Political Ecologies of Dispossession in Mumbai

AbstractIn Indian cities, informal ‘slum’ settlements have long been targeted for removal as an environmental improvement strategy, despite their relatively low impact. Slum clearance has escalated with the combination of speculative development and environmental change, creating uneven precarity throughout Mumbai's neighborhoods. State agents play a direct role in slum evictions, but they do not act unilaterally. Diverse lower‐income and middle‐class residents seeking better living conditions have sometimes converged in their embrace of slum clearances and resettlements that advance elite development interests. In other moments, the dispossessing effects of market‐based and elite‐biased slum rehabilitation have fomented contestation. This article analyzes how differently situated groups emerge as ‘environmental subjects’ that embrace or contest improvement projects. It suggests three dimensions of subject formation: governing logics and discourses of urban environmental improvement, the territorial politics of informality, and differentiated embodied experiences of precarity and dispossession. Environmental subject formation is explored through two interventions that entail slum clearance—mangrove and green space conservation and an urban transport infrastructure project. Findings suggest that the connection between displacement and improvement cannot be explained through theories of environmental gentrification but require attention to the simultaneously inclusive and dispossessing regimes of postcolonial development.

Preservation Park and themescape economics in Oakland, California

Abstract Preservation Park is a site in downtown Oakland, California, where original houses from the late nineteenth century have been restored in a re-creation of a period neighbourhood. This article begins by framing the site as a themed environment, or ‘themescape’, in which the act of historical preservation is undermined by various modern interventions that fabricate the past, such as the relocation of many of the houses from their original locations and the addition of idealized faux-Victorian details. Using the Developer’s Guideline, the principal text in the design of the site and contemporaneous city planning documents, the article identifies how the artificial reproduction of Victorian Oakland was intended to increase investment and reverse economic decline in the city centre. Drawing on theories of tourism and gentrification, the article analyses the design and theming of Preservation Park as economic devices and aesthetic entities that restrict movement, create a visual experience and use various signifiers of private space to make the site exclusive and valuable. These readings are then employed to contextualize the site’s racial and social history, leading to a discussion of the relationship between the economic objectives, the theming and the actual usage of Preservation Park and similar sites.

Gentrifications in the Planetary Elsewhere: tele-urbanization, Schengtrification, colour-splashing, and the mirage of “more-than-adequate” critical theory

ABSTRACTDespite the recent planetary turn that has swept through gentrification research, the theoretical barycentre remains pegged to a few strongholds located in the global north-west. Against this background, this essay offers a provincialized account of three gentrification-like trends – tele-urbanization, Schengtrification and colour-splashing – which are currently taking place in Tbilisi, Riga and Kiev. It is proposed that these processes are supported by an underlying logic that is not pinned to these cities’ specific (“post-communist”) contexts, raising questions about the avowedly universal validity of theories of gentrification stemming from the global northwest, and particularly those developed within the more critical scholarly tradition.

Fresh food, new faces: community gardening as ecological gentrification in St. Louis, Missouri

A largely qualitative body of literature has contributed to understanding the contradictory dimensions of community gardening as a social justice tool. Building on this literature through a city-wide, quantitative intervention, this paper focuses on community gardening as a facilitator of ecological gentrification in St. Louis, Missouri. Combining the analytical lenses of spatial justice, urban political ecology, and the rent gap theory of gentrification, I deploy spatial regression analysis to show that community gardening was positively associated with gentrification in St. Louis between the years 2000 and 2010, as measured by the growth of high socioeconomic status residents in each neighborhood. This result suggests that a sociospatial dialectic exists in which the implementation of a community garden, a change in the use of urban space, leads to unintended social outcomes. Contextualizing this finding within the broader literature, I conclude that the potential of community gardening as an instrument for spatial justice is contingent on institutional support against larger-scale processes, like gentrification, that lead to spatially unjust outcomes.

Rural gentrification in the North Aegean Countryside (Turkey)

This article examines rural gentrification as experienced on the North Aegean coasts of Turkey. The study area chosen is the closest Aegean coast to İstanbul and it attracts attention because of its archeological and mythological values, as well as its natural beauty and vernacular landscape. The most important element determining the rural landscape of the region is olive production. Depopulation in rural areas since 1950s and development of tourism in coastal areas after 1980 has brought about the investment-disinvestment cycle which is in the rural gentrification theory. The migration from urban to rural and tourism activities, which began in the rural area studied in 1980s, gained momentum in 2000s, real estate prices rose. It has been observed that in the rural area where tourism facilities have been improved, gentrification occurs in parallel. It is possible to categorize the newcomers as summer house vacationists, retired people, national elite and entrepreneurs. The study is based principally on in-depth interviews with village mukhtars, local people, newcomers, tourism entrepreneurs, and professionals. Newcomers and new economies change the rural landscape. However, the real estate market did not yet play a significant role in the rural gentrification in this area, unlike in developed Western countries. On the other hand, replacement of the agricultural sector by the service sector and change in land use creates post-productive landscape in North Aegean Countryside.

Gentrification and the Increasing Significance of Racial Transition in New York City 1970–2010

Gentrification is characterized as a spatial manifestation of economic inequality. An unsettled debate about gentrification is the extent to which it is also marked by distinct changes in neighborhood racial composition over time. This study uses a balanced panel of census data and retail data for New York City between 1970 and 2010 to extend prior research on the trajectory of gentrification and racial transition. This analysis finds an inverse relationship between Black and Latino residents and the pace of gentrification that increases over time. Consistent with theories of gentrification, it consistently trends with increasing household income. When income growth is disaggregated by race, Blacks and Latinos either have no effect or dampen the pace of gentrification by 2010. These findings support popular claims that even middle-class Blacks and Latinos are increasingly unable to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods as processes of change extend across the city.

Gentrification and the creation and formation of rent gaps

This contribution intervenes in the debate about gentrification theory's applicability to contexts outside the Global North, specifically responding to the work of [Ghertner, D. Asher. 2014. ‘India’s Urban Revolution: Geographies of Displacement beyond Gentrification.’ Environment and Planning A 46 (7): 1554–1571; Ghertner, D. Asher. 2015. ‘Why Gentrification Theory Fails in “Much of the World”.’ City 19 (4): 552–563]. It aims to show that, contrary to Ghertner's claims, gentrification theory is well equipped to analyze and understand the many different factors and forces that are involved in processes of urbanization and urban change across the globe. However, in order for the theory to be able to properly grasp these, I propose that we distinguish between two distinct processes involved in gentrification: (1) the creation and formation of rent gaps, making very relevant the state violence and legal/regulatory changes that accompany the enclosures and accumulation by dispossession that Ghertner says gentrification theory renders ‘unthinkable’, as well as other forces such as informality and conflict, and (2) these rent gaps’ subsequent closure (including property development), because the existence of a rent gap in and of itself is not a sufficient explanation of gentrification. Instead, whether areas with a rent gap gentrify is subject to numerous local specificities in the Global North and South alike. This distinction forces gentrification scholars to pay thorough attention to the political, cultural, social and economic factors that guide the creation and exploitation of rent gaps throughout the globe. To illustrate my arguments, I use examples from my work on the urban transformation of Beirut, Lebanon.

A rural gentrification theory debate for the Global South?

Phillips and Smith’s attempt to refresh (rural) gentrification theory is successful as they provide a prolific set of epistemological comparative threads and substantiate this position via analysis of the UK, France and the US cases. Nevertheless, in my opinion, academia should go beyond the Western European/North American comfort zone and embrace theoretical and epistemological complexity, the currently extended and variegated planetary space presents.

Gentrification 1.0: Urban transformations in late-19th-century Berlin

This article explores how contemporary theories of gentrification improve our understanding of past urban change. Discussing municipal housing statistics and local newspaper coverage from late-19th-century Berlin, it first illustrates the tremendous increase in rents that the German capital witnessed in the second half of the century. Rather than focusing on the rise of highly segregated neighbourhoods as urban historians usually do, the article then studies to what extent the growth of industrial cities like Berlin was accompanied by physical displacement in existing proletarian and middle-class quarters. Based on a methodologically innovative use of historical address books, it thus portrays an uneven geography of inner-city transformation. By compiling samples of socio-demographic change on the micro-level of individual streets, this article reveals that historical patterns of displacement followed a peculiar logic that affected socio-economic groups very differently. The article indicates that there exists a contentious pre-history of gentrification that has been utterly neglected in urban studies so far. At the same time, it epitomises the potential of historical research for the advancement of urban theory.