Gentrification has changed in ways that are related to larger economic and political restructuring. Among these changes is the return of heavy state intervention in the process. This paper explores heightened state involvement in gentrification by examining the process in three New York City neighbourhoods: Clinton, Long Island City, and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). We argue that state intervention has returned for three key reasons. First, continued devolution of federal states has placed even more pressure on local states to actively pursue redevelopment and gentrification as ways of generating tax revenue. Second, the diffusion of gentrification into more remote portions of the urban landscape poses profit risks that are beyond the capacity of individual capitalists to manage. Third, the larger shift towards post-Keynesian governance has unhinged the state from the project of social reproduction and as such, measures to protect the working class are more easily contested.

Although multiple authors have identified changes to gentrification since the early 1990s recession, there is not yet a composite sketch of the process in its contemporary form. The author synthesizes the growing body of literature on postrecession gentrification and explores its manifestation in three New York City neighborhoods. The literature points to four fundamental changes in the way that gentrification works. First, corporate developers are now more common initial gentrifiers than before. Second, the state, at various levels, is fueling the process more directly than in the past. Third, anti-gentrification social movements have been marginalized within the urban political sphere. Finally, the land economics of inner-city investment have changed in ways that accelerate certain types of neighborhood change.

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Rightsizing' is a planning paradigm currently being applied to shrinking cities in North America and Europe. The central idea is to avoid the trap o f growth-oriented planning by restructuring the urban landscape around mixed-income, mixed-use clusters. By replacing the current sprawling inefficiency, proponents argue, environmental, equity, and infrastructure efficiency goals can be achieved. Some have worried however, that rightsizing is merely a newly packaged version of urban renewal. I argue that both framings are misplaced. Through a careful consideration of rightsizing plans in five US citiesDetroit, Flint, Rochester, Saginaw, and Youngstown-I argue that austerity urbanism is the more apt way to characterize actualized versions of the idea. Actualized rightsizing lacks the utopian modernism and Keynesian interventionism o f urban renewal, and the progressive equity-oriented environmentalism idealized by its proponents.

Various authors have argued that common understandings of neoliberalism are flawed because they do not adequately account for its geographical contingency or internal contradictions. Many have suggested that neoliberalism is either too internally riven with contradiction to be considered a singular consistent project, or that its implementation is so locally contingent that we cannot plausibly speak of one ideal-type placeless ideology. Primarily based on interviews with over half of the municipal housing providers in Ontario, this article explores the extent to which the meta-ideas of neoliberalism are filtered and manifest (or not) locally. Social policy has been neoliberalized in Ontario at least since the advent of the 'common sense revolution' in 1995, when a Tory government was elected on a platform of neoliberal reform. The experience of social housing in the province, before, after and during the transition offers a useful window into the debate about the dissonance (or lack thereof) between ideal-type and contingent neoliberalism. Based on this case, we argue that, despite its obvious conceptual flaws, it is politically and analytically important to understand ideal-type neoliberalism better. Copyright (c) 2006 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Demolition has long been a component of urban policy in the United States and elsewhere. Until recently, however, demolition was seen as a mere component of a wider policy—e.g. the first step to build an affordable housing complex, or a revived commercial strip. Recently some have suggested that demolition can have stand-alone regenerative effects—that is, if blighted housing is demolished, surrounding markets and neighborhoods will heal and regenerate without further intervention. This article challenges this logic by examining neighborhoods in the American Rust Belt where ad hoc demolition has been the predominant urban policy in the past 40 years. In total, there are 269 neighborhoods in 49 cities that have lost more than 50% of their housing since 1970. In aggregate, these activities have led to more housing loss, and affected more land area than even the urban renewal period, yet have not led to market rebound or a decrease in social marginality.

Recent epistemological shifts in environmental geography have created a space to consider the interactions between ecological and urban systems more seriously. While openness to thinking about urban ecosystems has increased in recent years, there remain fundamental gaps in our knowledge. For example, recent research has examined the impact of urban–rural gradients on ecological conditions, but major voids exist regarding the relationship between urban development patterns and land cover heterogeneity, particularly for new forms of urbanization. This article attempts to address some of these gaps by examining the relationship between urban pattern and land cover in the greater Toronto area (GTA). In particular, measures of urban pattern that reflect aspects of development density, grain and function, as well as socio‐economic characteristics, are systematically analyzed in relation to land cover heterogeneity. The regression analysis shows that multiple components of urban development pattern and socio‐economic conditions are correlated with vegetated land covers, while urban density variables are not related. These results indicate more detailed representations of urban pattern should be incorporated into future human–environmental interaction studies in cities.