Not too many decades ago, commentators in the United States wrote with great alarm about the urban crisis and the fate of the country's older industrial cities (see Beauregard, 2003a;Macek, 2006). These cities were casting off jobs and residents and spiraling into a state of what seemed to be permanent decline. A brief flirtation with prosperity in the 1980s dampened these anxieties, but not until the renewed downtown investment and gentrification of the 1990s was the sense that cities had become obsolete finally dispelled. Once again, city living, bolstered by urban tourism, became attractive for a significant enough segment of the middle class to make a difference. Scholars began to explore what came to be called the`resurgent city' (Beauregard, 2004;Cheshire, 2006;Furdell et al, 2005;Turok and Mykhnenko, 2006).Noteworthy, then, is the attention currently being given to the`shrinking city' (Pallagst, forthcoming), a concern that runs counter to the groundswell of celebration that has occurred around the themes of globalization, gentrification, urban lifestyles,

Abstract. In this paper, a 'weak' test of the capital-switching argument developed by David Harvey is offered. With data on construction investment activity for the USA and on various alternative investments, a temporal analysis was used to assess whether evidence exists for the movement of capital from the primary to the secondary circuit. The investigation is focused specifically on the building boom of the 1980s, as that expansion has been the focus of recent theoretical and empirical work centered on the relation between urbanization and the restructuring of capital. Little support was found for the claim that capital switching has occurred, but the data do point to a delinking of real-estate investment from nonspeculative investment criteria and use-value considerations.

Our understanding of the comparative dynamics of neighborhood change is relatively undeveloped. In order to disentangle various trajectories, the complex processes which constitute gentrification are explored both quantitatively and qualitatively in four neighborhoods in Philadelphia for the postwar period. The analysis reveals quite diverse forms of gentrification, varying in potential and pace, that pivot around the structural forces of capitalism and the particularities of place. Emphasis is placed on the actions of agents of property and finance capital, governments, and individual households in bringing about gentrification; and those of neighborhood groups in resisting it. The implications for the merging of structure and contingency in neighborhood theory and for political action are addressed briefly.

In the last half of the 20th century in the United States of America, the modernist planning project that emerged in the first half is being challenged by the political and economic manifestations of postmodernity and its corresponding cultural practices, Despite a serious erosion of its rationalist roots, critical distance, reformist intentions, commitment to master narratives, and focus on the city as object of theory and practice, that project persists. Modernist planning seems suspended between modernity and postmodernity. In order to resolve these tensions, planners need to refocus their work on the built environment (specifically the process of city building), to reestablish a mediative role between capital, labor, and the state, and to project a more democratic profile in public debates surrounding the meaning and consequences of urban and regional development.

Over the past 10-15 years, many cities in the US have experienced a form of development unknown since World War II-middle-income housing in their downtown cores. Such downtown housing initiatives assume that functional interdependence among different property sectors-office, residential, retail, entertainment-will ensue and that the resultant, co-ordinated investments will produce a lively and attractive downtown environment. This article explores the impediments to this synergism using a perspective that emphasises the 'thicknesses' of property markets; that is, the social, institutional and place-specific qualities of real estate investment. New York City's lower Manhattan revitalisation plan, designed to subsidise office conversions, is used as an example.