From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Gentrification has become a global phenomenon over the last fifteen years, and has been understood as an increasingly important strategy within neoliberal policy-making.Focusing on London and Mumbai, this paper details how public policies and planning regimes have been reconfigured and rescaled to facilitate and encourage new property speculation. However, against more generalised and abstract accounts of the neoliberal city, the paper uses its comparative perspective to emphasise the geographically and historically specific manifestations and effects of gentrification processes. By highlighting different forms of state intervention and sharper socio-spatial impacts in Mumbai, the paper challenges the Eurocentric framing of a global spread of gentrification, and argues Mumbai can act as an important source of learning for gentrification research. 2Almost everywhere urban societies . . . seem to be going around in circles: they seem to be strangely slow and maladroit in dealing with the most urgent, material needs which they can well afford to meet -from the elimination of homelessness in London (a relatively small but stubborn problem) to the provision of water taps in the bustees of Bombay. (Glass, 1989, p. 102)

India's Urban Revolution: Geographies of Displacement beyond Gentrification

“…Contra gentrification studies, work on ABD makes such mechanisms clear, suggesting the analytical risk of subsuming different mechanisms of displacement into a single conceptual rubric-gentrification or any other. Gentrification scholars seeking to apply their toolkits to contexts marked more prominently by state force miss this point when they try to absorb the difference between ABD and 'the ordinary run of things' by adding modifiers like 'sharper edged' (Harris, 2008) or 'mega' (Lees, 2012a, page 163) to 'gentrification'. This is because these adjectives suggest issues of mere magnitude or scale and elide the qualitative difference between force and normalized market expropriation.…”

Full Issue PDF Volume 1, Issue 1

“…But the sections on stage models (when does the state become a key driver of gentrification? ), displacement, and resistance could have been more stimulating with the inclusion of material engaging with the challenges laid out, for example, by Harris (2008Harris ( , pp. 2423, a work suggested by the editors for further reading): " [T]here is a need to learn from the new sharp-edged forms and processes of socio-spatial upgrading in previously 'peripheral' cities.…”

Looking comparatively at displacement and resistance to gentrification in Latin American cities

“…It has already been established that gentrification studies have a strong comparative tradition and have been experimenting with comparative work (Harris, 2008;Janoschka et al 2014;Lees, 2012Lees, , 2014Lees et al, 2015López-Morales, 2015). Building on this experience, this commentary makes three contributions: First, I review the articles in the special issue noting the various forms in which they adopt comparative strategies and thus highlighting the specificities of gentrification processes in Latin America.…”