“…Smith's model stems from and is typically associated with urban settings and the study of gentrification, but it has always been conceptually rooted within the broader political economy of uneven development and capitalism's spatial expansion (Smith, 1982). However, as Clark and Pissin (2020) point out, rent gap theory itself (as opposed to gentrification) has largely remained isolated from broader, more generalized notions of land use change and capital investment in land; they therefore argue for a more ‘generic’ understanding of rent‐seeking practices—one that deploys rent gap theory in much wider contexts of struggle over land. There seems to be a curious lack of engagement, for instance, between the growing literature on land dispossession (namely, the forcible expropriation of land for accumulation's sake) and the rent gap as a driving mechanism behind it.…”