Whose (Im)moral rent gap?

What Constitutes Engaged Dialogue in Urban Research? Thoughts From a Long Time “Outside-Insider”

“…Randolph and Storper, 2023) but they refuse, obfuscate, avoid, sideline, and erase the reality of capitalist urbanization as a globally omnipresent process. In many ways, this reminds me of the capital versus culture debates in gentrification studies in the 1990s that dominated the pages of urban journals but that ultimately evaporated, collapsed, as both camps met somewhere in the middle, and accepted their complementarity (although I note Shaw, 2023, who says that Neil Smith's acknowledgement was fleeting and he retrenched). I expect that with time, the elsewhere and planetary urbanization camps will also collapse into each other too, recognizing that they both have stances, points, that make the whole more than the sum of its parts.…”

Response to Commentaries: Contrapuntal Gentrifications

“…Here one encounters profound, metaphysical dimensions of Shaw's (2023) cautions on the matter of publishing “private business.” The example Shaw cites—the rape of Indigenous women in Australia—reignites precisely those kinds of “difficult dialogues” across the “epistemological, theoretical, and political differences” (Davidson, 2023) that reproduce the essence of urban theory, practice, and politics—from the modernist industrialized carnage of George Orwell's day to the ghosts of McCarthyite purges of Harvey's early years at Johns Hopkins, to present considerations of the moral implications of Gibson-Graham's (1996) poststructuralist portrayal of capitalism as rape on a planetary scale (e.g., DasGupta et al, 2021; Puar, 2018). Said (1994: 17–18) first introduces the word “contrapuntal” only a page after juxtaposing a 1910 rationalization of the “moral superiority” of French colonizers in the “hierarchy of races and civilizations” with the way Eurocentric native nationalism is entangled with race relations as in the case of “the crisis over the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and the subsequent fatwa calling for Rushdie's death issued by Ayatollah Khomeini.” Shaw (2023: 6) is absolutely correct to question the morality of examples used to develop theory. The fact that matters are in the public record is a consideration—but not an exoneration.…”

“…Instead, pay careful attention to Ley's (2023) astute analysis of the evolution of the “property mind” from China to the “Great Wall of Capital” that now blends with Canada's fast-advancing frontier of Indigenous city building. Devote careful study to Shaw's (2023) incisive call for researchers to be more circumspect on the entanglement of “the cultural” with the politics of capital and whiteness when approaching colonial, decolonial, and Indigenous ontologies of space-time. Meditate on Bosma's (2023) erudite analysis of the ways in which “traditional” spatial processes constituting rent gaps are now being redefined through the calculative, algorithmic reproduction of urban space.…”

“…Here one encounters profound, metaphysical dimensions of Shaw's (2023) cautions on the matter of publishing "private business." The example Shaw cites-the rape of Indigenous women in Australia-reignites precisely those kinds of "difficult dialogues" across the "epistemological, theoretical, and political differences" (Davidson, 2023) that reproduce the essence of urban theory, practice, and politics-from the modernist industrialized carnage of George Orwell's day to the ghosts of McCarthyite purges of Harvey's early years at Johns Hopkins, to present considerations of the moral implications of Gibson-Graham's (1996) poststructuralist portrayal of capitalism as rape on a planetary scale (e.g., DasGupta et al, 2021;Puar, 2018).…”