Why gentrification theory fails in ‘much of the world’

Abstract

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Towards a paradigm of Southern urbanism

“…This list of tendencies is by no means exhaustive. Ghertner (2015) recently argued that gentrification theory fails in much of the world because it works through rent gaps which emerge when land use is determined by markets. He notes, however, that 'non-privatized lands (which just so happen to be concentrated in the South) represent obstacles that cannot be overcome without special efforts: namely, the application of extra-economic force' (553).…”

Introduction: Locating gentrification in the Global East

“…Instead of downplaying the usefulness of gentrification as a concept for those places experiencing informal landmarkets or fragmented property relations (e.g. peri-urban or outer rural spaces) (see Ghertner, 2015), it is important to have a longer-term perspective and under-stand how existing constraints are often dealt with by the state to clear the pathway to gentrification. Indeed, as La Grange and Pretorius (2014) acknowledge, the gentrification story remains incomplete.…”

Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of “Gentrification” in Oakland,CA

“…But even as they create nuanced accounts of how global flows of capital come to matter through grounded histories, institutions, and imaginaries, many scholars remain convinced that the geographies of commodification and displacement categorised as “gentrification” are central to spatial politics across the “world of cities”. Others, however, such as Asher Ghertner (), counter that gentrification is contingent on the social and spatial relations of select Northern and Western cities. As such, treating it as a model for urban transformations elsewhere threatens to obscure the main mechanisms driving displacement throughout “much of the world”, from the global South to the global East (Ouředníček ).…”

“…But in defending the differences of various elsewheres, he implies—however inadvertently—that gentrification is adequate to an understanding of spatial politics in cities across the UK, North America, and Australia. Likewise, in arguing that this analytic should be limited to areas where “individualized and property‐based land tenure is more or less universal”, Ghertner (:553) too suggests that the modes of dispossession remaking Oakland fit squarely within the ambit of gentrification theory.…”

“…As we have argued, however, such analysis has been impeded by the predominance of gentrification theory in popular and academic discourse. This dominance has been productively critiqued by postcolonial urbanists and scholars attuned to historical difference (Ghertner ; Maloutas ). But such attempts to demarcate the geographies of gentrification risk reifying a North/South divide in which the transposition of ideas between cities such as San Francisco and Oakland overwrites the coloniality of spatial politics in the metropole (cf.…”