Gentrification
Gentrification is the process by which a working-class neighbourhood attracts investment and higher-income residents, housing and retail prices rise, and the original population is displaced. Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term in 1964 to describe what was happening in London.
It is not just a change of neighbours but a change in who can afford to live there. Neil Smith explained the economic mechanism with the rent gap (1979): when the gap between what a run-down area yields and what it would yield once renovated is large enough, capital returns. Today's variants —tourist, commercial, green— repeat the pattern with different triggers.
Videos on this term (62)
- Urban history
Christine Boyer: How the City Turns Memory into a Tool of Power
M. Christine Boyer shows in The City of Collective Memory that heritage and urban images are selected and…
Christine Boyer 3 min read - Urban form
Néstor García Canclini: Where Cultures Mix, Belonging Emerges
Néstor García Canclini explains Latin American urban culture as hybridity: Hybrid Cultures, consumption as…
3 min read - Urban economy
Capitalist Accumulation in Space: David Harvey and the Urban Struggle
David Harvey explains why capital keeps remaking the city: spatial fix, uneven development and housing as an asset.
David Harvey 3 min read - Urban economy
Jane Jacobs: How Life on the Streets Builds Safe and Vibrant Cities
Jane Jacobs argued that mixed uses, small blocks, old buildings and density keep streets alive and safe through…
Jane Jacobs 3 min read - Urban economy
Who Wins When the City Becomes a Business: Molotch's Growth Machine
Harvey Molotch's growth machine explains who really wins when the city becomes a business: developers, politicians.…
3 min read - Public space
Why Cities Should Not Be Identical Models: Jennifer Robinson
Jennifer Robinson argues in Ordinary Cities that every city can produce theory and that judging them by the…
Jennifer Robinson 3 min read - Housing
The Rent Gap: How It Reveals When Gentrification Has Already Begun
Neil Smith's rent gap measures the difference between current and potential land rent and shows that gentrification…
3 min read - Housing
Sharon Zukin: How Culture Turns a Neighbourhood into a Product
Sharon Zukin explains how the symbolic economy raises a neighbourhood's value before prices rise: the sequence of…
Sharon Zukin 3 min read - Housing
The Real Cost of Living Away: More Than Rent
Cheap housing on the outskirts is paid in bus hours, fuel, care and lost opportunities: the H+T index, Carlos…
3 min read - Housing
Why People Buy Buildings to Leave Them Empty and Who Is to Blame
Emptying a tenanted block converts a wholesale valuation into retail profit: Savills figures, the Fidere, Patrizia…
4 min read - Housing
Empty Homes and Price Crisis: How Does the Market React?
Why homes stay empty amid a housing crisis and how the market reacts to correction: the home as store of value,…
3 min read - Housing
How Airbnb Changes the City: Rising Rents and Vanishing Neighbours
Airbnb raises rents, replaces local shops and dissolves neighbourhood ties. What the studies show and how…
3 min read - Housing
Art Washing: Murals, Investment and Displacement in Cities
Art washing uses murals, galleries and festivals to prepare working-class neighbourhoods for investment.
3 min read - Urban ecology
Green Gentrification: When Parks and Trees Push Residents Out
Green gentrification is the paradox of the sustainable city: the park that a neighbourhood fought for raises rents…
3 min read - Urban history
Patrick Geddes: regionalism and cities in evolution
Who Patrick Geddes was and what he gave urban planning: regionalism, environmental planning, the city as an…
Patrick Geddes 2 min read - Urban history
Aldo Rossi: The Architecture of the City
A summary of Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City (1966): the city as a historical artifact, urban…
Aldo Rossi 2 min read - Urban history
Friedrich Engels and the Industrial City: The Origins of Urban Justice
Engels described in 1845 how Manchester hid its workers and in 1872 why housing cannot be solved by reform. His…
Friedrich Engels 3 min read - Public space
Michael Hardt and the Urban Common: The City as Everyone's Work
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's urban common explains how the city produces collective wealth that capital…
Michael Hardt 3 min read - Urban form
John Forester: Dialogue and Mediation for Inclusive Urban Planning
John Forester explains what planners do among conflicting interests and how dialogue and mediation produce fairer…
John Forester 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Bob Jessop: The State and Neoliberal Urban Restructuring
Bob Jessop explains how the state moved from Keynesian welfare to competitive workfare and what it means for…
Bob Jessop 3 min read - Shrinking cities
China's Ghost Cities: Failure or Strategy According to Wade Shepard
Ghost Cities of China (2015) by Wade Shepard explains why China built empty districts, what became of Ordos or…
3 min read - Urban economy
Andy Merrifield: Critique of Neoliberalism and the Right to the City
Andy Merrifield describes the neoliberal city as parasitic and proposes replacing the right to the city with a…
Andy Merrifield 2 min read - Public space
Nicholas Blomley: Property, Space and Spatial Justice in the City
Nicholas Blomley shows that property is a spatial practice deciding who may be where. Unsettling the City, Rights…
Nicholas Blomley 3 min read - Housing
Tom Slater: The Critique of Gentrification and Displacement
Tom Slater argues that gentrification is a policy, not a natural process, and that its real cost is displacement.
Tom Slater 2 min read - Housing
Martha Rosler: art against gentrification
How Martha Rosler uses art to critique gentrification and urban capitalism: from If You Lived Here… to the city…
Martha Rosler 2 min read - Urban economy
Tania Murray Li: Development, Exclusion and the Will to Improve
Tania Murray Li explains why development programmes produce exclusion by rendering political problems technical.
Tania Murray Li 3 min read - Urban history
Christine Boyer: Collective Memory and Urban Planning
The City of Collective Memory (1994) by Christine Boyer explains how the city stores memory and how regeneration…
Christine Boyer 3 min read - Urban economy
Critical Urbanism: What It Is and What Harvey and Brenner Propose
Critical urbanism analyses the city as a product of power and capital. What David Harvey and Neil Brenner…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
City Politics by Judd and Swanstrom: Power and Urban Governance
City Politics by Dennis Judd and Todd Swanstrom explains how US cities are governed: private power, growth…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
African Cities by Garth Myers: Reassessing African Cities
African Cities (2011) by Garth Myers proposes reading African cities on their own terms: postcolonial, informal,…
Garth Myers 2 min read - Public space
Thirdspaces: Soja and Bhabha's Third Space in the City
Thirdspaces are the hybrid places where the dichotomies of public and private, centre and periphery break down.…
Edward Soja 3 min read - Housing
Loretta Lees: Urban Regeneration as State-Led Gentrification
Loretta Lees shows that urban regeneration demolishes public housing and scatters communities in the name of social…
Loretta Lees 3 min read - Urban history
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, the History of London
London: The Biography (2000) by Peter Ackroyd tells two thousand years of London as the life of an organism. From…
Peter Ackroyd 3 min read - Housing
Naked City by Sharon Zukin: Gentrification and Urban Authenticity
Naked City (2010) by Sharon Zukin shows how the search for authenticity gentrifies New York's neighbourhoods.
Sharon Zukin 2 min read - Housing
Neil Smith and Gentrification: Rent Gap and the Revanchist City
Neil Smith explained why gentrification happens: the rent gap that draws capital and the revanchist city that…
Neil Smith 2 min read - Housing
Loretta Lees: Gentrification, Super-Gentrification and Displacement
Loretta Lees widened gentrification with super-gentrification, new-build and planetary gentrification.
Loretta Lees 2 min read
