Loretta Lees

Lees documented how gentrification stopped being a spontaneous process driven by newcomers and became public policy: demolition of social housing, planned «regeneration» and rehousing that rarely returns people to their neighbourhood. She called it state-led gentrification.

With Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales she took the research to Seoul, Santiago, Shanghai and São Paulo, showing that the phenomenon takes different forms outside the Anglophone world, with displacement that is far more massive and far less visible in the statistics.