Dear all,
The next Urban Salon will be on Thursday 8 May convened by Loretta Lees and featuring visiting German scholar, Matthias Bernt, in conversation with a group of local London researchers, to take forward thinking on comparative approaches to gentrification.
Please join us and stay after for a drink, if you can do bring along some nibbles or something to drink. The Urban Salon is an opportunity for networking amongst urbanists across London, focussing on international urbanism and architecture. We invite you to pass on the invitation to interested staff and students, and to encourage them to sign up to the mailing list at www.theurbansalon.org.
Details below, and we look forward to seeing you there.
The organisers (Pushpa Arabindoo, Monica Degen, Michael Guggenheim, Loretta Lees, Jenny Robinson, Hyun Shin),
Dr. Matthias Bernt (Department of Sociology, Helmholtz Centre, Leipzig) The relationship between gentrification and public policy in Berlin - a conversation with London
Chair: Loretta Lees (Co-organiser Urban Salon)
Panel of discussants: Tim Butler (KCL), James Fourniere (KCL), Juliet Kahne (KCL), Alan Latham (UCL), Richard Lee (Just Space), Paul Watt (Birkbeck).
6pm Thursday 8th May 2014
UCL Pearson Building, Exhibition Room GO07, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT. (see www.ucl.ac.uk/maps)
Abstract: Over the last years, an increasing number of scholarly contributions have become interested in the interrelation of gentrification and public policies. Thereby, the idea that public policies today have become a main driver of gentrification has become a somewhat commonly understood fact. This talk takes issue with this view. It explores the changing interrelation of gentrification and public policy in the neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin) and argues that while demise in the face of market forces is clearly visible here, the scope of relations between public policies and gentrification is much wider and more complex. The reason for this is the double-character of housing as a commodity and a social right which leads to highly unstable and contradictory regeneration policies. Against this background I call for more awareness to varying national and local policy contexts in gentrification research. I argue that what is widely coined as “gentrification” is in fact an umbrella term for fairly disparate socio-spatial formations which are marked by different policies and state structures and result in different dynamics of regeneration and population change.
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