AAG Annual Meeting, 3-7 April, Washington

CFP: Limits to Gentrification?

Since Neil Smith’s (1996) observation that gentrification was no longer limited to urban centers or particular geographic regions of the globe, the concept has continued to be stretched analytically and geographically (Lees et al 2016). Gentrification is now used to describe nearly any phenomenon that can be demonstrated to be driven by a “rent gap” (Smith 1979) and/or any process that results in “a progressively more affluent” user (Hackworth 2002), residential or commercial (Zukin et al. 2009).This expansion has faced increasing criticism. Maloutas (2012) argued that the concept’s application outside of its original geographical and politico-economic contexts has resulted in a “conceptual decoupling”. As a result, historical and political contexts from cities like London and New York are brought to bear on significantly different urban settings. Other scholars have claimed that the gentrification concept often fails to explain urban change in certain types of cities, and particularly those in the Global South where informality plays an important role (Ghertner, 2014). Additionally, the contextual decoupling of gentrification can therefore potentially reinforce hegemonic Western urban epistemologies, raising critical questions about the erasure or ignorance of local understandings of urban transformation and class change (Smart and Smart, 2017). For gentrification to remain an important concept, urban scholars must therefore critically reflect on the conceptual utility of gentrification and assess its ability to provide insight into the complexities of contemporary housing markets.

This session will therefore examine the following issues:

• the empirical and theoretical of limits of gentrification
• the analytical challenges caused by the concept’s expansive geographical application
• the relationship between gentrification, displacement and context
• the explanatory potential of gentrification in relation to middle-class renting and new urban residential mobilities
• mutations in the forms and outcomes of gentrification
• gentrification and housing markets since the 2008 financial crisis
• the ability of gentrification scholarship to inform contemporary urban polices
• the politics of gentrification scholarship

If you are interested in presenting in the session please email paper abstracts (maximum 250 words) to David Lukens ([log in to unmask]) and Mark Davidson ([log in to unmask]) by Monday October 8th.

 

 

Ghertner, D. A. (2014). India's urban revolution: geographies of displacement beyond gentrification. Environment and Planning A, 46(7), 1554-1571.

Hackworth, J. (2002). Postrecession gentrification in New York city. Urban Affairs Review, 37(6), 815-843.

Maloutas, T. (2012). Contextual diversity in gentrification research. Critical Sociology, 38(1), 33-48.

Lees, L., Shin, H. B., & LÃ3pez-Morales, E. (2016). Planetary gentrification. John Wiley & Sons.

Smart, A., & Smart, J. (2017). Ain't Talkin'‘Bout Gentrification: The Erasure of Alternative Idioms of Displacement Resulting from Anglo‐American Academic Hegemony. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41(3), 518-525.

Smith, N. (1979). Toward a theory of gentrification a back to the city movement by capital, not people. Journal of the American Planning Association, 45(4), 538-548.

Smith, N. (2006). Gentrification generalized: From local anomaly to urban ‘regeneration’as global urban strategy. Frontiers of capital: ethnographic reflections on the new economy, 191-208.

Zukin, S., Trujillo, V., Frase, P., Jackson, D., Recuber, T., & Walker, A. (2009). New retail capital and neighborhood change: boutiques and gentrification in New York City. City & Community, 8(1), 47-64.