Advanced Introduction to Gentrification 1839106859, 9781839106859

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Advanced Introduction to Gentrification

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. The aims of the series are two-fold: to pinpoint essential principles of a particular field, and to offer insights that stimulate critical thinking. By distilling the vast and often technical corpus of information on the subject into a concise and meaningful form, the books serve as accessible introductions for undergraduate and graduate students coming to the subject for the first time. Importantly, they also develop well-informed, nuanced critiques of the field that will challenge and extend the understanding of advanced students, scholars and policy-makers. For a full list of titles in the series please see the back of the book. Recent titles in the series include: American Foreign Policy Loch K. Johnson Water Politics Ken Conca Business Ethics John Hooker Employee Engagement Alan M. Saks and Jamie A. Gruman Governance Jon Pierre and B. Guy Peters Demography Wolfgang Lutz

Environmental Compliance and Enforcement LeRoy C. Paddock Migration Studies Ronald Skeldon Landmark Criminal Cases George P. Fletcher Comparative Legal Methods Pier Giuseppe Monateri U.S. Environmental Law E. Donald Elliott and Daniel C. Esty Gentrification Chris Hamnett

Advanced Introduction to

Gentrification CHRIS HAMNETT

Emeritus Professor, Department of Geography, King’s College London, UK and Visiting Professor, Department of Urban Planning and Management, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

Elgar Advanced Introductions

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Chris Hamnett 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946167

02

ISBN 978 1 83910 685 9 (cased) ISBN 978 1 83910 687 3 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 83910 686 6 (eBook)

To Will, Emma, Katie, Mia and Anna

Contents

List of figuresviii 1

Introduction to gentrification

1

2

Definitions, forms, history and geography

12

3

Causation, explanation and theory: capital, class, culture and the state

39

4

Gentrification and the changing social-class structure of cities

57

5

Gentrification, displacement and replacement

79

6

Global gentrification or category imperialism?

100

7

Conclusion: the future of gentrification

110

References117 Index140

vii

Figures

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 3.1 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3

A gentrified London square (Tredegar Square, Tower Hamlets) A gentrified Victorian London street 1-10, Summers Street, Clerkenwell (the first industrial loft conversion in London) Entrepotdok in Amsterdam Converted apartments in a Victorian school in Hackney, London The Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor, Brune Street, London (now luxury loft apartments) New build gentrification in central Shanghai New build gentrification in central Ningbo, China The arrival of the hipsters The rent gap (adapted from Neil Smith) The changing distribution of socio-economic groups in greater London, 1961–1991, economically active males Demolition of peri-urban migrant housing on the fringe of Beijing Gentrification zone The gentrification cycle The demolition of old neighbourhoods in Guangzhou

4 5 19 20 21 22 23 24 26 45 70 78 89 91 98

Table 4.1

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London’s occupational class structure, 2001–2011

71

1

Introduction to gentrification

Introduction The term gentrification was first coined in 1964 by Ruth Glass, an émigré German-Jewish journalist turned sociologist, to describe the social changes she was witnessing in some parts of inner London: One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes – upper and lower. Shabby modest mews and cottages – two rooms up and two down – have been taken over when their leases expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses, downgraded in earlier or recent periods – which were used as lodging houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation – have been upgraded once again. Nowadays, many of these houses are being sub-divided into costly flats… Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed. (Glass, 1964, p. xviii)

This simple, beautifully written English, mercifully free of unnecessary jargon or complex sentences, highlighted three important aspects of the process. First and foremost, it is a process of social-class change where the middle class replace or displace the working class. Second, it involves some form of housing change or upgrading. Third, the quality and price of the renovated housing is invariably higher than that which it replaced. Although the nature and forms of gentrification have changed since Glass wrote, the elements of upwards class change, housing-market change and price change and residential displacement are generally common across all cities and countries. Areas that have been gentrified are usually higher class, higher quality and higher priced than before. I will return to these aspects later, but first it is important to explain what Glass meant by the 1

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term ‘gentrification’. Although the term and process have now spread widely across the world, its origins are very specific. The term was meant as an ironic reference to the class structure of 18th- and 19th-century rural England which consisted of the rich ‘landed aristocracy’ at the top with large country estates, big houses and farming income. Below them were the landed ‘gentry’ (a contraction of the term ‘gentlemen’), with nice houses and some land and a good income; then the yeoman farmers, the tenant farmers; then the large army of landless agricultural labourers. It is the upper-middle group – the so-called ‘gentry’ – that Glass first ironically identified in her essay, though she says remarkably little about them, what they do or where they come from or, indeed, why gentrification emerged when and where it did. I will pick up these questions in Chapter 2, though I should stress that her use of the term is ‘ironic’ rather than literal. Glass was writing about the expansion of a middle-class group (the new gentry) in the inner city in the 1960s, not a 19th-century rural land-owning group. But that was over 50 years ago and, since then, gentrification has expanded and changed a great deal. There has also been considerable debate about the causes and explanations for gentrification that focuses, respectively, on changes in choice and preference, industrial and social-class change, changes in patterns of land values and property prices, changes in the role of capital in the development industry, and changes in the role of the state in trying to regenerate inner areas to retain or attract more middle-class or higher-income residents back to the city. The term, gentrification, has now acquired a far-ranging if not global currency. It is possible to visit countries as far apart as Chile and China and see or be shown examples of residential or commercial gentrification. But, just as the term and the process have now diffused geographically very widely, so its meaning and form have also undergone a variety of mutations. Although residential gentrification commonly entails some form of middle-class in-migration and an upwards shift in social composition, not all forms of gentrification entail direct working-class or low-income displacement or replacement. There are numerous examples of what is termed ‘new build gentrification’ (NBG) that have taken place on land that was not primarily in housing use and where there were few, if any, existing residents. Gentrification can now involve a wide variety of both housing types and locations: from classic inner urban areas to rural villages, and from 18th- or 19th-century ‘period housing’ to urban ware-

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houses, factories and converted offices (or new build apartment blocks). So, although the term is now in very common global use, its meaning has widened and changed and relatively few people would be aware of its very specific geographical and historical origins in 1960s and 1970s inner London. Also, and importantly, the forms and processes that gentrification is now used to refer to in different parts of the world may differ considerably from the process Glass first identified. The term is a classic example of a process and a ‘travelling concept’ that has diffused far beyond its place of origin (Maloutas, 2018), and such concepts always face a major problem of ‘contextual diversity’ and relevance (Maloutas, 2012). What may make sense in one context may not be relevant in another (Yip and Tran, 2016). There is also a problem of conceptual imperialism, where concepts are exported to other situations without much thought about their appropriateness. So, it is very important to look at the origins of the term to understand its specific history. When this is done, we are in a better position to understand how it has diffused and changed over time. We are all, to some extent, a prisoner of our own history. What we have seen and experienced colours our view of the world, and I am no exception. When I first moved to London in 1970 to take up my first job as a university research assistant, I found a rented flat in Camden. Almost everywhere I went I saw decaying and run-down houses, some with builders’ skips outside, some already renovated. I had, quite unknowingly, stumbled on gentrification central. I lived there for three years and witnessed the take-off of the gentrification process in inner London. A lot of the poorer housing (if it was not being demolished and replaced by social housing estates, another major process at the time) was undergoing gradual renovation and upwards social change. Run-down, privately rented, multiple-occupied houses with tenants living in poor conditions were being converted into smart single-family owner-occupied houses (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). As Jonathan Raban (1974, p. 77) tellingly and accurately put it: The first sign is a crisp white painted house front. Outside, one of those continental biscuit-tin cars, a Renault 4L or a Citroën 2CV is parked. Inside, through the window – it has blinds not curtains – one spots a Japanese paper lampshade, a smart little bookcase of the kind you get on mailorder through the Observer, stacked with glossy volumes of reproductions, a stripped pine table, a long sealed and sanded floor with dead sheep for carpets. The middle

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interior wall has gone, and one can see through into the back garden with its breakfast patio. The knockers-through are here.

Source:  Tim Butler.

Figure 1.1

A gentrified London square (Tredegar Square, Tower Hamlets)

I was fortunate to witness the early years of gentrification and a number of subsequent processes of other London residential and social change, such as flat break-ups (condominium conversions, as they are called in North America and Australia), loft conversions and the like. Being at the right place at the right time, even if you do not quite understand what is happening, is useful. But it is important to try to break free of these constraints and look at the wider changes. Subsequently, I was fortunate enough to be able to work as a visiting professor in cities in Canada, the US, Australia and Europe, and most recently in various cities in China, but my early experience in London still forms an important reference point. So, I am pleased to be writing this book for several reasons. First, this is where I started my academic career. Second, the process that I observed first-hand (and puzzled over) has now spread internationally

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Source:  Tim Butler.

Figure 1.2

A gentrified Victorian London street

to many other continents, countries and cities (mutating significantly as it travelled) and is still generating argument and debate about its causes, effects and policies. Third, it is still socially and politically important 50 years on.

Gentrification: so what? Readers unfamiliar with the significance of gentrification may legitimately ask, ‘So what? What’s new or important about the process? Why is it significant, if indeed it is?’ This was certainly one response in the 1970s, and Slater et al. (2004) almost 20 years ago asked: ‘Why have so many researchers undertaken investigations into the emergence, life and times of middle-class gentrifiers?’ Leaving aside the cynical response that some of them may be middle-class gentrifiers themselves, there are several

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answers to this question; the first deals with urban history, the second with theory, the third with its impact and the fourth with urban policy. Looking first at the history of Western cities, gentrification was a significant turning point in both the historical development of the inner areas of some major cities and in terms of traditional urban land use and residential succession theory. Put simply, many large American and British 19th-century industrial cities saw a rapid process of both outwards growth and inner urban change whereby many, though not all, of the traditional middle- and upper-middle-class inner-city residential areas underwent a process of downwards physical and social change as the middle classes moved out and waves of new migrants moved in, often dividing the houses into smaller and cheaper units (Ward, 1971; Ward and Zunz, 1992; Beauregard, 1993a). The dominant process in the early to mid-20th century was one of large-scale suburban development and what Burgess (1925) termed, in his analysis of Chicago, ‘invasion and succession’. The middle classes were leaving or abandoning the inner city, even if they were only moving to new areas a little further out. They were certainly not (re-)colonising it. These areas were simultaneously being ‘invaded’ by large numbers of new immigrants, many of whom had arrived from Western, Southern or Eastern Europe. Consequently, rapidly growing big cities, such as Baltimore, Boston, New York and Chicago, underwent rapid and dramatic physical and social change in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This process was intensified in many older cities in the northern US and Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s with large-scale labour immigration both from the southern states of the US and from ex-European colonies or other sources of labour in the case of countries like Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands. The result in some cities, such as Detroit and Washington, DC, was rapid and large-scale ethnic change. From 1950 to 1990, Detroit’s Black population increased from 16 per cent to 76 per cent (Deskins, 1996), and similar changes took place in many other older cities, such as in the north-east US. This was a time of rapid suburbanisation, ‘white flight’ and inner urban decay and abandonment (Massey and Denton, 1993; Frey, 1993). Returning to Glass’s original statement, many larger houses in parts of central and inner London had been downgraded in the 1950s after the departure of original upper class tenants with the development of suburbanisation and the gradual division and conversion of many such houses into lodging houses or multi-occupied dwellings for low-income

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groups. This process of the ‘downwards filtering’ of once-grand inner-city housing was quite common in late-19th and mid-20th-century British and American cities as they expanded and the rich moved outwards. The result, as Glass indicates, was gradual deterioration, conversion and ‘multiple occupancy’. The houses, usually of three or four floors, had two, three or four rooms per floor and were fairly easy to subdivide into individual rooms or small apartments. Thus, in the 1950s, London, like many other European cities, had poor-quality, predominantly private rented, housing stock, with low levels of facility provision and very high levels of sharing. It is very difficult, from today’s vantage point, for most people to comprehend just how poor housing conditions still were for most people in post-war London or Paris and other large cities, but large parts of these cities, which are now desirable and expensive, were run-down with buildings in poor condition and many houses divided into rented rooms, shared bathrooms, and so on. For example, the 1951 census in inner London showed that two-thirds of households lived in shared dwellings, mostly privately rented, though this fell to 44 per cent in 1961. Even in 1961, 30 per cent of households shared a toilet with other households, and 30 per cent lacked a fixed bath. Residential densities were very high, and 12 per cent of households lived at a density of over 1.5 persons per room. Living conditions in many other European cities were probably very similar. Of course, this is a Western perspective. Until 20 years ago, these conditions were common in many Chinese cities, and most homes in the inner-Beijing Hutong or Shanghai lanes had no individual toilets and had to use communal street toilets. On my first visit to Shanghai in 1995, ‘nightsoil’ was still collected on carts every morning from some of the oldest central areas, and toilets in India are still a luxury for many. But gentrification was first identified in developed Western cities 50 years ago, and it is important to understand the context. Given the magnitude of this change, from inner-city decline and (in some US cities) abandonment to renovation, regeneration and renewal, the nature of the reversal took many people by surprise. More recently, as outlined in Chapter 2, the forms and extent of gentrification have changed significantly. New forms of gentrification have been seen in many countries and cities. One consequence is that gentrification has often been a theoretical battleground between conflicting approaches and interpretations, certainly during the 1980s and 1990s. This, of course,

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gave gentrification part of its intellectual interest, and the various theoretical approaches are outlined and discussed in Chapter 3. I am fortunate to have spent some time over the years in various cities with two of the main theoretical protagonists, David Ley and Neil Smith, and their work is both stimulating and extremely important. Neil’s early death was a great loss to the geographical and urban community and the loss of a good friend, notwithstanding our enjoyable disputes in print. As will be argued in Chapter 4, as a result of de-industrialisation and the growth of white-collar office work, the last 50 years have seen a dramatic reshaping of the industrial and occupational structure of Western cities that has greatly, and perhaps irrevocably, changed their occupational class structure. Whereas, until the mid–late 1960s, most major cities had a large working-class population and a smaller middle-class population, the relative size of these groups has changed over time, and cities like London, Paris and New York have a much larger middle class – a change reflected in dramatic increases in inequality and housing costs. Gentrification is, in part, a result of a process of class change, not just at the neighbourhood level but also at the level of the city and even the wider society. The middle classes who gentrify have not emerged from nowhere; they are a product of a wider set of economic and social changes. Gentrification is not an isolated process. It is part of a wider restructuring of the economy, society and urban space (Ley, 1980; Clerval, 2021; Hamnett, 2003a, 2003b, 2020; Scott, 2018). It was the 19th-century terraced housing that provided the original neighbourhood raw material for gentrification and gentrifiers to work on, and, inevitably, with a change from private renting to owning and from multi-occupation to single-family occupation, there was considerable reduction in residential density as landlords gave tenants notice to quit and sold the houses. There is no doubt, however, that Glass saw this as a process of social-class change, with the working class being displaced or replaced. To her, gentrification was, first and foremost, a process of neighbourhood housing social-class change, with one class displacing (or replacing) another with fewer resources. Thus, not surprisingly, she saw gentrification as a key part of a process that was transforming the social structure of London in an upwards direction, not one of deterioration or downwards social-class change.

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It is therefore not surprising that most academics, if not policy makers, have subsequently viewed gentrification in generally negative terms as a process that increases housing costs for low-income groups, squeezes them out of their neighbourhoods, breaks up communities and reduces housing choice. City governments, on the other hand, particularly in cities with deteriorated, abandoned or run-down areas, have often seen gentrification as a potential panacea. For them, bringing back the middle class is a solution, not a problem, that increases diversity and social mix and regenerates areas. Indeed, there are cities (e.g. Beijing) where it is almost explicit social policy to shift the social structure in an upwards direction by displacing poor, inner-city residents and migrants and shifting them outside the city. But for most academics, gentrification is a dirty word (Smith, 1996), greater ‘social mix’ is a mirage (Davidson, 2008, 2012) and the process should be resisted (Slater, 2006, 2008; Watt, 2008; I consider literature on displacement and replacement in detail in Chapter 5). It is important to ask if there is such a thing as ‘good gentrification’. The standard academic answer would be no, but many urban policy makers concerned with urban regeneration may answer with an unqualified yes. Atkinson (2003) poses the question explicitly: ‘Gentrification: misunderstood saviour or vengeful wrecker?’ The Economist (2015, 2018, 2019) falls firmly into the former camp, and most academics into the latter. Since Glass first identified gentrification in 1964, various forms of the process have been recognised in a growing number of towns and cities across the world. But, as the process has diffused outwards geographically from a small number of large Western 19th-century cities (London, New York, San Francisco, Melbourne, etc.), it has mutated in terms of its forms, and also undergone several ‘waves’. This has led to a series of debates about the extent to which gentrification can now be seen as a global or planetary-wide process (Lees et al., 2015, 2016). While it has become much more widespread across many developed countries, it is questionable whether it can be seen as a single, global process or as a set of processes. Indeed, attempts to impose a ‘one-size-fits-all’ concept on what may be a variety of different processes may actively hinder our understanding (Ghertner, 2015; Maloutas, 2018). This question is examined in Chapter 6 on global gentrification. Maloutas (2012) suggested that the Anglo-American origins of gentrification have cast an unhelpful ideological and theoretical blanket over gentrification, encouraging later scholars to see it through a particular lens. Given my affection for Ruth Glass’s work, I can only plead guilty, but I have tried to escape this trap.

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Finally, the book examines the future of gentrification. Thirty years ago, various critics, particularly Berry (1985, 2010) and Bourne (1993), suggested that gentrification was likely to prove a demographic ‘flash in the pan’ connected to the post-war baby boom and that, when the baby boom had passed, the urban social structure would revert to business as usual. They also suggested that its importance was nowhere near as big as some claimed, and that it constituted ‘islands of renewal in seas of decay’. While there is now little doubt that gentrification is here to stay (Badcock, 1993, 2001; Wyly and Hammell, 1999; Marcuse, 1999), and that the middle classes are reclaiming parts of the city, it can be argued that urban decay and suburbanisation may be larger and more significant urban processes. Still, it is clear that, at least for the foreseeable future, gentrification, the regeneration of some inner-city areas and the middle-class invasion of old residential areas are long-term fixtures. The baby boom may have come and gone, but gentrification has remained. Smith (2002a) suggested that gentrification is part of a general global urban strategy that is reshaping the physical and social structures of cities to make them more attractive to both capital and the middle classes. It is certainly true that city governments in various countries have engaged in policies of urban regeneration or revitalisation to attract or retain urban investment and residents, but it is questionable whether this is part of a general global urban ‘strategy’ in the sense of a shared, conscious plan. It may be better to see it as a common global response to common urban problems and pressures rather than an explicit strategy. There are potential limits to gentrification, some of which involve economic decline, ethnic change and rising levels of urban crime, drug use or poor education (Ley and Dobson, 2008). But one thing may call a halt to gentrification and that is the sudden emergence of COVID-19 across the globe in 2020. Some of the areas that were hardest hit were London, New York, Paris and other high-density cities. It appears that some inner-city apartments that were previously very attractive residential destinations may now be less attractive, as potential residents head for suburban houses with gardens (Marriott, 2021). Time will tell, but it is unlikely that the appeal of the revitalised inner city will disappear, not least in an era more dependent on public transport and less on the private car. I suspect that the lure of the suburbs and of rural life could fade once COVID-19 is back under control.

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The structure of the book is fairly straightforward. The second chapter is on the history, geography and development of gentrification and some of its more recent forms. The third discusses its causes and explanation, while the fourth focuses on the links between gentrification and social-class change in cities. Chapter 5 addresses the important issue of the displacement and replacement of working-class residents by middle-class ones, and the sixth chapter raises some questions about the scale and extent of global gentrification. The book closes with a short conclusion. There is an extensive bibliography covering both contemporary and historical sources. I may have overlooked some key papers (my apologies to the authors), but this is almost inevitable given the vast volume of recent literature on the subject. I hope, however, that you can find references to much of the key literature.

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Definitions, forms, history and geography

Introduction They decided to find a cheap Georgian or Regency house in some down at heel district near the core. However depressed the district, if it was Georgian or Regency, and reasonably central, it would soon be colonized by the middle classes. In this way they would secure an attractive and potentially fashionable house in the heart of London, at a price they could afford; be given credit by their friends for going to live among the working classes; acquire very shortly congenial middle class neighbours of a similarly adventurous and intellectual outlook to themselves; and see their investment undergo a satisfactory and reassuring rise in the process. Michael Frayn (1967), Towards the End of the Morning

Frayn’s humorous and ironic description of gentrification in early-1970s London neatly summarises some key elements of the process: housing, class change, centrality, affordability and investment. The term gentrification has now existed for over 60 years, during which time the phenomenon itself has changed very considerably and been identified in many parts of the world: from Baltimore to Brisbane, from Buenos Aires to Beijing and from Bristol to Barcelona. It is therefore important to examine the evolving history and geography of the process and its changing form. This is particularly important, as the term was originated in London by Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe a rather specific process but has since spread widely, involving a set of processes, some of which are very different from the original. Glass viewed gentrification as a process of social-class change linked to housing-market upgrading, where the existing working-class residents are first invaded and then displaced by middle-class in-migrants who renovate their houses. This is a commonly accepted definition, at least of the first phases of gentrification. Glass 12

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made numerous other perceptive observations. She was an urban visionary who foresaw what would happen to London over the subsequent 50 years, and one of the most telling remarks is her comment that: Any district in or near London, however dingy or unfashionable, is likely to become expensive, and London may quite soon be a city which illustrates the principle of the survival of the fittest: the financially fittest, who can still afford to work and live there… Thus London, always a unique city, may acquire a rare complaint. While the cores of other large cities in the world, especially of those in the United States, are decaying, and are becoming ghettoes of the ‘under-privileged’, London may soon be faced with an ‘embarras de richesse’ in her central area – and this will prove to be a problem too. (Glass, 1964, pp. 140–141, emphasis added)

This is precisely what has come to pass in large parts of inner London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Beijing, Shanghai and many other big cities. The rapid expansion of the professional and managerial classes, first working in education and the public sector in the 1970s, but increasingly today the upper-income groups working in finance, law and business services, have got the financial muscle to systematically outbid, replace and squeeze out lower-income groups from the housing market. Although not all lower-income groups are directly displaced, they or their successors now find it almost impossible to buy or rent in the areas they once occupied (Clerval, 2021). While the process now takes many forms, class change and housing change remain central (Bridge, 1995). Although Glass was the first person to coin the term ‘gentrification’ (an ironic reference to a class structure of 18th- and 19th-century Britain where the gentry formed a small but prosperous group sitting below the landed aristocracy but above yeoman farmers), the process was not wholly new or, indeed, confined to London. Firey (1947) had pointed to the preservation of older areas of middle-class housing in Beacon Hill in inner Boston, and others noted the artistic community living in Greenwich Village in central New York and the renovation of Georgetown in Washington and Society Hill in Philadelphia (Smith, 1979b). All these areas possessed attractive 18th- and 19th-century inner-city housing. These were seen as anomalies, however, as the dominant trend in North America was one of suburbanisation and inner-city decline, if not outright abandonment. Old housing was not generally regarded as attractive until a few pioneers bought in the mid-1960s. But today some older 18th- and 19th-century housing is seen as very attractive to live in. So, it is important to discuss the origins and historical development of gentrification as it has

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mutated, evolved and diffused. Gentrification today in Beijing or Mumbai is likely to be very different from that in Boston or Bristol 50 years ago.

Gentrification as a historical anomaly in the US: reversing a process of inner urban decline The examples above are anomalies, at least in most large cities in North America, Britain and Australia. The dominant pattern of urban residential change in the inner areas of many, if not most, American and other cities from the late 19th century onwards was one of decline and decay as immigrant groups or an expanded urban working class moved in and the middle classes moved out to more attractive, newer and better-quality housing a little further out. This process was documented by Burgess (1925) in his classic analysis of social and land-use change in Chicago in the early decades of the 20th century. He coined the terms ‘invasion’ and ‘succession’ to identify the process of neighbourhood social change where new migrant groups from Europe moved into the innermost housing zones around the downtown as the existing groups moved out. A similar process was seen in New York and other eastern American cities. For much of the first two-thirds or three-quarters of the 20th century, this process of suburbanisation and inner-city decline continued, aided in the post-war period by Black migration from the southern states of the US to the northern cities, by de-industrialisation and by large-scale new suburban construction This has been extensively documented by Ward (1971), Frey (1993), Sternlieb and Hughes (1983) and Ward and Zunz (1992). In general, the dominant narrative at this time in North America was one of urban decline and ‘white flight’, a narrative documented by Beauregard (1993a, 1993b) in his book Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities. Smith (1996) offers a similar analysis in his book The New Urban Frontier. The dominant narrative had been one of decline. As Smith and Williams (1986) point out: the 20th-century American city came to be seen by the white middle class as an urban wilderness; it was, and for many still is, the habitat of disease and crime, danger and disorder… Indeed, these were the central fears expressed through the 1950s and 1960s by urban theorists who focused on urban ‘blight’ and ‘decline’, ‘social malaise’ in the inner city, [and] the ‘pathology’ of urban life. (p. 16)

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This highlights an extremely important point regarding the significance of gentrification, particularly in North America. The reason why gentrification proved so important, conceptually, theoretically and practically, is that, until the onset of gentrification, the dominant urban experience (outside some European cities) had been one of middle-class outmigration, suburbanisation and inner urban decline. Meanwhile, Burgess’s model of residential invasion and succession focused on changes over time in the inner city as new migrant groups pushed outwards from the centre, pushing existing groups further out. This is what Alonso termed the ‘historical’ model because residential differentials emerge over time. But the dominant school of American urban land-use theory, led by Alonso (1960, 1964), had put forward ‘structural’ urban land-use models that examined a ‘trade-off’ between centrality, cost and space and argued that, in a land market where land values were highest in the centre of the central business district (CBD) or downtown, and steadily declined out to the urban periphery, most Americans with the ability to choose preferred to trade centrality and accessibility for cheaper space and houses on large suburban plots. People preferred suburban space and a longer commute than a small apartment or house close to the city centre. Alonso argued that this was the ‘dominant’ North American preference. The only people who wanted to live in the central or inner city were a few cosmopolitan ‘bohemians’. As Alonso (1964) put it: Taste and preference for space are possibly words too weak to denote what is really meant by this key variable of the structural theory. Rather, the nature of the demand for space in this country seems to be a deeply engrained cultural value, associated not only with such functional needs as play space for children, but also with basic attitudes towards nature, privacy and meaning of the family. (p. 230)

What is now clear is that, whereas this may have been the dominant preference structure in North America and Australia, it was not the dominant preference in many Western European cities where high value was placed on centrality and accessibility to the cultural, gastronomic and entertainment facilities of the city centre and inner city. This is why some continental European urbanists struggled to understand the significance of gentrification until about 20–30 years ago. As the middle classes in many European cities had not left the inner city, they could not, understandably, see what all the fuss was about them coming back (Buzar et al., 2007; Preteceille, 2007). Indeed the attractions of the suburbs outlined by Alonso would be seen as a cultural kiss of death by many European urban

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residents used to the attractions of life in the urban centre. The debate about urban land-use theory and its legacy and contrasts between the ‘historic’ and the ‘structural’ (based on bid-rent theory) models of urban land-use change is analysed in detail by Hamnett (1984). Effectively, gentrification caught most urban analysts and policy makers by surprise. The reality and dominant perception of urban social change in the 1960s and 1970s was one of de-industrialisation, decline and decay. The middle classes had been leaving the inner cities, so their emergence in areas of old housing near the city centre in the 1970s was unexpected. In terms of the existing dominant urban residential theory, gentrification was not supposed to happen. Middle-class households with choice were expected to live in suburbia not the inner city, which was seen as decaying, dirty and unsafe. Gentrification was also contrary to the current ‘stage theories’ of Hoover and Vernon (1959) and Birch (1971), which argued that neighbourhoods slowly decline over time once they have matured. This thinking was a product of a specific time and place and urban history (post-war North America). Some neighbourhoods slowly decline, but others stay desirable for many decades or even centuries. The significance of gentrification in the US was perceptively captured by Griffiths (1996): ‘Gentrification flies in the face of post-World War II migration patterns and urban spatial structure in the United States… After several decades of seemingly irreversible middle-class flight to the suburbs and corresponding urban decline, gentrification appeared to many to be the only hope for saving US central cities’ (p. 241).

The metamorphosis and diffusion of gentrification It is important to note here that, in the early days, gentrification had several other names linked to the various forms of the process in different cities. In Toronto it was called ‘white painting’, and in Brooklyn ‘brownstoning’ after the types of property involved (see Carpenter and Lees, 1995, and Lees, 1994, on gentrification in Brooklyn, New York). Some saw it as a ‘back-to-the-city’ movement (Laska and Spain, 1980) or ‘middle class resettlement’ (Clay, 1979). But, importantly, only 10–15 years after Glass’s initial paper, a spate of literature emerged trying to grapple with the issues. Hamnett (1973) linked gentrification in inner London to government improvement grants; Williams (1976) examined the role

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of lending institutions in the process in inner London and Hamnett and Williams (1980) examined gentrification in London. In Canada and the US – Lipton (1977), London (1980) and Ley (1980) on Vancouver, Smith (1979a, 1979b) and Gale (1979) on Washington, Clay (1979), Laska and Spain (1980) and Henig (1980) – all discussed issues regarding gentrification. To generalise, we can say that the years 1979–1980 mark a turning point in terms of academic attention. Gentrification has fascinated academics and policy makers for over 40 years. But in geographical terms, the initial focus of attention was almost exclusively on London, a handful of American cities, plus Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney and Melbourne (Ley, 1980, 1981, 1986; Caulfield, 1994; Logan, 1985; Slater, 2004a, 2004b; London et al., 1986; Bounds and Morris, 2006; Badcock, 1993, 2001). Subsequently, it has spread far and wide, and there is a growing recent literature on gentrification in Istanbul (Islam, 2005), Latin America (Betancur, 2014; Rubino, 2005; Lopez-Morales, 2011; Lopez-Morales et al., 2016; Garmany and Richmond, 2019; Rodriguez and di Virgilio, 2016; Janoschka et al., 2014; Janoschka and Sequera, 2016; Gaffney, 2016; Delgadillo, 2016; Leite, 2015), China (He, 2007, 2012, 2019; Guan and Cao, 2020; He and Wu, 2005, 2007) and Korea (Ha, 2004, 2015; Lee, 2018; Shin, 2009; Shin and Kim, 2016), but the reference points are still predominantly Anglo-American, prompting Shin and Lopez-Morales (2018) to ask how to break out of this frame (see Smart and Smart, 2017, and Smith and Butler, 2007, for a discussion of a wide range of gentrification possibilities). Today, we have a plethora of edited global collections with chapters ranging far and wide (Lees et al., 2015, 2016; Lees and Phillips, 2018; Krase and DeSena, 2020; Lees et al., 2010; Brown-Saracino, 2010; Shin, 2018). Gentrification has become a global urban research industry and is transnationally transmitted via tourism and global investment (Hays and Zaban, 2020). Expansion into older Western industrial cities has, however, been much slower or even non-existent (Dutton, 2003; Swanstrom and Ploger, 2020). Indeed, in many cities, decline, decay and abandonment have remained the key processes of urban change. It is important to stress that not all forms of upwards social-class residential change and renovation necessarily involve gentrification. Clay (1979) was the first to point out that ‘incumbent upgrading’, where renovation is undertaken by existing residents, can have similar results. This has subsequently been developed by Milward and Davis (1986) and Kovacs et al. (2015). The latter found in Budapest that they could ‘identify three

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main types of upgrading: classical gentrification (with two sub-types), as well as incumbent upgrading and soft forms of revitalisation’ (p.  251). Van Criekingen and Decroly (2003) identified four types of upgrading in Brussels and Montreal: gentrification, ‘marginal gentrification’ (which they see as separate from the first and not necessarily leading to it), ‘neighbourhood upgrading’ (which occurs in slightly decayed, bourgeois neighbourhoods where younger families replace older ones) and ‘incumbent upgrading’ (moderate-income households improve their own housing with no social-class or income change). Recently, Owens (2012) examined a variety of forms of neighbourhood ‘socio-economic ascent’ in the US, arguing that gentrification was just one of a variety of types of neighbourhood ascent, including incumbent upgrading, marginal gentrification and certain forms of upwards suburban change. Almost all of this early literature dealt with what can be called the first stage of gentrification, which overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, involved the renovation of older inner-city properties by individual buyers. This is quintessentially the world of the 1970s described by Ruth Glass and Michael Frayn. Subsequently, there was a growing realisation that gentrification takes a variety of forms. One of the first to be identified was ‘rural’ gentrification, where the middle classes moved in and renovated old houses in villages close to smaller towns and cities (Phillips, 1993, 2002). Second, and importantly, was the identification of a variety of property types, particularly conversion of old inner-city and waterfront warehouses, factories and offices into ‘loft apartments’. This happened first in the SoHo district of New York, where old 19th- and early-20th-century cast iron industrial buildings were converted first into ‘artists’ lofts’ and second into luxury apartments (Jackson, 1985; Zukin, 1982, 1987). This subsequently spread into other parts of downtown Manhattan, such as Tribeca and Chelsea. It was then identified in Clerkenwell and the 19th-century industrial ring around London (Hamnett and Whitelegg, 2007; Hamnett, 2009a; Podmore, 1998; Figure 2.1). In addition, many old riverside warehouses along the Thames in the London Docklands and in Amsterdam were converted into luxury apartments. When containerization took off, ships got bigger, trade moved downstream and old warehouses became redundant (Figure 2.2). This subsequently spread to a number of other cities (Wong, 2006). Later, a variety of other buildings, including old schools, hospitals and churches, were converted (Figure 2.3).

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Source:  The author.

Figure 2.1

1-10, Summers Street, Clerkenwell (the first industrial loft conversion in London)

It is perhaps difficult to grasp today, but when Zukin was writing, areas of downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn that are now eye-wateringly expensive and fashionable were largely ignored or written off. Why would anyone with a choice want to live in an industrial building in the semi-derelict ‘garment’ or meat-packing district? The same view was held about inner-city areas such as Clerkenwell, Shoreditch or Hoxton in London, or parts of the Left Bank and the 18th, 19th and 20th arrondissements in Paris, or parts of inner-city Amsterdam (Palumbo, 2020; Bacqué and Fijalkow, 2006; Keohane, 2020) and Harlem in New York (Schaffer and Smith, 1986; Smith and deFilippis, 1999). These areas were viewed as run-down and unattractive. Choosing to buy an ex-industrial inner-city apartment or warehouse apartment was considered bizarre. Now, of course, such accessible inner-city areas are often hugely fashionable and correspondingly expensive. It is an ironic reflection of the gentrification

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Source:  Wikimedia Commons, user Jvhertum, 2008.

Figure 2.2

Entrepotdok in Amsterdam

of loft apartments that one historic building in the City of London converted into loft apartments was the Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor on Brune Street, built in 1901. Apartments there would now sell for well over £1 million (Figure 2.4). Poor people need not apply. More recently, however, starting around 2000, it was realised that gentrification was not restricted to the conversion of old buildings and that there was also extensive NBG. Typically, this took the form of new apartment buildings in inner-city, ex-industrial or waterfront locations built by commercial developers (Davidson and Lees, 2005, 2010; Boddy, 2007; Rérat et al., 2010; Rérat and Lees, 2011; Rérat, 2012; He, 2010). In all these cases, profit is the major motivating force for gentrification, with developers looking to ‘unlock’ the profit potential of valuable inner-city sites by high-density redevelopment. In this respect, gentrification has been commodified and has been taken over by big companies with the capital and expertise to develop. Individual agency has little or no role in this form of gentrification except for people’s decision to buy or rent a new apartment in a new-build location. But, like classic gentrification,

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Source:  Tim Butler.

Figure 2.3

Converted apartments in a Victorian school in Hackney, London

gentrifiers tend to be younger and strongly orientated to the facilities and transport provided by inner-city locations. The extension of the idea of gentrification to include new build was initially questioned by some, but it is now generally accepted that it is gentrification if the area is the inner city and new residents are middle class. NBG is not restricted to Western countries. On the contrary, in China and Southeast Asia, the great majority of gentrification is NBG. In many cities in China, large parts of the inner areas have been demolished and replaced by high-rise apartments (Figures 2.5 and 2.6). Also, in the last 20–30 years, gentrification has been identified in a much wider variety of contexts and countries, including Eastern Europe, Latin America and China. This raises wider questions about the extent to which all these forms can, in fact, be sensibly or logically grouped under the same broad-brush label. Are they all variations on a single overarching theme, or are they rather different processes that have very little in common? At present there is no single answer to this question, and it is important not

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Source:  The author.

Figure 2.4

The Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor, Brune Street, London (now luxury loft apartments)

to view gentrification solely through a narrowly Western lens (Shin and Lopez-Morales, 2018). Some authors, such as Lees et al. (2015, 2016), view gentrification as a global phenomenon, but others are far more doubtful (Ghertner, 2015; Smart and Smart, 2017). What different continents, cities, areas and housing types perhaps have in common is a reassertion of the value of centrality and water frontage by the state, developers and affluent middle- and upper-class residents who now often find it attractive and convenient to live in central areas (Ley, 1996). NBG raises interesting questions as it often involves housing construction for the middle class in old industrial, dockland or vacant areas where few, if any, people lived before. In this case, there is clearly no direct displacement of an existing working-class population or transformation of an existing housing stock, but there is creation of new middle-class residential areas where nothing similar had previously existed. This as an increasingly important form of gentrification, although the developers

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23

Source:  The author.

Figure 2.5

New build gentrification in central Shanghai

and types of residents involved are very different from traditional forms of gentrification (Butler, 2007b; Doucet, 2013; Rérat, 2012). Indeed, Lees and Ley (2008) have defined gentrification as ‘the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city into middle-class residential and/or commercial use’ (p. xv, emphasis added). The inclusion of vacant areas suggests, of course, that gentrification can be seen more widely than a process of class displacement. You can exclude, but logically you cannot displace, a group that is not already present. This issue is taken up in Chapters 4 and 5. One of the biggest issues concerns the scale of gentrification. There is a huge amount written about it, but that is not necessarily an accurate reflection of its overall importance. There may be examples of gentrification in cities across the world, but they may be relatively small in scale compared to other equally if not more important processes, such

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Source:  The author.

Figure 2.6

New build gentrification in central Ningbo, China

as urban decay, suburbanisation or abandonment (Beauregard, 1985). Has the debate about gentrification overshadowed its importance? There has been considerable debate about this. One of the early critics was Berry (1985) who argued that, alongside suburbanisation, the dominant process of urban change in the US was inner-city decline; he termed gentrification ‘islands of renewal in seas of decay’. Bourne (1993, 2003) also argued that the importance of gentrification had been overstated, but this was challenged by Badcock (1993) and, more recently, by Wyly and Hammel (1999) in ‘Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal’, who argued that, ‘Between 1992 and 1997, gentrified neighborhoods attracted conventional home-purchase mortgage capital at a rate that grew at more than 2.3 times the suburban rate’ (p. 711). This was challenged by Berry (2010), who said: ‘gentrification is confined to cities with substantial central business district office growth and with housing markets characterised by substantial suburb‐to‐inner-city filtering. The process remains limited in

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scale, and available data do not permit a judgment as to whether changes in mortgage lending have changed the nature of the process’ (p. 783). Unfortunately, the empirical evidence is not available to give a clear answer about the global scale of gentrification, but Badcock (2001), writing about gentrification in the five major Australian cities, has specifically claimed that – contra Berry – gentrification is now widespread in Australian cities and is more important than urban decay. While this may be true of the major Australian cities, and while gentrification is now widespread, urban decay may, in reality, still be more extensive and important, certainly in many of the old industrial cities that have not transitioned to a post-industrial economy. This is well discussed in the final chapter of Smith and Williams’s (1986) pioneering book, Gentrification of the City. They link the growth of gentrification in some cities and its absence in other cities to their position in the international division of labour. Fundamentally, they see many older industrial centres as doomed to a long process of economic and social decline, while those cities that have important roles for finance capital are likely to experience more gentrification. The 35 years since they wrote have confirmed their conclusions. To this extent, Berry was correct: there are still large areas of inner-city decline, and suburbanisation continues apace. This issue is discussed further in Chapter 6.

Who are/were the gentrifiers? It is all very well to talk about ‘gentrifiers’, but who are they, what are their characteristics and where did they come from? Are they even a homogenous group? Is there, as Bridge (2007) has asked, such a thing as a global gentrifier class? There is a well-established set of classical images of gentrifiers dating to the early 1970s. They were typically seen as single or two-person university-educated professional households (Butler, 1997), usually with no children and termed ‘yuppies’ or young urban professionals (Short, 1989) and portrayed in a variety of cartoons, but it has subsequently been realised that there are several types of gentrifiers, ranging from pioneer and marginal gentrifiers (Rose, 1984) at one end to ‘super gentrifiers’ (Lees, 2003a; Butler and Lees, 2006) at the other. Gay gentrification was also initially seen as important in some cities, such as San Francisco (Lauria and Knopp, 1985; Christafore and Leguizamon,

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2018). Today, hipsters may be an important new gentrifier group in some Western cities, as a cartoon by Dave Simonds suggests (Figure 2.7).

Source:  Dave Simonds and The Economist.

Figure 2.7

The arrival of the hipsters

It is also important to differentiate between people who live in an area or gentrified property and the agents or developers who did the renovation or redevelopment. In some cases, where individual gentrification and renovation is involved, the agents and the residents are one and the same, but in others they are very different and the residents are people who buy, rent or occupy buildings after renovation. The developers could even be an anonymous overseas company who saw a profit opportunity. But this aside, gentrifiers are not a homogenous group. Their characteristics, motives and origins have changed over time and from country to country and place to place. There is not a single ‘global gentrifier class’ (Bridge, 2007; Rofe, 2003) though there are some similarities, not least in terms of education and, to a lesser extent, occupation and income. Someone moving into a well-established ‘upmarket’ gentrified area today is likely to have to pay a lot of money to buy. Houses in fashionable parts of inner London, such as Notting Hill and Primrose Hill, today regularly change hands for several million pounds each. But, when these areas were still ‘up and coming’ 50 years ago, it was possible to buy houses requiring

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renovation for £20,000–30,000 or even less. At that time, many of these areas were run-down and the houses were often multi-occupied, rented and in very poor condition. As a result of the lower prices, it was often possible for younger members of the new middle class to buy. Today, this is largely impossible. But what most gentrifiers have in common is higher education. Most of them are university educated (Bridge, 2006), but as Butler (1997) showed in Hackney, inner London, there are both affluent private-sector gentrifiers and less-well-off public-sector gentrifiers who may have higher levels of cultural and educational capital (Owens, 2012). There is an interesting literature on the identity of the early 1970s pioneers. Logically, it would be highly unlikely that the pioneers would be existing members of the middle or upper classes in high-quality housing in attractive areas. Why would they move to a marginal area? It is generally accepted (Butler, 1997; Ley, 1996; Rose, 1984; Bridge, 2007) that the pioneers disproportionately consisted of white, liberal professionals, many part of the post-war baby boom, beneficiaries of the post-war university expansion and often working in the public sector. Although they had considerable cultural capital, their salaries were not high and they were attracted to the 19th-century middle-class housing that formed the inner ring close to the city centre of many big, older cities. The houses (and almost all were houses, not apartments – they came later) offered a lot of space for the money and had high ceilings and a lot of attractive ‘period’ features. Although unmodernised, they offered considerable potential for renovation, and it was possible for middle-income households to inject ‘sweat equity’. Given their specific class and educational background, it was thought that members of this group were willing to take the risk of living in a marginal or up-and-coming area. Indeed, the ‘edginess’ may even be part of its attraction. Only later, as the neighbourhoods became smarter and safer, did the wealthier households move in (Butler, 1997), hence David Ley’s (1996) comment from a Vancouver real estate agent that early gentrification was said to ‘follow the hippies’. Much the same can be said of San Francisco. Rose (1984) termed this group ‘marginal gentrifiers’, and it was subsequently suggested that gays had played an important part in the early stage of gentrification in some areas, like Castro in San Francisco. This may be because such groups could not afford to buy in a ‘better’ neighbourhood or because they were not worried that the area did not possess bourgeois attributes or because they found the lack of such attributes and

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the edginess of the district attractive. While gays have played a role in gentrification, it has been a relatively small one in most areas (Lauria and Knopp, 1985; Knopp, 2007; Christafore and Leguizamon, 2018). Recent work by Blasius et al. (2016) on Cologne also supports the idea of pioneer or marginal gentrifiers. Bridge (2003) argues that it is possible to identify different types of gentrifiers, including both marginal and pioneer gentrifiers at one end, and what he terms corporate gentrifiers, who have more money and generally want to move into areas and houses that have already been gentrified. Once the gentrification process got under way and the attractions of inner-city residence were more widely appreciated, the pioneers were followed by the next wave of more affluent gentrifiers in the most attractive areas. Glass noted this in 1964. Butler (1997) also distinguished between the two types. Butler and Lees (2006) have subsequently termed this process ‘super-gentrification’, during which waves of increasingly affluent residents move in and price out existing residents. It can be seen in many of the more well-located areas of attractive housing, such as Notting Hill, Islington and Primrose Hill in London, and Brooklyn in New York (Halasz, 2018). As the scale of gentrification increases in a city, it affects properties in the already gentrified areas, but it also spreads outwards into other previously non-gentrified, areas, in some cases into marginal properties (Hamnett, 2010a). A useful analogy is that of the tide slowly coming in on a beach. But when the economy stalls, the tide often goes out again, leaving marginal properties and areas temporarily or permanently high and dry. There is some literature on ‘de-gentrification’ and ‘post-recession’ gentrification (Lees, 2009; Lees and Bondi, 1995; Hackworth, 2002), but for the most part, gentrification has continued its largely inexorable expansion. There is a related question: where do gentrifiers come from? Initially, it was seen as a back-to-the-city movement by young people returning from parental suburbia, but this was dismissed by Clay in 1979, and today most gentrifiers are thought to come from within the city itself as they leave home or move from private renting to home ownership (Griffiths, 1996; Hyra, 2014). Van Criekingen (2009) states of Brussels that: ‘Rather than a reversal of long-established middle-class trends of suburbanisation, gentrification rests foremost on a reshuffling of a stock of middle- and upper-class households within the urban area’ (p. 827). This is true in the short term, but the potential gentrifiers are produced via long-term and large-scale processes of industrial, educational and occupational change

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that have led to the growth of a much larger professional and managerial class over the last 50 years or so. Members of this expanded group are not all automatically gentrifiers, but many work in the city centre and a good proportion of them are attracted to housing in the inner city (this argument is discussed in Chapters 3 and 4). There is a related debate about the significance of purely demographic change versus gentrification. Buzar et al. (2007) suggested in an analysis of Bologna, Italy, that it has experienced a process of ‘demographic re-urbanisation’ (rather than gentrification), where younger people are returning to the city centre rather than suburbanising. The authors examined the process of re-urbanisation in four European cities and argued that it is necessary to ‘re-urbanise gentrification’. But van Criekingen (2010) argues that this neglects the class dimension of the process and that, contra Buzar et al., it is necessary to ‘gentrify the re-urbanisation debate’. It is possible that, in some cities, there are re-urbanisation processes that range over a variety of social classes, but it is likely that re-urbanisation generally involves higher social classes, given the higher property prices in many central and inner-city areas. In other words, re-urbanisation is very likely to involve some degree of gentrification.

Waves and stages of gentrification The changes in the physical forms of gentrification and its widening geographical diffusion have led to wider discussions about both stages and waves of gentrification and attempts at periodisation. The argument is that gentrification is not static and has changed in its form, geographical extent and underlying processes over both time and place. This is clearly correct, and the changes have involved not just the built forms (e.g. individual houses and apartments, factories, warehouses, new build) but also the areas involved and, crucially, the key agents and processes involved (Kerstein, 1990). There is an evolving geography of gentrification. As Lees (2000) stated, ‘Gentrification today is quite different to gentrification in the early 1970s, late 1980s, and even the early 1990s’ (p. 389). In purely geographical terms, there has been a massive expansion of gentrification from a few core areas of old 18th- and 19th-century housing in specific inner areas of London, New York, Paris, Vancouver, Toronto,

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Sydney and Melbourne, both outwards across these cities – including parts of the East End of London and the eastern arrondissements of Paris, parts of inner East Berlin, such as Prenzlauerberg (Levine, 2004), and Brooklyn in New York, amongst others (Clerval, 2013; Lees, 2000) – but also down the urban hierarchy to a range of smaller cities, such as Manchester, Edinburgh, Leeds and Bristol in Britain; Amsterdam, Leiden and Utrecht in the Netherlands (van Kempen and van Weesep, 1994; van Weesep, 1994; Hostenbach, 2017); Adelaide, Brisbane and Newcastle in Australia (Walters and McCrae, 2013; Rofe, 2000) and Madrid (Vazquez, 1992), and into some towns and rural villages; and outwards into a range of other countries, such as China and Korea (Shin, 2009; Shin and Kim, 2016; Shin et al., 2016). There has also been significant gentrification in some cities of Eastern Europe, notably Berlin (Bernt, 2012; Bernt and Holm, 2005, 2009; Levine, 2004), Prague, Warsaw and Budapest post-1989 (Sykora, 1993, 2005; Kovacs, 1998). A map by Clerval (2011) in an open-access journal, Cybergeo, shows the spread of gentrification eastwards across Paris and Siemer and Matthews-Hunter (2017) give a good map for Berlin. In some cities, gentrification has spread outwards from some of the older, wealthier areas within the inner city, but in others it started in fairly run-down areas, though many were often built for the middle classes. In some interesting cases, such as Jericho in Oxford or Walthamstow in North London, gentrification has been of small-terraced houses originally built for the working classes (Clerval, 2011). In the process of outwards and downwards diffusion, the nature of the process has often changed, with an increasing stress on state-led NBG and apartment building construction involving big capital. The era of individually driven gentrification in a small number of Western cities appears to have largely ended, but gentrification has become a much more spatially extensive phenomenon. So, it is important to try to separate out the overlap of, first, the outward diffusion of gentrification within cities over time; second, the diffusion down the urban hierarchy from big to small cities; and, third, outwards diffusion between countries, from the early North American and Western European core. There have been at least three overlapping waves of diffusion over time. The first of these attempts to identify different waves was made by Hackworth and Smith (2001). Writing primarily about New York and the US, they identified three waves of gentrification. The first wave, which they date from 1968 to 1973, was sporadic individual renovation in a few

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neighbourhoods, not undertaken by big capital and not state-led. They then identified a transitional period, from 1974 to 1977, where investors and developers began to get involved. The second wave, from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, spread into previously uninvested neighbourhoods and into smaller cities. This was followed by another transitional period, from 1988 to 1993, in which the recession slowed gentrification before a third wave of ‘post-recession’ gentrification, starting in 1993–1994, during which the process picked up speed again and spread further out and into new cities, with a greater role for large-scale capital. The third wave was frequently state led, and gentrification formed a part of what Smith (2002a) has termed ‘a wider urban strategy’ for urban regeneration and renewal. Hackworth and Smith (2001) suggest that third-wave or state-led gentrification is distinct from the first two waves in at least four ways: First, gentrification is expanding both within the inner-city neighbourhoods that it affected during earlier waves and to more remote neighbourhoods beyond the immediate core. Second, restructuring and globalisation in the real estate industry has set a larger context for larger developers becoming more involved in gentrifying neighbourhoods… While such developers used to be common in the process only after the neighbourhood had been ‘tamed’…they are now increasingly the first to orchestrate investment. Third, effective resistance to gentrification has declined as the working class is continually displaced from the inner city… Fourth…the state is now more involved in the process than in the second wave. (p. 468)

The attempt at periodisation is both necessary and commendable, but the limitation of Hackworth and Smith’s periodisation is that it was primarily based on the US experience and largely on New York, and cannot simply be generalised to match the experience of other countries, although they do note that: ‘Specific dates for these phases will undoubtedly vary from place to place, but not so significant as to diminish the influence of broader-scale political events on the local experience of gentrification’ (Hackworth and Smith, 2001, p. 466). Various authors have extended the analysis by looking at more waves and other countries. Aalbers (2019) argues that Hackworth and Smith’s wave approach is very valuable and suggests that: Although it can be argued that gentrification started at a different time in different cities and countries, and that the years…are incorrect for other places, it

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could also be hypothesized that we are seeing a process of synchronisation in which the mutations which result in new phases increasingly take place around the same time.

Indeed, he suggests that Hackworth and Smith: changed the way we think about gentrification. Hitherto, discussions had been dominated by production- versus consumption-led debates and the process of gentrification itself had been approached as having different stages (starting with marginal gentrifiers like artists and students, and ending with full-fledged and later ‘super’ gentrification), but Hackworth and Smith discussed how gentrification was qualitatively different in different decades.

While the wave approach is valuable, I am not convinced that there is a common international chronology. In the ex-state socialist cities, such as Berlin, Prague and Budapest, gentrification did not even begin until after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, and in parts of these cities the process started much later (Bernt and Holme, 2005; Kovacs, 2009; Kovacs et al., 2013; Sykora, 2005). In China, gentrification did not begin until after 1998 and the opening up of the housing market (He, 2012, 2019). There have been communalities, but different waves in different places at different times (see Murphy, 2008, for an analysis of gentrification in Auckland, New Zealand). Hackworth and Smith are broadly correct about the increasing role of the state over time, though the details of their periodisation are rather American or even New York-specific, but it would be a mistake to assume that what holds for New York (or London) necessarily holds for other cities in different continents and with different economic and political histories. At the risk of replacing one overgeneralisation with another, it is not possible to produce a single, universally valid chronology of waves of gentrification. The precise forms and timings of different waves vary from one country to another and even one city to another, with possible common features, such as the global financial crisis in 2008 or the impact of COVID-19 in 2020. Only by comparing different national chronologies will it be possible to see what, if any, communalities exist. There may be some major ones, but we cannot say so ‘a priori’ (van Gent, 2013). Hackworth and Smith’s idea does offer a valuable potential framework for analysis as long as the timing and nature of phases is not applied mechanically. There is likely to be a considerable degree of national variation depending on both history and economy.

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Hackworth and Smith’s periodisation does broadly parallel what was happening in Britain with individual gentrification taking place in specific parts of London from the early 1960s through the late 1960s. Then, with the first housing price boom, from 1970 to 1973, it began to diffuse outwards a bit more widely until the first oil price shock, the ‘Barber boom’ and the dramatic five-point increase in interest rates in late 1973. This had a massive effect: house buyers suddenly found their mortgage interest rates increased from 10 per cent to 15 per cent overnight. There was then a recovery in the late 1980s, the deep recession of the early 1980s brought about by Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson when interest rates spiralled again, the big boom in the mid–late 1980s and the major housing market slump of the first half of the 1990s in Britain (Hamnett and Reades, 2019). Still, there is inevitably considerable variation from country to country, and from continent to continent, and it cannot be just assumed that Hackworth and Smith’s periodisation holds for other places. I look briefly at some other national periodisations below. In London, as Hamnett and Whitelegg (2007) and Hamnett (2009a) have shown, the recession of the early 1990s and the slump in the commercial property market created the conditions for loft conversions to take off in inner London. Until about 1990, the so-called ‘Big Bang’ in London had created a large demand for new office space in the city, and this spilled over into secondary locations in the city ring where old factories and warehouses were about to be converted into office space. The property market slump of the early 1990s meant that this market dried up, but a change in planning law meant that it suddenly became possible to convert commercial buildings to residential use. Initially, nothing happened, but in 1992 an American developer, Harry Handelsman, set up the Manhattan Loft Corporation and purchased a 40,000-square-foot print building in Clerkenwell (1-10 Summers Street) for what now seems a remarkably small sum of money (£400,000) and converted it into ‘raw’ apartment spaces (they had electricity and plumbing in place but were otherwise unfinished). The purchase price was about £10 per square foot, but the apartments were sold for £100 per square foot. Today they would fetch prices in excess of £1,000–£1,500 per square foot (about £15,000 per square metre; see Figure 2.1). Britain also suffered a remarkably harsh residential property market slump from 1989 to 1995 which saw prices and sale volumes fall back sharply (Hamnett, 1999). During the course of this slump, over 500,000

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households saw their homes repossessed. While no detailed research has been done on the impact of the housing market slump on gentrification, the fall in prices allowed more people to buy and the loft conversion market took off in 1995. More recently, the American home-loan crisis in 2007–2008 was paralleled by dramatic financial and property market downturns in Britain, Spain and Ireland. Similarly, the Southeast Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the Russian debt crisis of 1998 were quite specific in their impacts. More research is needed to examine the effects of these crises, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet empire in 1989. In some places, gentrification may have come to an abrupt halt, whereas in others it may have provided a potential opportunity to kick-start projects, as Levine (2004) and Holm (2013) suggest for Berlin. In China, Mao was still in control until 1976, and it was not until 1978, the rise of Deng Xiaoping and the start of reform that the country emerged from revolutionary socialism. Gentrification could not even get under way until the late 1990s, when the housing market was liberalised, and it was wholly state-led from the start (Wu, 2015; He, 2007, 2012, 2019; Tomba, 2017). Also, because all urban land is owned by the state, the state has been the key driver in gentrification, seeing it as part of a wider strategy for urban regeneration and social change. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Chinese government initiated massive infrastructure spending as part of a neo-Keynesian strategy to ensure that the economy continued growing. Private-sector, individual-led gentrification is practically non-existent in China. More generally, it is likely that new waves of gentrification will affect different countries at different times and in different ways, depending on their urban history, the state of the global and the national economy, the political freedom for gentrification to happen, potential profit possibilities and the extent of political resistance. What this means in practice is that gentrification is not a simple mechanical process. Thus, gentrification is unlikely to happen in poor countries with no developed middle class or a market economy. Nor is it likely to happen in cities without a central historic core. The necessary conditions are simply not present. Thus, for example, gentrification only effectively started in Eastern Europe in the 1990s with the privatisation of housing and the re-emergence of mass private ownership after the collapse of communism in 1989. While it typically started in the historic inner areas of cities, such as Berlin, Prague, Krakow, Warsaw and Budapest, with close proximity to the centre

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(Prenzlauerberg, Berlin), the process depended on the historic structure of the cities, the form of privatisation and property restitution, and it was held back initially by the post-privatisation economic recessions of the early 1990s (Kovacs, 1998, 2009; Kovacs et al., 2013; Sykora, 1999, 2005). The important point is that there is no single cross-country periodisation for gentrification, although it is possible to show how it has diffused over time and space. What may be valid for New York is not necessarily valid elsewhere. This said, state-led or state-initiated gentrification has become more common in recent years as cities have been attracted by the financial and social potential of increasing the size of the middle-class population in the inner city.

Gentrification as a tool of urban revitalisation What is clear is that gentrification has become increasingly important as a tool of urban revitalisation, designed to inject new life into run-down or decaying inner urban areas. While this may seem very attractive in theory, it has attracted considerable criticism from the academic left. Neil Smith (2002b) has suggested that gentrification is a global urban strategy that has taken over from liberal urban policy. He argued that: the new revanchist urbanism that replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction… Second, the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets of some command-center cities, is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy. No longer isolated or restricted to Europe, North America, or Oceania, the impulse behind gentrification is now generalized; its incidence is global, and it is densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation. What connects these two arguments is the shift from an urban scale defined according to the conditions of social reproduction to one in which the investment of productive capital holds definitive precedence. (p. 427, emphasis in original)

While the argument that gentrification is a global urban strategy is perhaps somewhat overstated, there is a significant element of truth in it, as various city governments have adopted urban policies that focus on increasing urban prosperity and upgrading and making cities a more

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attractive place to live for the middle class (Lees and Ley, 2008). In some cases, urban renewal can indirectly lead to gentrification (Bailey and Robertson, 1997).

New forms of (quasi-)gentrification: studentification and tourist gentrification The role of young households as gentrification pioneers in marginal areas has long been recognised, but in more recent years, Darren Smith (2005) has developed the idea of ‘studentification’ as a prelude to gentrification proper. This process involves large numbers of university students living in particular residential areas and dramatically changing their demographic and social composition. While studentification is not a form of mainstream gentrification, these areas undergo a distinct change and often the students may go on to gentrify other areas when they have graduated. In this respect, studentification may be, as Smith suggests, a ‘gentrification factory’ producing some of the educated labour force necessary for the process (see also Moos et al., 2019, for a discussion of studentification). Studentification is not gentrification in a classic sense but a potential precursor to it, and it does involve changes in housing occupancy (though not perhaps upgrading) and a potential class change (Smith and Holt, 2007). Another potential form of gentrification is tourism-led. Big increases in tourism in some areas can have a major effect on residential and commercial areas, changing land uses, visitor patterns and buildings and pushing up rents and prices. The potential impact of tourism on cities was recognised early on by Judd and Fainstein (1999) and by Hoffman et al. (2003) in two pioneering edited collections. But more recently there has been a growing literature on ‘touristification’ and tourist gentrification as forms of transnational gentrification (Hays and Zaban, 2020; Sigler and Wachsmuth, 2020; Jover and Diaz-Parra, 2020; Sequera and Nofre, 2020; Gotham, 2005; Narravete, 2020). There is another important process linked to this – the growth of Airbnb rental properties in many major cities. This is becoming a new and rather worrying dimension of gentrification, as the gains to be made from short-term tourist rentals often greatly outweigh the returns from conventional rentals, particularly in popular tourist cities, such as San Francisco, Paris, Madrid and Barcelona

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(Urquiaga et al., 2020; Cocola-Gant, 2018; Cocola-Gant and Lopez-Gay, 2020; Shabrina et al., 2021; Balampanidis et al., 2019; Wachsmuth and Weisler, 2018). While Airbnb cannot be seen as a conventional form of gentrification as it does not involve a class change in permanent residents, the influx of visitors can and does lead to significant changes in the social composition of the area and the direct, indirect or exclusionary displacement of local residents. Unless Airbnb is regulated, it could lead to significant pressure on private renting through reducing the supply and help to drive up rents. One of the most interesting new ideas is that of ‘climate gentrification’ put forward by Keenan et al. (2018). The idea is that, as global warming, climate change and rising sea levels take hold, properties at higher elevations are likely to increase in value faster than ones nearer sea level that are more prone to flooding. This is a fascinating idea that could be extended to whole cities. Clearly low-lying coastal or riverine cities, such as New York, Amsterdam, London and Shanghai, would be most at risk without major remedial flood-control measures. In the long term, there could be major latitude and altitudinal effects as well, but for these to be linked to gentrification there would have to be significant social-class-related residential changes. The recent increase in wildfires in the western US and parts of Australia, combined with massive flooding in parts of Europe, China and Australia, raise important questions about the impact of climate change on cities. Another related term is that of ecological gentrification (Quastel, 2009). With all these new forms of gentrification, there is, however, a danger of conceptual overstretch and conceptual dilution. As Gale (2018) noted, ‘If everything is gentrification, is anything gentrification?’ (p. 299). Finally, it is important to mention the growth of international investment in housing in key cities, both to rent and simply as an asset and store of value (see Fernandez et al., 2016). While this is not necessarily leading to an influx of middle-class residents and can lead to more vacant property, it can be a form of indirect housing displacement for local residents priced out of the market. What is perhaps true is that, in societies with high inequality, there will always be new forms of gentrification as higher-income groups search out potentially attractive residential opportunities, whether these be older period housing, riverside warehouses, new-build apartments, converted factories or Airbnb. In some ways, gentrification is simply a contemporary manifestation of the ability of the better-off to

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outbid the less well-off for desirable housing. The nature of the housing and the areas may have changed, but the power of fundamental inequalities in purchasing or rental power has not. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when suburbanisation was the dominant form of urban development in the US, the middle classes were criticised for leaving the inner cities on a large scale (and many still are), but in the 1980s, some of the next generations opted for gentrification instead. What is clear is that gentrification is not unchanging (Clark, 2005). I consider the future of gentrification in Chapter 7.

3

Causation, explanation and theory: capital, class, culture and the state

Introduction One of the biggest sources of controversy in academic gentrification debates has been over the issue of the causes and explanation of gentrification and how best to theorise it. The important questions are: why did gentrification emerge when and where it did, and what were the causes? Glass’s pioneering early work on London was descriptive rather than theoretical and did not attempt to identify the underlying causes of gentrification. The focus of research has moved on very considerably since then. Several explanations have been put forward, including ones that stress demographic changes and domestic technology, and the focus of each explanation has changed over time. But fundamentally, the early debate rests on two famous papers that set up very different explanatory positions: the first focuses on the origins and characteristics of the gentrifiers, and the second on the production of their housing. The first of these papers, by David Ley (1980), described and explained the emergence of a new process of residential renovation in inner Vancouver in terms of the emergence of a new class of university-educated service-sector workers with specific cultural and residential preferences. The second, by Neil Smith (1979a; see Smith, 1996, for a later elaboration), outlined a more general, radically different and totally opposed explanation focusing on the key role of capital, property and the development of industry, and fiercely criticising choice- and preference-based approaches. Its title is self-explanatory: ‘A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People’. These two explanations are variously described in terms of ‘demand versus supply’, ‘agency versus structure’, ‘choice versus constraint’ and 39

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‘preference versus profit’. I deal with each of them, and also with changes in industrial and occupational structures. I also discuss a third important explanation put forward by Smith (2002a), which argues that gentrification has increasingly become part of a state-led global strategy to regenerate cities and strengthen the urban economy. It is, in part, gentrification’s place as a theoretical as well as an important policy arena that has made it of continuing interest. There have been various attempts to reconcile the competing explanations (Hamnett, 1984, 1991; Boyle, 1995; Clark, 1994), but one of the best accounts is presented by Beauregard (1986), who stated: There can be no single theory of an invariant gentrification process. Rather, there are theoretical interpretations of how the ‘gentry’ are created and located in the cities, how ‘gentrifiable’ housing is produced, how those to be displaced came to live in inner-city neighbourhoods, and finally how the various processes of gentrification unfold given the establishment of these three basic conditions. These different theoretical arguments must be combined in a fashion compatible with the specific instances of gentrification that we wish to explain. The emphasis must be placed on contingency and complexity, set with the structural dimensions of advanced capitalism. (p. 35)

There is still a continuing debate about which should take explanatory precedence, people or profits, but Beauregard (1986) clearly states: The explanation for gentrification begins with the presence of ‘gentrifiers’, the necessary agents and beneficiaries of the gentrification process, and the direction taken by their reproduction and consumption… [W]ithout this group, the whole process ceases to exist. Different types of housing stock might be rehabilitated, and diverse individuals and families displaced, but the characteristics of the gentrifiers are remarkably similar. (p. 41)

Beauregard went on to analyse the changing economic and industrial structure of American cities in the 1970s and 1980s, noting that the gentrifiers are predominantly professional-managerial workers. He then noted that, to explain why a fraction of this group remains in the city and does not migrate to the suburbs, it is necessary to look at their reproduction and consumption activities, particularly the growth of dual-career households, increased commuting costs and the attraction of certain forms of consumption. The next step in Beauregard’s analysis is to explain the existence of inexpensive inner-city housing, which the gentrifiers can take over. This is where the deterioration and devaluation of inner-city housing and the rent gap come in. I take the explanations in order, starting with David Ley.

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David Ley: post-industrialism, class and culture Put simply, Ley (1980) sought to explain the gentrification of parts of inner Vancouver and the rise of a liberal urban political movement (advocating for a more liveable city) in terms of the growth of a new group of highly educated professional workers who saw the attraction of living in relatively cheap, spacious, older houses close to the downtown with its cultural and leisure facilities. In doing so, Ley explicitly sought to link his explanation to the work of sociologist Daniel Bell (1973) and the emergence of what is now called ‘post-industrial’ society. Bell’s post-industrial thesis argues that modern Western societies have seen the decline of industrialism, the growth of what was termed a ‘quaternary’ or information-based economy (it would probably now be called a digital economy) and the associated growth of a university-educated labour force. The baby boomer generation rejected the suburban ethos of their parents and looked anew at the appeal of older, cheap housing in the inner city. Ley argued that ‘the changes in urban policy associated with the liveable city ideology were associated with shifts at the economic, the political and the socio-cultural levels of society, so that an understanding of the emerging urban landscape requires an a priori grasp of wide-ranging processes of change in society itself’ (p. 240). Ley stressed that the rise of post-industrial society led to major changes in the structure of Western economies and the structure of the labour force, with a shift from a goods-producing to a service-producing economy and the rapid growth in the numbers of professional, managerial and technical workers and of white-collar workers more generally. Ley linked this to a growth of the public sector and to the rise of an amenity ethic, the growing importance of aesthetics and the rise of a culture of consumption. Thus, Ley linked economic, political and socio-cultural changes to the regeneration and renewal of some old, previously industrial inner areas of Vancouver. His paper was the first to explicitly link large-scale industrial and upwards occupational change, socio-cultural values and residential change. There are links to the changes in cultural taste and preferences stressing the aesthetic attraction of some old, Georgian, Victorian or Edwardian period housing in Britain and 19th-century housing more generally. Some of these houses also offered elegant rooms. Jager (1986), for example, argues that, in Melbourne, Australia, middle-class gentrifiers’

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aesthetics valued older property. It should be stressed here that, because of the outward historical development of cities, most of the older housing was found in the inner city, often in close proximity to the centre. This housing thus offered space, period features and good accessibility. The aesthetics argument has been developed further by other writers who have pointed to the role of artists and creative workers in early stages of the process (Ley, 1994, 2003). In general, however, while early gentrifiers may have possessed a different aesthetic value system to their parents or to suburbanites – one that valued older property rather than new, emphasised very different lifestyles (Caulfield, 1989, 1994; Mills, 1988) and led to a reassessment of inner-city housing – it is difficult, if not impossible, to argue that gentrification primarily hinges on differences in aesthetic values, tastes and housing preferences alone. Indeed, Ley (1980) stressed changes in industrial and occupational structures that underpinned the growth of a new class, and Bridge (1993, 1995, 2006) argued that gentrification was not just about taste but also wider issues of cultural capital. Bridge (2001) raised the important issue of gentrification’s links to Bourdieu’s conception of habitus and asked the important question: if issues of location and a shift in preference towards inner-city housing were unimportant, what is all the fuss about gentrification? Why is gentrification held up to be symptomatic of the cultural practices of a new middle class? If gentrification is a minor variation in the reproduction of the middle class then why did it happen at all, given the fact that in terms of the existing tastes of the middle class (i.e. the existing habitus), the inner urban areas to which early gentrifiers might move were seen as inherently risky? (p. 207, emphasis in original)

Bridge is correct: the question of the nature and location of inner-city housing is not an irrelevance. On the contrary, it is precisely because a fraction of the middle class began to move into older housing in inner-city areas that were previously seen as run-down and the preserve of low-income groups and the working class that gentrification emerged as a new phenomenon when it did. The question of changes in new middle-class spatial and housing decision-making are central to any explanation of gentrification as are the issues of where the new middle class came from and why these areas became run-down in the first place. Bridge argues that gentrifier locational and housing decisions embody a conscious middle-class aesthetic choice. There is an important, indeed critical, role for individual and collective social agency in deciding to renovate a house in the inner city. As he put it: ‘The renovation of

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working-class inner urban housing is a set of practices inconceivable for the middle class 40 years ago’ (Bridge, 2001, p. 212). This is consequently something that needs to be explained. The importance of lifestyle and preferences is also stressed by Allen (2007) regarding the emergence of city-centre living in Manchester and its ‘counter-cultural’ aspects.

Neil Smith: capital and real estate, not culture Ley’s thesis, with its perceived emphasis on individual choice and preference, was a red rag for Neil Smith, one of the first of David Harvey’s talented Marxist PhD students. Smith (1979a) argued that the thesis was intellectually flawed, if not wholly bankrupt, for what he saw as its individualist emphasis on preference and its failure to consider the structure and operation of the profit-based land and property system and the role of the property and mortgage-finance industry. In Smith’s view, gentrification had little to do with individual choice and preference and was, instead, largely a product of the profit-driven property system. He argued that it was not possible to understand changes in urban residential structure without understanding the changing structure of the land and housing market, and, in capitalist societies, these are driven by a search for increased profits. As he put it: To explain gentrification according to the gentrifier’s actions alone, while ignoring the role of builders, developers, landlords, mortgage lenders, government agencies, real estate agents, and tenants, is excessively narrow. A broader theory of gentrification must take the role of producers as well as consumers into account, and when this is done, it appears that the needs of production – in particular the need to earn profit – are a more decisive initiative behind gentrification than consumer preference. (p. 540)

Further, Smith (1979a) stated: The so-called urban renaissance has been stimulated more by economic than cultural forces. In the decision to rehabilitate an inner city structure, one consumer preference tends to stand out above the others – the preference for profit, or, more accurately, a sound financial investment. Whether or not gentrifiers articulate this preference, it is fundamental, for few would even consider rehabilitation if a financial loss were to be expected. A theory of gentrification must therefore explain why some neighbourhoods are profitable to redevelop while others are not. What are the conditions of profitability? (p. 540)

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Smith is correct that few gentrifiers would want to make a financial loss, but this does not mean that profit was important for them. Specifically, he suggested that one of the key pre-conditions for gentrification, a supply of relatively cheap inner-city housing, was produced by the operation of the capitalist urban property market that, over time and partly as a result of suburbanisation and middle-class outmigration, saw the devaluation of inner-city housing to the point where a ‘rent gap’ could open up between actual capitalised ground rent (or land value) of a plot of land in its present use and the potential ground rent or land value under a higher use (Figure 3.1). This gap represented a profitable opportunity for landed property interests who saw the potential of either upgrading the housing and selling or renting to middle-class incomers, or redeveloping the area with new and more highly priced housing. Smith then examined the structure of urban land values. He noted that, in the 19th century, in most older American cities, land values showed a classic pattern, reaching a peak at the centre of the CBD or downtown, then declining towards the urban periphery. This was a reflection of the limited supply of city-centre land, higher accessibility and a greater supply of both labour and potential consumers. Traditionally, the CBD was the office and retail centre, surrounded by inner-city housing and manufacturing industry, and then suburban housing. But with the suburbanisation of industrial capital, many inner-city areas experienced a long process of decline, and a land-value ‘valley’ or trough began to form in the inner city from the 1920s and deepened, producing the decaying slums, by the 1960s. Smith then argues that: ‘A theory of gentrification needs to explain the detailed historical mechanisms of capital depreciation in the inner city and the precise way in which this depreciation produces the possibility of profitable reinvestment. The crucial nexus here is the relationship between land value and property value’ (p. 542). Smith then distinguished between the house value and price, the capitalised ground rent (generally the value of the land under its existing use) and what he termed the potential ground rent – that is, the amount that could be capitalised under the ‘land’s highest and best use’. The key to Smith’s theory is that, as housing and inner areas deteriorate and generally undergo downwards social filtering, a rent gap emerges between actual and potential ground rent. Smith argues that only when this gap emerges can redevelopment be expected and, the wider the gap, the greater the likelihood of gentrification as developers can buy the properties, pay the builders’ costs and leave a satisfactory profit. He stresses the role of devel-

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Source:  The author.

Figure 3.1

The rent gap (adapted from Neil Smith)

opers, arguing that the process is initiated not by the exercise of individual consumer preferences but by some form of collective social action (see also Smith, 1987b). The rent gap should not be confused with the value gap – a concept introduced by Hamnett and Randolph (1984, 1986, 1989), which looks at the gap between the tenanted and open-market value of rented housing (Clark, 1992; Millard-Ball, 2000).

Some problems with the rent-gap thesis Smith’s critique of explanations based largely on taste, choice and preference is very compelling, and his 1979 paper makes a powerful read. The

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idea of a rent gap between existing and potential ground rent fits the experiences of many inner-city areas where housing or other buildings have deteriorated over time, and the rent-gap thesis has attracted a lot of attention (Badcock, 1989, 1990; Clark, 1988, 1992, 1995; Clark and Gullberg, 1991; Darling, 2005), but it has its critics (Bourassa, 1993). I have outlined some criticisms elsewhere (Hamnett, 1984, 1991), but a key problem is the stress given to the dominant role of capital and the real estate market in general, and to supply over demand. There is no doubt that these factors are important, and where large-scale developments are concerned, they are crucial. An individual household may be able to buy and renovate a single house, but they cannot undertake larger developments (Davidson, 2007; Dutton, 2003). Almost all large-scale developments (e.g. a large block of apartments) are undertaken by companies or developers with knowledge and financial resources. In these cases, the role of individual households is limited to a decision whether to rent or purchase units in such developments. The buyers may have certain common tastes or preferences, but they cannot initiate developments. Medium or large housing development is dependent on professional developers and big capital. Individual gentrifiers can only undertake renovation of individual houses, apartments or small-scale commercial property. In large-scale development, profit is paramount. However, much initial gentrification was small scale and involved individual households buying and renovating houses, rather than large-scale capital. There is another problem in that it is difficult to empirically determine the existence of a rent gap. First, though most cities have quite good house price data, data on land values is more difficult to find and data on potential ground rent is generally non-existent. Thus, the rent gap is an attractive concept that is extremely difficult to test empirically. Measurement aside, there is a broader geographical problem – how and why does the rent gap manifest itself in some cities and areas and not in others (e.g. why Manhattan and not Middlesbrough?); a timing problem – why did the rent gap manifest itself when it did; and a problem regarding the size of a rent gap needed to trigger renovation or renewal. But there have been studies of rent gaps (see Badcock, 1989, 1990, on Adelaide; Clark, 1988, 1995, on Malmo in Sweden; Sykora, 1993, on Prague; Hammel, 1999, on Minneapolis; and Slater, 2015). Using public micro-data for 1990 and 2006 for New York, Porter (2010) concluded that there were two visible land-value valleys and that, as the first valley closed, the second expanded.

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But such studies are rare. In general, the existence of rent gaps is assumed or asserted rather than empirically demonstrated. This thesis is an attractive and influential one, and references to a ‘rent gap’ have become common in much literature on the causes of gentrification. Not everybody is convinced, however, and it is possible to raise a number of important criticisms of Smith’s thesis as noted above. First, there is the problem of timing. If the rent gap develops over time, why did gentrification start in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Why not earlier or later? Second, why does a rent gap apparently only appear in some cities and not others? This is very important as, during the 1960s and 1970s, large parts of American inner cities, such as the Bronx and the south side of Los Angeles, were experiencing large-scale abandonment. The properties and the areas appeared to have little or no value to investors or landlords (Harvey, 1973). As Beauregard (1986) notes: The rent gap argument provides only one of the necessary conditions for gentrification and none of the sufficient ones. Observation shows that many areas of central cities have rent gaps greatly in excess of those that gentrify. Thus the theory cannot easily explain why Hoboken (New Jersey) becomes gentrified, but Newark – where capitalised ground rents are extremely low and whose locational advantages relative to Manhattan and transportation facilities are on a par with Hoboken’s – does not. (p. 39)

While it can be argued that it is partly a question of timing, this goes back to the first problem. The third problem concerns the origins of the occupants of renovated or redeveloped property. If, as Smith argues, the existence of a rent gap can generate attractive and profitable possibilities for capital and the property industry, where do the middle classes come from who occupy this property, and why are they seemingly happy to do so when previously this group was leaving the inner city? Given the widespread diffusion of gentrification and its increasing global reach, this raises a bigger question about the growth of the middle classes in general in the last 40 years. Gentrification not only requires a supply of properties in key areas; it also requires a supply of potential gentrifiers to occupy those properties. While demand without supply is in vain, supply without demand is futile. This is, thus, a major problem for Smith’s argument that gentrification involves capital and not people returning to the city. This was true both of the early years in the 1970s, when middle-class gentrifiers were

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buying and renovating older houses in selected areas in inner London, Sydney and New York, and of the more recent decades, when there has been large-scale apartment building in inner-city areas by commercial developers (Davidson and Lees, 2005). In both cases, people have to want to live in these properties, whether buying or renting. Gentrification involves a supply of both properties and people. The final problem for the rent-gap thesis is one of measurement. The concept is simple to understand but, in practice, it is difficult to get reliable, long-term data on land values and building rents or values for a given city. Hence, the rent gap has been more often asserted than empirically demonstrated. Thus, Beauregard (1986) states that, in addition to the problems listed above: no attempt is made to address the diverse nature of gentrification. It is collapsed into an ‘ideal type’ concept. Lastly, the arguments are characterised by lack of attention to the role of reproduction and consumption in gentrification. They begin and end in the economic base, the sphere of production, and do not consider how changes in these other two spheres structure, produce and even represent gentrification. (p. 39)

Interestingly, Zapatka and Brenden (2020) undertook a detailed empirical study of New York to shed light on the consumption-versus-production argument. Using census and property tax assessment data for 2100 census tracts between 2009 and 2016, they found that: neighbourhoods that experienced an increase in White, middle-class residents had related housing price spikes in each of the subsequent two years. A 1% increase in gentrifiers was associated with a subsequent 2.7% increase in property values. However, housing market growth did not predict future increases in gentrifiers. This suggests that consumption leads production during neighbourhood gentrification, and that developers are reactive, not proactive, in their investment decisions.

This is an important finding that, at least for New York and these dates, casts doubt on Smith’s argument that production is always the decisive influence and that consumption has a secondary role. But for large developments, capital is clearly crucial. Without large-scale capital there can be no large-scale development. This is always and necessarily producer-led. Here, Smith and I are in full agreement (see Smith, 1992, for a defence of his analysis and a stimulating critique of my argument).

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In addition to the arguments advanced by Ley and Smith, I have argued (Hamnett, 2003a, 2003b), following Ley, that a fundamental factor driving the first waves of gentrification in a small number of major global cities was the dramatic change in industrial structure in Western countries, with de-industrialisation accompanied by the rise of financial and business services and, subsequently, the growth of the creative industries. This development led to changes in the structure of work and to a change in the occupational class structure, which led to a decline in the size of the manual working class and a large increase in the size of the educated professional, technical and managerial groups, with an associated change in the demand for housing. This is not an argument about changes in residential choice and preference but about the changing occupational class structure of the labour force, which is class-based. Clearly, a significant section of the group had to want to live in the inner city and older housing, but the important driver is the expansion of the professional and managerial group itself. This provided the basis for the increase in middle-class demand for inner-city housing. Scott (2018) and Clerval (2021) make similar cases for Los Angeles and Paris, respectively. The implications of this argument are taken up and developed in Chapter 4.

Gentrification, gender, the baby boomers and domestic technology There are three further explanations. The first, put forward by Berry (1985) and Bourne (1993), argued that the timing of gentrification could be accounted for by the coming of age of the post-war baby boomers, who began to enter the housing market in large numbers in the early 1970s. This is an important argument as, in 1946–1947, the number of babies born in Western countries rose dramatically, peaking about 1960. Add to this the post-war expansion of universities and the fact that baby boomers in their early 20s began to hit the labour and housing markets in large numbers from the early 1970s, and the timing is perfect (1946+24=1970). This is when gentrification was first identified on a major scale and when house prices in Britain first began to rise sharply. Demographic change does not provide the key explanation for gentrification, but it originally provided a major trigger factor that was very important in timing terms. Interestingly, both Berry and Bourne argued that the end of the baby boom would lead to a decline in the scale of gentrification. This has not

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happened. The post-war baby boom ended in the late 1970s, but gentrification has continued apace. It has not slowed or gone into reverse, as Berry predicted. We can perhaps deduce from this that, in terms of timing, while gentrification may have started with the maturation of the post-war baby boom, it was not dependent upon it. Why else would gentrification have taken off in Eastern Europe after 1989 or in China in the last 20 years? It is more likely that changes in the economic structure and the housing market have played a key role. A second and related explanation focuses on the role of gender, particularly on the changing position of women in the labour market and the development of dual-career and dual-earner households in the decades since 1970. Whereas, in the past, it was often falsely assumed that men were the sole or dominant breadwinners and that women worked in the home and focused on family and childcare, the changing structure of the labour market and women’s liberation meant that many more women worked, both before and after children. A perceived implication for dual-career households was a greater focus on convenient home locations near the city centre to maximise access to jobs. Rose (1989) also argues that inner-city locations provide greater support for single-parent mothers in terms of facilities and help. While few believe that gender was the key factor in gentrification, it has certainly had a role (Bondi, 1991, 1999; Warde, 1991; Rose, 1984, 1989; Butler and Hamnett, 1994). Boterman and Bridge (2015) provide a useful summary of the literature in their comparative study of the links between gender, family and gentrification in Amsterdam and London. Likewise, Karsten has published various studies on what can be called ‘family gentrification’ by families rather than by singles or couples (Boterman et al., 2010; Karsten, 2003). The other, quirky, explanation was advanced by Redfern (1997a, 1997b) and focuses on the availability of new forms of domestic technology. Essentially, Redfern argues that, until around the late 1960s or early 1970s, most European households did not possess widespread ownership of washing machines, dishwashers and the like, and that, consequently, the material basis for the renovation and modernisation of old houses was not available on a large scale. It was the widespread availability and rapidly falling cost of these domestic appliances that made it easy to modernise old 19th-century houses. While it is correct that gentrification started in older 18th- and 19th-century houses that needed upgrading, and the timing does parallel the widening availability of domestic

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appliances in Britain, Redfern’s thesis does not provide anything like a sufficient basis to explain the timing or geography of gentrification, but it may have a small contributory role. In addition, domestic appliances had become more widely available in the US much earlier, even pre-war, but there was no gentrification at that time. So, we are back to looking at changes in occupational class, culture and preferences and the role of the land market and property industry. Although there has been fierce debate about the relative importance of choice and preference versus capital, individual agency versus structure, supply and demand, changes in class structure and the role of the property industry, amongst others, it is clear that, as Beauregard indicated, there is no single mono-causal explanation of gentrification. On the contrary, gentrification involves a complex of factors, the importance of which varies over time and place. It is not possible to have a purely demand-side or supply-side process without considering corresponding supply and demand elements (see Hamnett, 1984, 1991, for an analysis of the two main positions). As Hostenbach and van Gent (2015) noted of gentrification in Amsterdam and Rotterdam: our findings stress that the different models of upgrading – corresponding to theoretical positions – are varyingly involved in producing gentrification within various neighbourhoods resulting in different forms of gentrification across the city. Therefore, the different models underlying these debates are not contradictory, mutually exclusive, or irrelevant to the study of gentrification. Instead, they should be effectively integrated to advance our understanding of gentrification as an urban phenomenon that stretches far from the inner-city core, that occurs in multiple guises and is liable to change its spots over time. This allows for interpretations of gentrification that simultaneously recognise its widespread nature as well as neighbourhood-level variations in the mechanisms of population composition change, apart from migration. (p. 1497, emphasis added)

The role of the state The final explanation we must consider is the key role of the state in driving gentrification. This was not an important factor initially, and much gentrification was initially a small-scale individual affair, though it was assisted by things like improvement grants in Britain (Hamnett, 1973). However, the role of the state has increased dramatically in impor-

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tance, both directly and indirectly, in the last 30 years, and gentrification (if not called that) is an integral element of urban renewal. Indeed, in some cases, the state played a crucial initial role. Smith (1979b, 1996) points out that the gentrification of historic Society Hill, Philadelphia, in the 1960s and 1970s involved civil society, the private sector and the state: ‘The state, broadly conceived, constituted the third major ingredient in Society Hill’s gentrification, acting variously as an economic, political and ideological agent for the project’ (p. 123). State intervention can take several forms. One of the most important is large-scale urban renewal or regeneration policy where central or local government decides to regenerate or redevelop older, usually inner-city areas that deteriorated or were abandoned in an early era. This can take many forms, including redevelopment of old docklands, railway yards, markets, industrial areas and urban utilities, such as power stations (Imrie et al., 2008). Examples can be seen in New York, London, Paris, Singapore and many other cities. In Paris, for example, the redevelopment of the area near the Austerlitz station and the Mitterrand Library has transformed the district, as has redevelopment of the La Villette canal basin at Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie. London possesses many examples of this form of renewal – the King’s Cross regeneration is one of the latest. What is important is that the state action can include new housing construction that is generally aimed at higher-income households to rent or buy, or it can generate associated housing renovation or upgrading in adjacent areas. The extent of state intervention also varies from one country to another depending on their political economy and political history, and in some countries, particularly in China, where the influence of the state is very considerable, state intervention plays a key role. But, as noted in Chapter 2, Neil Smith (2002b) argues that gentrification has now become part of a wider government urban strategy. This is a radical argument because it sees gentrification as part of a wider urban policy to transform and upgrade cities more generally through urban redevelopment and social upgrading. While I am sceptical about the notion of shared transnational urban strategies, there is no doubt that gentrification (or, more often, various forms of urban regeneration) as a form of state urban policy has become commonplace in many cities facing problems of inner-city decline, decay and abandonment (Doucet, 2017). Bringing in the middle classes is seen to increase the tax base, reduce social problems, halt abandonment, upgrade the housing stock,

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improve educational standards and kick-start economic regeneration (Brummet and Reed, 2019; Byrne, 2002; The Economist, 2015, 2018). There are now many examples of state-led gentrification in a variety of countries (see Wilson, 1989, for the US; Aalbers, 2010, Hostenbach, 2016, Teernstra, 2015, Uitermark et al., 2007, and Uitermark and Bosker, 2014, for the Netherlands; and La Grange and Pretorius, 2015, for Hong Kong). Lees (2003b, 2003c) looks at gentrification and British urban policy, and Wyly and Hammel (2004) provide a detailed analysis of government-supported mortgage lending in 23 US cities and its impact on gentrification and segregation.

The redevelopment of London Docklands One of the clearest cases of state-led gentrification in London is the redevelopment of Docklands. This had been one of the poorest working-class areas of London since the early 19th century, and the construction of the docks reinforced its class composition. When the docks closed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a huge area of land from St Katherine Docks eastwards, over 20 square kilometres, was left semi-derelict. Eventually, the establishment of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) in 1978 transferred all the land to the new LDDC and gave them planning power. One of the crucial early decisions was that the area already had too much social housing (80 per cent of households were in council housing in Tower Hamlets in 1981), and that what was necessary to physically and socially transform the area into an office complex to complement the city of London was more private housing, both to buy and to rent. Consequently, almost 100 per cent of the many new apartments built in Canary Wharf and Docklands have been private market. The LDDC consciously used private housing construction as a tool to restructure the housing market and the social structure of the area (Goodwin, 1991; Butler, 2007b; Smith, 1989). Goodwin terms it ‘replacing a surplus population’, which is a fairly accurate description. Docklands redevelopment has been hugely economically successful, and today the area is amongst the highest earning in London, but residents are commonly Docklands financial workers, not traditional, local, working-class residents. By and large, those who have not died or moved out have been financially excluded. A similar process has

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happened with the redevelopment of the Olympic site (Watt, 2013). Similar, if less marked, changes have been seen in other parts of London where redevelopment has been accompanied by an increase in the amount of private housing. Such areas include King’s Cross, Paddington, Greenwich, Wembley and Battersea Power Station. This should come as no surprise as few private-sector developers want to build social housing to rent to low-income groups if they can build private housing to sell to higher-income groups. The former is far less profitable. This is not a statement of moral approval, but a statement of fact, nor is the process confined to Britain (Brownhill, 1990).

The sale of social housing and gentrification One of the fascinating, if rather depressing, aspects of state-led gentrification has involved the sale of social housing. Margaret Thatcher initiated the policy in Britain in 1980. It was initially intended to involve the sale of rented homes to their tenants with a view to strengthening the Conservative vote in Britain. It certainly managed this, but what was perhaps not foreseen was that many tenants would subsequently sell their homes on the open market to a very different demographic. While sales are a normal part of the housing market, in desirable parts of inner London, former council housing was often sold to young, middle-class buyers seeking to get an affordable foothold in an expensive housing market. This led to a process of slow gentrification but, in recent years, it has speeded up as a result of large-scale estate sales by local authorities to developers. There are several reasons for this, but arguably it was caused by the increasingly statutory pressure put on local government by central government to modernise and upgrade their housing stock, combined with a rigid financial squeeze, which means that they have no money to do so. Consequently, they are frequently forced to sell estates, either to the increasingly large housing association sector or to commercial developers who promise to modernise them or demolish and rebuild with a very high proportion of homeowners and a small ‘affordable’ housing component (Watt, 2009). This has very clearly been shown in London by Lees (2013; Lees and Ferreri, 2016) and her colleagues in the case of the Aylesbury and Heygate Estates in Southwark, but there are many other examples, such as Woodberry Down Estate in Haringey, where the local authority brought in Berkeley homes to modernise the estate. What is problematic in these

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cases is the large-scale displacement and overall loss of social housing. Lees and Ferreri (2016) show that residents have been displaced large distances from their original homes, and leaseholders who had bought their homes have had them compulsorily purchased, often at a relatively low valuation. Similar processes have been observed in the Netherlands where social housing has been sold off.

State-initiated gentrification in China In some countries, and China is a classic example, state-led gentrification is part of a policy of large-scale neighbourhood clearance and redevelopment. In these cases, notably in Beijing and Shanghai, local government designates large areas of older, poor-quality housing for clearance, and households are often given only a few months to move out before the area is cleared and redeveloped. In some cases, property owners are offered new replacement apartments, often on the periphery of the city, but renters are simply pushed out. The key driver is land values because most Chinese governments derive a high proportion of their revenues from the sale of land to developers. Inner-city land is very valuable, and there is a strong financial incentive to clear and redevelop. Although gentrification is now widespread in a number of big Chinese cities (He, 2007, 2019; Yang and Chang, 2013; Yang and Zhou, 2018; Yang and Ley, 2018), it is rarely, if ever, initiated at the individual level, simply because of the level of political control. In almost every case, gentrification is initiated by local government as part of a strategy to redevelop or renew inner areas. In most cases, an area is identified for redevelopment, and developers are invited to bid to develop the site or to renovate in specific ways. Tomba (2017) has argued that this is a form of state-led renewal (He and Lin, 2015; Wu, 2015; Tang, 2017). Beijing city government has even decided that, as part of their strategy to make Beijing a global city, it is necessary to upgrade the social and educational composition of the population by reducing the number of migrant workers. This is effectively a form of social cleansing (Shi et al., 2017).

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Conclusions In conclusion, we can say that there is no single explanation of gentrification that clarifies the phenomenon over time and place. It is a product of a combination of causes and processes operating at different times in different ways. While it is impossible for gentrification to occur without a ready supply of gentrifiers, with the necessary occupations, incomes and aesthetic/cultural values, it is also impossible for gentrification to occur without a supply of suitable gentrifiable property (whether this is old period housing or new apartments). As Beauregard (1986) noted in the quotation at the head of the chapter, it is necessary to explain both the production of potential gentrifiers and the production of potential gentrifiable housing, and the changing social and housing context of the areas. As we have seen, the relative importance of these factors has changed over both time and place. So, too, it is clear that the role of the state has increased considerably in recent years and, in some places – notably China – the role of the state is all-important given the state ownership of urban land and the leading role of the party. Some argue that the debate about the causes and explanations of gentrification are now ‘old hat’ and largely irrelevant, but I disagree. Unless we have a clear understanding of the causes of gentrification, it is not possible to effectively address it in policy terms. If gentrification today is largely a result of state action or decisions by large-scale private developers, this is where action needs to be focused. I have outlined an integrated explanation of gentrification (Hamnett, 1991), and Clark (1994) has also set out the basics for an integrated explanation. Any adequate integrated explanation of gentrification needs to convey at least three things: first, the origins of the expanded supply of professionals and managers to occupy gentrified housing; second, the reasons for the supply of gentrifiable housing (which may be due to previous deterioration or abandonment and migration) in the inner city and elsewhere, or a change in state policy that revalorises inner-city locations; third, the willingness or enthusiasm on the part of the new ‘gentry’ to live in the locations and housing available; and fourth, an adequate supply of housing finance to purchase or renovate the properties where appropriate.

4

Gentrification and the changing social-class structure of cities

Introduction Ruth Glass defined gentrification as a process of social-class change: a replacement or displacement of older, working-class residents by a new middle class, and it is widely agreed that class change is crucial to the definition of the process. Even Neil Smith, who was sceptical of the role of the middle class in the process, seeing it as being primarily led by capital and the state, accepted that the middle class have a key role of living in gentrified housing; otherwise, how could class change occur (Smith and Williams, 1986, Ch. 10)? The debate about displacement and replacement of working-class residents by middle-class ones clearly recognises that class change is important. I would go further and argue that it is impossible to provide a full account of gentrification without discussing the wider issue of social-class change in cities of which gentrification is an important part, whether it is viewed as a cause or a consequence. Gentrification is part of a wider process of urban class change. Yet strangely, with exceptions (Ley, 1981, 1994; Mullins, 1982; Smith, 1987a; Filion, 1991; Badcock, 2001; Hamnett, 2003a, 2003b; Cunningham and Savage, 2017; Scott, 2018; Clerval, 2021; Butler and Hamnett, 2009), there is little discussion in the literature of the relationship between gentrification and the wider patterns and processes of social-class change in cities. This is a big gap. Logically, if a city or an area within it is undergoing extensive gentrification, it is probably also experiencing a process of upward social-class change. The two tend to go hand in hand, although some critics (Davidson and Wyly, 2012, 2013, 2015) question the idea that post-industrial cities may be becoming more middle class as gentrification proceeds. As Smith and Williams (1986) state: 57

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‘Urban processes are quite specific to different societies, different periods, and especially different modes of production…and the contemporary process of gentrification is quintessentially a feature of the advanced capitalist city. Gentrification would be impossible in cities where there was no well-developed system of residential location by class’ (p. 206). This raises the wider issues of where gentrifiers come from or what processes generate them. We can clearly dismiss any idea that they are raised in a Brave New World-style, neo-liberal reproduction centre creating the required supplies of Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta residents. It was originally thought that, following the suburbanisation of their parents, they were returning from the suburbs (Laska and Spain, 1980) – hence the subtitle of Neil Smith’s famous 1979 paper, ‘A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People’ – but this is now thought unrealistic (van Criekingen, 2010). The argument I want to make here is one initially raised by Ley (1980) and developed by others, that gentrification is partly a product of changes in the industrial and occupational structure of developed Western economies – particularly the rise of post-industrial society, the growth of the educated professional and managerial class and the decline of manufacturing industry and factory workers. As Robinson (1995) noted: ‘Since World War II, San Francisco has been transformed by the high-rise post-industrial restructuring of central cities and by corresponding gentrification pressures’ (p.  483). Smith (1987a) is sceptical of this argument, arguing that, while there have been substantial changes in occupational structure, including a decline in manufacturing workers and a growth in professional and managerial workers, these alone do not provide support for the rise of a new class, and that it would be mistaken to stress changes in consumption and tastes. Instead he stresses the changing position of women in the labour force, but Smith too easily dismisses changes in class structure. Stressing the importance of the new middle class is not an argument about taste and preference, as Smith suggests; it is an argument about the role of industrial, occupational and social-class change. This is not to suggest that gentrification is an inevitable consequence of such changes – it is not – but that they are necessary (but not sufficient) for it to occur. Various authors pointed to the key role of such class changes in gentrification over 30 years ago. Beauregard (1986) rightly commented that ‘The explanation for gentrification begins with the presence of “gentrifiers”, the necessary agents and beneficiaries of the gentrification process’ (p. 41); but he also noted that: ‘changes in the sphere of production are part of

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a long-term trend embodying the decline of the manufacturing sector and the rise of professional and managerial employment, but it is their spatial manifestation over the past two decades which is pivotal for gentrification’ (p. 42). He continued, ‘The forces that generated employment opportunities for the professional-managerial class have also diminished low-wage manufacturing jobs… The restructuring of the urban labour market is thus part of the explanation for the existence of both the potential gentrifiers and the potential gentrified’ (p. 49). Marcuse (1985) took a very similar view. He argued that: Abandonment and gentrification are both reflections of a single long-term process, resulting from the changing economy of the central city. This process has two aspects: the shift from manufacturing to services, from reliance on mid-level skills to automation and de-skilling, on the one hand, which renders redundant large parts of the workforce and reduces lower-income rent-paying ability; and the increasing professionalization and the concentration of management and technical functions, on the other, which creates additional higher-income demand for housing. (pp. 154–155)

Smith and Williams (1986) argue that these changes are linked to the emergence of managers and professionals who have a specific set of residential requirements. This is not to argue that the rise of post-industrial society caused gentrifiers to choose older inner-city property. That is the result of the growth of higher education, changes in taste, the supply of available devalued inner-city housing and the growth of city-centre office jobs. But changes in industrial and occupational structure created a ready supply of potential professional gentrifiers. It is not fortuitous that the authors quoted above were making a similar argument in the mid-1980s.This is when the importance of the new international division of labour (NIDL) and its ramifications for cities began to be clearly recognised. Smith and Williams (1986) argued that the continuing development of NIDL would be a major determinant of urban restructuring and that, paralleling the dramatic deindustrialisation of older industrial cities and concentration of new forms of industrial development, the world is seeing the emergence of a new group of global cities that have a key role in control of the global economy. As they put it: ‘For the international and most of the national cities, it is the concentration of money capital and the gamut of financial, administrative and professional services that lubricate the money flow: it is this function that defines the late capitalist cities at the top of the new urban hierarchy’ (p. 211).

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It is clear that we cannot discuss gentrification without discussing the changes in the social-class structure of cities of which it is a crucial part. While many authors see gentrification as a cause of social-class change through displacement of working-class or lower-income residents, gentrification should be seen as both a cause and, crucially, a consequence of industrial and social-class change in cities. Without industrial and social-class change the potential gentrifiers would not exist, and many large cities would still have large concentrations of skilled manufacturing workers. But what has happened over the last 50 years is that, as the manufacturing industry and employment has shrunk, so has the traditional inner-city manual working class. Simultaneously, professional, managerial and technical jobs have greatly increased in number and proportion. Many major Western cities are now much more middle class than they were 50 years ago. There is still a significant working class but it is smaller in size. This is a far cry from the 1950s and 1960s. LS Lowry’s paintings of armies of factory workers in Manchester hark back to a bygone era. Badcock (2001) states that, even by 2000, gentrification had largely remade the social-class structure of inner Adelaide. Between 1966 and 1996, the number of professional, managerial and technical resident workers and lower white-collar workers in the metropolitan area more than doubled while the number of skilled and semi-skilled manual workers fell by 27 per cent. In the inner area, the percentage of professional and managerial residents rose from 22.6 per cent to 45 per cent, while the skilled and unskilled workers fell by two-thirds and half (from 34.6 per cent to 10.2 per cent and from 20 per cent to 10 per cent), respectively. These are very dramatic changes. Badcock (2001) stated: ‘These trends are so advanced by now that one can confidently state that the middle-class recapture of Inner Adelaide is all but complete’ (p. 1566). He went further to forcefully claim that: There can no longer be any doubt…that the housing reinvestment and inner-city revitalisation normally associated with gentrification has proceeded apace right through the 1990s in Australia’s five largest cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth). Revitalisation in Australia has been sufficiently thorough-going during the lifetime of this 30-year case study to justify turning Berry’s (1985) metaphoric reference to ‘islands of renewal in seas of decay’ in North American cities on its head. (p. 1570)

The theoretical links between gentrification and social-class change have been developed by Filion (1991). Starting from the sound premise that ‘the emergence of gentrification is a result of society’s transition from an industrial to a post-industrial phase’ (p.  554), he argues that there is

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a two-way relationship between gentrification and social change. Whereas most research adopts a linear ‘social change leads to gentrification’ causal model, he argues that there is also a ‘gentrification to social change’ link, not just through housing displacement, but through the structure of advantages and disadvantages it helps create through differential social contacts, knowledge and opportunities and constraints. Thus, the high incomes associated with gentrifiers can give access to inner-city housing, housing appreciation and increased job opportunities, whereas low incomes can lead to a peripheral location and poor job opportunities. Similar patterns of (dis)advantage are created by the links between the housing market and educational opportunities. In sum, Filion argues that gentrification-related consumption inequalities can play an important role in the reproduction of social inequality. Returning to the issue of the change from an industrial to post-industrial society, if we go back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a substantial literature in both Britain and the US focused on urban decline and downwards social-class change (Beauregard, 1993a, 1993b). The fear at the time was not gentrification, but of the middle classes abandoning the city for the safety and economic stability of the suburbs (Wilson, 1996). American cities, such as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Detroit, were exemplars of middle-class flight (Deskins, 1996; Doucet, 2017). As Smith and Williams (1986) noted: ‘The 20th-century American city came to be seen by the white middle class as an urban wilderness: it was, and for many still is, the habitat of disease and crime, danger and disorder. Indeed, these were the central fears expressed throughout the 1950s and 1960s by urban theorists’ (pp. 15–16). The debates about gentrification are part of a wide discussion of the nature and direction of social-class change in cities. If gentrification is widespread in many cities, as the literature suggests, it raises the crucial question: where are the gentrifiers coming from? They are clearly not emerging out of thin air, and the early literature suggested that gentrification represented a return from the suburbs of young, middle-class professionals who found their parental suburban lifestyles uninteresting. But the growth of the new middle class was too large to just be return from the suburbs, and it was soon realised that gentrification, and gentrifiers, were indicators of a more fundamental economic shift. The literature also suggested that this group had jobs in the city-centre business and creative service sectors and found it advantageous to live in proximity to their work (Ley, 1980, 1981, 2003). But

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this raises the issues of where these new jobs had come from and the changing structure of industry and employment in large Western cities. What is unlikely is the idea that gentrification in a given city could proceed, hand in hand, with overall downwards change in social-class structure (i.e. that some areas get more middle class while the city as a whole becomes less so). What is far more likely is that gentrification proceeds along with a wider process of upward social-class change in cities and is a manifestation of it, as Filion (1991) suggests. This is the argument that is made in this book. Gentrification is an important manifestation of a wider underlying urban economic change that has been slowly remaking the social structure of some, but not all, cities since the late 1960s or early 1970s. In some cities the process started earlier than in others, and in Eastern European and Chinese cities, the process did not start until the 1990s or when political change began to loosen the socialist economy and class structure. Gentrification and state socialism are not usually compatible bedmates. Only when it becomes economically, politically and socially possible for the emergence of a growing new middle class and the investment of capital in inner-city housing on a large scale can gentrification take place. They will not necessarily cause gentrification to occur, but the existence of a large group of potential gentrifiers in the labour market and a liberalised housing market are necessary preconditions for it to take place. This was a profound change from the previous economic and physical structure of the city, which dominated from the second half of the 19th century onwards: the era of industrial capitalism. Whereas 19th-century industrial cities were characterised by a very large unskilled migrant labour force, the cities of the early to late 20th century were characterised by a growing semi-skilled manual labour force working in factories. This was the era of post-war economic growth and increasing prosperity. But from about the late 1960s onwards we have witnessed what many have seen as a shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy and society characterised by a sharp decline in manufacturing industry employment and the growth of a more highly educated, professional, managerial and technical labour force employed in office work. Indeed, almost all the authors writing on gentrification today are part of the post-World War II generation of university-educated academics. But others (Braverman, 1974; Kumar, 1978) argue that this period has also given rise to widespread ‘de-skilling’ and the creation of a new white-collar proletariat working in call centres

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and other low-paid and repetitive jobs. And yet others argue that there has been growth at both the top and the bottom of the occupational structure and a shrinkage in the middle. So, although there is broad agreement on the nature of the class structure of cities during the industrial revolution and into the era of mechanisation and automation up until 1965, after that there has been considerable disagreement on the subsequent direction and nature of the urban class structure, with different authors arguing for very different things. Nor are these trends confined to Western cities. There are similar trends in other countries (Chen and Qin, 2015; Shi et al., 2017; Gustafsson et al., 2020). The growth of the middle class is a widespread global phenomenon, although there are still billions of poor people worldwide.

The three Ps: professionalisation, proletarianisation and polarisation There has been a big debate over the structure, nature and direction of occupational class change. Put simply, the questions include: are cities experiencing an upwards shift in their occupational class composition; are they seeing a downwards shift in the occupational class structure; and, finally, are they seeing growth at both the top and the bottom of the class structure? These three trends are often referred to as professionalisation, proletarianisation and polarisation. The question is important because it has major implications for the structure of the labour force, housing costs, education, health, crime, social cohesion and gentrification. It is not surprising that this issue has been an important one for many years. In the 19th century, when cities were rapidly industrialising, there were widespread middle-class fears about the creation of a large new working-class urban proletariat and an underclass or ‘residuum’ of casual workers, both of which were seen as a threat to social stability. These concerns were reflected in the detailed work done by Charles Booth and by Henry Mayhew on the changing structure of the London labour force and the geographical distribution of poverty and wealth. Similar debates were seen in Europe and North America, where rapid industrialisation, immigration and urban growth were changing the urban social structure and creating large new areas of slum housing (Ward, 1971; Ward and Zunz, 1992). One of the most impressive studies is that by Steadman-Jones (1971) in his book Outcast London. This examined changes in London’s industrial

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structure during the 19th century, the structure of occupations, the growth of casual labour in the docks and elsewhere, the extent of poverty and deprivation and the impacts of these changes on housing demand and ability to pay. In particular, it focused on the appalling housing conditions and the debate over the existence of an ‘underclass’ or ‘residuum’ of unemployed or sporadically employed, poverty-stricken households living in extreme conditions. A somewhat similar picture was painted by Engels (1845) in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England. The debates resurfaced in another very different context in the US in the 1960s and 1970s as a consequence of both large-scale Black migration from the southern states to cities in the north-east, de-industrialisation, inner-city decay or abandonment and associated ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. The dramatic changes in the ethnic composition and employment patterns of older American cities in the post-war decades were associated with major debates about the future of the American city. In 1968 the Kerner Commission report on riots and civil disturbances in American cities in the mid-1960s pointed to the existence of both Black deprivation and institutional racism. Subsequent work included Wilson’s (1996) classic study of inner-city Chicago, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, and Edward Banfield’s (1970) conservative polemic, The Unheavenly City. More recently, Beauregard (1993a) has carefully examined the narratives on the decline of the North American city in his book Voices of Decline. Not surprisingly, the dominant narrative during this period was that of middle-class suburbanisation and flight from the inner city, which was commonly perceived to be moving downwards socially in a process of proletarianisation. Thus, the emergence of gentrification was seen to be very significant both theoretically and in policy terms. Although there were also concerns in the early 1970s that British cities may be going in the same direction as some American ones, with economic decline, the growth of social housing in inner cities, middle-class outmigration and the growth of a Black underclass, these fears did not materialise, and at a broader societal level, the picture has been one of a growing middle class though poverty is still widespread. The idea of a post-industrial economy and society was put forward by Daniel Bell (1973) in his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. He argued that capitalist societies were undergoing a shift from industrialism to post-industrialism, an economy less dependent on manufacturing employment characterised by an increasingly highly educated labour

GENTRIFICATION AND CHANGING SOCIAL-CLASS STRUCTURE

65

force of professional, managerial and technical workers in the quaternary information-processing sector, where an increasing level of employment takes place in offices by people working at computer terminals or (today) laptops and iPads, creating, manipulating and analysing text and data. The scale and significance of these changes in the nature of work cannot be understated. The office has replaced the factory as the locus of much employment. Savitch (1988) linked this to the concept of post-industrial cities. Bell’s thesis is not without its critics, however, and Braverman (1974) and Kumar (1978), amongst others, have argued that the growth of white-collar office employment disguises large-scale de-skilling and the creation of a low-wage labour force working in repetitive jobs with very little control over their work. Specifically, they pointed to the rise of telephone call centres and to the growth of low-wage jobs in hotels, restaurants and security. There is no doubt that the labour market has created large numbers of repetitive, low-wage service jobs. The big consideration, however, is whether this has been the dominant process of job creation, as there have also been big losses of other low-skilled jobs. There are, therefore, two contradictory views of the changing nature of employment in post-industrial societies: one of professionalisation, the other of proletarianisation. There is no doubt that there has been a growth of part-time and precarious work in recent decades, with the associated problem of ‘flexible hours’ contracts where people are paid only for the hours they work rather than for a week’s work. Nonetheless, reviewing the changing social-class structure of Britain over the 20th century, AH Halsey (2000) commented that: By the end of the century millions of children of manual workers had risen into non-manual jobs and many thousands had become the graduate grandchildren of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, following professional careers. The occupational, and therefore the class structure, had shifted. In 1900 the vast majority of Britons were elementary school proletarians; by 1970 they were divided half and half between white and blue collar jobs. By 2000 the balance had been tipped decisively to form a white collar majority. (p. 17)

Similarly, Esping-Andersen et al. (1993), in their comparative study of trends in the changing class structure in Western countries, said that: Virtually all research rejects Braverman’s de-skilling and mass proletarianization thesis pointing, instead, to a pervasive momentum of skill upgrading and professionalization… Despite the divergent shape of the post-industrial hierarchy,

66

ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO GENTRIFICATION

there is very little evidence to suggest strong polarization. Everywhere, the trend favors the higher-grade occupations such that the shape of the post-industrial occupational hierarchy is biased towards the top and the middle, rather than the bottom. (pp. 32–33)

Counter to this, more recent authors have argued that the last 20 years have seen massive growth of short-term, temporary contracts and casualisation and more precarious employment (e.g. the rapid rise in the number of food delivery drivers or nail bar workers paid minimum wage or less). The problem is that this type of work is less well picked up in official employment statistics. But there is powerful evidence for the growth of a professional and managerial class in a wide variety of countries (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 1979). Using a Marxist-based analysis of the professional and managerial class, Ikeler and Limonic (2018) examined the growth of this group in the US from 1970 to 2010. They found that: contrary to income based studies, the middle class did not decline in the United States under neo-liberalism. In fact, it grew steadily and substantially from just under 20% to 32% of the active workforce. This was mainly through displacement of the working class, which shrank by 15% over the same period but still constituted the large majority (57%) in 2010. (p. 2)

Social polarisation More recently, a third concern has grown, that of ‘social polarisation’. The term is an attractive and catchy one but is often used loosely and imprecisely to signify greater social division or inequality or a growing split between the top and bottom of society. But it has a more precise theoretical origin and definition, which is important to stick to, otherwise it can mean everything and nothing. Though the debate was already established in the early 1970s, and Harris (1973) attempted to define the term when evaluating whether London had experienced social polarisation, the phrase became increasingly popular in the next few years. Friedmann and Wolff (1982) focused on world cities, which Friedmann (1986) argued were command and control centres of the capitalist global economy. Due to their key role, he indicated that these cities had a distinctive ‘polarised’ social structure (though, frustratingly, he did not define what he meant): Transnational elites are the dominant class in the world city, and the city is arranged to cater to their life styles and occupational necessities… The contrast

GENTRIFICATION AND CHANGING SOCIAL-CLASS STRUCTURE

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with the third (or so) of the population who make up the permanent underclass of the world city could scarcely be more striking… The primary social fact about world city formation is the polarization of its social class divisions. (Friedmann and Wolff, 1982, p. 322, emphasis added)

Five years later, in her influential book The Global City, Saskia Sassen (1991) argued that the evolving structure of economic activity in global cities, particularly the rapid growth of financial and business services and the decline of manufacturing industry, has ‘brought about changes in the organisation of work, reflected in a shift in the job supply and polarisation in the income and occupational distribution of workers’ (p. 9, emphasis added). Further: New conditions of growth have contributed to elements of a new class alignment in global cities. The occupational structure of major growth industries characterised by the locational concentration of major growth sectors in global cities in combination with the polarised occupational structure of these sectors has created and contributed to growth of a high-income stratum and a low-income stratum of workers. It has done so directly through the organization of work and occupational structure of major growth sectors and indirectly through the jobs needed to service the new high-income workers, both at work and at home as well as the needs of the expanded low-wage work force. (p. 13, emphasis added)

Sassen’s definition has the great merit of precision: social polarisation involves growth of both the top and the bottom of the occupational and income spectrum, paralleled by job losses in the middle. Unfortunately, the term has subsequently taken on a life of its own to refer to almost anything about inequality, social divisions and the like. Over the last 30 years, social polarisation has become a label favoured by many analysts who find it politically attractive even though, or perhaps because, it is often ill defined. But, as Fainstein et al. (1992) tellingly pointed out: The images of a dual or polarised city are seductive, they promise to encapsulate the outcome of a wide variety of complex processes in a single, neat and easily comprehensible phrase. Yet the hard evidence for such a sweeping and general conclusion regarding the outcome of economic restructuring and urban change is, at best, patchy and ambiguous. If the concept of a ‘dual’ or polarising city is of any real utility, it can serve only as a hypothesis, the prelude to empirical analysis, rather than as a conclusion which takes the existence of confirmatory evidence for granted. (p. 13)

A similar conclusion was reached by Mollenkopf and Castells (1991) in Dual City: Restructuring New York. This addressed the question of whether or not New York is, or was, a dual city – that is, a city divided into two parts

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by class, income, race, health and so on – but concluded that it was not: the reality was much more complex. So, theories of social change aside, what does the empirical evidence tell us about the changing occupational class structure of cities? Are there more or fewer managers and professionals? Has the working class expanded or shrunk? Are we seeing growth or shrinkage of the less-skilled groups, or growth at both the top and the bottom and shrinkage in the middle? The answer to these questions are very important in terms of implications for incomes, housing and the like. So, let us turn to look at some of the empirical evidence for particular cities.

Occupational class change in London and Paris Going back 50 years, Ruth Glass (1973) was adamant that London was not becoming polarised: London is not, and is not likely to become, polarised. The image conveyed by the term ‘polarisation’ (alias the ‘rout of the middle classes’) is, first, that both the top and bottom groups in the society of London are becoming larger, at the expense of the middle strata; second, that the extreme groups are, or will be, located in sharp juxtaposition to one another – on either side of the ‘tracks’. Both these images are false. In fact, the upper and middle strata are becoming stronger, numerically, in Greater London, and the skilled manual group has remained stable, while the proportion of non-skilled workers has decreased. (p. 423)

Lest there was any doubt, Glass (1973) subsequently added that: London is now being ‘renewed’ at a rapid pace – but not on the model about which we are so often warned. Inner London is not being ‘Americanised’: it is not on the way to becoming mainly a working class city, a ‘polarised’ city, or a vast ghetto for a black proletariat. The real risk for Inner London is that it might well be gentrified with a vengeance, and be almost exclusively reserved for higher class strata. (p. 426)

Glass’s interpretation has proved largely correct, though London has not become ‘almost exclusively reserved for higher class strata’ and has lost skilled manual workers. Although the high-class stratum has grown, London, like other global cities, still has a substantial low-skill and low-income population, albeit a much smaller one than 40–50 years ago.

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One of the first empirical studies of urban occupational class structure was undertaken by Wilmott and Young (1973), who looked at London in the period from 1951 to 1966. They concluded: ‘There was a general upgrading. Both Greater London and the Outer Metropolitan Area showed an increase in the proportion at the top and a decrease at the bottom, with the intermediate class staying much as it was. In this sense, the whole London region became more middle class over the 15 years’ (p. 200, emphasis added). Subsequent work (Hamnett, 1976, 1994, 2003a, 2003b) shows that London did not become polarised during 1961–1991, but instead saw an increase in the number and proportion of its professional and managerial workforce combined with stability in the intermediate non-manual groups and a decrease in the size of its skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manual labour force (Figure 4.1). The dominant process is one of professionalisation. This finding was reinforced by Butler et al. (2008), who argued using National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) occupational class data from 1981 to 2001 that the process of professionalisation had continued with extensive growth of the lower middle class as well as the top, and large increases in inner London. Over this period, inner London changed from having an underrepresentation of the professional and managerial class to having an overrepresentation. But May et al. (2007) argue that, while London may have undergone a process of professionalisation from the 1960s to the 1990s, growing globalisation and internationalisation with weakening labour protections has more recently led to the growth of a large migrant labour force working in the low-wage hospitality, catering and security industries. What is also clear is that London has unfortunately increasingly attracted the super-rich as a residential and investment destination (Atkinson, 2020; Atkinson et al., 2016). Davidson and Wyly (2013, 2015) challenged Hamnett and Butler’s analysis and findings, querying the allocation of occupational class groups to the middle class (see the response in Hamnett and Butler, 2014). Manley and Johnston (2014) argue that the analysis of occupational class change (2001–2011) does not show a continued expansion of the professional and managerial middle class. Rather, it appears that the growth of the middle class stalled in this decade. Hamnett (2015) agrees (Table 4.1), but argues that their analysis is flawed by virtue of their exclusion of a large group of the self-employed from the middle class (Cunningham and Savage, 2017, agree). It seems, therefore, that while London has seen a long-term process

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ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO GENTRIFICATION

Source:  The author.

Figure 4.1

The changing distribution of socio-economic groups in greater London, 1961–1991, economically active males

of professionalisation from 1961 to 2001, the process has now stalled, though whether temporarily or permanently is unclear. Preteceille (1995, 2007) and Rhein (1998a) showed that Paris has undergone a very similar process to that of London, with significant growth of the professional, managerial and technical groups and a decline in the share of manual groups. Preteceille’s work on Paris has recently been updated by Clerval (2013, 2021), who compares the occupational class structure of Paris and the Ile de France between 1982 and 2008 – a 25-year period during which Paris witnessed major changes in its industrial, occupational and residential structure, including a large expansion of gentrification, particularly in the inner city. Using Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) census areas, she examines the expansion of the managerial and professional class across the city. The experience in Paris appears very similar to that of London (Hamnett, 2021). Clerval convincingly shows the dramatic changes that have taken place in the occupational class structure of Paris over the period in question: a rapid expansion of the managerial and professional class and the shrinkage of the traditional working class. She also shows, with her mapping of various area types at both time periods, the eastwards push of gentrification out from the ‘beaux quartiers’ of inner-western and Left Bank Paris, into hitherto predominantly working-class areas and beyond the city of Paris into some

506 290 6 117 482

Unemployed and others

All categories: NS-SEC

100.0

8.3

11.4

100.0

22.1

9.2

12.9

32.7

6.2

11.7

14.7

45.2

28.7

16.5

%

5 300 281

318 704

1 230 975

3 750 602

785 975

306 901

479 074

1 146 373

264 617

339 188

542 568

1 818 254

1 178 092

640 162

Number, 2001

Source:  Hamnett, from Census of population, 2001 and 2011, NS-SEC.

700 292

4 910 900

Subtotal classified

Not classified

1 087 713

Working class

453 923

7. Routine occupations

1 604 466

Lower-middle or intermediate class 633 790

305 781

5. Lower supervisory and technical occupations

6. Semi-routine occupations

575 331

4. Small employers and own account workers

2 218 721

Middle class 723 354

1 410 785

2. Lower managerial, administrative and professional occupations

3. Intermediate occupations

807 936

Number, 2011

London’s occupational class structure, 2001–2011

1. Higher managerial, administrative and professional occupations

 

Table 4.1

 

6.0

23.2

100.0

21.0

8.2

12.8

30.6

7.1

9.0

14.5

48.5

31.4

17.1

%

817 201

187 586

−530 683

1 160 298

301 738

147 022

154 716

458 093

41 164

236 143

180 786

400 467

232 693

167 774

Absolute

15.42

23.0

−43.11

31

38.39

47.91

32.29

39.96

15.56

69.62

33.32

22.02

19.75

26.21

% Change

 

2.3

−11.8

0.0

1.2

1.1

0.1

2.1

−0.8

2.7

0.3

−3.3

−2.7

−0.6

PPC GENTRIFICATION AND CHANGING SOCIAL-CLASS STRUCTURE 71

72

ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO GENTRIFICATION

parts of the wider Ile de France. She also undertakes a detailed and valuable analysis of class change in Paris, focusing on the managerial and professional classes who, she says, have a relation of domination over the working class and compete with them for housing: In the residential space, this class is highly concentrated in large cities with metropolitan functions and is divided between more or less exclusive areas of wealthy households and former working-class areas by gentrifying them. Thus, the relation of domination between the professional-managerial class and the working class also involves competition for space and the appropriation of working-class areas. (Clerval, 2021)

In terms of her IRIS spatial units, 24.6 per cent of the household populations were classed as professional and managerial in 1982 compared to 39.5 per cent in 2008, while the working-class groups shrank from 41.8 per cent to 26.3 per cent. Again, this shows a marked upwards shift in class composition. Radical critics may not like her findings, but the changes are clear cut. Paris, like London and New York and many other world cities, has become a much more middle-class city. Clerval even states that, viewed from the perspective of the Ile de France as a whole, ‘it appears that there are almost no working-class areas left in Paris’. This is a dramatic statement, but she notes that: ‘Although the gentrification of Paris did not annihilate the working class, this class has become more vulnerable, poorer and more foreign, and it still accounts for 23% of the household population (against just under 40% in the Île-de-France)’. The importance of Clerval’s research is the clear linkage she makes between the wider process of upwards social-class change and the gentrification of Paris. As she notes: From 1982 to 2008, Paris’s social singularity became more evident with an overrepresentation of managers and professionals and a clear underrepresentation of blue-collar workers compared to the region and the country… The overall transformation of the social structure followed that of jobs, matching the shifts experienced by industrialized countries in the past few decades. For instance, manual jobs decreased in former industrial countries while they increased in other parts of the world. In contrast, former industrial countries increasingly turned to the immaterial functions of production and peri-production (such as finance, insurance and real estate)… This shift has been strongest in large cities, in particular in the Paris metropolitan area and even more so in inner Paris, as it happened in London.

Although Clerval’s analysis focuses on the growth of the professional and managerial class, her conclusions are very similar to Hamnett and Butler’s for London. Both cities have become increasingly dominated by expanded

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73

professional and managerial middle classes over the last 40–50 years. This is not to say that the working class or working-class areas have disappeared, or that these cities are dominated by the middle classes, but the working classes have certainly shrunk in size over this period, a conclusion that is supported by Rhein (1998b), who talks about the ‘erosion of the formerly prominent working class’. Where I differ from Clerval is that she sees gentrification as the major cause of the social-class change in Paris, whereas I think that gentrification is a socio-spatial expression or manifestation of underlying processes of industrial and occupational class change. I accept, however, that gentrification may be the major proximate or direct cause of social-class change in many areas, although the professional and managerial classes are produced by other underlying economic processes (Hamnett, 2021).

Upwards social-class change in other Western cities In a similar analysis of Amsterdam and the Randstad in the Netherlands, Hamnett (1994) argued that the Randstad had seen a process of professionalisation in both its occupational and its educational structure from 1981 to 1991 (see also Burgers, 1996, and Hamnett, 1996). More recently, van Gent and Musterd (2016) examined the changing social and income structure of Amsterdam and the surrounding region for 2004–2011. They compared three income categories based on quintiles of the national income distribution. Low income categories are comprised of the lowest two quintiles. Middle income categories are the next two quintiles, and high income is the top 20 per cent. They found that the Amsterdam municipality saw the biggest increase in the size of the high (+18 per cent) income group compared to 8 per cent and 5 per cent for the middle and low income groups. In the surrounding region, by contrast, the lowest group grew most (+21 per cent) compared to the middle (+5 per cent) and low income (+8 per cent) groups. Amsterdam is seeing a gentrification of the city and a suburbanisation of lower income groups. They suggest that the upward shift in the income (and occupational) structure of the city is a product of its changing industrial structure and growth of business services and creative industries and the decline of manufacturing. Research on Vienna shows evidence of asymmetric polarisation with the professional and managerial classes growing from 26 per cent to 36 per cent from 1995–2019 (Kazepov, 2022). But while London, Paris and the Randstad show clear evidence of professionalisation in recent decades, the debate is much wider than Europe.

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Writing on New York, Ehrenhalt (1993) highlighted growth in managerial, professional and technical jobs, and Brint (1991) noted that: where salaried professionals and managers accounted for under 5 per cent of the working population throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they now represent nearly 30 percent of the labour force [of New York]. At the higher end of the professional and managerial spectrum, affluent professional people are now so numerous, visible and influential that some observers have characterised them as the ‘new dominant class’ of the postindustrial city. (p. 155)

Similarly, Clark and McNicholas’s (1996) study of occupational change in Los Angeles from 1970 to 1990 found that: ‘The substantial increase in the professional, managerial and technical group stands out from all the other occupational changes…the massive decline is in the proportion reporting unskilled occupations ’ (pp. 61–62). Recent work by Scott (2018) also shows sharp growth in the number of skilled white-collar jobs in LA County, 2000–2015, a trend that he sees as underpinning gentrification. Finally, Walks’s (2001) analysis of occupational change in Toronto from 1971 to 1991 also showed that professional occupations grew very significantly. He comments that: ‘Overall, the Toronto region would appear to mirror established occupational changes witnessed in many other North American cities with a similar industrial heritage, such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco, where a reduction in factory jobs has been accompanied by an increase in professional employment’ (p. 417). Similar work on Sydney and Singapore (Baum, 1997, 1999) suggests that there is a clear trend towards professionalisation rather than polarisation: ‘within Singapore, rather than the development of a polarised structure, there is a trend towards a professionalised occupation structure, and a growing upper-middle income group’ (Baum, 1997, p. 1095). The findings of Badcock’s (2001) analysis of occupational class change in Adelaide have already been summarised. Thus, we see a broadly common pattern across many global cities in the Global North. Moving to the Global South, there have been some interesting and rigorous studies of polarisation in Johannesburg and Cape Town by Borel-Saladin and Crankshaw (2009) and Crankshaw and Borel-Saladin (2014). Their work on Johannesburg suggests that occupational change within economic sectors produced professionalisation alongside a higher level of unemployment rather than polarisation. Looking at Latin America, Marques’s (2016) detailed work on Sao Paulo showed the expected massive inequality

GENTRIFICATION AND CHANGING SOCIAL-CLASS STRUCTURE

75

between rich and poor, but he found that: ‘Contrary to the expectations of studies formed by general descriptions of globalization, economic restructuring and neoliberalism, the recent economic transformations have not led to social polarization’ (p. 3, emphasis in original). Similarly, valuable comparative work on Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Paris (Preteceille and Cardoso, 2020) using the French categorie socioprofessionelle and data from the 2000 and 2010 censuses in Brazil and 1999 and 2006 in France for the wider metropolitan areas found that, while Rio and Sao Paulo have a much larger working class than Paris – about half the active population in the Brazilian cities compared to a quarter in Paris – ‘The trend, nevertheless, is similar in the three cities, with a decline of the working class, more intense for blue-collar workers… Contrary to the dual-city model, in all three cities the middle class represent a substantial part of the active population, and an expanding one’ (p. 309, emphasis added). This links back to the detailed study of Paris by Clerval (2021), summarised above, which also found that the professional and managerial middle class in Paris had grown dramatically over the 26 years from 1982 to 2008. The situation in China is complex. Although the migrant population in Chinese cities has continued to grow and totals an estimated 200+ million people, many of whom are working in low-skilled jobs on low incomes, the top layer of professionals and managers has also grown rapidly, and Shi et al. (2017, p. 160) argue that the local state has had a very major role in globalising Beijing, pushing the social structure of the city away from a polarised one. Their detailed analysis of the changing occupational structure of Beijing from 2004 to 2103 reveals a sharp increase (+13 percentage-point change) in the proportion of professionals, administrators and managers, from 31 per cent to 44 per cent; a big shrinkage of the middle group of manual workers (−11 percentage points); and a slight shrinkage (−2 percentage points) of the semi-skilled or unskilled workers. They conclude that: ‘Beijing, as a global city in China, has witnessed a significant occupational upgrading by the process of professionalization, in which the proportion of managers and professionals rose whereas the shares of employment in all the other occupational groups fell’ (p. 160). The Beijing government has recently initiated the demolition of informal peripheral settlements for migrant workers as part of a policy to upgrade and internationalise the economy and social structure of the city. This

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is state-led social upgrading (Figure 4.2). But Beijing is just one city. Wider-ranging research by Chen and Qin (2015) finds that the middle class has grown across most cities in China (see Wang and Lau, 2009, on Shanghai). Tomba (2017) also argues forcefully that this type of state-led social engineering to replace poor urban workers with managers and professionals is now common across China. Finally, it is important to note recent research by van Hamm et al. (2020) that compared the changing occupational structure and spatial segregation of New York, London and Tokyo from 1980 to 2010. They concluded that professionalisation, not proletarianisation or polarisation, was the dominant trend in the three cities over the 30-year period.

Gentrification and the changing social-class structure of cities What all this shows is that we cannot analyse gentrification in isolation from the wider social-class changes that have taken place over the last 50 years. Gentrification is part and parcel of a wider process of industrial and occupational change that is remaking the structure of many, but not all, major Western cities. These changes have been driven by both the emergence of a post-industrial society with far fewer manufacturing jobs and far more jobs in financial services, advanced business services, information processing and the like. As a consequence of the shrinking working class and the growing middle class and a change in residential preferences, the inner areas of some cities have become more middle class. As Smith and Williams (1986) perceptively suggested 35 years ago: we can expect a Manhattanization of the international city whereby the agglomeration of corporate and corporate-related activities at the centre leads to a further agglomeration of upper-income residential neighbourhoods and of lavish recreation and entertainment facilities. The main question here is the extent to which this type of gentrification will permeate down the urban hierarchy. (p. 212) The trends we have identified suggest a continued momentum toward a gentrified central and inner city. The direction of this change is toward a new central city dominated by middle-class residential areas, a concentration of professional, administrative and managerial employment and the upmarket recreational and entertainment facilities that cater to this population… Though relatively central enclaves of working-class residents will surely remain, the momentum

GENTRIFICATION AND CHANGING SOCIAL-CLASS STRUCTURE

77

of the present restructuring points to a more peripheralized working class, in geographical terms. (p. 217)

The decades since Smith and Williams wrote have confirmed their thesis. Many big international cities have undergone a process of ‘Manhattanization’ and upward social change that is linked to the gentrification of their central and inner areas. The two things are inextricably linked.

Is there a global gentrifier class? What about the gentrifiers themselves? Glass (1964) was silent on the origins of the new middle class in London and its characteristics. One of the first to attempt a characterisation was Ley (1980, 1996) in his work on Vancouver. He identified gentrifiers as a highly educated group of young households, mostly working in white-collar jobs in the city centre. He also saw them as politically progressive or left (Ley, 1994), but this not true of all gentrifiers, particularly the later, wealthier ones (Butler, 1997) who may be politically conservative. Members of this group were later derogatorily termed ‘yuppies’ or young urban professionals (Short, 1989) and were linked to the changes taking place in urban industrial structure in Western economies in the 1970s. Bridge (2007) asked whether there is a global gentrifier class of people with broadly similar occupational and educational characteristics and similar economic and cultural capital, aesthetic values and urban space. Are gentrifiers in Beijing similar to gentrifiers in Brooklyn, Baltimore or Bangalore? Bridge’s conclusion, and mine, is that the case for a common global gentrifier class, with most of these characteristics in common, is a weak one. For example, there are major differences between the residents of ‘period’ row or terraced houses in some older Western inner cities (such as London, Washington, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney) and the new middle-class residents of inner-city apartment buildings in Beijing or Seoul. There may also be significant differences between the characteristics and outlooks of residents of period and new build housing in older inner cities (Butler, 2007b; Rérat, 2012; Allen, 2007; Rose, 1984; Ley, 1996). But while there is no one uniform ‘identikit’ global gentrifier class with a common set of tastes and preferences, this is not to say there is not a new urban middle class with broadly similar occupational and educational characteristics, even if they have different tastes and live in different types of housing. In

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ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO GENTRIFICATION

Source:  The author.

Figure 4.2

Demolition of peri-urban migrant housing on the fringe of Beijing

this respect, it may be possible to identify a global gentrifier class, but they are defined more by their occupational and educational characteristics than by other attributes. Gentrifiers are partly a product of wider long-term changes that have reshaped the economies of advanced capitalist societies, but their particular tastes and housing preferences are likely to differ from one country to another depending in part on the existing stock of available housing and the structure and history of the housing market. Gentrifiers in London, Melbourne or Washington may have traditionally sought out 19th-century period housing, but this is partly because of the built history of their cities. In other cities, gentrifiers may opt for modern apartments or old warehouses; it depends on the culture and built form of different countries. There is no uniform set of tastes that favour older, period housing over other forms, but there may be a wider underlying process of industrial and occupational upwards class change and a broad preference for more central housing.

5

Gentrification, displacement and replacement

Introduction Of all the issues concerning gentrification, the issue of displacement is undoubtedly the one that generates most attention and polarises opinion (Atkinson, 2003). While some claim (The Economist, 2015, 2018, 2019) gentrification is a beneficial process that assists the regeneration of run-down inner-city areas, most academics view it as a negative process, and it has been linked with the displacement of lower-income groups by higher-income groups right from Glass’s (1964) pioneering definition of the process: ‘Once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed’ (p. xviii). Some argue that gentrification always entails the displacement of one group of people by another richer one with the ability to push or price the former out of an area. Indeed, they would argue that displacement is an inevitable corollary of gentrification. Others argue that gentrification does not necessarily entail displacement and that it could be a slow process of class replacement or, if the area was not previously residential, the introduction of a middle class on a blank social-class slate. Urban displacement has a long history. Engels identified a similar process in Manchester in the 1840s; Haussmann’s renovation of central Paris in the second half of the 19th century displaced many residents, and Steadman-Jones (1971) showed that displacement was common in the poorer areas of central London in the 19th century, though the cause then was slum clearance rather than gentrification. Displacement was a big 79

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problem in some parts of inner London in the 1960s. Perec Rachman and other notorious slum landlords used thugs and dogs to get rid of poor tenants and push up rents. The term Rachmanism became a synonym for slum landlordism in Britain. In New York in the 1950s and 1960s, Robert Moses, the city parks commissioner, was responsible for the demolition and remodelling of large areas of the city with highways carved through the Bronx and other boroughs, but although there was large-scale displacement, it did not result in gentrification, rather the reverse: he helped to destroy some existing middle-class communities. Equally, not all commentators think that displacement is an inevitable corollary of gentrification (Vigdor, 2010; Vigdor et al., 2002). Freeman (2005, 2006, 2009) and Freeman and Braconi (2004) argue that the process is a form of succession in some American cities, and low-income groups are not always displaced. Byrne (2002) and Brummet and Reed (2019) see the process as beneficial, as do Brown-Saracino (2009) and The Economist (2015) and the Financial Times (Ganesh, 2017). But they are a minority. The great majority of academic writers on gentrification are highly critical (see Shaw, 2008a, 2008b). For many, gentrification has become a dirty word: GENTRIFIER has surpassed many worthier slurs to become the dirtiest word in American cities. In the popular telling, hordes of well-to-do whites are descending upon poor, minority neighbourhoods that were made to endure decades of discrimination. With their avocado on toast, beard oil and cappuccinos, these people snuff out local culture. As rents rise, lifelong residents are evicted and forced to leave. (The Economist, 2018)

The underlying reason is simple. In almost all market-based economies, where access to housing is based on (in)ability to pay, higher-income groups will consistently outbid lower-income groups. In this situation, higher-income groups will almost always end up in better-quality, larger housing in more attractive areas, and low-income groups get what is left (Engels, 1845; Harvey, 1973). Only subsidised or philanthropic social housing is able to provide low-income groups with decent housing. The market is generally unable or unwilling to provide low-cost housing at an affordable rent. Thus, a growing middle class, with higher incomes, is always likely to put increasing pressure on lower-income households unless the supply of affordable middle-class housing is rapidly increasing. So, what we see in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Paris, London and many others is a process of sequential social change whereby the working class gradually shrinks in number. In some cases, the process will be one of displacement, in others of replacement or

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both, but gentrification is essentially a manifestation of the changing occupational-class and income structure of cities, and lower-income residents are gradually priced out. There is an interesting issue regarding the changing residential behaviour of sections of the middle class over time. As noted in Chapter 2, in the late 18th–19th centuries, the middle classes in older Western cities, such as London and New York, usually lived in close proximity to the city centre. But as time went on and the cities expanded, industrialised and new migrant groups moved in and some sections of the middle class moved further out. Subsequently, towards the end of the 19th century and again from the 1950s and 1960s, large segments of the middle class moved out to growing suburbia, leaving older housing behind them. What happened with gentrification post-1970s was that some segments of the growing new middle class moved back into these same houses. This is very clearly seen in large parts of inner London. Some houses had originally been built for the professional and managerial middle classes, then deteriorated and filtered down, only to be subsequently reoccupied by the gentrifying middle class. There is a paradox here, as in much urban sociological literature in the 1960s–1970s, the middle classes were criticised for abandoning the inner city and moving to the suburbs; subsequently, they have been criticised in the gentrification literature for coming back. Atkinson (2003) notes the ‘poetic injustice in the withdrawal of the middle classes from central neighbourhoods in the late 19th century and their subsequent recolonization of these areas within the past half century’ (p. 2343). The issue has been neatly summarised by Douglas Massey in his commentary on Vigdor et al.’s (2002) research: I have always thought that complaints about gentrification are fundamentally hypocritical. On the one hand, liberal urban specialists rail against the suburbanization of America and the abandonment of the cities by the nation's whites. On the other hand, when a very few and highly selected whites buck the trend and stake a claim in the city, they are berated as opportunists and decried for gentrifying the inner city. But liberals can't have it both ways. If the middle and upper classes are to remain in the city to shore up the tax base and play leadership roles in civic affairs, they have to live somewhere. (pp. 174–175)

While concern about people losing their homes is understandable, trying to understand the scale, extent and processes of displacement is not always as simple as it may first seem. On the contrary, there are complex

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issues of definition and measurement involved. First, and most important, are the issues of what constitutes displacement and how it differs from replacement or the long-term processes of residential area change through ageing, retirement, death and associated in- and outmigration. While it is easy to identify some cases of direct displacement, such as eviction or notice to quit, other forms of displacement can be more problematic. There is also a problem of measuring displacement after the event, as those displaced may already have left. It is thus not surprising that discussion of the extent and importance of displacement has a long history in the gentrification literature (Sumka, 1979; Grier and Grier, 1980; Henig, 1980; LeGates and Hartman, 1986; Lang, 1986; Lees, 2013; Palen and London, 1985; Marcuse, 1985, 1986; Atkinson, 2000a, 2000b; Slater, 2006, 2008, 2009; Newman and Wyly, 2006; Wacquant, 2008; Watt, 2008; Weller and van Hulten, 2012; Easton et al., 2020; Larsen and Lund Hansen, 2008; Podagrosi and Vojnovic, 2008; Janoschka and Sequera, 2016; Freeman, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009; Brummet and Reed, 2019; Vigdor, 2010; Badyina and Golubchikov, 2005; Mair, 1986; Schill and Nathan, 1983; Wyly et al., 2010). What is clear is that the extent, forms and processes of gentrification and displacement vary from one country to another (Buzar et al., 2007; Delgadillo, 2016).

Definitions of displacement The definition of displacement is not an easy one but it is very important. Marcuse’s (1985, 1986) definition is now widely accepted and cited in the academic literature. Marcuse distinguished between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ displacement and ‘exclusionary’ displacement. Direct or forced displacement is the most unpleasant and the easiest to define, and involves residents leaving a house or area against their will. This can range from landlords giving tenants notice to quit to various forms of harassment to force tenants out, including stopping maintenance, shutting off utilities such as water or gas, rendering a building unsafe or unhygienic and physical intimidation by thugs, dogs and gangs brought in by the owner. Such techniques unfortunately have a long history. This can also include government designating an area for clearance and redevelopment as is widespread in China. Second, there are a variety of forms of indirect displacement where, for example, existing houses are sold or rents are raised, and people who might previously have been able to afford a place to live in

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an area are now excluded on grounds of affordability or availability. This can happen both to existing residents or to potential residents who are effectively priced out. The impact on potential residents is exclusionary displacement, but Marcuse (1985) states that: ‘it is virtually impossible to distinguish between direct displacement, exclusionary displacement and the pressure of displacement’ (p. 161). More recently, the term has been widened to include ‘symbolic displacement’, which refers to cases where residents may become alienated from their home neighbourhoods by virtue of gentrification-related changes taking place in them (Atkinson, 2015; Hom, 2020). Residents no longer feel ‘at home’. Elliott-Cooper et al. (2020a) go further to interpret displacement in terms of ‘unhoming’. There is no doubt that various forms of displacement are commonly associated with gentrification. Even though direct displacement may, fortunately, not be the most common, rising rents or prices can have a similar effect of slowly squeezing people out of an area by making it more unaffordable. As housing is a desired good, better housing in better areas inevitably costs more money than poor housing in poor areas. Thus, gentrification brings in more middle-class residents with more money who can easily outbid lower-income groups for housing. While some more market-orientated commentators (The Economist, 2015, 2018, 2019; Ganesh, 2017) welcome gentrification as a way of kick-starting urban regeneration or widening ‘social mix’ (i.e. bringing in more middle-class people), most liberal academics are firmly opposed to it and strongly support the right of existing residents not to be displaced by landlords or wealthy in-movers. But the debate has now extended beyond criticism of gentrification, per se, to criticism of some gentrification research and researchers who are deemed to have lost their critical edge and become apologists for the process (see Watt, 2008; Slater, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011; Hamnett, 2009b; Atkinson, 2003, 2004, 2008; Freeman, 2008; Wacquant, 2008; Shaw, 2008a, 2008b; Butler and Hamnett, 2009). For a useful overview of the issues, see Weller and van Hulten (2012). The problem with the concept of exclusionary displacement is that, while it is a real phenomenon, it can be so widely defined to include all those who cannot afford to live in an area (even one with few existing residents, such as parts of Docklands, which had little previously existing housing). I may wish to live in Hampstead (or another attractive but expensive area of London), but I cannot afford to: does that mean that I have been subject to exclusionary displacement? If so, this stretches the definition

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of displacement too far. If almost everything can be defined as a form of exclusionary displacement, then the term runs the danger of becoming so all-inclusive that it becomes virtually meaningless. On this basis, most Londoners can be said to be excluded from more expensive areas and the same is true of New York, Paris, Beijing and virtually every other major city. All cities have a hierarchy of residential areas and housing differentiated by size, quality, location, attractiveness, accessibility and so on, and there is a corresponding price hierarchy. Given income inequality, this means the great majority of people cannot afford to live in the more expensive areas. But to argue that this is exclusionary displacement is an example of conceptual overstretch. David Harvey (1973) gave the valuable metaphor of the housing market as a theatre with differentially priced seats. The rich get first choice of the best seats and so on, with low-income people in the cheapest seats and the homeless unable to enter the theatre at all. This is not displacement, in my view; it is financial exclusion. If someone is directly displaced, they already lived in an area. If they do not live there but want to but cannot afford to, it is financial exclusion. Slater (2006) argues that there has been a gentrification of gentrification research, and some researchers (myself included) have abandoned their previous critical edge and become apologists for the middle-class takeover of the inner city. Similarly, Watt (2008) states that there has been a middle-class colonisation of both the inner city and the urban imagination, and that middle-class apologists have evaded necessary condemnation of displacement and have tried instead to portray gentrification as a benign process that can bring positive outcomes, such as greater social mix. Wacquant (2008) says there has been a ‘shift from the denunciation to the celebration of gentrification, the elision of the displacement of the established residents, and the euphemistic focus on “social mixing” [which] partake of a broader pattern of invisibility of the working class in the public sphere and social inquiry’ (p. 198, emphasis added). The critics of gentrification are correct that there is a good deal of uncritical boosterish cheerleading for gentrification on the right that largely overlooks displacement and the loss of housing opportunities. For those people who lose their homes through direct displacement, notice to quit or rising rents, gentrification brings no benefits, though it may where the middle classes are attracted back to parts of the inner city where there is no existing housing or where the housing is decayed and abandoned.

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There is a danger, however, of overextending the concept of displacement to the point where it becomes so broad as to lose its meaning and analytical edge. While there is no doubt that direct displacement occurs where households are forced out of an area as a result of landlord, developer or state actions, and indirect displacement takes place as households are priced out of areas as they are redeveloped or upgraded, it is more difficult to argue that brownfield development, on the sites of existing non-housing uses, represents displacement. Although low-income families cannot afford to buy or rent in such areas, it would be more accurate to say that they are excluded by virtue of income inequality and the price mechanism. This would allow studies of displacement to focus on the extent of direct and indirect displacement rather than the more amorphous exclusionary displacement. In Hanoi, Vietnam, for example, Potter and Labbe (2020) argue that: Because displacement only occurs in marginal cases and generates limited feelings of social injustice, the term ‘gentrification’ is of little use. Instead…in a context of rapid urbanisation and relatively inclusive economic growth, such as that of Hanoi, the terms ‘livelihood dispossession’ and ‘value grabbing’ may better capture the experience of social injustice and are therefore more likely to generate political traction.

Yip and Tran (2016), in their valuable research on Hanoi, also note that displacement is very limited. Similarly, in their study of gentrification in Brazil, Garmany and Richmond (2019) argue that displacement is too limited a term to convey the complex nature of the process and suggest instead the Brazilian ‘hygienization’. Hostenbach and van Gent (2015) show in their analysis of Amsterdam and Rotterdam that there are a variety of processes at work, some involving displacement and some other forms of residential change.

Displacement vs replacement One common weakness in the displacement thesis is the argument that, when the social composition of an area or a city undergoes an upwards shift over time, and the proportion of professional and managerial residents increases and the proportion of working-class residents decreases, this is inevitably a result of displacement. It may be a result of displacement but it may equally be a result of underlying long-term structural

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processes of urban social change that take place as one group expands and another decreases. This is shown by Clerval (2021) in her valuable study of occupational-class change and gentrification in Paris. She shows that, over the 25-year period from 1982 to 2008, Paris, like London, witnessed a major growth in the proportion of its professional and managerial population (from 25 per cent to 39 per cent) and an equally large decrease in the proportion of its working-class population (from 42 per cent to 26 per cent). She also shows that gentrified areas spread out eastwards across the city, and she argues that gentrification was the major factor behind the change in the social structure of Paris. But it is difficult to see how gentrification can change overall occupational-class structure of a city. It is more realistic to see the gentrification of Paris and other cities as the spatial expression of changes in the industrial and occupational structure that produce a supply of potential gentrifiers and change the proportions of different groups and their geography. Clerval (2021) suggests that processes of replacement and displacement are in fact complementary in changing the socio-spatial class structure of Paris. The best way to illustrate the role of replacement is to look at the occupational-class composition of an area over time. If, for example, the class composition of the economically active and employed in an area changed from 100 per cent working class and 0 per cent middle class in 1960 to 0 per cent working class and 100 per cent middle class in 2000 (i.e. a total inversion of the class structure), we can ask, how did this happen? Is it a result of displacement or replacement or both? We need to look at the changing structure of the labour force over time. Assume, for ease of argument, that people enter the labour force at age 25 and retire at age 65: a working life of 40 years. Thus, in just 40 years the entire labour force is replaced, and over 10 years, a quarter is replaced by a simple process of ageing, retirement and new recruitment. If the period were 50 years, the same principle would apply, but 20 per cent would be replaced every decade. It is, therefore, entirely possible, though unlikely, for the class structure of the area to occur simply as a result of retirement of equal numbers of working class and the recruitment of middle-class workers over each decade. Real-world social change is unlikely to be this simple, but the key is the importance of long-term processes of social change that can change the social character of an area imperceptibly. This does not require gentrification-induced displacement to cause the change. It happens as a result of retirement and recruitment, though

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gentrification is a likely consequence of change in occupational composition simply because of changing pressures on the housing stock in different areas of the city over time. This long-term replacement process in the labour force can create a much more middle-class city over several decades. The process could work in the opposite direction if structural changes in the labour force went in the opposite direction. Gentrification does not create long-term change in cities’ occupational-class structures, it is more likely to be a consequence of them. Indeed, Marcuse (1985), in a much-quoted analysis of gentrification and displacement, clearly states: Gentrification occurs when new residents – who disproportionately are young, white, professional, technical, and managerial workers with higher education and income levels – replace older residents – who disproportionately are low-income, working-class and poor, minority and ethnic group members, and elderly – from older and previously deteriorated inner-city housing in a spatially concentrated manner, that is, to a degree differing substantially from the general level of change in the community or region as a whole. The definition hinges on economic, social, and population changes that cause physical changes to the neighborhoods. The physical changes, however, are not the essence of the process. (pp. 198–199, emphasis added)

Although Marcuse focuses on displacement and links it to gentrification, he recognises the existence of replacement (as a more general term), and the question arises of the nature of the replacement. Some residents will voluntarily move out, retire or die, while others may be actively displaced as a result of gentrification. Indeed, displacement or replacement are not either/or binary outcomes. It is entirely possible for both to exist simultaneously, and their relative importance will vary from place to place. Similarly Rose (1984) also defined gentrification as involving ‘the replacement of lower-income residents of a neighborhood with inhabitants of a higher income and socioeconomic standing and different material interests than the incumbent residents, by means of the renovation and “upgrading” of dwellings’ (p. 57). Some may argue that trying to differentiate displacement and replacement is merely academic hair splitting, and that we all know what is entailed when people leave an area, and that the terms can be used interchangeably, but I disagree. To be forced out or displaced from an area is very different from being replaced. Northern Ireland has, for years, been dominated, demographically and politically, by the Protestants. However, as a result of the higher birth rate amongst the Catholic population and the ageing of the Protestants, a slow change is taking place; in 2020, the

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Catholic population is just edging ahead of the Protestants and is set to become the majority. This replacement process is all but invisible, but the Protestants are being replaced by Catholics – not displaced. Historically, Protestants have been the economically dominant group. Similar processes have changed the ethnic composition of cities and nations by differential population growth and decline.

Gentrification and social mix Glass (1964) argued that gentrification saw a growing proportion of the middle class move into areas that they then took over. There was, therefore, a (short) period of increasing social mix in gentrified areas before the original working-class residents were permanently squeezed out by rising property prices. Whether this social mix is seen to be beneficial or not is debatable. Some argue that greater social mix can be beneficial in that it brings more middle-class people into an area, which is somehow in itself thought to be beneficial by bringing in better facilities, higher standards and other resources. (Curiously, it is never seen the other way round. There are rarely arguments to introduce more working-class people into middle-class areas!) Clearly, increased social mix is of zero benefit to households that have been priced out of an area. But some argue that the influx of the middle class linked to gentrification can be very beneficial for education as middle-class parents motivated to improve school quality use their greater knowledge of the system and social skills to push for better schools while their children bring in higher levels of cultural capital. On the other hand, a middle-class influx into an area can lead to increased competition for good schools and ‘sharp-elbowed’ middle-class parents displacing working-class children (Butler and Robson, 2003; Butler et al., 2013; Wu et al., 2016). More generally, Davidson (2008, 2010, 2012), Lees (2008) and Uitermark (2003) argue that greater social mix is often illusory because, even if there is some social mix in development, there is very little social interaction between different social classes in practice (Bridge et al., 2014; Moore, 2018). Shaw and Hagemans (2015) found that, even if residents remained, changes in retailing and social structure could cause a loss of place linked to gentrification. Similar findings are reported by van Gent et al. (2016) in a study of some of the psychological impacts of gentrification in

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Amsterdam, and Atkinson (2015) raises the issue of symbolic displacement where local residents feel ‘out of place’ in their home area (Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1

Gentrification zone

From a very different perspective, Brummet and Reed’s (2019) quantitative econometric study investigated the extent to which gentrification allowed low-income residents exposure to higher-income neighbourhoods, thereby potentially increasing the long-term levels of educational attainment and income for children and adult health benefits. They suggest that: ‘Gentrification has the potential to dramatically reshape the geography of opportunity in American cities’ (p. 1). Using longitudinal, national-level, individual data for 2000 and 2010, they measure changes in

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a number of outcomes. Their conclusions are markedly at variance with the general consensus, arguing that: gentrification creates some important benefits for original resident adults and children and few observable harms… Overall, we find that many original residents, including the most disadvantaged, are able to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods and share in neighborhood improvements. Perhaps most importantly, low-income neighborhoods that gentrify appear to improve along a number of dimensions known to be correlated with opportunity, and many children are able to remain in these neighborhoods. (p. 25)

It is not possible to discuss their findings in detail here, but it is important for critics to engage with studies like this to try to resolve the contradictory views on the costs and benefits of gentrification. Conversely, it is important for econometric studies like this to engage with the extensive existing literature on gentrification, of which they often seem unaware. Brown-Saracino (2017) notes that qualitative and quantitative methods tend to produce very different conclusions. She (2009) also argues that gentrification is not necessarily a simple, clear-cut process of one class displacing another, but can involve gentrifiers trying to retain particular aspects of their neighbourhoods. Doucet and Koenders (2018) also show that existing residents are not always hostile to gentrification, and Moore (2009) argues that the return of middle-class Blacks to poor Black neighbourhoods is not necessarily negative.

Sequential gentrification One interesting aspect of gentrification is that it can be a continuing process of upgrading rather than a one-off affair. Glass noted this back in 1964: ‘Once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed’. In fact, the process can also be slow or stall, but both Rose (1984) and Ley (1996) realised that pioneer gentrifiers could be replaced or displaced by subsequent waves of more affluent gentrifiers who have the financial muscle to outbid those with shallower pockets. This process is captured by Sorensen’s cartoon showing sequential waves of gentrification in an American city (see Figure 5.2). Arguably, this was already happening in

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inner London in the 1970s when the affluent middle class were replacing the public-sector middle class (Butler, 1997).

Source:  Jen Sorensen (2013).

Figure 5.2

The gentrification cycle

It has also been discussed by Lees (2003a), Butler and Lees (2006) and Halasz (2021) in what is termed ‘super gentrification’ whereby the increasingly affluent move in and replace earlier groups of lower-income gentrifiers. This process of ‘sequential gentrification’ is undoubtedly important, particularly in longer-established ‘prime’ gentrified areas, such as Chelsea, Islington and Notting Hill in London, where, as prices rise, in-movers are increasingly affluent. Eventually, only the rich can

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live in such areas. Regrettably, more and more of them move in seeking planning permission for underground cinemas, garages, game rooms and swimming pools as status markers. Baldwin et al. (2019) have mapped the distribution of planning permissions for such underground pools. Digging out the basement for extension is now a source of considerable disturbance in some parts of central London where the very wealthy move in. There have even been occasional housing collapses. Many areas of smaller terraced housing in inner London have seen substantial sequential changes over the last 50 years, from a white working class in the 1950s and 1960s to a mixture of Irish, Greek, Turkish and West Indian immigrant housing and, increasingly today, to professional and managerial predominantly white gentrifiers. More generally, the rich price out the well-off, who in turn price out the less well-off and the poor. This is termed ‘spatially displaced demand’ (Hamnett, 2010a). In the area where I live in North London, my wife and I could just about afford to buy our terraced house many decades ago, but today a university lecturer and a teacher would not get a look in. The area has slowly moved upward as older residents die or move and are replaced by people with more money. This has happened across London and many other European cities, such as Paris and Amsterdam (Keohane, 2020).

Gentrification and the revanchist city There is a more radical argument about gentrification and displacement that focuses on the idea of the ‘revanchist city’. Neil Smith outlined this idea in his 1996 book The New Urban Frontier and the Revanchist City. The concept derives from the French right-wing revanchist political movement of the late 19th century when conservatives, angered by the increasing freedom of the Second Republic, the defeat of France in the 1870 Franco–Prussian war and the Paris Commune working-class uprising of 1870–1871, organised a movement against both royalists and the working class. Although Smith says the parallels with the contemporary period should not be overdrawn, the idea of a city where the middle class exacts a (metaphorical) form of revenge on the poor and working class for undermining the bourgeois stability of the city has been taken up

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with enthusiasm. As Slater (2012) put it in his posthumous tribute to Neil Smith: whereas the liberal era of the post-1960s period was characterised by redistributive policy, affirmative action and antipoverty legislation, the era of neoliberal revanchism was characterised by a discourse of revenge against minorities, the working class, feminists, environmental activists, gays and lesbians, and recent immigrants: the ‘public enemies’ of the bourgeois political elite and their supporters. New York City in the 1990s became an arena for concerted attacks on affirmative action and immigration policy, street violence against gays and homeless people, feminist-bashing and public campaigns against political correctness and multiculturalism.

We should not take the idea of revanchism too literally. It is intended as a concept to encapsulate a set of policies that have the general effect of containing, marginalising or excluding certain groups in the city. One of the best examples is the policies enacted by some American cities to stop the homeless from sleeping, begging or using the streets or parks. But while this has considerable utility, it is stretching the concept too far to argue that gentrification in general is a form of revanchism. But there are clear instances – for example, in the redevelopment of London’s Docklands – where the policy makers decided that the social class and housing mix of the area needed changing and ensured that only private housing should be built in the area to attract a new class of residents. Goodwin (1991) termed this the ‘replacement of a surplus population’. Indeed, there are a few right-wing writers (Schumacher, 2018) who argue that subsidised social housing should be displaced from the inner city as it is not the best (i.e. most profitable) land use, and that only capitalism can solve the housing crisis. This is wholly unrealistic as capitalism is based on the profit motive and ability to pay market prices, and the poor can never afford decent housing in a market system. This is why subsidised philanthropic housing was pioneered in London in the 19th century and why subsidised rental housing for the working classes expanded after World War I in several European countries. There are now many papers that have taken up the concept of revanchism to analyse urban social change, for example, MacLeod (2002) on Glasgow, Uitermark and Duyvendak (2008) on Rotterdam and Aalbers (2010) on the renovation of the Bijlmer planned social housing estate on the periph-

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ery of Amsterdam, which had seen a long-term process of decline. Aalbers (2010), though critical, takes a nuanced view, arguing that: This revanchist renewal not only benefits the middle and lower-class population of the district, but it also serves the interests of private developers. European revanchism makes the city safe for corporate investment and aims to restore social order as well as stimulating the development of a strong middle class… [H]ard revanchist policies are demanded not only by private developers but also by the middle and lower classes, and they exist alongside soft ‘caring’ policies. (p. 1696)

Aalbers indirectly raises an important point. A problem with the idea of revanchism is that, while there are clearly some attempts to push out ‘undesirables’, almost any attempt by a city or local government to improve the local area, to make it more attractive for its citizens or local residents, can potentially be labelled as ‘revanchist’ and designed to exclude the poor or the working class. Many proud and ambitious city governments in the US, Australia, Britain and other European countries built grand concert halls and art galleries for their citizens in the 19th century as did Chinese cities in the last 20 years. Was this urban revanchism designed just for the middle classes? I doubt it: it was more an expression of municipal pride and boosterism.

Displacement and the sale of council housing in Britain A clear example of displacement has been the sale of council housing (Forrest and Murie, 1988, 1990). Britain had a large and growing council housing sector until 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher, who initiated the ‘right to buy’ policy for council tenants at a significant discount to market value. This policy, whose underlying objective was to reduce the size of the council sector, proved very popular and, over the next 40 years, a significant amount of the council sector was sold off to tenants. While this was generally beneficial to the individuals involved who gained an appreciating asset at much less than its potential market value, the housing was not replaced by new building and, in addition, many right-to-buy properties were subsequently sold, either by their new owners or their beneficiaries. One consequence, particularly in areas of high housing demand, such as central London, is that former council houses have been sold to more affluent, middle-class buyers trying to get

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a foot on the home-ownership ladder. The housing is no longer available to groups in most housing need (Hamnett, 1994). More recently, largely because of changes in central government policy that have pressured local councils to upgrade their housing stock but have given them no money to do it, an increasing number of local councils have resorted to the sale or transfer of entire estates to social or private landlords. In some cases, particularly where there are Conservative local authorities, there has been enthusiasm to transfer the entire council housing stock (Daly et al., 2005; Watt, 2009, 2021). Likewise, a number of local councils have decanted the residents of some estates and sold the estates to private developers to clear, redevelop and sell the new housing for home ownership on the open market, sometimes with limited amounts of ‘affordable’ social housing. The rationale is to either widen the social mix or to increase the number of housing units, but the underlying cause is often the financial impossibility of updating and modernising the blocks and estates, as they are required to do by central government with the lack of financing to do it. It is as if central government deliberately legislatively tilted the game table to ensure that the only way the ball could exit was via sales. Whatever the cause, the result has been large-scale displacement of social-housing tenants and the loss of social housing. Many inner London councils have done this, including Haringey, Hammersmith and Fulham, but one of the most notorious and well-documented cases is that of the Aylesbury and Heygate Estates in Southwark. Lees and her colleagues (Lees, 2013; Lees and White, 2019; Lees and Ferreri, 2016; Hubbard and Lees, 2018; Hubbard et al., 2020; Elliott-Cooper et al., 2020a, 2020b) show that the process has resulted in large-scale displacement and associated psychological distress to the residents. Communities have been broken up and residents scattered across London and the region. In addition, some residents who had bought their flats under the right-to-buy legislation were offered very low compensation, insufficient to buy a comparable property in the local area or elsewhere (see Watt, 2013, 2021, for a comprehensive analysis of council estate ‘regeneration’ and displacement). There are other examples, such as the policy initiated by the London borough of Westminster in the 1980s by Shirley Porter, the disgraced Conservative council leader, to change the social composition of council estates by sales to try to attract more middle-class, and Conservative-voting, home-owning residents. This policy, officially labelled ‘building stable communities’ but more accurately termed ‘homes for votes’, was subse-

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quently found to be illegal and improper by the district auditor and, after long legal action, Lady Porter and several of her colleagues were found guilty and forced to financially compensate the council to the tune of £42 million (Dimoldenberg, 2006; House of Lords, 2001). One accused councillor even committed suicide. Similar, though not illegal, policies were pursued by Wandsworth Council to encourage right-to-buy sales and to try to change the social structure of the borough in a more middle-class direction. The sale of public housing and the displacement of tenants is not confined to London, as Morris (2019a, 2019b) showed in the case of Millers Point in Sydney and Hedin et al. (2012) showed in cities in Sweden. Another indirect example of urban revanchism is the impact of the welfare cuts imposed by George Osborne, the Conservative chancellor, in 2010, which had the indirect effect of hitting low-income groups in high-housing-cost areas, such as inner London. By reducing the amount of housing benefit for low-income households and placing a weekly cap on the total amount of benefits received by any household, the policy had the effect of squeezing some low-income residents out of London, as the benefits they receive are now insufficient to pay their rent and living costs (Hamnett, 2010b). Right-wing critics, of course, see no problem with this situation. Their view is that, in a market economy, ability to pay determines where you can live. If high house prices in central London or Paris mean that only the rich can live there, so be it. Why should the state support them? They would be happy to sell off all social housing in the inner city and see the poor pushed out to the periphery or beyond (Schumacher, 2018). Who would perform the basic services necessary for a city to run – the cleaners, rubbish collectors, subway and bus drivers, nurses, teachers, restaurant staff – is not a consideration. ‘Let them eat cake’, as Marie Antoinette is alleged to have said when told that the poor of Paris had no bread. Examples of state-led redevelopment in the Netherlands are documented by Aalbers (2010), Uitermark and Duyvendak (2008), Boterman and van Gent (2014), Uitermark et al. (2007) and Doucet et al. (2011). But interestingly, Uitermark and Loopmans (2013) highlight a policy in Belgium that tries to ensure that urban renewal does not always displace low-income residents.

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State-led gentrification and displacement in China China presents one of the clearest examples of state-led gentrification and displacement and on a massive scale (He, 2007, 2012, 2019; Shin, 2009, 2016). The country is unique in that the state still plays a leading if not dominant role in urban development, and the state owns all urban land. Since the start of the opening up and reform process in 1978, but particularly since the transition to market-based housing in 1995, there has been massive residential clearance and redevelopment in most, if not all, Chinese cities, led by local government (Wu, 2004, 2015). Huge parts of the inner areas of many cities have been cleared and rebuilt, usually in the form of owner-occupied gated communities. Property owners are usually offered either cash compensation or one or more new purpose-built apartments on the city periphery. Rental tenants are offered nothing. The clearance process can be very rapid and is quite brutal in that residents can get only a month or two notice to quit before bulldozers come in to clear the site. Indeed, the scale of displacement in China goes far beyond gentrification per se (Figure 5.3). Tomba (2017) states forcefully that: The systematic expulsion of workers from forcibly gentrifying areas with the assistance of neighbourhood organizations controlled by the state suggests that in urban settings, the direct friction between residents and gentrifiers is limited… [T]he replacement of one class with another in Chinese cities is the overall goal of urbanization rather than one of its consequences. In rapidly urbanizing areas of China, gentrification is not a phenomenon derived from the rebalancing of a city’s economic, political or cultural dynamics, but rather a significant feature of the production and reproduction of state authority through urbanization. (p. 514)

Tomba’s claim about class replacement being the overall goal of urbanization in Chinese cities is very radical and raises big questions about gentrification on a city wide scale.

The right to the city The final issue to be discussed is that of ‘a right to the city’: a concept pioneered by Henri Lefebvre in his book Le Droit à la Ville (1968). This was subsequently developed by David Harvey (2008) and by Newman and Wyly (2006) in their paper, ‘The Right to Stay Put, Revisited’. Essentially,

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Source:  The author.

Figure 5.3

The demolition of old neighbourhoods in Guangzhou

what all three authors are arguing is that, rather than space and housing simply being a commodity that is produced, bought and sold on the market for profit, it should be constituted as a basic human right: people should have a right to live in the city, and a right to stay put rather than being dispossessed by developers or landlords or city governments intent on maximising financial gains (see Gillespie, 2015, for an interesting analysis of dispossession in Accra, Ghana). The idea of a ‘right to the city’ has become increasingly influential on the academic left but it is difficult, if not impossible, to realise in practice in either capitalist cities, because of the power of the market, or socialist ones where the state can embark on clearance and redevelopment with little hinderance. At present, the idea of a right to the city remains an ideal to argue for rather than a reality.

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Conclusion In conclusion, it is important to ask: are there limits to gentrification or, to put it another way, is gentrification inevitable, inexorable and invincible? Can it be stopped – and should it? As indicated in the Introduction and in Chapter 5, most liberal academics would be agreed that gentrification should be stopped where possible. But many market economists and city policy makers would argue that it should be encouraged. Ley and Dobson (2008) examined the limits to gentrification in Vancouver, looking at two inner-city areas, Downtown Eastside and Grandview-Woodland, both with low indicators of gentrification. They reveal the ‘intersection of local poverty cultures, industrial land use, neighbourhood political mobilisation and public policy, especially the policy of social housing provision, in blocking or stalling gentrification’ (p.  2471). Similarly, Hwang and Sampson’s (2014) analysis of large-scale data for Chicago showed that levels of minority ethnic populations of over 40 per cent were linked to attenuated gentrification. Timberlake and Johns-Wolf (2017) had similar findings for New York and Chicago. The political dimension of gentrification is perhaps one of the most important. Most liberal academics oppose gentrification even though a not-insignificant proportion of liberal academics live in the inner areas of cities that were once working class. Indeed, the huge expansion of universities in the last 50 years is a part of the substantial occupational-class change that has taken place in most Western societies. Some of the middle-class academics may, ironically, be part of the current gentrification phenomenon. Nonetheless, the great majority of academics who write about gentrification are strongly opposed to it. Thus, for example, Slater (2006, 2009) argues that, in recent years, there has been the eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research and that various researchers (myself included) have fallen victim to neo-liberalism and bought the argument that gentrification is not such a bad thing, or have even signed up to argue that gentrification is a good thing. Other critics, such as Watt (2008), Wacquant (2008), Wyly (2015, 2019) and others take a similar view to that of Slater. But the underlying issue is that if the middle classes are growing in size and number, as is occurring in some cities, their greater market power will ensure that they will try to find a place to live, often expanding into formerly working-class neighbourhoods. This issue is likely to grow in importance.

6

Global gentrification or category imperialism?

Introduction Atkinson and Bridge (2005) highlighted the increasingly global spread of gentrification 15 years ago: Gentrification is now global. It is no longer confined to western cities. Processes of neighbourhood change and colonisation represented by an increasing concentration of the new middle classes can be found in Shanghai as well as Sydney, or Seattle. Nor is it now limited to the ‘global’ cities, the focus of much of the gentrification debate to date. It can now be found in new regional centres…as well as capital cities previously not associated with the process such as Moscow, Brussels and Berlin. All of this is to say nothing of the now rampant and almost exhaustive process of gentrification in cities like San Francisco, London, New York and Melbourne. (p. 1)

But as gentrification has spread and evolved, so it has changed. As Wyly (2015) pointed out: ‘As capitalist urbanisation evolves, so too does gentrification. Theories and experiences that have anchored the reference points of gentrification in the Global North for half a century are now rapidly evolving into more cosmopolitan, dynamic world urban systems of variegated gentrifications’ (p. 2515). Neil Smith (2002b) even suggested that gentrification is now part of a global urban strategy for neo-liberal urban governments looking to regenerate their cities. Gentrification is now seen in Latin America, in Eastern Europe, in Southeast Asia, as well as in many European and North American cities, spreading out into smaller towns and cities and even into some rural villages (Phillips, 1993). Gentrification is now increasingly widespread. More recently, it has been suggested that we are seeing the 100

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rise of global or planetary gentrification (Lees et al., 2015, 2016; Wyly, 2015). This raises several important questions, not least whether the expansion is truly global in scope or just geographically scattered in a few cities across the globe. In addition, is this process of global gentrification a uniform one or are there, in fact, a number of very different phenomena all grouped under one very broad label? There is the related issue of whether the term is being stretched too far to cover things that might be better described in other ways and may be obscuring key differences. There is always a risk with popular concepts, such as gentrification, that they become used so widely and so loosely that they lose their analytical value. Maloutas (2012) terms this ‘conceptual stretching’.

Gentrification: how widespread and how different? There is no doubt that gentrification, in one form or another, is now quite widespread, not just in Europe or North America, but also in cities in China, Australia, Latin America and elsewhere. In this sense, the process is increasingly global. It has also diffused down the urban hierarchy from a handful of Western cities in the 1970s to many smaller cities and even into rural areas. The literature is very extensive. The number of papers on gentrification now run into the thousands, if not tens of thousands. Gentrification research has become a global urban growth industry. It is now possible to find many papers on small areas of gentrification in small towns and cities in remote places. I discuss some of the issues and questions this raises below, but first it is useful to give a brief overview of gentrification’s global reach. Gentrification was initially identified in Boston, Philadelphia (Smith, 1979b), Vancouver (Ley, 1980, 1981), Washington (Gale, 1979, 1984), New York (Marcuse, 1985), London and some other European cities (van Weesep and Musterd, 1991; van Kempen and van Weesep, 1994). It was also quickly identified in Australian cities (some of which had a similar Victorian housing stock to London; Mullins, 1982; Logan, 1985; Jager, 1986; Engels, 1994). Then it was subsequently spotted in several Eastern European cities and in Moscow after 1989 (Sykora, 1993, 2005; Kovacs, 1998; Kovacs et al. 2013). But more recently, gentrification has been extensively written about in China (Wu, 2015; He, 2007, 2012, 2019; Shin, 2016; Tomba, 2017; Huang and Yang, 2017; Huang et al., 2018; Yang and

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Zhou, 2018; Yang and Ley, 2018), Korea (Shin, 2009; Shin and Kim, 2016; Lee, 2018), Singapore (Wong, 2006), Taipei (Jou et al., 2016), Hanoi (Yip and Tran, 2016; Potter and Labbe, 2020) and other East Asian countries (Shin et al., 2016; Waley, 2015), as well as Latin America (Rubino, 2005; Garmany and Richmond, 2019; Gaffney, 2016; Delgadillo, 2016; Jones and Varley, 1999; Janoschka and Sequera, 2016; Lopez-Morales, 2011, 2016; Lopez-Morales et al., 2016), South Africa (Visser and Kotze, 2008; Aah Goo, 2018) and Nigeria (Nwanna, 2015). The list is very extensive and growing. But while the gentrification map has undoubtedly widened and deepened, questions have been raised about the use and applicability of the term and whether what is identified as gentrification in one country or city is the same as is identified in another. Is it accurate to group a number of potentially different processes into a single category – a kind of ‘category imperialism’? As Jeff Beck (1968) sang in ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’, the old disco classic, ‘You’re everywhere and nowhere, baby, That’s where you’re at’. Discussing Latin America, Delgadillo (2016) notes that ‘the forms, timing, and intensity of gentrification are different from those in cities of the Global North’ (p. 1154). Similarly, Kubes and Kovacs (2020) note that, although the Eastern European countries transformed from a centrally planned to a market economy after 1990, it is not always appropriate to use the term gentrification: the classic stage model of gentrification cannot be used in post-socialist cities, partly because the process is still in its infancy and partly because several hybrid forms of gentrification-like processes hide the spatial effects of market-based renewal. The variegated forms of urban change are the results of historical legacies, path dependencies and a set of factors embedded in local contexts (p. 2591)

So too, Potter and Labbe (2020) note that: Large-scale residential developments on expropriated lands in periurban Hanoi resemble forms of gentrification seen elsewhere. But is it gentrification? Current debate over the definition of gentrification has focused on whether the term has become too broad to be useful in different institutional and spatio-temporal contexts. While some push for a generalisable definition based in capitalist development, others argue that the term harbours Western assumptions that fail to usefully explain unique local circumstances.

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In another paper on Hanoi, Yip and Tran (2016) also suggest that ‘there is an increasing tendency to a spatio-temporal overstretching of the concept. Gentrification is being employed, not just to embrace nearly any form of urban regeneration regardless of the context, but also being spread to very diverse socio-cultural backgrounds’ (p.  492). They suggest that, in Asian cities, many of the transformations are large in scale and rapid in speed compared to the block-by-block processes in older Western cities. Second, the transformation or upgrading of working-class areas is often into upmarket retail and leisure use rather than residential use. The third difference is the pivotal role of the state, and the fourth is that many of the changes take place not only in working-class areas but in brownfield and greenfield sites. The danger is that many forms of urban regeneration or renewal may be subsumed under the gentrification label when it may not be appropriate. However, while there have been calls to de-colonialise urban theory to make it less ‘Western’ and more ‘local’, it is important not to abandon some of the major developments in urban theory to date. Perhaps it is best to say there are a number or processes of urban social and housing market change worldwide that have similar or shared characteristics. One of the first has been the decay of some older, inner urban areas. Another has been attempts at large-scale urban renewal and regeneration. Another has been the growth of an expanded educated, professional and managerial middle class in different societies in recent decades (Ley, 1980; Hamnett, 2003a; Clerval, 2021; Scott, 2018; Chen and Qin, 2015; Ikeler and Limonic, 2018). This does not mean that the working class has disappeared, and it does not mean that income inequality has been reduced: quite the reverse. But it does mean that the industrial and occupational structures of many countries have changed significantly in recent decades and, along with them, there has been growth in the number of professional and managerial jobs and perhaps greater pressure on the housing market. A second common characteristic is that there has been an expansion of the middle class into areas of the city not recently seen as traditional middle-class residential areas. These include previous middle-class residential areas that had been downgraded and have now been upgraded again, areas of old, upgraded working-class housing, new build in previously derelict or empty areas or conversion of other uses, such as the loft areas of New York and London and social housing estates. But both the forms and the nature of the processes involved could be very different,

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ranging from small-scale owner renovation to large-scale commercial development. There are a variety of forms of urban redevelopment or regeneration that do not necessarily involve the creation of middle- or upper-class housing or the expulsion of low-income residents. Such cases do generally involve some form of land use or building upgrading designed to attract more visitors or to increase sales or rental income, but they are not gentrification in the more restricted traditional sense of the term (Smart and Smart, 2017). Jones and Varley (1999), Rubino (2005), Delgadillo (2016) and Garmany and Richmond (2019) have identified urban renewal and regeneration processes in various Latin American cities that do not necessarily result in a return of the middle classes to the inner city, and Potter and Labbe (2020) have queried to what extent such processes all involve displacement. To label all such processes as gentrification is both misleading and unhelpful. As Holm (2013) points out, gentrification can and does take many forms in different places, and it is very place-specific. We thus need to be careful in using the term, otherwise there is a danger that it can be extended too widely. But, in cities where the middle class is growing in size, it is likely that gentrification or some other forms of middle-class housing expansion will be occurring. Gentrification can be seen as one outcome of class competition for desirable housing. In recent years, a number of papers have appeared that have questioned the uncritical use of gentrification to describe various processes of urban change. They argue that, while there may be some similarities, there are often a number of crucial differences and that labelling the processes as gentrification may obscure their meaning and significance. This is allied to the concern that the use of terms such as gentrification may tend to privilege the experience of developed, Western cities over the experience of other cities that are being ‘fitted’ into a ‘one-size-fits-all’ Western-based category when, in reality, the nature of the phenomenon and the processes are very different. As most international journals and papers are Western, there is a danger for some Western researchers to see the world through Western eyes and for some non-Western researchers to uncritically emulate this or to downplay local specifics as some kind of provincial or unimportant anomaly. The ‘Western gaze’ can be very misleading. We must therefore be very careful in assuming that different

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forms of urban social or upwards housing-market change can all be lumped together under a gentrification label: it may or may not be appropriate. These reservations have also been found within Europe, with Buzar et al. (2007), suggesting that the transformation of Bologna is best seen as re-urbanisation rather than gentrification, and Preteceille (2007) voicing doubts regarding the applicability of the term in Paris. Butler (2007b) has also raised questions about whether the redevelopment of London’s Docklands is best seen as gentrification or a form of suburbanisation. A considerable number of researchers have now lined up to raise doubts about the generalisability or overextension of the gentrification concept. One of the first was Harris (2008) in his comparison of London and Mumbai. He challenged a Eurocentric framing of a global spread of gentrification and said that: ‘A problematic tendency in accounting for new globalised geographies of gentrification is to neglect the diversity of the process’ (p. 2410). Subsequently, Ghertner (2015) asked in a provocatively titled paper, ‘Why Gentrification Theory Fails In “much of the world”?’, whether gentrification is: really such a useful concept for describing displacement in Mumbai, Rio and Luanda? Is it time to lay the concept to bed, to file it away among those 20th-century concepts we once used to anticipate globalized urbanization? If by gentrification we mean nothing more than a rising rent environment and associated forms of market-induced displacement, then gentrification does indeed appear to be a global phenomenon. However, …this definition is so broad that it diverts attention away from more fundamental changes in the political economy of land in much of the world. (p. 552)

He further explained that: the global search for gentrification risks following a diffusionist logic that either presumes a Euro-American template, or else so sheers gentrification of its analytical specificity that it loses both its explanatory power and its political potency… A priori commitment to the gentrification analytic…overlooks key features of urban change in contexts, like India, with property, planning, and legal systems different from the postindustrial geographies from which gentrification theory developed. (2014, p. 1554, emphasis in original)

Ghertner is not alone. Ren (2015), writing on gentrification in China, questions ‘the tendency to stretch existing concepts such as gentrification

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in order to interpret urban change processes’ in a variety of different contexts. She says: Studying gentrification in China produces an understanding of China as part of a global neo-liberal system of urban development, but focusing on gentrification is also limited in its ability to account for major structural transformations in class structures and housing, as well as basic problems of urban governance, tax structures, land use, citizenship/property rights and housing shortages which all play a part in displacement. (p. 329)

Gentrification in China effectively began on a small scale in the late 1990s, following reform and creation of a private housing market. Previously, housing was allocated to households by their work units, or danwei, and gentrification was effectively impossible. People took what they were given in terms of housing and there were still large areas of inner-city Beijing, Shanghai and other cities that had the original residents. Broadly speaking, housing and residential areas were not allocated in terms of class and income, but the introduction of a housing market (over 85 per cent of housing is now owner-occupied) has not created Western-style individual gentrification. In China, the local state still plays a very major role in both urban planning, development and land release, and most gentrification is state-driven and -directed. It generally takes the form of the clearance and redevelopment of older areas of poor-quality housing in the inner city and their replacement by high-rise apartment buildings that, because of their cost, are only for middle- to high-income residents. The original residents, if they are owners, are offered larger replacement apartments in new housing developments on the urban periphery or small or more expensive ones on site. The peripheral apartments are much larger and well-equipped with kitchens and bathrooms, but they are a long way out of the city. Tenants get no rehousing and are required to move out. Thus, there is very little gentrification of individual houses: displacement, and social-class change is a result of clearance. The scale of state-led inner-city gentrification in China is now extensive, not least in terms of the income-generating potential of land sales by government (He, 2007, 2012, 2019; Huang and Yang, 2017; Ren, 2015; Tomba, 2004; Yang and Ley, 2018; Wu, 2015, 2020a). Tomba (2017) argues that Chinese-style gentrification is a clear example of state-led urban development for financial ends. More generally, Ray Forrest (2016) made the point that there is a ‘need for a sceptical and cautious approach to the transfer of concepts from one socio-spatial context to another. So, something that looks like

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“gentrification” may well be produced by quite different processes and with quite different consequences’ (p. 609). Forrest’s point is an important one. It is dangerous to infer similar causes from similar outcomes. Depending on the local situation, similar causes may generate different outcomes, and vice versa. It is only necessary to look at the very different processes producing gentrification in cities such as Seoul and Beijing (Shin et al., 2016). But, equally, there have been some considerable similarities in process and outcomes, so it is just as wrong to assume that there are no similarities and that all theory should be local and nationally specific. The critique of the overuse of gentrification as an umbrella concept to embrace urban social upgrading is now widespread. Maloutas (2012) argues that contextual diversity is important in gentrification research, as in many other areas of social science. What holds in one city or one country does not necessarily hold elsewhere. He ‘cautions against the “contextual stretching” of gentrification theory, whereby the more researchers insist on seeing urban development through lenses of gentrification – and, thus, the more that diverse urban contexts are shoehorned into gentrification theoretical frameworks – the more empirical nuance is likely to be overlooked’ (Maloutas, 2012, p.38). Maloutas (2018) subsequently argues that gentrification is a good example of a ‘travelling concept’ that can be applied worldwide but is still attached to the context in which it was produced and may not be appropriate elsewhere. He argues that the ‘simple definition adopted by the current gentrification research agenda leads us to accept gentrification’s global reach literally by definition’, and he notes: ‘the metamorphoses of gentrification through its different waves in the Anglophone world do not provide the script for understanding other cities’ urban histories and making sense of their urban restructuring processes’ (p. 250). Smart and Smart (2017) make a similar critique, arguing that: The concept of gentrification has become stretched, both conceptually and geographically, in ways that both erode its utility and displace alternative ways of understanding the displacement of lower‐income people by urban transformation. Among the negative consequences…is that the resulting pressure to reframe analysis in terms of gentrification reinforces Anglo‐American academic hegemony and increases the difficulty of introducing more appropriate theoretical approaches from scholars in, and of, the Global South… At the same time, the theoretical extension of the concept of gentrification to replace alternative ways of thinking about the displacement of lower-income

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populations, such as ‘urban renewal’, has reduced the analytical utility of gentrification itself by confusing different mechanisms by which this is achieved. (p. 518)

The common message that emerges from most of these critiques is that we must beware of overextending the concept of gentrification to apply to almost everything and anything involving urban renewal or regeneration or the pushing out of lower-income groups from some areas. Gentrification emerged in the context of older Western cities with specific developmental histories and economic and social systems, and attempts to ‘impose’ gentrification as some kind of ‘one-size-fits-all’ concept can be both inappropriate and counterproductive, inhibiting understanding of the local specifics. Notwithstanding all the reservations and caveats listed above regarding the uncritical transfer of theories and concepts from one context to another, it is clear that cities in many parts of the world have seen some broadly similar processes of social and spatial change, and we should not fall into the reverse trap of assuming that these processes are all different and unrelated. They may have major elements in common. As Lopez-Morales (2015) has observed: ‘We do need some generic theoretical categories (regardless of the geographical location where they were first formulated) to bring urban debates within certain useful parameters’ (p. 564). In his view, this is far more productive than bringing together lots of relatively isolated cases but keeping them in different regional silos because their concepts seem geographically or historically dissimilar. Lopez-Morales is correct. The problem is keeping a useful and productive balance between generalisation and individual cases and not over-extending the concept to include almost everything and anything. What gentrification research must avoid is falling into a similar trap to that into which some researchers fell in the 1970s of trying to fit European cities into the dominant and influential models of American urban growth and change. There was often a perception at the time that, if European cities did not fit American models, they were somehow parochial. We now understand that they were simply different. Similar realisations are taking place in other countries. Due to the global dominance of English-language international academic literature, and the dominance within this of the North American experience, there is sometimes a tendency to look at the Western literature and attempt to apply it globally without fully acknowledging local differences. But, as argued by

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Wu (2015) and Hamnett (2020), the Chinese experience and processes are often very different. So, to conclude, while it is important to see whether various global examples of upwards social-class residential change and/or urban regeneration can be usefully classed as forms of gentrification, the answer can be yes or no. In some cases, gentrification may be an appropriate description, but we should beware of using the gentrification label because of superficial similarities. This would be a form of conceptual laziness.

7

Conclusion: the future of gentrification

There are a number of key issues to take up in the conclusion. The first is whether gentrification is really important in terms of its scale and extent, or whether it is small-scale and a distraction from real urban problems elsewhere. The second, related issue is whether gentrification is temporary or permanent, and whether it is part of a wider economic social transformation of some major cities. The third question is, how can we best explain gentrification? The fourth concerns whether gentrification is always and everywhere associated with displacement, and whether it has any positive qualities. The final question is, is gentrification a worldwide or global process and, if so, is it a single process or is it variegated and differentiated? The answer to the first question is that, with the great advantage of hindsight, both Berry (1985) and Bourne (1993) were wrong to dismiss gentrification as a temporary or small-scale phenomenon. It is important in terms of scale and extent, and it has reshaped the inner areas of some, but by no means all, Western cities over the last 50 years (Badcock, 1993), and it is continuing to do so (Wyly and Hammel, 1999). While it is arguably less important in scale and impact than either suburbanisation or the economic and social decline of many North American inner cities, it has shown that continued inner-city decline is not inevitable and can, in some cases, be halted or even reversed. In particular, gentrification has shown that there is not a fixed life cycle for urban areas of growth, decline and decay, as some early American urban models argued. But it would be wrong to ignore the scale of both continued suburbanisation or inner-area decline and slum formation. Both are of continuing importance, and Wu (2020b), Wu and Phelps (2011), Li et al. (2020), Shen and Wu (2017) and Wu and Keil (2020) have stressed the significance of periurban development in China, India and other countries. A visit to any 110

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Chinese city, large or small, shows rapid outwards expansion into previously rural farmland areas at an almost unbelievable rate. There may also be significant inner-city reconstruction. Equally, problems of slum formation – such as Cape Flats in Cape Town – and inner-city decline have not disappeared with the rise of gentrification. They proceed in parallel, and they are often quantitatively much more significant than gentrification. We should not let the rise of gentrification obscure the continuing reality of long-term urban poverty problems. Interestingly, 20 years ago, Wyly and Hammel (2004) concluded their analysis on the links between federal mortgage support and gentrification by saying that ‘Gentrification affects a tiny slice of the contemporary, dispersed metropolis, but in the US it certainly provides an important vantage point from which to see some of the social processes of recent years’ (p. 1239, emphasis added). Second, there is little doubt that, barring some kind of major economic or environmental disaster, gentrification is here to stay. Given its links to the changing structure of industry and occupations in big cities and the creation of an increasingly post-industrial educated work force who may work in the central or inner city and find its leisure and entertainment activities attractive, it is extremely unlikely that gentrification is going to prove a flash in the pan. On the contrary, it is part of a wider set of changes reshaping the economies and residential patterns of many cities. In addition, the increasing importance of climate change and global warning and the shift away from private cars is likely to increase the desirability of central and inner-city locations. In this respect, Ley and Smith were both correct. Parts of some select inner cities (but not all) have become bourgeois playgrounds. But it will be interesting to see to what extent the impact of COVID-19 changes public perception of space and reawakens the demand for suburban houses with gardens rather than inner-city apartments. This links back to the explanation of gentrification. While the decline and devaluation of some inner-city areas and their subsequent regeneration can be explained in part by Neil Smith’s rent-gap theory, this does not operate in all cities or all areas. Some cities, of which Detroit is a notable example, have declined and never really recovered. This owes a great deal to more deep-rooted economic changes, de-industrialisation and widespread abandonment, as Smith and Williams (1986) and Marcuse (1986) recognised. Nor can the emergence of gentrification simply be explained as the result of changes in tastes and preferences of a small section of the

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middle class. It is linked to, and is partly a product of, much wider economic changes that have taken place in some cities as deindustrialisation and a shrinking manufacturing-based working class have been accompanied by the rise of a post-industrial, information-processing economy and a growing new professional and managerial middle class. But this process is only confined to some cities and some areas. There are still large areas of our cities that have not been touched by significant gentrification, and this will continue. The economic and social problems of peripheral social housing estates around Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paris, Naples and some French and Swedish cities have not disappeared, and poverty and urban unrest are widespread in some American cities and Brazilian cities, such as Rio. It is important that gentrification in some cities does not divert our attention from decay and deprivation in others. We are seeing the suburbanisation of poverty in some western cities (Hostenbach and Musterd, 2018, 2021; Bailey and Minton, 2017). Fourth, ever since Neil Smith (1979a) launched his powerful attack on gentrification and choice and preference-based approaches to explanation, gentrification has been under attack from Smith and others (Shaw, 2008a, 2008b; Clerval, 2013, 2021; Wyly, 2015; Lees, 2013), who see it as an attempt by capital and the middle classes to retake the inner city and convert it to a bourgeois playground. Hence, the title of Smith’s book (1996), The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, and Clerval’s (2013) Paris Without the People. The vision they outline is one where many ordinary residents have been effectively pushed out of the city by rising prices. There is little doubt that this is correct. Most of the inner areas of London, Paris, New York, Beijing or Shanghai are not remotely affordable by those on average incomes (or even on 2–3 times the average income). In November 2020, average property prices in London hit £500,000 compared to a median household income of about £31,000. Despite critics’ claims to the contrary (Davidson and Wyly, 2012, 2013), occupational class data for London, Beijing, Paris, Los Angeles and New York show that they and other cities have become increasingly professionalised, and low-income groups have been increasingly replaced or displaced (Hamnett, 2015; Clerval, 2021; van Hamm et al., 2020; Scott, 2018). Twenty years ago (Hamnett, 2003b), I made the argument in my book Unequal City that London was seeing both growing professionalisation and growing inequality. The two are not contradictory but often seem to go hand in hand.

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Gentrification has now clearly spread very widely across different continents and cities, but whether it is truly worldwide or global in its spread is more debatable. There are many countries and cities where gentrification is simply not present, although other forms of upgrading may be. This links to the issue of differentiation. It is clear that, as gentrification has spread, it has also mutated in its forms as traditional forms of single-family house gentrification have switched to warehouses, lofts and new build apartments, and the process has diffused geographically down the urban hierarchy. It is also clear that the causes of gentrification have changed, away from the initial role of pioneering individual households towards a great role for developers, local government and corporate capital. The local state, particularly in China, is now a key driver of gentrification, planning and organising large-scale inner-city clearance and redevelopment. This cannot happen without state approval, and this links to Smith’s idea of gentrification as a global urban strategy. Again, there is little doubt that a wide range of city governments have seized on the idea of gentrification as a path to regeneration. When considering the future of gentrification, it is instructive to return to three of the early writers: Glass (1964), Ley (1980) and Smith and Williams (1986). They identified trends that have continued in some big Western cities for more than 40 years: the continuing transformation of the inner city and a reversal of previous residential patterns, with the most affluent living in the city centre as they did before the advent of industrialism in the 19th century, and with lower-income groups often displaced to areas of the city further from the centre. Glass (1973) was clear that London was not being polarised or becoming a city dominated by low-income groups: quite the reverse. She thought it was being gentrified with a vengeance and that the low-income groups were being squeezed out. David Ley (1981) saw this as part of a longer-term trend associated with the transformation of the urban economy and social-class structure: Present social, economic, and political trends are redefining the morphology inherited from the industrial city… If present trends accelerate, the social geography of the nineteenth-century city may appear to urban scholars of the future as a temporary interlude to a more historically persistent pattern of higher-status segregation adjacent to the downtown core. (p. 145)

Williams and Smith (1986) also foresaw this trend: an inversion of the previous urban structure and reversion to the pre-industrial structure, with the elite in the central and inner areas of major centres. But there

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is a geography to gentrification that mirrors the geography of economic and social power. They argued that, at the regional scale, ‘the continuing development of a new international division of labour will be the major determinant of urban restructuring’ (p. 208). They suggested that cities in declining regions would have little investment in the built environment, whereas others could grow: The trends we have identified suggest a continued momentum toward a gentrified central and inner city. The direction of this change is toward a new central city dominated by middle-class residential areas, a concentration of professional, administrative and managerial employment… Though relatively central enclaves of working-class residents will surely remain, the momentum of the present restructuring points to a more peripheralised working class, in geographical terms… [but] the bourgeois playground at the centre is as yet partial and selective; it is not happening in all cities, nor are all affected cities already a replica of Manhattan. (p. 217)

What Williams and Smith forecast has been proved correct, though not in all cities, and certainly not in most de-industrialised and run-down American or European inner-city areas. But, in those dynamic post-industrial cities where there is growing business and financial services and/or a high-tech sector, an educated labour force with disposable income and good housing stock, the attractions of proximity to the city centre and a good public transport network are likely to prove strong. Of course, if the class geography of the city can change once, it can change again. It is not permanently fixed. But it is a result of the changing structure of the national and international division of labour, the structure of the urban hierarchy and the changing nature of the industrial and occupational-class structure, as well as other factors. It is very likely that gentrification will continue to push its way into new areas. These, mostly, will be more peripheral areas of cheaper housing further from the city centre, particularly, but not always, located near good transport links. In the process, lower-income residents are likely to find that they are progressively pushed further and further out of the city into the remaining areas of unattractive, low-rent housing, such as the banlieue estates around the city of Paris (Clerval, 2021). Thirty-five years ago, Smith and Williams (1986) concluded Gentrification of the City by suggesting: Although it is possible to forecast a collapse in the office market, and a change in the administrative economy through the use of high-technology leading to

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the residualization of all but a few urban centers, it would seem that, for the next 25 years, we are likely to witness an intensification of the gentrification process. One of the most salient checks may well be the increase in violence and crime that will come about as more and more of the urban population in centers throughout the world are marginalized… [T]he threat of uprisings is highly inimical to continued gentrification. (p. 223)

Until early 2020, there was little reason to doubt their speculations, and there has been a tendency towards what is termed ‘the suburbanisation of poverty’ in some cities in the US, Britain and the Netherlands (Hostenbach and Musterd, 2018; Bailey and Minton, 2017). Ehrenhalt (2012), a journalist rather than an academic, suggests in his book The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City that some US cities may be being turned inside out, with the affluent moving back into the city centre and the poor and low-income groups being pushed out. But a new element may have entered the equation. Before the impact of COVID-19, it was a reasonable assumption that the attraction of city-centre and inner-city locations, particularly for younger age groups, would continue to increase, aided by green politics, the turn away from the private car, and the growing importance of accessibility via public transport. In cities like London, larger numbers of private apartment blocks were being built, many in inner-city areas. But COVID-19 has raised some big, if only temporary, question marks about the value of centrality and density. Will urban high densities and the absence of gardens prompt a migration of families, or even one- and two-person households, to the suburbs, and will working from home and the demise of city-centre offices become the new normal? Time will tell, but although there will be a shift at the margin, I doubt we will observe a full-scale hollowing out of city centres. The attractions of collective working are still very considerable, but the 8–6 or 9–5, five-days-a-week commute to the office may be a thing of the past in the West (though in China, jiu, jiu, liu or 9, 9, 6 – 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week – is still a reality for many private-sector executives, where time in the office is seen as a mark of commitment). So, as Smith (1996) said, ‘It may not be too much of an exaggeration to surmise that proclaiming the end of gentrification today may be akin to anticipating the end of suburbanization in 1933’ (p. 230). Returning to the question of whether gentrification is a ‘flash in the pan’, a transient and small-scale phenomenon of limited long-term importance, the answer must be an unequivocal no. Gentrification has irrevocably changed the social structure of some Western inner cities

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(Badcock, 1993); the middle classes are ‘back in town’ (Andreotti et al., 2015). But a corollary of this is that criticism of gentrification-induced displacement is likely to continue, particularly if the working-class and lower-income groups continue to be pushed out towards the periphery of the city. It is also likely that the slow increase in the size of the global middle class is likely to increase the global reach of the process as it gradually makes its way down the urban hierarchy and from more developed to less developed. But whether there is a global gentrifier class is debatable. In terms of the growth of the professional and managerial middle classes, the answer is yes, but the forms this group takes and the choices and preferences they have and constraints they face will inevitably differ from country to country, along with built form and historic urban legacy. It is also questionable whether gentrification constitutes a single global process or, more realistically, a set of processes that have some elements in common. What is almost certain is that gentrification will continue to be a long-term focus of urban research and policy debate. In this respect, the urban agenda has been significantly reset. It is, however, quite possible that, at some stage, the focus of academic attention will turn elsewhere, as it has before, maybe back to decaying inner cities and continuing suburbanisation. There has been sporadic debate about ‘de-gentrification’ (Lees and Bondi, 1995), ‘post-recession’ gentrification (Hackworth, 2002) and the end of gentrification (Lees, 2009), but, with some exceptions and hiccups, gentrification has continued its steady progress. My view is that this is likely to continue barring a major economic recession. The housing bust of the early 1990s in Britain may have slowed or paused gentrification, but it certainly did not stop it, nor did the global financial crisis in 2007 and afterward. What may be the waves of the future? What is almost certain is that, in market economies, the rich and powerful will want to live in the most attractive areas, and governments will rarely oppose this. Money will dominate residential choice as it has in the past. Recognising the truth of this does not make us enthusiastic cheerleaders for the process, but it is important to recognise the inequalities of income and wealth. So, if the choices and preferences of the wealthy continue to favour the inner city, gentrification will continue. But if they shift, the process may slow and stall.

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Index

Aalbers, M. 31–2, 93–4, 96 access to housing 80 Adelaide 60 aesthetics 41–2 Airbnb 36–7 Alonso, W. 15 Amsterdam 73 Atkinson, R. 9, 81, 89, 100 Aylesbury and Heygate estates, Southwark 95

Britain, displacement and council housing sale in 94–6 Brown-Saracino, J. 80, 90 Brummet, Q. 80, 89 Budapest 17 Burgess, E. W. 6 invasion and succession 14, 15 Butler, T. 27–8, 69, 72, 91, 105 Buzar, S. 29, 105 Byrne, J. 80

baby boomers 10, 41, 49–50 back to the city movement 16, 28, 58 Badcock, B. 24, 25, 60, 74 Baldwin, S. 92 Banfield, E. 64 Beauregard, R. A. 14, 40, 47, 48, 51, 56, 58, 64 Beck, J. 102 Beijing 7, 55, 75–6 Bell, D. 64 post-industrialism 41 Berry, B. J. 10, 24, 25, 49, 50, 60, 110 Birch, D. 16 Blasius, G. 28 Booth, C. 63 Borel-Saladin, J. 74 Boterman, W. 50, 96 Bourne, L. 10, 24, 49, 110 Braconi, F. 80 Braverman, H. 65 Brazil 75 Brenden, B. 48 Bridge, G. 25, 28, 42, 50, 77, 100 Brint, S. 74

Cape Town 111 capital 44, 46–8, 51, 112 Castells, M. 67 category imperialism 102 Chen, C. 76 China 75 gentrification 34, 55, 105–7, 113 and displacement in 97 choices 42, 43, 49, 51, 112, 116 see also preferences Clark, E. 56 Clark, W. A. V. 74 Clerkenwell 18–19 class 41, 49, 51 gentrifier 77–8, 116 geography 114 middle see middle class working 8, 14, 42, 60, 72, 73, 85–6, 92, 103, 116 class change 1, 2, 8, 58, 60–62, 65–6, 76–7, 106, 113 gentrification and 58, 60–62, 76–7 occupational see occupational class change in Western cities 73–6

140

INDEX

Clay, P. L. 17 Clerval, A. 30, 49, 70, 72, 73, 75, 86, 112 climate change 37, 111 gentrification 37 conceptual imperialism 3 contextual diversity 3, 107 council housing sales 54, 94–6 COVID-19 10, 32, 111, 115 Crankshaw, O. 74 culture 41–2, 51 Davidson, M. 57, 69, 88 Davis, D. 17 Decroly, J. 18 de-gentrification 116 de-industrialisation 14, 16, 49, 64, 111 Delgadillo, V. 102, 104 demographic re-urbanisation 29 Detroit 6 diffusion 16–25, 29, 30, 47 direct or forced displacement 82, 83, 85 displacement 1, 2, 22, 23, 79–81, 89, 105, 106, 116 and council housing sale 94–6 definitions of 82–5 direct or forced 82, 83, 85 exclusionary 83–4 forms of 82–4 indirect 82–3, 85 state-led gentrification and 97 vs. replacement 85–8 Dobson, C. 99 Docklands redevelopment 53–4, 93, 105 domestic technology 50–51 Doucet, B. 90, 96 dual city 67 Duyvendak, J. W. 93, 96 ecological gentrification 37 Economist, The 79–80, 83 Ehrenhalt, A. 115 Ehrenhalt, S. M. 74 Elliott-Cooper, A. 83 Engels, F. 64, 79

141

Esping-Andersen, G. 65 exclusionary displacement 83–4 Fainstein, S. S. 36, 67 family gentrification 50 Ferreri, M. 55 Filion, P. 60–62 Firey, W. 13 flexible hours 65 Forrest, R. 106–7 Frayn, M. 12, 18 Freeman, L. 80 Frey, A. 14 Friedmann, J. 66–7 Gale, D. 17, 37, 101 Garmany, J. 85, 104 gender 50 gentrification 1–2, 42, 49–50 in Australian cities 25, 30 baby boomers and 49–50 causes of 56 in China 34, 55, 105–7, 113 classic stage model of 102 climate 37 concept of 107–8 contextual stretching of 107 costs and benefits of 90 critics of 83, 84 defined 12, 23, 57 diffusion of 16–25, 29, 30, 47 domestic technology and 50–51 in Eastern Europe 30, 34–5 ecological 37 expansion of 29 first stage of 18 future of 110–16 gay 25, 27 gender in 50 geography of 29–30 global 9, 100–109, 113 as global urban strategy 10, 35, 100, 113 identification of 101–2 integrated explanation of 56 limits to 99 of loft apartments 18, 19 in London 3–4

142 ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO GENTRIFICATION

new forms of quasi- 36–8 and occupational class change 86–7 ‘one-size-fits-all’ concept 9, 104, 108 overextension of 105 in Paris 72, 73, 86 planetary 9, 101 research 101, 104–5, 107, 108 and revanchist city 92–4 role of the state in 51–3 rural 18 sale of social housing and 54–5 scale of 23–5 sequential 90–92 and social class change 8, 58, 60–62, 76–7 and social mix 88–90 Society Hill 52 theory of 39–40, 43–4 as tool of urban revitalisation 35–6 tourism-led 36–7 in U.S. 14–16 waves and stages of 18, 29–35 Western cities 6–7, 113 Gentrification of the City (Smith and Williams) 25, 114–15 gentrifiers 25–9 class 77–8, 116 Ghertner, D. A. 105 Glass, R. 1, 6–8, 16, 18, 28, 39, 68, 77, 79, 88, 90, 113 gentrification 12–13 definition 57 identification of 1–3, 9 global 101 gentrification 9, 100–109, 113 gentrifier class 25, 77–8, 116 urban strategy 10, 35, 100, 113 warming 37, 111 Goodwin, M. 53, 93 Griffiths, J. M. 16 Hackworth, J. 30–33 Hagemans, I. W. 88 Halasz, J. 91 Halsey, A. H. 65

Hammel, D. 24, 53, 111 Hamnett, C. 16, 17, 33, 45, 69, 72, 73, 109 Handelsman, H. 33 Harris, A. 105 Harvey, D. 66, 84, 97 Haussmann, G.H. 79 Hedin, K. 96 Henig, J. R. 17 Hoffman, L. D. 36 Holm, A. 34, 104 Hoover, E. 16 Hostenbach, C. 51, 85 housing 1, 6–9, 40, 42, 49, 59, 61, 62 price 1, 33, 44, 48 value 44 Hughes, J. W. 14 Hwang, J. 99 Ikeler, P. 66 Ile de France 70, 72 income inequality 84, 85, 103 incumbent upgrading 17–18 indirect displacement 82–3, 85 industrial cities 62 inner-city 6–9 decline 7, 13–16, 24, 52, 110, 111 housing 7, 40, 42, 44, 49, 59, 61, 62 institutional racism 64 invasion and succession 6 residential 14, 15 Jager, M. 41 Johannesburg 74 Johnston, R. J. 69 Johns-Wolfe, E. 99 Jones, G. 104 Judd, D. R. 36 Karsten, L. 50 Keenan, J. M. 37 Keil, R. 110 Koenders, D. 90 Kovacs, Z. 17, 102 Kubes, J. 102 Kumar, K. 65

INDEX

Labbe, D. 85, 102, 104 labour immigration 6 Laska, S. 17 Lawson, N. 33 LDDC see London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) Lees, L. 22, 23, 28, 29, 55, 88, 91, 95 Lefebvre, H., ‘a right to the city’ concept 97–8 Levine, M. A. 34 Ley, D. 8, 17, 23, 27, 39, 49, 58, 77, 90, 99, 113 post-industrialism, class and culture 41–3 liberal urban policy 35 Limonic, L. 66 Lipton, G. 17 Li, Z. 110 loft apartments 18, 19 London 13, 105, 113 gentrification in 3–4 housing in 7 occupational class change 68–71 redevelopment of Docklands 53–4 sale of social housing 54–5 London, B. 17 London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) 53 Loopmans, M. 96 Lopez-Morales, E. 17, 108 Los Angeles 74 luxury apartments 18 MacLeod, G. 93 Maloutas, T. 3, 9, 101, 107 Manhattanization 76, 77 Manley, D. 69 Marcuse, P. 59, 87, 111 displacement definition 82–4 marginal gentrification 18 marginal gentrifiers 27, 28 Marques, E. 74 Massey, D. 81 Mayhew, H. 63 May, J. 69 McNicholas, M. 74

143

metamorphosis 16–25 middle class 1, 2, 8–10, 16, 42–3, 47–8, 57, 58, 61, 66, 69, 76, 80, 81, 84, 86, 104, 112, 116 flight 16, 64 influx 88 outmigration 15, 44, 64 residential areas 22, 76, 103, 114 suburbanisation 64 Milward, H. 17 Mollenkopf, J. H. 67 Moore, K. S. 90 Morris, A. 96 Moses, R. 80 Mumbai 105 Musterd, S. 73 NBG see new build gentrification (NBG) neighbourhood upgrading 18 neoliberal revanchism 93 new build gentrification (NBG) 2, 20–22 new international division of labour (NIDL) 59, 114 Newman, K. 97 New York 74 NIDL see new international division of labour (NIDL) occupational class change 8, 58, 63, 74, 114 gentrification and 86–7 in London 68–71 in Paris 70, 72–3, 86 occupational structure of growth industries 67 ‘one-size-fits-all’ concept 9, 104, 108 Osborne, G. 96 Outcast London (Steadman-Jones) 63–4 Owens, A. 18 Paris 75 gentrification in 72, 73, 86 occupational class change 70, 72–3, 86

144 ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO GENTRIFICATION

Phelps, N. A. 110 pioneer gentrifiers 27, 28, 90 planetary gentrification 9, 101 polarisation 63, 69, 74, 76, 113 social 66–8 Porter, M. 46 Porter, S. 95–6 post-industrialism 41, 61, 62, 64–5 post-war baby boom 49–50 Potter, C. 85, 102, 104 poverty 64, 111 suburbanisation of 112, 115 preferences 43, 49, 51, 112, 116 Preteceille, E. 70, 105 professional and managerial class 13, 66, 70 professional, managerial and technical jobs 60 professionalization 63, 65, 66, 69, 70, 73–6 proletarianisation 63–5, 76 Qin, B. 76 quasi-gentrification 36–8 Raban, J. 3 Rachmanism 80 Randolph, B. 45 Randstad 73 real estate 43–6 redevelopment 52, 104 China 55 of London Docklands 53–4 Redfern, P. 50–51 Reed, D. 80, 89 regeneration 103, 104, 108 policy 52 Ren, J. 105 renovation 3, 7, 17, 26, 42–3 rent gap problems 45–9 Smith, N. 44–5, 111 replacement 2, 57, 82 displacement vs. 85–8 of a surplus population 93 replacement apartments 106 residential invasion and succession 14, 15

residential property market 33–4 re-urbanisation processes 29 revanchist city 92 revitalisation 10, 18, 35–6, 60 Rhein, C. 70, 73 Richmond, M. 85, 104 ‘right to buy’ policy 94–6 ‘a right to the city’ concept 97–8 Rio de Janeiro 75 Robinson, T. 58 role of the state 51–3 Rose, D. 27, 50, 90 gentrification definition 87 Rubino, S. 104 rural gentrification 18 Sampson, R. J. 99 Sao Paulo 74, 75 Sassen, S. 67 Savitch, H. V. 65 Scott, A. 49, 74 sequential gentrification 90–92 Shanghai 7 Shaw, K. S. 88 Shen, J. 110 Shi, G. 75 Shin, H. B. 17 Simonds, D. 26 Singapore 74 Slater, T. 5, 84, 93, 99 Smart, A. 107 Smart, J. 107 Smith, D. P. 10, 31, 36, 40 Smith, N. 8, 14, 17, 25, 30–33, 35, 39, 52, 57–9, 61, 76, 77, 92, 93, 100, 111–15 capital and real estate 43–5 criticisms of rent-gap thesis of 45–9 rent gap theory 44–5, 111 theory of gentrification 43, 44 social class see class social class change see class change social housing 93 sales 54–5, 94–6 socialism 62 social mix 9, 83, 84, 95 benefit 88

INDEX

gentrification and 88–90 social polarisation 66–8, 75 soup kitchen for the Jewish poor 19 Spain, D. 17 spatially displaced demand 92 state-led gentrification 51–3 China 34, 55, 106 and displacement 97 redevelopment of London Docklands 53–4 sale of social housing 54 Steadman-Jones, G. 63, 79 Sternlieb, G. 14 studentification 36 see also gentrification suburbanisation 10, 13–15, 24, 28, 37, 44, 64, 105, 116 of poverty 112, 115 Summers Street 1–10, 33 super gentrification 28, 91 Sydney 74 symbolic displacement 83, 89 Thatcher, M. 33, 54, 94 Timberlake, J. 99 Tomba, L. 55, 76, 97, 106 Toronto 74 tourist gentrification 36–7 Tran, H. A. 85, 103 travelling concept 3, 107 Uitermark, J. 88, 93, 96 United States (US), gentrification in 14–16 urban decay 10, 24, 25 decline 14–15 displacement 79 economy 113 land-use theory 15, 16 land values 44 processes 58

145

redevelopment 104 regeneration 103, 104, 108 renewal 103, 108 revanchism 92–4, 96 revitalisation 35–6 value gap 45 see also rent gap Van Criekingen, M. 18, 28 Van Gent, W. 51, 73, 85, 88, 96 Van Hamm, M. 76 Varley, A. 104 Vernon, R. 16 Vigdor, J. L. 81 Wacquant, L. 84, 99 Walks, R. A. 74 Ward, D. 14 Watt, P. 54, 84, 99 welfare cuts 96 Western gaze 104 Westminster council 95–6 white flight 6, 14, 64 Whitelegg, D. 33 Williams, P. 14, 16, 17, 25, 57, 59, 61, 76, 77, 111, 113, 114–15 Wilmott, P. 69 Wilson, W. J. 64 Wolff, G. 66–7 working class 8, 14, 42, 60, 72, 73, 85–6, 92, 103, 116 see also class; middle class Wu, F. 109–10 Wyly, E. 24, 53, 69, 99, 100, 111 Wyly, K. 97 Yip, N. M. 85, 103 Young, M. 69 Zapatka, K. 48 Zukin, S. 18 Zunz, O. 14

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