Beyond Anglo-American Gentrification Theory*
by
Hyun Bang Shin(1) and Ernesto López-Morales(2)
(1)
Department of Geography and Environment, London School
of Economics and Political Science, U.K. (
[email protected])
(2)
Department of Urban Planning, University of Chile, Santiago,
Chile (
[email protected])
* This chapter is to appear in The Handbook of Gentrification
Studies (Edward Elgar), edited by Loretta Lees and Martin
Phillips.
Introduction
Has gentrification 'gone global? Has it diffused from its usual suspects (e.g.,
London and New York City) to other non-Anglo-American cities that are more
peripheral to global capitalism? What is the meaning of gentrification as a
“global urban strategy”, which is seen now as a relatively structuralist
interpretation by the late Neil Smith (2002)? Does it mean gentrification as a
neoliberal urban policy colonising cities outside the core of global capitalism?
Or, does it mean that the dominant epistemological horizon has expanded to be
more inclusive of non-Anglo-American cities that have seen (historic)
endogenous urban processes akin to gentrification? And, what do scholars in
the global North understand about gentrification processes taking place in
emergent cities in the global South, some of which they may not even locate on
their world map?
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In this chapter, we discuss what it means to study gentrification beyond the
Anglo-American domain, emphasising the possibility of gentrification mutating
across time and space, in the same way any other social phenomena associated
with the changing nature of capitalism goes through mutation. We also question
here why academia should maintain the Anglo American cultural region as a
necessary comparative framework to talk about gentrification elsewhere.
Gentrification is now embedded in urbanisation processes that bring together
politics, culture, society and ideology. Such urbanisation is uneven and placespecific, thus displaying multiple trajectories, hence there is a need to
provincialise (c.f. Chakrabarty, 2000; cr Lees, 2012) gentrification as we know
it (namely, the rise of gentrification in plural forms or in other words, provincial
gentrifications). However, we argue this must be done without losing the most
critical aspects of gentrification that need to be investigated, namely the class
remaking of urban space. For us, gentrification is a reflection of broader
political economic processes that result in the unequal and uneven production
of urban(ising) space, entailing power struggles between haves and have-nots,
be they disputes over the upgrading of small neighbourhoods or larger clashes
related to social displacement experienced at the metropolitan or even regional
scale.
In this chapter, we focus on four key issues. Firstly, we discuss the epistemology
of comparative gentrification studies, explaining what it means to think of
gentrification in pluralistic perspectives. In doing so, we remain conscious of
how gentrification reflects the more fundamental shift in politics and economics
through active circuits of (real estate) capital and policies, which are often
dominated by national and transnational economic elites in spite of wide-spread
dispossession of people across the Global South; thus we call for planetary
thinking of gentrification (Lees et al., 2016). Secondly, related to the first point,
we discuss the linguistics of gentrification, questioning the extent to which
gentrification can be a useful conceptual tool to analyse urban processes in
places where gentrification as an expression cannot be easily translated into
local expressions. Thirdly, we ascertain the importance of scrutinising the role
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of the state and the workings of political elites, for they collectively play a pivotal
role in (re-)imagining city-making and deciding how resources are to be
allocated in terms of production and consumption.
Fourthly, we further
elaborate on the state question in gentrification research. The state in the global
South has been of greater significance in gentrification processes because of the
vulgar nature of capitalism lacking a historical compromise between dominant
and subordinate classes. Finally, we conclude the chapter by thinking about
what possibilities there are for seeing social conflicts through the lens of
gentrification and how anti-gentrification struggles could be positioned in a
broader scheme of societal transformation and defending the right to the city in
a manner that is far more socially just than what the current stages of capitalism
allow for.
An Epistemology of Comparative Gentrification Studies
Some urban researchers have been struggling to come to terms with regards to
the suitability of a gentrification framework as a useful lens to analyse processes
of urban restructuring outside of the global North. Some still see gentrification
(somehow unimaginatively) as associated only with specific spatio-temporal
contexts, not susceptible to transfer to elsewhere outside the usual suspects.
These sceptics have mechanically interpretated London and New York City as
the only emblems of gentrification. This is an extreme perspective on
gentrification, that treats it as a historic-cultural process associated primarily
with inner-city London in the 1960s (e.g., Maloutas, 2012). Viewed this way, the
process of gentrification is effectively fossilised, and disavowed of any
applicability outside of a particular time and place/space: it is thus rendered
lower than a 'mid-range concept.’
Some sceptics further argue that gentrification is a micro-economic process
involving formal property rights and playing out in formal real estate markets
only (e.g., Ghertner, 2015). Such a viewpoint reflects confusion in the midst of
its attempt to intertwine reductionist theorisation of urban change with the rich
Marxist interpretations of gentrification, and displays a tendency (1) to regard
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cities in the global South as qualitatively different and isolated from more
general process of capitalist accumulation; (2) to treat slums and informal
settlements as distinct urban spaces where logics of capital accumulation cannot
penetrate; (3) to disregard how deeply market and non-market processes are
entangled in the same way, how formal and informal processes are fused
together in the global economy; (4) to understate how much the operation of
speculation and landlordism can be prevalent in informal settlements. From
this perspective, any effort to apply the gentrification lens to other geographical
contexts outside of the UK (and possibly North America) is seen as the
imposition of Anglo-American hegemony. But adhering to such a perspective
would also make it difficult to understand that the commodification of
decommodified housing stocks has been a major thrust of gentrification in
London too, as witnessed by the gentrification of council housing estates (Lees,
2014). It also ignores the many other comparable precedents in North America,
as well as in Latin America and Asia from the 1970s (Janoschka et al., 2014).
The variegated ways in which those occupying informal, non-market housing
are dispossessed of their rights in many parts of the world are part and parcel of
gentrification processes (see Lees et al., 2015).
Those who deny the application of ‘gentrification’ to non-Western cities should
perhaps revisit the history of how the concept has evolved within the confines of
the so-called global North. By the 1970s, gentrification as a term and concept
was appropriated by critics on the other side of the Atlantic, discussed in the
context of mainly New York City but also other major cities in the eastern US,
and indeed Canada. A number of young North American urban scholars saw
gentrification as having resulted from two major forces inherent to capitalism:
(1) the socio-cultural transformations in the aftermath of the ‘baby boom’ era;
(2) the emerging importance of the real estate sector that took advantage of
widening rent gaps. For more than two decades, gentrification debates battled
back and forth over the ‘post-industrial, new middle class’ thesis and the ‘rent
gap exploitation’ thesis over what had caused the rise of gentrification (see Lees,
Slater and Wyly, 2008). Importantly, both hypotheses never questioned the
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stretching of the gentrification concept beyond the domain of inner-city London
in the 1960s; they were more concerned about the North American
particularities that gave rise to a particular form of mutated gentrification (Ley,
1980, Smith 1979; also see Slater, 2006, for a full account of this historical
debate). In a similar vein, readers should not be surprised by the scale and
nature of contemporary gentrification in London, where expensive, new-build,
often high-rise redevelopment came to dominate (Davidson and Lees, 2010).
This mutation has been supported by both New Labour and Tory policies of
housing privatisation and individual responsibility, and has led to soaring
housing prices, severe unaffordability issues, and unprecedented rates of
displacement, not only of the most deprived segments of society but also of the
relatively affluent middle classes.
The fossilisation of gentrification also makes it difficult for critics to understand
how urban processes coined as gentrification (especially with its focus on real
estate capital, the recomposition of class, displacement of original land users
and space commodification) have become increasingly pronounced in Asian and
Latin American cities. For decades, a large number of non-Anglo-American
cities have undergone substantial socio-spatial changes due to intensive stateled and/or private-led investment (often built upon growth coalitions between
endogenous political and business elites), which have resulted in upward and
unequal social re-stratification of neighbourhoods, favelas, gecekondu and
lilong (Lees et al., 2015; López-Morales, 2016a, forthcoming; Sánchez and
Broudehoux, 2013). There is a whole new global context which is seeing the
predominance of capital over publicly oriented policy decisions regarding the
use of urban space as an asset for the sake of capital accumulation: this is,
however, nothing more than the corollary of decades of advancement of a
relatively ample and adaptive array of state discourses and policies that range
from extreme free-market ideology or neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005) to marketoriented state developmentalism in the case of East Asia (Shin et al., 2016).
Around the world, gentrification – as an explicit or implicit, or even as a hidden
discourse – has become a major justification and goal for urban redevelopment
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in economies that depend heavily on the circulation of capital for
commodification and exploitation of already urban or urbanising space.
The Linguistics of Gentrification
Attempts to investigate and conceptualise gentrification in non-Anglo-American
cities faces some familiar criticisms, eg. that gentrification is difficult to
translate into other languages as the term is too UK-specific. But, does it really
matter whether or not gentrification as a term exists in a particular locality?
Comparative urban studies on gentrification have produced significant
achievements, calling for a more generic definition of gentrification to be
adopted (Clark, 2005) and asking researchers to pay attention to conjunctural
factors that give rise to locally tuned process of gentrification or actually existing
gentrification.
Once we rescue gentrification from its confinement to the place specificities of
1960s London, and build upon the achievements of 20-30 years of comparative
gentrification studies, we can broadly define gentrification as "the
commodification of space accompanying land use changes in such a way that it
produces indirect/direct/symbolic displacement of existing users and owners by
more affluent groups" (Shin et al., 2016: 458; see also the categories proposed
by Janoschka et al., 2014). This is in line with Clark’s (2005) call not to equate
Ruth Glass’s particularistic coining of the concept with its origin, calling instead
for a more theoretically productive and intellectually inspiring "generic
gentrification" (Clark, 2015) that can be applied as both an analytical tool and
empowering political goal for the local grassroots to defeat, impede or regulate.
The key to this perspective is the realisation that generality and particularity are
not mutually exclusive and can co-exist in theoretical and political realms.
Similar awareness can be considered as one of the major tenets of comparative
studies on gentrification; building on the late Doreen Massey who once argued
that "interdependence [of all places] and uniqueness [of individual places] can
be understood as two sides of the same coin, in which two fundamental
geographical concepts - uneven development and the identity of place - can be
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held in tension with each other and can each contribute to the explanation of
the other" (1993: 64 cited in Lees et al, 2016: 6)). It is perfectly possible to
generalise gentrification as a process of land use change that results in the
unequal appropriation of rents and causes the displacement of existing land
users, while at the same time emphasising the particular trajectories of how this
process is shaped by the workings of the place-specific political, economic and
social relations that co-exist in space.
At this point, it is useful to revisit the recent argument made by Ley and Teo
(2014), who discuss how in Hong Kong the absence of linguistic expressions of
gentrification does not preclude the ontological presence of gentrification as an
actually existing urban process. Although the argument might seem a little
obvious, we concur with them that it is possible to think of the ontological
presence of gentrification in a given society, even though there is no word such
as gentrification being circulated in public or academic discourse. A
comparative perspective on gentrification can suggest that gentrification as an
urban process is often known by more localised forms of expressions such as
blanqueamiento in Mexico (López-Morales, 2016a) and ‘urban redevelopment’
in Seoul (Shin and Kim, 2016). It may also be translated into an expression that
is more useful for local populations, while retaining the core principle of
gentrification in the translated version. For example, in South Korea, reflecting
the growing popularity of gentrification, 1 the National Institute of Korean
Language, a government agency that works to translate foreign expressions into
standard Korean, has suggested in May 2016 that in Korean, gentrification
should be translated as dungji naemolim, literally meaning eviction/
displacement from one’s nest/home.2 while discussions about gentrification
were largely confined to academic discourse, from 2015 it began to receive
significant attention in the media and public discourse.
1 According
to Lee (2016), there were less than ten reports of ‘gentrification’ made by the media annually
between 2004 and 2011, but the frequency of media reports referring to gentrification exploded, with 45
mentionsin 2014, and 813 in 2015.
The announcement can be accessed here: http://news.korean.go.kr/index.jsp?
control=page&part=view&idx=10332 (last accessed on 13 June 2017).
2
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Latin American experiences inform us that theorising gentrification should be
“sensitive enough to recognize that gentrification also means urban inequalities
and segregation accentuated by the state responding to large-scale private
interests” (López-Morales, 2016a: 571). In Chile, for example, well before the
term gentrification started to be used in the analysis of the unequal production
of urban space in a highly neoliberalised housing market (López-Morales,
2008), ample discussions took place to critically understand the effects of
private-led residential redevelopment in the country’s major cities (Sabatini et
al., 2001). The importance of exploiting the potential to appropriate rents from
land development has been historically so pronounced (as part of an
institutional design by the state since the early 19th century aimed at increasing
property tenure among the lowest fractions of society) that there has been
frequent conflict between the private exploitation of the commercial value of
land and the ‘right to stay put’ of those living on that land (Wyly et al., 2010), or
in simpler terms, between developers and petty land-owners who are usually the
ones facing unsurmountable barriers (eg. soaring housing prices and lack of
financial loans) in finding replacement accommodation within redevelopment
areas or nearby after selling their land (López-Morales, 2016b). Following Clark
(2005: 258), “any process of change fitting this description is, to my [our]
understanding, gentrification.”
The state-designed nexus between gentrification and
displacement
One of the major characteristics of contemporary capitalism and gentrification
is the scaling up of real estate projects. Increasingly it is an entire district or a
neighbourhood that becomes subject to the intervention of real estate capital,
resulting in wholesale clearance and reconstruction. Real estate capital has
grown large in scale, hence the domination of big real estate corporations that
have access to state institutions and finance, while smaller firms operate to pick
up niche properties in the shadow of scaled-up projects. More importantly,
however, scaling up of real estate projects calls for a dedicated role for local and
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central states to clear barriers and obstacles, to facilitate the displacement of
oppositional voices, creating tabula rasa conditions for real estate investment
and the production of ideological discourses (Shin, 2016; Slater, 2014). To help
facilitate private sector investment, governments assemble a range of
preferential and subsidising policies. Joined-up efforts by governments,
government-affiliated agencies, developers and the media often produce
stigmatisation of neighbourhoods to be subject to ‘revitalisation,’ as if such
areas and residents therein have lost their vitality and fallen into eternal
disrepute or the so-called ‘territorial stigma’ (see Shin, 2016; Lees 2014;
Wacquant, Slater and Pereira 2014). Reinvestment and hence gentrification
emerges as an alternative to real or perceived persistent decay and dilapidation,
a mythical presumption that forces people to believe that there is no other
alternative. In similar vein to Defilippis (2004) and Lees (2014), Slater (2014)
calls this a ‘false choice urbanism,’ and says there is an urgent need to “blast
open this tenacious and constrictive dualism of ‘prosperity (gentrification) or
‘blight’ (disinvestment)” and reveal the intrinsic relationship between the two in
a more fundamental process of uneven capitalist urbanisation.
The scaling up of real estate projects leads to the rise of mega-gentrification and
mega-displacement, which is enabled by the dispossession of people’s rights
through the workings of a growth alliance between the (central and/or local)
state and (real estate) capital. Obviously the nature of this alliance may differ
across geographies. Very often, in the global South, governments and
developers are fused together through ownership shares or the close ties
between developers and ruling families or political figures as in Abu Dhabi and
Lebanon. The close nexus between large businesses and political elites in South
Korea is another example of this politico-economic fusion (Shin and Kim, 2016),
and so is the ‘state capitalism’ that has emerged in mainland China. In Latin
America, a more recent example includes the scandal of Adebrecht, the
Brazilian construction group that is currently under investigation in several
Latin American countries for possible cases of bribery in campaigns and the
private accounts of top politicians including national Presidents (The Guardian,
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2017).3 Where there is a strong alliance between the state and real estate capital,
it becomes increasingly difficult to challenge real estate development and
resulting displacement.
As for mega-displacement and gentrification in post-colonial states, ethnicreligious tensions often become the sources of retribution against the
marginalised, resulting in mega-displacement to set redevelopment and
gentrification in motion. In Mumbai, for instance, the 1995 Maharashtra state
elections led to the formulation of the state government’s Slum Rehabilitation
Scheme (SRS) that was to carry out large-scale slum clearance in order to clear
ways for real estate and infrastructure construction in globalising Mumbai
(Doshi 2013). Eligibility for the resettlement of slum dwellers was based on
paper-based evidences of residence in Mumbai prior to the cut-off date of the
scheme. The SRS was to enable the involvement of real estate developers in
redeveloping slums by introducing “transferable development rights,” which
allowed developers to produce higher density market rate housing on cleared
slums or elsewhere in the suburbs, on condition that developers also provided
compensation units for eligible slum dwellers, although off-site resettlement
was more popular among those affected. The Vision Mumbai redevelopment
programme to transform Mumbai into the “next Shanghai” resulted in
“Mumbai’s ‘tsunami’” of mass clearance and eviction, demolishing about
45,000~90,000 informal structures and rendering 300,000~350,000 people
homeless (see Doshi 2013; Ramesh 2005). Affected were those ‘illegal’
settlements which emerged after 1995. Xenophobic campaigns by the local
political party aggravated the conditions of evictees further, as “most Vision
Mumbai evictees were ethnically North Indian or Muslim” (Doshi 2013: 858).
In promoting mega-gentrification, project financing becomes important, as an
individual developer (or even a consortium of developers) will often find it
difficult to finance the entire project on its own. In this regard, the origin of
capital becomes key to understanding the nature of the state-capital
Odebrecht is one of the key operators in the Porto Maravilha mega redevelopment in the (until a few
years ago) derelict Zona Portuária (Sánchez and Broudehoux, 2013).
3
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relationship, as well as the state-society relationship. National savings schemes
such as the Central Provident Fund in Singapore or the National Housing Fund
in South Korea have had a strong role to play in facilitating real estate
construction in these countries, while foreign direct investment tends to be
highlighted in recent years with regard to the rise of mega urban projects
(Shatkin, 2008). Surplus from a country or region often gets channelled into
other regions in a geographical switching of capital (see Percival and Waley,
2012 on Korean investment in Cambodian new town construction, and Kutz and
Lenhardt, 2016 on inward investment in Morocco). Sovereign wealth funds, as
well as savings of middle- or upper-class families in Asia (e.g., Singapore and
China) have emerged as major investors in cities of the global North, suggesting
that the circulation of real estate capital has become quite complex and involves
multiple directions between the global North and the global South and within
each region.
While financialisation plays a key role in the rise of (speculative) real estate
projects (see Moreno, 2014), how local governments make use of their planning
powers to increase the financial viability of real estate projects is pivotal for
urban development in the global South in particular, where endogenous
investors and major political elites work together with transnational investors.
An exemplary case can be found in Mexico, which involves a public-private
corporation called PROCDMX that cooperates with global financial players for
the purpose of transforming entire districts in central Mexico City into transport
corridors and hubs for luxury real estate investment. In this scheme, the
Mexican state has privatised urban lands in core locations as public
contributions to the public-private partnership, but at the same time guarantees
the private sector’s real estate operation by issuing 40-year-long contracts so
that the private sector can extract rents from zoned urban space. Researchers
and neighbourhood activists together wonder nowadays whether this carefully
designed, sanitised new space of exception would be able to host/enlist any type
of dissent, social deviation, grassroots cultural expressions or undesired actors
(Gaytán, 2016).
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In many ways, the example of Mexico’s PROCDMX chimes with the case of
Buenos Aires’s Puerto Madero mega-project, initiated in the late 1980s and
since then having deeply transformed the city’s old and derelict port area,
Puerto Madero. It all started in 1989 when the city government transferred
public land to the ad hoc, newly created Corporación Antiguo Puerto Madero
(hereafter CAPM). The redevelopment of Puerto Madero was carried out under
a prevailing neoliberal planning philosophy that widely failed to keep their
initial promises of social mixing and public infrastructure provision: the result
was a concentration of high-rise luxury condominiums and elite-oriented
commercial land use that prevented social mixing. For instance, the highly
segregated and enclosed Rodrigo Bueno shanty town located nearby lost access
to the newly created ‘ecological park’ that was supposed to be open for public
use according to the law that allowed the Puerto Madero operation (see Cuenya
and Corral 2011; Garay et al., 2013). There, experts from Barcelona provided
ideas and good-practice strategies for the CAPM operation (see Lees at al,
2016). Critics complain that although Puerto Madero has produced a new
landscape pertinent to the world-city status of Buenos Aires, the area is separate
from the rest of the city socially and economically, that the masses have been
excluded from the project, and that the privatisation of public resources such as
public lands resulted in private investors’ appropriation of enormous returns on
their investment with comparatively minuscule collection of tax revenues
(Garay et al., 2013).
The State Question
The above discussions about the state-designed nexus between gentrification
and dispossession compels us to examine the state question. In Western
Europe, there is a legacy of social democratic welfare statism, which has been an
outcome of the post-war reconstruction and consensus between labour and
capital. In this context, gentrification has a limited role to play if we assume the
interventionist role of the state to provide collective consumption including
housing welfare. The social democratic orientation of the state, and its legacy in
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the contemporary neoliberal world, would also create certain barriers to the full
exploitation of real estate commodities. The disintegration of the post-war
consensus and welfare statism, has therefore, served to accelerate gentrification
processes in Anglo-American cities. The demise of Western Keynesian welfare
statism has been accompanied a state rhetoric that argues that gentrification is
an inevitable outcome or the only means to revitalise post-industrial urban
spaces constrained by a lack of public funding. Lang (1982: 1) goes as far as to
claim that “gentrification comprises one of the few urban success stories that is
not dependent on a massive infusion of government moneys."
The rhetoric of an incompetent state is frequently put forward in the global
South, where corrupt, ineffective or rent-seeking state officials are thought to
have failed to provide basic urban services and functions. This is an
incompetence that can be very functional for capitalist goals. In the context of a
neglectful state that displays impotence in terms of bringing change and
maintaining the urban core, private capital initiatives are often regarded as a
viable alternative. For instance, Elshahed (2015) is sympathetic to the
involvement of real estate capital, especially in a developer’s (Al-Ismailia for
Real Estate Investments) attempt to reuse and therefore salvage Egypt’s
modernist heritage building - Cinema Radio - without gentrification impacting
on other current users in the vicinity (Elshahed 2015, p.137). However, the
ability of the private sector, formal or informal, to deliver key urban services
needs to be viewed with care, especially with regard to their intervention in land
and housing markets.
Contrary to incompetent state rhetoric, East Asian developmental statism is on
the other end of the spectrum of understanding in terms of how the state has led
the way to provide business-friendly environments as part of nation-building
and maintaining state legitimacy (Castells, 1992; Haila, 2016; Woo-Cumings,
1999). And, it is in this context that the rise of gentrification in East Asia is to be
thought of. The lack of a mature civil society in East Asia is often pointed out as
a reason for the brutal oppression of protesters against eviction by the state.
This had been the case in South Korea, for example, in the early 1980s when
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there was an all-out attack on tenant protesters against a new redevelopment
programme that resulted in large-scale new-build gentrification of dilapidated
sub-standard neighbourhoods in Seoul (see Ha, 2001; Kim, 1999). China’s
urban redevelopment histories are also full of the violent use of state power to
prevent local residents from hindering redevelopment progress (Shao, 2013). It
is also necessary to remember that in the historical context of urbanization,
under the developmental state, the notion of private urbanism may simply be a
myth that disguises the underlying and historic intervention of the
developmental state in urban development. For example, Shin (2017) examines
the case of smart city construction in Songdo, South Korea, and reveals that
despite a more recent surge of smart city and private urbanism rhetoric
associated with the Songdo City project, the characteristics of developmental
state-led urbanisation turned out to be persistent. These include the long-term
commitment of the (local) state to realise the construction of a brand new town,
the developmental vision repackaged as green growth, and smart city promotion
to adjust to the changes of the reigning urbanism. Moreover, profiteering from
real estate projects, a key characteristic of speculative Korean urbanisation,
turned out to be the fundamental motive of both domestic and transnational
developers, despite the dominant discourses of smart urban growth (see also
Shin, Park and Sonn, forthcoming).
On the other hand, a longer trajectory of neoliberalisation in Latin America
provides a picture that can be contrasted with East Asian states. However, this
is not a story of top-down neoliberal imposition but a story of endogenous
political and economic interests engaging with global players, on their own
terms and conditions. Redeveloping slums (read slum gentrification) has
involved the workings of the state that often spearhead the changes. The story of
Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires, aforementioned, is also one which saw the
involvement of the state to eradicate shanty towns and displace local residents.
So far, for at least two decades, the southern part of Buenos Aires (La Boca, the
Barracas and Parque Patricios neighbourhoods, among others) which previously
the state paid no attention to leaving slum dwellers in
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what became their
neighbourhoods (see Rodriguez and Di Virgilio, 2016), has increasingly
witnessed the expansion of rent-seeking, culturally hip gentrification waves that
are transforming the whole central city (Herzer et al., 2015). It is also
illuminating to note that such attacks on shanty towns have historic precedents
in the city. An unexplored case of state-led gentrification already occurred in
1977 during the eradication of a shanty town in the Bajo Belgrano district: an
important reason for this state action was that the main stadium for the 1978
Football World Cup was located next to this villa miseria. Subsequently, in the
1990s and 2000s, the land was gradually redeveloped to accommodate luxury
condominiums. In this case, mega-event driven displacement and state-led,
neoliberal new-build gentrification, seem historically connected. The recent
experiences of mega-scale redevelopment in Rio de Janeiro, e.g., the ongoing
redevelopment of Zona Portuária or Porto Maravilha also demonstrate the rise
of state-led gentrification through
the sanitisation and commodification of
urban space, combined with transforming public space into exclusive
consumption space for urban elites (Queiroz Ribeiro and dos Santos Junior,
2007; Sánchez and Broudehoux, 2013).
Conclusion
As the real estate economy has become an increasingly dominant arena of
capital accumulation, and as city-making has become an increasing part of the
political ambition of governing elites, dilapidated and/or undesirable urban
spaces have become subject to eradication and further commodification.
Gentrification in this regard is a reflection of the state’s political, ideological and
economic project (Shin, forthcoming). This is the story of many countries in the
global South, which are increasingly integrated into the global circuits of capital
and people, and as such experiencing the rise of new gentrifications or localised
embryonic forms. In this chapter, we have argued that gentrification narrowly
understood in a fossilised way (e.g., gentrification equated with its classic form
in 1960s London) is not a useful barometer through which to evaluate the
experiences of other urban processes, either inside or outside of the usual
Page 15 of 24
suspects in gentrification studies. What comparative gentrification studies in
recent years have taught us is the importance of de-centring the production of
knowledge, incorporating emergent contextual discussions from elsewhere (and
as it seems, literally from everywhere), and adhering to relational perspectives
in order to understand how gentrification interacts with other locally available
processes and discourses (see also Bernt, 2016; Lees et al. 2016; López-Morales,
2016a; Shin et al., 2016; Shin, forthcoming). The de-centring of gentrification
studies requires researchers to pay more careful attention to the historicity of
urbanisation and urban contestation. It also requires researchers to accept that
gentrification may look completely different in places and societies we
researchers do not yet know about or do not understand enough about as of
now.
We conclude this chapter with a brief reflection on the construction of political
alternatives in the fight against planetary gentrification. While this chapter has
largely emphasised the workings of the state and capital in the global South, it is
also premature to simply assume that governments, developers and other state
apparatuses are the only agents of mega-gentrification. With the growing
affluence and expansion of middle classes in a number of global Southern
countries that have seen the generation of wealth by their own industrialisation
and urban-based accumulation or the transfer of surplus capital from elsewhere
(e.g., King, 2008; Koo, 1991; Lett, 1998; Tomba, 2004), it is equally important
to understand how the actions of the state-capital nexus have gained hegemony
in their respective territories, and secured consent among a faction of residents,
especially the property-owning middle classes who are attracted to securing
gains from real estate investment. Such attention to state-society relations is
particularly important, as the urban questions in the global South are hard to
detach from broader questions that emerge out of political mobilisations, which
occasionally erupt to question state legitimacy. Where the support of the middle
classes leans towards is significant in terms of how the state sustains its power
vis-à-vis wider social movements. The resulting complexities provide both
challenges and opportunities for anti-gentrification struggles in the global
Page 16 of 24
South, which in turn can never be dissociated from those struggles that play out
in the global North.
The experience of Latin American urban struggles can be illuminating in this
regard. Historically, Latin America is full of revolutionary moments in its
history, starting with the independence wars in the early 19th century, followed
by the Mexican and Cuban revolutions in the 20th century. Not only national
political movements but also urban-based social uprising and revolutionary
insurrection have also been prevalent (see Castells, 1985). Latin America is
currently seeing complex multi-scalar repertoires of social action, which are
unfolding in extremely diverse urban contexts, ranging from Santiago to Buenos
Aires to Mexico City, from disputes in micro-neighbourhoods to metropolitanlevel conflicts. At a general level, urban social movements in Latin America
show certain regularities such as class ‘recomposition’ on the one hand,
exhibiting a growing cross-class consciousness of inequality which has emerged
through spatial/local struggles against what Harvey (2010: 181) calls speculative
“landed developer interests" in cities. On the other hand, such urban social
movements display a seemingly contradictory, but much more variegated and in
many ways ‘creative,’ repertoire of protest performances, where claims are made
for space, centrality and housing as social rights, yet somewhat detached from
the language and histories of class struggle. These include the successful
struggle in Mexico City to fend off the operation of private-public urban renewal
agency as a neoliberal government apparatus, which has sought to carry out
aggressive urban redevelopment and social cleansing (López-Morales,
forthcoming), and the creative appropriation of neoliberal urban renewal
policies in Buenos Aires to secure housing loans for supporting cooperativestyle housing management and producing hundreds of low-cost, good quality
social housing units all over the southern part of the city (Rodríguez and Di
Virgilio, 2016; see also Cociña and López-Morales, forthcoming, López-Morales,
2016c). Anti-gentrification agendas increasingly occupy a central position,
contributing to the formation of political alternatives and serving as a nexus
between everyday struggles over lived space and larger social movement
Page 17 of 24
agendas. While we endeavour to locate gentrification in the global South by not
privileging the experience of Anglo-American cities, thinking of antigentrification strategies calls for the need to localise anti-gentrification fights
while bearing in mind the possibility of the generalisability of such fights for
cross-regional alliances. Thus, we consider planetary use of the concept of
gentrification as becoming more than normative.
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