This is a guest essay published on the website of the International Journal of Urban and Regional... more This is a guest essay published on the website of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, referring to the demolition of a peripheral neighborhood in Northern Casablanca, shortly after the demolition took place.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2017
In-depth studies of and attempts to theorize or conceptualize resistance to gentrification have b... more In-depth studies of and attempts to theorize or conceptualize resistance to gentrification have been somewhat sidelined by attention to the causes and effects of gentrification in the now rather extensive gentrification studies literature. Yet resistance to gentrification is growing internationally and remains a (if not the) key struggle with respect to social justice in cities worldwide. In this article, we address this gap head on by (re)asserting the value of survivability for looking at resistance to gentrifications around the globe. U.S. urban scholars have been at the forefront of writing about resistance to gentrification, especially in cities like San Francisco and New York City, but in a situation of planetary gentrification it is imperative that we learn from other examples. Critically, we argue that practices of survivability can be scaled up, down, and in between, enabling the building of further possibilities in the fight against gentrification, the fight to stay put. There needs to be a stronger and more determined international conversation on the potential of antigentrification practices worldwide and here we argue that survivability has a lot to offer these conversations.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2018
Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.-... more Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.-BOOK REVIEWS Derek Hyra 2017: Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Key to Derek Hyra's new book is the idea that Washington, DC has transitioned from being a 'chocolate city' (the first major US city to become predominantly black) to being a 'cappuccino city'. The 'cappuccino' label was applied tongue in cheek (and in retrospect ironically, given that it is now a mainstream coffee) by British sociologist Rowland Atkinson in 2003 to refer to the domestication of space caused by processes of gentrification. Hyra extends the metaphor to apply to the racial changes occurring due to gentrification in DC. The colour of gentrification is the beige of the cappuccino, referring to the in-migration of white residents into hitherto black areas; the froth of the cappuccino symbolizes the (re)imagineering of the 'ghetto' that is associated with this. One of the most important findings from the book is that black branding does not safeguard minority communities against gentrification and displacement, with implications for all sorts of black branding projects across the US and beyond.
This paper discusses ‘austerity gentrification’, austerity eviction/displacement, and resistance ... more This paper discusses ‘austerity gentrification’, austerity eviction/displacement, and resistance to them in Southern Europe during the current crisis. We focus on three cities, which until recently have barely featured in gentrification studies: Athens, Madrid and Rome. We show that eviction/displacement is being framed as a collective problem by anti-eviction/gentrification movements in Southern Europe but that more inter-class solidarity will be needed in the future. Northern European cities would do well to look at the resistance practices operating in Southern European cities.
Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 2014
I first came across research on gentrification in Norway, specifically Oslo, in 2003 when I was i... more I first came across research on gentrification in Norway, specifically Oslo, in 2003 when I was invited to give a keynote speech on 'Gentrification and the idea of social mixing' at Urbanism 2003: New Urban Cultures: gentrification and immigration, organised by the Department of Urbanism and the Norwegian Architects Association at the Oslo School of Architecture. I was one of four international speakers, the others being Robert Beauregard, Michael Pryke and Andres Duany. On hearing in some detail about the various research projects about gentrification going on in Oslo I was struck back then with the relationship between immigration and gentrification in the city. As such I began to read sociologist Tone Huse's new book Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City: on displacement, ethnic privileging, and the right to stay put based on ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo with great interest. The book is part of Ashgate's Cities and Society book series which seeks to disseminate new research that contributes to a sociological understanding of the city. And Huse's book is very successful in doing just that even if much of the literature she uses is from geography. Unlike most gentrification research which to date has been city or neighbourhood based Huse brings her lens down to the scale of a particular street-Toyen Street-a block away from Oslo's central station. The result of this smaller scaled lens is a very 'thick' and revealing ethnographical account of gentrification from below. This is scaled up then to the wider Gronland-Toyen working class, immigrant area and the stateled gentrification of Old Oslo. The study does not set out to evaluate Norwegian politicians' representation of the state-led gentrification of Old Oslo as a success story, but nevertheless the book performs just such an evaluation. It reveals the injustices that this long term process has wrought. Unlike much gentrification research Huse gives voice to both the gentrifiers and those being affected and indeed displaced by gentrification, making for a very rounded account. She explores urban change through the stories told by those experiencing gentrification first hand, stories of their 'everyday lives'. The overall result is
... In addition to the UTF report, the UWP draws on the work of the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), ... more ... In addition to the UTF report, the UWP draws on the work of the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), and on work such as The state of the English cities (DETR, 2000f). ... Smith (2002) argues that a new revanchist urbanism has replaced the liberal urban policy of cities in the ...
Introduction ~ Loretta Lees, Hyun Shin and Ernesto Lopez Part 1: South East Asia Value extraction... more Introduction ~ Loretta Lees, Hyun Shin and Ernesto Lopez Part 1: South East Asia Value extraction from land and real estate in Karachi ~ Arif Hasan Rethinking Gentrification in India: Displacement, Dispossession and the Specter of Development ~ Sapana Doshi Gentrification in China? ~ Julie Ren Promoting Private Interest by Public Hands? The Gentrification of Public Lands by Housing Policies in Taipei City ~ Liling Huang The Endogenous Dynamics of Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Seoul, South Korea ~ Seong-Kyu Ha Part 2: Africa The place of gentrification in Cape Town ~ Annika Teppo and Marianne Millstein The prospects of gentrification in downtown Cairo: artists, private investment and the neglectful state ~ Mohamed Elshahed Gentrification in Nigeria: the case of two housing estates in Lagos ~ Chinwe Nwanna Part 3: Latin America Gentrification in the city of Buenos Aires: global trends and local features ~ Hilda Herzer, Maria Mercedes Di Virgilio, Maria Carla Rodriguez Confronting Favela Chic: the Gentrification of Informal Settlements in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ~ Jake Cummings Gentrification, Neoliberalism and Loss in Puebla, Mexico ~ Gareth Jones Emerging Retail Gentrification in Santiago de Chile: the case of Italia-Caupolican ~Elke Schlack and Jon Neil Turnbull Part 4: The Middle East When Authoritarianism Embraces Gentrification - the Case of Old Damascus, Syria ~ Yannick Suderman Capital, state and conflict the various drivers of diverse gentrification processes in Beirut, Lebanon ~ Marieke Krijnen and Christiaan De Beukelaer Diverse and widespread forms of gentrification in Israel ~ Amiram Gonen City Upgraded: Redesigning and Disciplining Downtown Abu Dhabi ~Surajit Chakravarty and Abdellatif Qamhaieh Part 5: Atypical European Cases The making of, and resistance to, state-led gentrification in Istanbul, Turkey ~ Tolga Islam and Bahar Sakizlioglu Slum gentrification in Lisbon, Portugal: displacement and the imagined futures of an informal settlement ~ Eduardo Ascensao Unraveling the yarn of gentrification trends in the contested inner city of Athens ~ Georgia Alexandri Gentrification dispositifs in the historic centre of Madrid: a re-consideration of urban governmentality and state-led urban reconfiguration ~ Jorge Sequera and Michael Janoschka Afterword ~ Eric Clark.
... Liz Bondi Department of Geography University of Edinburgh Edinburgh EH8 9XP Scotland, United ... more ... Liz Bondi Department of Geography University of Edinburgh Edinburgh EH8 9XP Scotland, United Kingdom ... Early examples include Greenwich Village and SoHo in Manhattan, and Park Slope in Brooklyn, where gentrification began in the 1950s and 1960s. ...
This paper examines an incidence of fear that a resident experienced in a council tower block in ... more This paper examines an incidence of fear that a resident experienced in a council tower block in inner London. Thinking through this ‘building event’, the paper returns to earlier work that called for a move towards ‘a critical geography of architecture’ and draws on the work in so-called new geographies of architecture over the past decade. A series of arguments related to the human experience of buildings is made. Latourian actor network theory-type approaches in architectural geography are criticised for having little to say about emotion. An argument is made that the work on affect in geography needs to develop a more complex sense of human subjectivity and to take the force of the material more seriously. More generally new critical geographies of architecture are urged to attend to the theoretical, conceptual and methodological intricacies of affect/emotion, materiality, immateriality and human subjectivity.
... The fissiparous nature of urban geography was nowhere more apparent than at the 2000 Institut... more ... The fissiparous nature of urban geography was nowhere more apparent than at the 2000 Institute of British Geographer's Conference in Brighton where the RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group (UGRG) organized a session titled 'Urban geography at the millennium'. ...
The trend so far for those social scientists excited by both Marxist economic and postmodernist c... more The trend so far for those social scientists excited by both Marxist economic and postmodernist cultural interpretations has been an anarchic eclecticism. Post-Marxists such as Stanley Aronowitz (1988a; 1988b) and Scott Lash (1990a; 1990b) force Marxian analysis to conform to a ...
... Page 2. Progress in Human Geography 27,1 (2003) pp. 107-113 Urban geography: &amp... more ... Page 2. Progress in Human Geography 27,1 (2003) pp. 107-113 Urban geography: 'New' urban ... I Introduction:method and methodology in the 'new' urban geography ... But increasingly qualitativeresearch includes discursive and representational analyses . . . ...
Page 1. RESEARCH NEW ZEALAND Geographer 51 (21 1995: 32-41 Ponga, Glass and Concrete A Vision for... more Page 1. RESEARCH NEW ZEALAND Geographer 51 (21 1995: 32-41 Ponga, Glass and Concrete A Vision for Urban Socio-cultural Geography in Aotearoa/New Zealand LORETTA LEES AND LAWRENCE D. BERG ABSTRACT ...
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1995
Paris 287 around the globe. Others formulated the idea of an Atlantic Gap in the operation of gen... more Paris 287 around the globe. Others formulated the idea of an Atlantic Gap in the operation of gentrification between the 'market-orientated United States' and 'state-controlled Europe' (see also Badcock, 1993; Lees, 1994). However, Smith (1991: 57-9) suggested that 'America versus Europe' is a false dichotomy. He argued that the differences between gentrification in the United States and Europe are a matter of degree rather than kind, and proposed that 'there may be greater differences within Europe than between Europe and the US.' A process outline of gentrijkation In this paper we examine the historical, political, economic and cultural distinctions between gentrification in New York, London and Paris. In so doing, we look at the various evolutionary processes in each city which have led to a similar result, that of gentrified residential neighbourhoods. In order to do this we have devised a process model to apply to each of our three cases. This has been derived from the theoretical literature on the economic aspects of gentrification, looking at the processes of the involvement of capital in urban restructuring that have led to gentrified neighbourhoods. This is not to downplay the importance and role of gentrifiers in the process, but space prohibits a comprehensive comparison of the existence of potential gentrifiers in each city. In addition, it is commonly acknowledged that New York, London and Paris are all 'postindustrial cities' (Savitch, 1988), and so it might be reasonably assumed that the supply of gentrifiers, which Ley and others believe to be so crucial to the process, is not a problem (Ley, 1986). We justify the use of an evolutionary stage model because of the historical nature of the gentrification process and because of its suitability for comparative analysis. The concepts of disinvestment and reinvestment are crucial to an understanding of gentrification. According to Harvey (1977), an over-accumulation of capital in the 'primary circuit' of the production process prompted a switch to the 'secondary circuit' of the built environment, providing the engine of change behind the suburbanization process. These ideas were taken up in the context of gentrification by Smith (1979), who argued that cyclical patterns of disinvestment and reinvestment in the built environment determine the supply of gentrifiable housing in the inner city. As capital switches to suburban development so there is less opportunity for capital investment in the inner city; building structures age, maintenance costs rise, and eventually buildings are abandoned. This gives rise to what Smith calls the 'rent gap' in the city centrethe difference between the capitalized ground rent under present land use and the potential ground rent under a more profitable function. Actors in the land and housing market looking for locations of profitable investment, will, according to Smith, turn to the 'abandoned' inner city properties, 'once the rent gap is wide enough' (ibid.: 545). This leads to a process of reinvestment as actors capitalize on the surplus profit to be made in central neighbourhoods. Continuing in the reinvestment vein, other commentators have conceptualized the process around the idea of a 'value gap' (Hamnett and Randolph, 1984; 1986). They stress the difference between property values under tenanted, rather than owner, occupation. In periods of inflated property prices or policies favouring owner occupation, while depressing rent levels, landlords may be keen to exploit the 'value gap' by selling property on to individual owner-occupiers, thus encouraging gentrification through a conversion of tenure, and a shift upwards in residential profile. What both these structuralist approaches have in common is an emphasis on reinvestment that involves the crucial role of actors or power brokers in the urban arena. But also implicit throughout the whole process of disinvestment and reinvestment is the role of institutional finance, at different times constraining or facilitating the gentrification process, and thus the final outcome, gentrified neighbourhoods.
... conservation practices. These are illustrated with reference to two examples ofgentrification... more ... conservation practices. These are illustrated with reference to two examples ofgentrification: in Barnsbury, part of the inner London borough of Islington and in Park Slope, part of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. The analysis ...
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1999
The weaving of gentrification discourse and the boundaries of the gentrification community Synops... more The weaving of gentrification discourse and the boundaries of the gentrification community Synopsis Interest in the subject of gentrification has declined since the early 1990s when it seemed almost impossible to pick up an academic journal without encountering some discussion of the process. Despite several prominent efforts to look at gentrification anew, most of what has been published since 1994 has been summary statements culminating years of gentrification research by individual authors. In this guest editorial I take stock of gentrification as a process of academic knowledge production. In many ways the story of gentrification is one of great academic progress. From the simplistic oppositions of the polarised debates of the late 1980s, geographers have reached a consensus on the need for synthetic understandings that productively exploit the tensions between different theoretical positions (Lees, 1994; Smith, 1996). The overall trend has been one of growing analytical sophistication in academic knowledge of gentrification. This knowledge, however, has come at a price. The emerging academic consensus on gentrification—the agreement to disagree within certain recognised explanatory traditions (Redfern, 1997)—-marks the exclusion of alternative understandings of gentrification. Among urban geographers gentrification has become a somewhat closed and self-referential field of study. Gentrification studies are the province of an international, if selective, club, one that women, in particular, have found difficult to enter. Feminist geographers have begun to challenge the dominant conventions of academic practice responsible for this marginalisation. Questions about the politics of academic knowledge production can no longer be avoided.
This paper argues that an architectural geography should be about more than just representation. ... more This paper argues that an architectural geography should be about more than just representation. For both as a practice and a product architecture is performative in the sense that it involves ongoing social practices through which space is continually shaped and inhabited. I examine previous geographies of architecture from the Berkeley School to political semiotics, and argue that geographers have had relatively little to say about the practical and affective or ‘nonrepresentational’ import of architecture. I use the controversy over Vancouver’s new Public Library building as a springboard for considering how we might conceive of a more critical and politically progressive geography of architecture. The library’s Colosseum design recalls the origins of western civilization, and is seen by some Vancouverites to be an insensitive representation of a multicultural city of the Pacific. I seek to push geographers beyond this contemplative framing of architectural form towards a more active and embodied engagement with the lived building.
Two 'real' attempts that have been made to engage geography with everyday struggles are considere... more Two 'real' attempts that have been made to engage geography with everyday struggles are considered in the light of the critical geography movement. first, my experiences of an anti-gentrification workshop at the Inaugural International Conference on Criticai Geography in Vancouver, Canada. Second, my experiences in speaking about a research project 'outside' the academy, through the media. These attempts illustrate that geographers may be overestimating the particular expertise and experience that we bring to the table. Stepping out of our so-called 'ivory towers' is but the first step in what can only be called an educational journey.
This is a guest essay published on the website of the International Journal of Urban and Regional... more This is a guest essay published on the website of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, referring to the demolition of a peripheral neighborhood in Northern Casablanca, shortly after the demolition took place.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2017
In-depth studies of and attempts to theorize or conceptualize resistance to gentrification have b... more In-depth studies of and attempts to theorize or conceptualize resistance to gentrification have been somewhat sidelined by attention to the causes and effects of gentrification in the now rather extensive gentrification studies literature. Yet resistance to gentrification is growing internationally and remains a (if not the) key struggle with respect to social justice in cities worldwide. In this article, we address this gap head on by (re)asserting the value of survivability for looking at resistance to gentrifications around the globe. U.S. urban scholars have been at the forefront of writing about resistance to gentrification, especially in cities like San Francisco and New York City, but in a situation of planetary gentrification it is imperative that we learn from other examples. Critically, we argue that practices of survivability can be scaled up, down, and in between, enabling the building of further possibilities in the fight against gentrification, the fight to stay put. There needs to be a stronger and more determined international conversation on the potential of antigentrification practices worldwide and here we argue that survivability has a lot to offer these conversations.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2018
Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.-... more Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.-BOOK REVIEWS Derek Hyra 2017: Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Key to Derek Hyra's new book is the idea that Washington, DC has transitioned from being a 'chocolate city' (the first major US city to become predominantly black) to being a 'cappuccino city'. The 'cappuccino' label was applied tongue in cheek (and in retrospect ironically, given that it is now a mainstream coffee) by British sociologist Rowland Atkinson in 2003 to refer to the domestication of space caused by processes of gentrification. Hyra extends the metaphor to apply to the racial changes occurring due to gentrification in DC. The colour of gentrification is the beige of the cappuccino, referring to the in-migration of white residents into hitherto black areas; the froth of the cappuccino symbolizes the (re)imagineering of the 'ghetto' that is associated with this. One of the most important findings from the book is that black branding does not safeguard minority communities against gentrification and displacement, with implications for all sorts of black branding projects across the US and beyond.
This paper discusses ‘austerity gentrification’, austerity eviction/displacement, and resistance ... more This paper discusses ‘austerity gentrification’, austerity eviction/displacement, and resistance to them in Southern Europe during the current crisis. We focus on three cities, which until recently have barely featured in gentrification studies: Athens, Madrid and Rome. We show that eviction/displacement is being framed as a collective problem by anti-eviction/gentrification movements in Southern Europe but that more inter-class solidarity will be needed in the future. Northern European cities would do well to look at the resistance practices operating in Southern European cities.
Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 2014
I first came across research on gentrification in Norway, specifically Oslo, in 2003 when I was i... more I first came across research on gentrification in Norway, specifically Oslo, in 2003 when I was invited to give a keynote speech on 'Gentrification and the idea of social mixing' at Urbanism 2003: New Urban Cultures: gentrification and immigration, organised by the Department of Urbanism and the Norwegian Architects Association at the Oslo School of Architecture. I was one of four international speakers, the others being Robert Beauregard, Michael Pryke and Andres Duany. On hearing in some detail about the various research projects about gentrification going on in Oslo I was struck back then with the relationship between immigration and gentrification in the city. As such I began to read sociologist Tone Huse's new book Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City: on displacement, ethnic privileging, and the right to stay put based on ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo with great interest. The book is part of Ashgate's Cities and Society book series which seeks to disseminate new research that contributes to a sociological understanding of the city. And Huse's book is very successful in doing just that even if much of the literature she uses is from geography. Unlike most gentrification research which to date has been city or neighbourhood based Huse brings her lens down to the scale of a particular street-Toyen Street-a block away from Oslo's central station. The result of this smaller scaled lens is a very 'thick' and revealing ethnographical account of gentrification from below. This is scaled up then to the wider Gronland-Toyen working class, immigrant area and the stateled gentrification of Old Oslo. The study does not set out to evaluate Norwegian politicians' representation of the state-led gentrification of Old Oslo as a success story, but nevertheless the book performs just such an evaluation. It reveals the injustices that this long term process has wrought. Unlike much gentrification research Huse gives voice to both the gentrifiers and those being affected and indeed displaced by gentrification, making for a very rounded account. She explores urban change through the stories told by those experiencing gentrification first hand, stories of their 'everyday lives'. The overall result is
... In addition to the UTF report, the UWP draws on the work of the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), ... more ... In addition to the UTF report, the UWP draws on the work of the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), and on work such as The state of the English cities (DETR, 2000f). ... Smith (2002) argues that a new revanchist urbanism has replaced the liberal urban policy of cities in the ...
Introduction ~ Loretta Lees, Hyun Shin and Ernesto Lopez Part 1: South East Asia Value extraction... more Introduction ~ Loretta Lees, Hyun Shin and Ernesto Lopez Part 1: South East Asia Value extraction from land and real estate in Karachi ~ Arif Hasan Rethinking Gentrification in India: Displacement, Dispossession and the Specter of Development ~ Sapana Doshi Gentrification in China? ~ Julie Ren Promoting Private Interest by Public Hands? The Gentrification of Public Lands by Housing Policies in Taipei City ~ Liling Huang The Endogenous Dynamics of Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Seoul, South Korea ~ Seong-Kyu Ha Part 2: Africa The place of gentrification in Cape Town ~ Annika Teppo and Marianne Millstein The prospects of gentrification in downtown Cairo: artists, private investment and the neglectful state ~ Mohamed Elshahed Gentrification in Nigeria: the case of two housing estates in Lagos ~ Chinwe Nwanna Part 3: Latin America Gentrification in the city of Buenos Aires: global trends and local features ~ Hilda Herzer, Maria Mercedes Di Virgilio, Maria Carla Rodriguez Confronting Favela Chic: the Gentrification of Informal Settlements in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ~ Jake Cummings Gentrification, Neoliberalism and Loss in Puebla, Mexico ~ Gareth Jones Emerging Retail Gentrification in Santiago de Chile: the case of Italia-Caupolican ~Elke Schlack and Jon Neil Turnbull Part 4: The Middle East When Authoritarianism Embraces Gentrification - the Case of Old Damascus, Syria ~ Yannick Suderman Capital, state and conflict the various drivers of diverse gentrification processes in Beirut, Lebanon ~ Marieke Krijnen and Christiaan De Beukelaer Diverse and widespread forms of gentrification in Israel ~ Amiram Gonen City Upgraded: Redesigning and Disciplining Downtown Abu Dhabi ~Surajit Chakravarty and Abdellatif Qamhaieh Part 5: Atypical European Cases The making of, and resistance to, state-led gentrification in Istanbul, Turkey ~ Tolga Islam and Bahar Sakizlioglu Slum gentrification in Lisbon, Portugal: displacement and the imagined futures of an informal settlement ~ Eduardo Ascensao Unraveling the yarn of gentrification trends in the contested inner city of Athens ~ Georgia Alexandri Gentrification dispositifs in the historic centre of Madrid: a re-consideration of urban governmentality and state-led urban reconfiguration ~ Jorge Sequera and Michael Janoschka Afterword ~ Eric Clark.
... Liz Bondi Department of Geography University of Edinburgh Edinburgh EH8 9XP Scotland, United ... more ... Liz Bondi Department of Geography University of Edinburgh Edinburgh EH8 9XP Scotland, United Kingdom ... Early examples include Greenwich Village and SoHo in Manhattan, and Park Slope in Brooklyn, where gentrification began in the 1950s and 1960s. ...
This paper examines an incidence of fear that a resident experienced in a council tower block in ... more This paper examines an incidence of fear that a resident experienced in a council tower block in inner London. Thinking through this ‘building event’, the paper returns to earlier work that called for a move towards ‘a critical geography of architecture’ and draws on the work in so-called new geographies of architecture over the past decade. A series of arguments related to the human experience of buildings is made. Latourian actor network theory-type approaches in architectural geography are criticised for having little to say about emotion. An argument is made that the work on affect in geography needs to develop a more complex sense of human subjectivity and to take the force of the material more seriously. More generally new critical geographies of architecture are urged to attend to the theoretical, conceptual and methodological intricacies of affect/emotion, materiality, immateriality and human subjectivity.
... The fissiparous nature of urban geography was nowhere more apparent than at the 2000 Institut... more ... The fissiparous nature of urban geography was nowhere more apparent than at the 2000 Institute of British Geographer's Conference in Brighton where the RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group (UGRG) organized a session titled 'Urban geography at the millennium'. ...
The trend so far for those social scientists excited by both Marxist economic and postmodernist c... more The trend so far for those social scientists excited by both Marxist economic and postmodernist cultural interpretations has been an anarchic eclecticism. Post-Marxists such as Stanley Aronowitz (1988a; 1988b) and Scott Lash (1990a; 1990b) force Marxian analysis to conform to a ...
... Page 2. Progress in Human Geography 27,1 (2003) pp. 107-113 Urban geography: &amp... more ... Page 2. Progress in Human Geography 27,1 (2003) pp. 107-113 Urban geography: 'New' urban ... I Introduction:method and methodology in the 'new' urban geography ... But increasingly qualitativeresearch includes discursive and representational analyses . . . ...
Page 1. RESEARCH NEW ZEALAND Geographer 51 (21 1995: 32-41 Ponga, Glass and Concrete A Vision for... more Page 1. RESEARCH NEW ZEALAND Geographer 51 (21 1995: 32-41 Ponga, Glass and Concrete A Vision for Urban Socio-cultural Geography in Aotearoa/New Zealand LORETTA LEES AND LAWRENCE D. BERG ABSTRACT ...
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1995
Paris 287 around the globe. Others formulated the idea of an Atlantic Gap in the operation of gen... more Paris 287 around the globe. Others formulated the idea of an Atlantic Gap in the operation of gentrification between the 'market-orientated United States' and 'state-controlled Europe' (see also Badcock, 1993; Lees, 1994). However, Smith (1991: 57-9) suggested that 'America versus Europe' is a false dichotomy. He argued that the differences between gentrification in the United States and Europe are a matter of degree rather than kind, and proposed that 'there may be greater differences within Europe than between Europe and the US.' A process outline of gentrijkation In this paper we examine the historical, political, economic and cultural distinctions between gentrification in New York, London and Paris. In so doing, we look at the various evolutionary processes in each city which have led to a similar result, that of gentrified residential neighbourhoods. In order to do this we have devised a process model to apply to each of our three cases. This has been derived from the theoretical literature on the economic aspects of gentrification, looking at the processes of the involvement of capital in urban restructuring that have led to gentrified neighbourhoods. This is not to downplay the importance and role of gentrifiers in the process, but space prohibits a comprehensive comparison of the existence of potential gentrifiers in each city. In addition, it is commonly acknowledged that New York, London and Paris are all 'postindustrial cities' (Savitch, 1988), and so it might be reasonably assumed that the supply of gentrifiers, which Ley and others believe to be so crucial to the process, is not a problem (Ley, 1986). We justify the use of an evolutionary stage model because of the historical nature of the gentrification process and because of its suitability for comparative analysis. The concepts of disinvestment and reinvestment are crucial to an understanding of gentrification. According to Harvey (1977), an over-accumulation of capital in the 'primary circuit' of the production process prompted a switch to the 'secondary circuit' of the built environment, providing the engine of change behind the suburbanization process. These ideas were taken up in the context of gentrification by Smith (1979), who argued that cyclical patterns of disinvestment and reinvestment in the built environment determine the supply of gentrifiable housing in the inner city. As capital switches to suburban development so there is less opportunity for capital investment in the inner city; building structures age, maintenance costs rise, and eventually buildings are abandoned. This gives rise to what Smith calls the 'rent gap' in the city centrethe difference between the capitalized ground rent under present land use and the potential ground rent under a more profitable function. Actors in the land and housing market looking for locations of profitable investment, will, according to Smith, turn to the 'abandoned' inner city properties, 'once the rent gap is wide enough' (ibid.: 545). This leads to a process of reinvestment as actors capitalize on the surplus profit to be made in central neighbourhoods. Continuing in the reinvestment vein, other commentators have conceptualized the process around the idea of a 'value gap' (Hamnett and Randolph, 1984; 1986). They stress the difference between property values under tenanted, rather than owner, occupation. In periods of inflated property prices or policies favouring owner occupation, while depressing rent levels, landlords may be keen to exploit the 'value gap' by selling property on to individual owner-occupiers, thus encouraging gentrification through a conversion of tenure, and a shift upwards in residential profile. What both these structuralist approaches have in common is an emphasis on reinvestment that involves the crucial role of actors or power brokers in the urban arena. But also implicit throughout the whole process of disinvestment and reinvestment is the role of institutional finance, at different times constraining or facilitating the gentrification process, and thus the final outcome, gentrified neighbourhoods.
... conservation practices. These are illustrated with reference to two examples ofgentrification... more ... conservation practices. These are illustrated with reference to two examples ofgentrification: in Barnsbury, part of the inner London borough of Islington and in Park Slope, part of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. The analysis ...
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1999
The weaving of gentrification discourse and the boundaries of the gentrification community Synops... more The weaving of gentrification discourse and the boundaries of the gentrification community Synopsis Interest in the subject of gentrification has declined since the early 1990s when it seemed almost impossible to pick up an academic journal without encountering some discussion of the process. Despite several prominent efforts to look at gentrification anew, most of what has been published since 1994 has been summary statements culminating years of gentrification research by individual authors. In this guest editorial I take stock of gentrification as a process of academic knowledge production. In many ways the story of gentrification is one of great academic progress. From the simplistic oppositions of the polarised debates of the late 1980s, geographers have reached a consensus on the need for synthetic understandings that productively exploit the tensions between different theoretical positions (Lees, 1994; Smith, 1996). The overall trend has been one of growing analytical sophistication in academic knowledge of gentrification. This knowledge, however, has come at a price. The emerging academic consensus on gentrification—the agreement to disagree within certain recognised explanatory traditions (Redfern, 1997)—-marks the exclusion of alternative understandings of gentrification. Among urban geographers gentrification has become a somewhat closed and self-referential field of study. Gentrification studies are the province of an international, if selective, club, one that women, in particular, have found difficult to enter. Feminist geographers have begun to challenge the dominant conventions of academic practice responsible for this marginalisation. Questions about the politics of academic knowledge production can no longer be avoided.
This paper argues that an architectural geography should be about more than just representation. ... more This paper argues that an architectural geography should be about more than just representation. For both as a practice and a product architecture is performative in the sense that it involves ongoing social practices through which space is continually shaped and inhabited. I examine previous geographies of architecture from the Berkeley School to political semiotics, and argue that geographers have had relatively little to say about the practical and affective or ‘nonrepresentational’ import of architecture. I use the controversy over Vancouver’s new Public Library building as a springboard for considering how we might conceive of a more critical and politically progressive geography of architecture. The library’s Colosseum design recalls the origins of western civilization, and is seen by some Vancouverites to be an insensitive representation of a multicultural city of the Pacific. I seek to push geographers beyond this contemplative framing of architectural form towards a more active and embodied engagement with the lived building.
Two 'real' attempts that have been made to engage geography with everyday struggles are considere... more Two 'real' attempts that have been made to engage geography with everyday struggles are considered in the light of the critical geography movement. first, my experiences of an anti-gentrification workshop at the Inaugural International Conference on Criticai Geography in Vancouver, Canada. Second, my experiences in speaking about a research project 'outside' the academy, through the media. These attempts illustrate that geographers may be overestimating the particular expertise and experience that we bring to the table. Stepping out of our so-called 'ivory towers' is but the first step in what can only be called an educational journey.
Uploads
Papers by Loretta Lees