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INTRODUCTION

While the evolution of gentrification may contain few surprises, the scale of its most recent results . does represent an extraordinary new departure. Gentrification can be seen as a simple class (and sometimes race) retaking of the city, but it has a much broader significance. It simultaneously involves a certain economic excommunication of working class people from their communities. Gentrification represents a nexus of class memory with contemporary social violence. Just as capital and culture have become quintessentially global, class and politics are also global. Gentrification, as a class conquest of the city, is one of the touchstones of that recognition today and its globalisation requires a global response. (Smith, 2009: 25) The cover illustration for this Reader is by a New York City artist, Stevenson Estime, it is a collage on wood titled 'Gentrification'. Estime, the son of Haitian immigrants, grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1970s-1990s. He saw his neighbourhood (in the West 90s) change before his eyes, as zoning laws were changed and developers who owned tenements and row houses were given tax breaks to tear them down and build high rise condominiums in their place. The city mandated that within these new high rises 5% of apartments be reserved for low to mid-income families. So, in a building with 1 00 apartments, five of them were reserved for low to mid-income families. This change in housing regulations and zoning laws guaranteed that the children of parents who lived on the Upper West Side, like Estime, would no longer be able to afford the new fees and rents in the neighbourhood they grew up in, forcing large generations and groups of low to middle income people to move to other, less desirable neighbourhoods and boroughs. The Upper West Side became homogeneous and the island of Manhattan turned into 'a big mall' of consumption and wealth that erased racial, ethnic, and class diversity. The majority of people that Estime grew up with moved away, while young urban professionals - 'yuppies' - moved in. Prices for goods and services (and places to live) escalated rapidly, gradually making Manhattan into an enclave for the wealthy. Artists, writers, actors and musicians had to find other places to live. Gentrification like this occurred all over the city and even in some of the suburbs close to the city. Neighbourhoods that were once associated with the cutting-edge of emerging trends in art and creativity - like SoHo and the Lower East Side - became impossibly expensive for working artists or other creative types. Developers even built condos next to city housing projects: For 1 0 years I lived in a housing project and watched as condos emerged next to them. Now, urban kids are living in the backdrop of the new young urban professional. This concept and actuality was the impetus for the image, Gentrification. (Interview with Estime, July 2009)

INTRODUCTION

Estime's image, although it plays off very problematic stereotypes of race and class - white yuppies and black gang bangers- captures well a number of the contemporary features about 'gentrification '. It symbolises the process as 'the new urban colonialism': Contemporary gentrification has elements of colonialism as a cultural force in its privileging of whiteness, as well as the more class-based identities and preferences in urban living. In fact not only are the new middle class gentrifiers predominantly white but the aesthetic and cultural aspects of the process assert a white Anglo appropriation of urban space and urban history. The colonial aspects of gentrification are also evident through the universalising of certain forms of (de)regulation. There is the obvious spread of market discipline, such as the privatisation of housing markets in ex-communist countries for example. The neighbourhood transitions that result are accompanied, or indeed sometimes led by, an expansionist nee-liberalism in public policy that often accentuates the social divisions between gentrifiers and the displaced .. . these policies have resulted in a kind of neo-colonialism in the US context. (Atkinson and Bridge, 2005: 2) This neo-colonialism is nowhere more evident than in the gentrification and market-driven ethnic cleansing of parts of inner city New Orleans, post-Katrina, by the HOPE VI program , a visceral process that Lees, Slater and Vfyly (2008), in the partner text to this Reader, discuss as a 'fourth wave' of gentrification (pp. 185-187). In the UK this new urban colonialism, embedded in government policy on social mixing and the urban renaissance (see Lees, 2008), seeks to socially cleanse British city centres, what Wacquant (2008: 199) calls the 'literal and figurative effacing of the proletariat in the city .. . '.In London the Aylesbury Estate - the largest social housing estate in Europe - is in the process of being demolished, as is its low income, ethnically and socially mixed community of council tenants, right-to-buy tenants, and asylum seekers, and being rebuilt as 'socially mixed' housing. On the day after New Labour's general election victory in 1997 Tony Blair made a surprise visit to the Aylesbury where he made a speech highlighting the estate's residents as Britain's 'poorest' and the 'forgotten'; many of whom 'play[ed] no formal role in the economy and were dependent on benefits' (Blair, 2007) . Very quickly afterwards the Aylesbury was given New Deal for Communities status and studies began on how the estate could be redeveloped. They

Plate 2 The Aylesbury Estate, London, awaiting demolition to make way for a new 'mixed income' development. Photograph by Loretta Lees.

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were given 56.2m over 10 years in order to lever in a further 400m as part of stock transfer to housing association tenure. But the local community rejected the stock transfer of the Aylesbury from Southwark Council in December 2001 because for the most part they were satisfied with their estate. But Southwark Council decided that the estate was too expensive to refurbish and that demolition was the most cost effective solution. They set about persuading the tenants that the estate was structurally unsound and .em_olis !QW;-cos: work~ng not a pleasant place to live. As Chris Allen (2008: 8, see also 117) sa class houses in order' lb l'ftftltf 'high value' 'products' that middle class people will allegedly buy 'violates a whole way of working class "being" towards houses (place to dwell rather than position within the space of positions)'. The Guardian newspaper's Matt Weaver (22 September 2005) has said: 'If the tenants are p1 ' not being socially cleansed, they are being treated like Another example of gentrification as a form o neo-colonialis that fits well with the cover image acial stere pes) is the case of the Aragon Tower 'Gentrification' by Stevenson Estime (although not t on the Pepys Estate in Deptford, London. Aragon Tower was the focus of a 2007 BBC1 documentary series The Tower that charted Lewisham Council selling off this council tower block to the private developer Berkeley Homes for over 10 million, cashing in on its proximity to the Square Mile. The BBC followed its subsequent redevelopment as the Z Apartments. This gentrified towerblock is not a classically gentrified historic property- a Georgian or Victorian house, it is a modernist building that was built between 1961 and 1963. It has not been renovated to highlight its prior architectural and aesthetic state, instead it has been re-clad to cover over its old aesthetic. The stereotypical council tower block grey pebbledash has been replaced by a cool, metallic blue finish, so that the high-rise now glows day and night, the lights of the City reflected both on its own walls and in the river Thames flowing below. But neither is it strictly newbuild gentrification, although it does incorporate an element of this in the five newly built floors, including 14 penthouse units that have been added to the top of the high rise, making it, at least for the moment, the tallest privately owned residential tower block in London at 29 storeys (see Davidson and Lees, 2010, on the Z Apartments as a hybrid form of gentrification). What it does represent, however, is gentrification in

Plate 3 The Z Apartments, Deptford, London. Photograph by Loretta Lees.

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London's New 'Gold Coast' - The Montevetro, Battersea, London. Photograph by Loretta Lees.

the C21 st. It embodies the key economic forces of gentrificatio . A rent gap the council could not afford the upkeep nor to renovate a high rise undermined by years of disinvestment. Reinvestment: a private developer saw an opportunity to create a prestigious building facing Canary Wharf. The existence of a rent gap here is the function of gentrification elsewhere in inner London. The low income council tenants (made up of many different races/ethnicities) were moved out (direct displacement) and middle income owner-occupiers (again made up of many different races/ethnicities) moved in, the tower block was gated and a security guard installed to protect the residents and their cars. High living in a council owned tower block is stigmatized, living in a privately rented or owned tower block is the ultimate in urban chic. Berkeley Homes' PR blurb says that the new Z apartments, as they are now known, offer 'not only some of the best views in the capital but also stylish, light-flooded interiors and a specification providing the ultimate in high-rise living, style and sophistication'. In a recent study of social housing reform in the London borough of Lewisham, Stone (2003) has argued that what has happened at Aragon Tower cannot be divorced from the coincidences of location and d isinvestment: ' mhose being demolished do happen to be amongst those closest to river, the area most amenable of cou rse to gentrification. Not unrelated, of three Pepys tower blocks the one right on the river, Aragon Tower, has had its tenants "decanted" (relocated) and has been sold to a private developer' (p. 50). Stone also recognizes that the cooperation of state and capital, a marker of third wave gentrification (see Hackworth and Smith, 2001 ), has been pivotal in the gentrifying redevelopment of Aragon Tower: '[R]esident leaders and activists understandably are disturbed not only by the social consequences of the activities, but what they regard as the secrecy with which decisions have been made' (p. 50). Lez Brooke, who worked as a children's clown, had lived in the high rise, once described by the residents as a vertical village, for 20 years, and was the last resident to move out. He was a leaseholder, had brought up his daughter there and seen his granddaughter born there. He didn 't want to move out. He was offered a less than market value buy back from the Council, which he rejected. Eventually the Council threatened him with an eviction order (classic gentrification induced displacement) but he finally sold out at market value after hiring a solicitor to argue his case (The Telegraph, 13/11 /2004) . The shock waves of directly displacing the inhabitants of 144 flats, many of them families, are still being felt. In similar vein, the gold cover image (of the financial district in Lower Manhattan, New York City) of our partner core text (Lees, Slater and Wyly , 2008, see inside cover) connects to the Thames-side redevelopment around Aragon Tower facing Canary Wharf in London . The gold colour and the waterfront view across Governors Island on the Gentrification book cover symbolizes the irony of gentrification as 'the new Gold Coast' (see also Plate 4) . For in the Park-Burgess model of urban residential location the gold coast was the area near the loop that contained the wealthiest residents next to some of the

INTRODUCTION

poorest residents in the city (see also Zorbaugh's 1929, The Gold Coast and the Slum) . But where Park and Burgess believed that the affluent would be at the forefront of moves out of the city, gentrification challenged the historical specificity of these traditional ecological models of residential location (see Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2008: xvi) in that the affluent were seen to move back to the city through a process of gentrification. The 'back to the city' myth was later shattered by gentrification researchers, who found that gentrifiers had mostly moved from elsewhere in the city and had instead chosen not to move out to the suburbs. Neil Smith's (1979) seminal paper: 'Toward a theory of gentrification : a back to the city movement by capital, not people' illustrates this well (see Chapter 9 of this Reader) . Gentrification began as a small-scale urban process, pioneered by a new liberal middle class but in which the state was involved from the beginning, to become a mass-produced, state-led process around the world, what Neil Smith calls 'a global urban strategy'. Its history, its progress from being a marginal urban process to becoming a mainstream urban process, is an interesting one given that many of the pro-gentrification policies today draw on the ideologies of pioneer gentrifiers (see Lees, 2008). Before looking a little more at that history we begin by offering a useful definition of gentrification.

DEFINING GENTRIFICATION
Gentrification -the transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the central city into middle-class residential or commercial use. (Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2008 : xv) We have provided detailed summaries of the various definitions of gentrification in the core text that is the partner of this Reader- Gentrification (Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2008). We do not want to rehearse these here and, more to the point, Chapter 1 of this Reader considers definitions of gentrification. Rather we begin here with a recent descriptive summary of the process of gentrification, one that also outlines well our political stance on this process : Gentrification, to put it bluntly and simply, involves both the exploitation of the economic value of real estate and the treatment of local residents as objects rather than the subjects of upgrading. Even though population movement is a common feature of cities, gentrification is specifically the replacement of a less affluent group by a wealthier social group - a definition which relates gentrification to class. Whether a result of city council policies or real estate pressures, gentrification stands in contrast to earlier attempts to improve deprived neighbourhoods by addressing the built environment, the central objective of urban renewal up until the 1970s. More recently, the betterment of deprived neighbourhoods has taken a completely different form as the improvement of living conditions is no longer considered the task of the state ('to enlighten the masses'), but rather a side effect of the development and emancipation of the higher and middle classes. The state seems to have acknowledged its inability to influence the welfare of its residents directly and has left that task to the workings of the supposedly objective agency of the market. Gentrification has become a means of solving social malaise, not by providing solutions to unemployment, poverty, or broken homes, but by transferring the problem elsewhere, out of sight, and consequently also geographically marginalising the urban poor and ensuring their economic location and political irrelevance. (Berg , Kaminer, Schoonderbeek and Zonneveld , 2009 Houses in Transformation: Interventions in European Gentrification) Unlike other Readers which do not offer up a favoured view of their subject, in this one we do, because the Reader is partnered with a text that is undeniably political and challenges its 'readers to think critically about the gentrification process' (Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2008: xxii) and to weigh up arguments and debates. Although we advocate 'a critical geography of gentrification, one that follows a social justice agenda and one that is focused on resisting gentrification where necessary' (p. xxiii) this does not mean that we have excluded writings that we disagree with ; on the contrary, it is important to include these writings to demonstrate the academic battles (theoretical, conceptual and political) that have been fought over gentrification. Following Clark (2005) we argue that a definition of gentrification should include the root causes of gentrification, which he sees to be 'commodification of space, polarised power relations, and a dominance

INTRODUCTION

of vision oversight characteristic of "the vagrant sovereign"' (p. 261; see Chapter 4 in the Reader). As we state in Lees, Slater and Wyly (2008) the term needs to be elastic enough to allow new processes of gentrification which may yet emerge to be drawn under its umbrella, for as Smith (2009: 1 7) says: 'it is hardly surprising that over nearly half a century the process of gentrification has transformed significantly .... the larger urban-global context is part of the story in the sense that the contemporary city is very different from that of the 1960s'. And at the same time a definition needs to be able to make political statements. Davidson and Lees (2005) have put forward the following definition of gentrification, a definition that focused on the core elements of the process, one that is not attached to a particular landscape or contextallowing other forms of gentrification (such as rural, etc., see Chapter 32 in the Reader) currency: 1. 2. 3. 4. reinvestment of capital social upgrading of locale by incoming high income groups landscape change direct or indirect displacement of low income groups.

GENTRIFICATION - ITS HISTORIES AND TRAJECTORIES


The writings that have been selected for inclusion in this Reader are culled from nearly a half century of monographs, journal articles and edited book chapters on the process of gentrification. The time line ranges from 1964, when the British sociologist Ruth Glass was first seen to use the term 'gentrification ' in a book about urban and social change in London, to recent writings on the process. This time line follows the histori es and trajectories of this process as it moved from classic or first wave gentrification to second wave gentrifi cation, to third wave or post-recession gentrification and into a fourth wave of gentrification. The time line also follows the geographical expansion of gentrification beyond the inner city to rural areas and the suburbs, and from Anglo-American cities to cities all around the world, including Less Developed W orl d cities and ex-socialist/communist cities. Of particular relevance given the current global economic recession the time line also includes debates about the end of gentrification, especially those that surfaced during the recession of the early 1990s (see Chapter 7). These debates have some resonance for thinking about both the fate of gentrification in the current recession (see Lees, 2009) and the future of gentrification (see Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2008: Chapter 7). Smith (2009: 25) has some useful words on th is: Yet the global economic recession that set in during 2007-2008, triggered by the home-mortgage meltdown in the US and exploding in the global debt and financial markets, will have predictable effects. Before the 1980s gentrification was effectively counter-cyclical, or at least unperturbed by economic cycles, but as it became more systemic, gentrification became highly susceptible to the cyclical movements of the wider market. A lot hinges on the economic power taken by, or allowed to, the state. The contentious 2008 bailout of Wall Street marks a denouement of a neo-liberal ideology, if not necessarily neo-liberalism per se. The state has finally revealed itself as a central puppeteer of neo-liberalism. Although not itself a gentrification measure, this and related international bailouts will have the effect sooner or later - of enhancing the gentrification market. One final point is worth mentioning about the histories and trajectories of gentrification. Caroline Mills (see Chapter 1 6 in the Reader) was already arguing that the process of gentrification had gone mainstream back in 1988: ... Just as blue jeans became the international uniform of the new class .. . so gentrified housing became its international neighbourhood .. . Ironically, as blue jeans turned into a new conformity, so does the landscape distinctiveness of the gentrified neighbourhood. (p. 186) Yet it was not really until the late 1990s/early 2000s that gentrification was viewed in both academia and the wider world as a mainstream urban process. The result of this is that authors are only now beginning

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to realize that to some degree the original distinction between the marginal process of gentrification and the hegemonic process of suburbanization has begun to blur: Gentrification at the center and sprawl at the edge have been flipsides of the same coin. In a typically paradoxical situation, no matter how much the new, more affluent residents profess to like the 'gritty' urban character of the place, so different in their minds to the subdivision of the far suburbs, what makes the neighbourhood attractive today are less the things that are traditionally urban but those that are not. The most important of these are sharply lowered population densities, fewer poor residents, less manufacturing activity, and the things that the Lower East Side finally shares with suburbs: reliable plumbing, supermarkets with good produce, and a substantial cohort of middle-class residents. (Bruegmann, 2006: 4) New forms of gentrification, such as new-build gentrification and super-gentrification, reveal these suburban slippages into gentrification - from the suburbanized back yards of super-gentrifiers homes in Brooklyn Heights, New York City (see Lees, 2003) to the gated developments and fearful relationship that new-build gentrifiers in Docklands, London, have to the socially mixed environment of inner London (Butler, 2007). Butler (2007: 177) argues that the aspirations of the new-build gentrifiers that he interviewed in London's Docklands echo not those of the gentrifier but those of the classic 'suburbanizer' - 'to be near but not in or of the city' . This just serves to reinforce the opening point about gentrification as a form of neo-colonialism. Future work on gentrification needs to be much more attuned to the fact that gentrification is now mainstream and to the idiosyncracies of this fact.

The Gentrification Reader and the core text Gentrification


This Reader is linked to the core text - Gentrification - which we published in 2008. The best way to describe these two books is as partners - not strictly married but designed to live side by side with each other, each enhancing and embracing the other. Although designed to be partners both of these books are also free standing. Whereas Gentrification offers a comprehensive text on the forty year plus history of gentrification, outlines the main theoretical debates, and provides detailed case studies as exemplars, The Gentrification Reader allows the reader to consider relevant essays on gentrification that are discussed or referred to in the text book. Unlike many of the Readers that are published these days we have chosen to reprint the vast majority of the chosen readings in full. Only a handful of the forty readings are excerpts. As a result, readers do not have to go off and search for the originals to get the full journal article or book chapter, as such this is an invaluable collection for any course or research on gentrification. Our editorial goals are to present a collection of the most original, the most important, the most cited, the most provocative, the most useful, the most informative, writings on gentrification. We have chosen classic writings that moved debates on gentrification forward , controversial writings associated with the so-called 'gentrification battleground', and writings that have forced many observers to think more deeply and indeed politically about this urban process. Given word limits we feel that we provide here as comprehensive a Reader as possible on gentrification. While word limits forced us to omit many important readings, we have referred to those contributions in various parts of the book, and in Box 1 we provide a list of monographs and edited collections on gentrification for our readers to survey. And there will always be some who will contest our choices. It is also worth pointing out that the readings here were all published in English. There are of course many writings on gentrification that have been published in French, German, Spanish and indeed in a large number of other languages too. It is very important that these non-English language accounts are heard by English speakers and vice versa, but such a task is beyond the remit of this Reader. Along with academic geographers the Reader includes contributions by sociologists, anthropologists, urban planners, policy analysts and those who write more broadly in urban studies and housing studies. This is in recognition that gentrification is an interdisciplinary field. As such the Reader should have broad appeal across the breadth of the social sciences. This interdisciplinarity is important because it shows the reader how geographers have learnt from sociologists and vice versa, and how a very specific subject - that

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of gentrification - has allowed different disciplines to talk to each other and blurred these disciplinary boundaries. The spatialization (drawing on ideas about space and spatiality from geography) of sociological accounts of gentrification, as seen in Butler with Robson (2003), illustrates this well. One thing that we strive to do in this Reader is to address some of the limitations of the core text Gen trification, in particular we seek to consider the issue and ideas about displacement in more detail. Displacement received much less attention than it should have in our core text (see Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2008: 21 7-221 ), we address this imbalance through Part 4 of the Reader, which focuses explicitly on displacement. In so doing we reprint Peter Marcuse's seminal work on displacement (Chapter 26), work that is of increasing relevance today, especially in the recent debates over gentrification versus reurbanization (see Rerat, Soderstrom and Piguet, 201 0). In Chapter 7 of the Reader we also add to and update our discussion of resisting gentrification reprinting (Chapter 37) and revisiting (via Kathe Newman and Elvin Wyly, Chapter 38 ) Chester Hartman's 'The right to stay put' and excerpting the conclusion of a very long document by The Urban Institute (2006) - In the face of gentrification: case studies of local efforts to mitigate displacement (our final chapter 40). We also reprint in Chapter 7 an article that has stimulated discussion about how academics research and write about gentrification (Tom Slater's The eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research , Chapter 39) indeed how some of the writing on gentrification itself has become gentrified! Finally, it is worth noting that both the core text Gentrification and The Gentrification Reader largely (but not completely) refer to Anglo-American cases of gentrification and theories and conceptualizations based on Anglo-American experiences. The majority of the readings are by British, American and Canadian authors. One reason for this is that these three countries are where our expertise is mainly based; second, the vast majority of the gentrification literature has been published in these countries; third, all of the classic and/or most cited writings on gentrification come from these countries; fourth, it is beyond the scope of these two texts to translate literature from other languages - although we recognize that this is an important task and should be done in the future. For those of you who seek non Anglo-American writings that are published in Eng lish - we provide detailed further reading lists after each part and section. Indeed the global nature of gentrification today has meant that many edited books and journal special issues on gentrification now include work from around the globe - China, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, old and new Europe, and many other places too.

THE STRUCTURE
The structure of thi s Reader does not simply mirror that of the core text Gentrification - rather it has been designed to emphasize, and add to, particular arguments and debates that we outline in that book and which we fee l are the most significant since authorship on gentrification first began. Furthermore as pointed out above we have a.so sought to address a couple of the limitations of Gentrification in The Gentrification Reader. The Reader contains forty read ings (chapters) on gentrification; each of the seven thematic parts of the Reader includes four readings, although Part 3 on Explaining/Theorizing Gentrification has been subdivided into four sections, A th rou gh D, with four readings in each. Each part and section of The Gentrification Reader has been provided with an introductory overview that situates the key argu ments and contributions that the readings have made in a broad scholarly context, as well as providing background mform ation on the ideas and the authors. Given that some 'big ' names are associated with the theoretica. battles that raged over gentrification -tell ing our readers about the authors should help them to understand where these theorists are com ing from. Moreover, a little biographical detail humanizes these 'big ' names - we provide th is biographical detail in boxes 2-6, in which some authors also reflect on the article of theirs which we have reprinted. The chapters in the Reader are arranged to lead the reader through old and new ideas on gentrification in a logical manner. Parts 1 and 2 of the Reader, 'Defining Gentrification ' and 'Stage Models of Gentrification' respectively, are linked to Chapter 1 of the core text Gentrification - on the birth of gentrification and to Chapter 5 Towards a new stage model of gentrification (pp. 173-185). These readings demonstrate how the definition of gentrification has changed over time and the political challenges of defining th is process as it moves through time and space. The writings on stage models illustrate the dynamism of this process over different

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periods of time, and in particular they show the initial gut feelings of some authors that this process was going against the grain of 'normal' urban filtering and that it would not last. The final reading in Part 2 by Jason Hackworth and Neil Smith shows how gentrification fought against recession and marginality and came out on top. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned here by the doom mongers who are speculating yet again on the end of gentrification in the current recession. Part 3 of the Reader focuses on the most influential explanations and theorizations of gentrification from the literature. This has been subdivided into four sections, A to D. Section A on Production Side Explanations links directly to Chapter 2 of the core text - Producing Gentrification. Here production or supply-side arguments are made to explain the emergence of the process of gentrification. The focus is on the Marxist explanatory vehicle - the rent gap, a theory (hinged in uneven development theory) put forward by Neil Smith back in 1979. The rent gap shows how disinvestment opened up the inner city for the reinvestment of capital. Critiques and attempts to re-establish the rent gap are also included in the readings. Section B on Consumption Side Explanations in the Reader is linked to Chapter 3 in Gentrification on Consumption Explanations. Here gentrifiers themselves are seen to be significant players in the production of gentrification through their consumption preferences. The politics, desires, aesthetic ideologies, and lifestyles of this new middle class of gentrifiers is the focus of the readings.This section shows how a group of middle class individuals began to identify with each other and with a series of values connected with history and heritage that gave their 'class' a 'place' in the changing urban social order. The fact that we have used the word 'side', as in production and consumption side explanations, should alert the reader to the different stances or positions that authors have taken on the process of gentrification. These different stances are often allied to Marxist readings of the process versus Humanist or Postmodernist readings of the process. It was these different positions that led to what some have called the 'gentrification battleground' or the 'gentrification stalemate', a state of play demonstrated by the fact of a section titled 'The problems with production explanations' at the end of Chapter 2 (pp. 74-80) in the core text and in 'The problems with consumption explanations' at the end of Chapter 3 (pp. 1 21-1 23) in the core text. David Ley's reply to Neil Smith in Chapter 10 of the Reader illustrates this battle and stalemate. But by the early 1990s gentrification researchers were fed up with this battleground and wanted to move beyond this stalemate, for they believed that both explanations were complementary. Amongst others Lees (1994) wanted to transcend the oppositional thinking between Marxist economic analysis (on production) and postmodern cultural analysis (on consumption). She used the notion of complementarity as part of a dialectic in which she could specify the contradictions between the two, with the aim of transcending the contradictions between the two bodies of theory so as to improve our understanding of gentrification. She was clear: ... I do not want to choose between economic Marxism and cultural postmodernism; I want the stability of the former and the instability of the latter. I want to utilize a productive tension between the two. (p. 138) For Lees (1994), and others, the realization that both explanations were complementary solved the problem of 'big names', whose work she respected, battling each other. Section C reprints some of this literature that argued for explanations of gentrification to move beyond the production versus consumption stalemate and beyond singular truth claims. As Beauregard (1986: 35) argued: ' ... there can be no single theory of an invariant gentrification process ... different theoretical arguments must be combined in a fashion compatible with the specific instances of gentrification that we wish to explain'. Geographer Damaris Rose's 'Rethinking Gentrification : beyond the uneven development of Marxist urban theory', published in the very first volume of Environment and Planning 0: Society and Space was one of the first articles to seek a postmodern view or anti-metanarrative stance on gentrification (see Chapter 17 in the Reader). Sociologist Sharon Zukin sought to combine production and consumption arguments and her reading here (in Chapter 18) is related to her now classic 1982 text: 'Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change'. The papers by Chris Hamnett and Eric Clark (Chapters 19 and 20 respectively) reveal the struggles that continued over the explanation of gentrification. Section D reprints readings which show how debates over the explanation of gentrification progressed as issues not just of class, but also of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity, as these cleavages began to find increasing currency. A sample paper from each is included in this section of the Reader, and we finish

a more recent paper (by Cahill) that illustrates for us how the literature has moved on so that issues class, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity are considered not just with respect to the gentrifiers but also to the gentrified. Papers like this heed the call made in Slater, Curran and Lees (2004) to include the voices of non-gentrifiers in gentrification research. Part 4 of the Reader focuses on one of the most negative and problematic results of gentrification that of displacement. The readings selected here are a mix of conceptual statements about types of displacement to those that have sought to collate empirical evidence on displacement - a very difficult and often flawed task. The final reading by Freeman and Braconi (Chapter 28) led The USA Today to claim that 'Gentrification is a boost for everyone' (see Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2008: 219-220). Freeman and Braconi's conclusion that displacement as a result of gentrification was limited gave fuel to the positive spins on gentrification issued by the state in the US in order to sell their neoliberal agenda of state-led gentrification. Part 5 of the Reader probably created the most difficult decisions with respect to which readings to include. This part on geographies of gentrification relates to Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of the core text Gentrification. By geographies of gentrification we mean: i) those gentrifications that are seen to have occurred outside of the central city, e.g. rural or wilderness gentrification, suburban gentrification and coastal gentrification; ii) those that focus on the spatial scales of gentrification, e.g. global gentrification, global elites, provincial gentrification, metropolitan gentrification, discussions of gentrification throughout the urban hierarchy, as Smith (2009: 19) states 'a new geo-economic competition has arisen between cities of which gentrification is a central strategy' ; iii) those that focus on different types of gentrification in the city, e.g. super-gentrification, tourism gentrification, new-build gentrification, studentification; iv) those that focus on comparative work, whether comparing different neighbourhoods, different cities and/or different countries or how theories and concepts about gentrification embedded in a particular context play out in another context (e.g. the emancipatory and revanchist theses on gentrification). As you can see there is much more here than is represented by the four readings - but these should suffice to give our readers a flavour of the different debates here. It is also interesting to note here how different authors have used each others work to trigger progress in the literature on gentrification - for example Lees (2000) , Chapter 29 here, drew on earlier work by David Ley (1992 , 1996) for her 'geography of gentrification' and in so doing pushed the 'geography of gentrification' higher up the gentrification agenda. And drawing on Lees (2000) Slater (2004) set out to explore the emancipatory and revanchist theses on gentrification outside their immediate place-based theoretical contexts. Studying gentrification, it is important and useful to get a clear sense of where, why and how ideas and work developed. Part 6 of the Reader relates to Chapters 5 and 6 of the core text, and is particularly important given the fact that, for the most part, gentrification around the world today is state-led through similar yet distinct policy discourses (see Lees and Ley, 2008). The different readings reprinted here look at early work that promoted gentrification as a positive process for urban change that policy makers ought to promote, to writings on the relationship between policy and gentrification. Chapters 34, 35 and 36 are critical of the import of gentrification into policy making and governmental strategies for revitalizing central cities. This work cannot be disentangled from writings on the neo-liberal city, which argue that
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If public housing and middle-class suburban housing were icons of the Keynesian managerialist city, then gentrified neighbourhoods and downtown commercial mega-projects are the icons of the neoliberal city. (Hackworth, 2007 : 78) .. . inequitable real estate development in cities is the knife-edge of neoliberal urbanism, reflecting a m'der s!lift toward a more lndlvlduaflst and market-driven political economy in cities. Gentrification, publicly funded projects for private benefit, and the demolition of affordable housing are all part of this knife edge, and all of these are occurring in very different locales. (Hackworth , 2007: 191-192) The final part of the Reader, Part 7, reprints writings on resisting gentrification and relates to Chapter 7 (more specifically pp. 246-277) in the core text Gentrification. We begin with the classic text from Chester Hartman - 'The right to stay put' (see Chapter 37), then we move onto Newman and Wyly's (2006) discussion of why Hartman's text is still pertinent today and the difficulties of resisting displacement and

INTRODUCTION

IEII

gentrification. In chapter 39 we reprint a paper that has triggered debate recently (Slater, 2006) over the perspectives of middle class academics (many of whom are gentrifiers themselves) on gentrification, perspectives argued to be soft or pandering to nee-liberal thinking on the city. Food for thought! And finally, in Chapter 40, we finish the Reader with a chapter that summarizes some useful and successful attempts to mitigate displacement and gentrification, examples collated in a study by The Urban Institute. This final reading should make clear that resistance is not dead (contra Hackworth and Smith, 2001 ); however we must be clear that it is not confined to the United States and Canada either (as Chapter 40 in the Reader and the examples in Chapter 7 of Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2008, might suggest). The Transformer Houses project (Berg, Kaminer, Schoonderbeek and Zonneveld, 2009) looked all over Europe and discovered a significant number of initiatives, projects, positions and strategies that have led to interventions in gentrification. They call attention to the following: 1. Acts of protest or provocation and agitprop. The aim of these projects is to form a consciousness or at least awareness of gentrification, but the strategy deliberately uses shock and provocation. 2. Projects that address radical changes in neighbourhoods that are causing the wholesale demolition of existing houses or the eviction of unwanted residents. 3. The attempt to improve the built environment by involving locals in direct actions and encouraging local responsibility by intervening in or introducing green space. 4. Projects intended to create a local consciousness or to raise awareness of both the historical origins of the neighbourhood and the transformations presently taking place. 5. Projects which attempt to rectify or offer alternative and meaningful public space, usually as a means of forming a community, whether by inserting a social practice or by other means. Much more detailed research needs to be done on resistance to displacement and gentrification, but reading the examples in Berg, Kaminer, Schoonderbeek and Zonneveld (2009) and Chapter 7 of the Reader is a good first step. Indeed, perhaps it is time to return to, and indeed update, texts like Pile and Keith's (1997) Geographies of Resistance, focusing explicitly on gentrification and displacement.

HOW TO USE THIS READER


Before reading the various writings on gentrification in this Reader we suggest that firstly you read through the partner book Gentrification. That book and the introductions to the different parts and sections of the Reader should make clear the maio debates and issues that surround the process of gentrification. This partnership between a core text and an associated Reader gives these two books a distinct pedagogic value, providing our readers access to a guide on the debates over gentrification and access to the original source material so that students and others can see first-hand how debates have developed over time. Since the core text and the Reader are designed to be read together we suggest that they are read in seven sittings - either using the seven chapters from the core text or the seven parts of the Reader, neither way is necessarily better given they ought to be read in conjunction with each other. There are three ways in which the Reader and the partner core text on gentrification may be used as a basic resource for class instruction/lectures: 1. Instructors/lecturers could organize a specific course/unit/module on gentrification around the entirety of the seven parts of the Reader or the seven chapters from the core text. The Reader and the core text have been designed for this. If used for a single course we also recommend designing field trips on the topic of gentrification, showing video documentary footage of gentrification for the remains of the module, and getting students to undertake some of their own research into issues associated with gentrification- quantitative or qualitative- such activities make for a more multi-media, visual, and 'real' introduction to gentrification. Instructors should also utilize the further reading sections from both the Reader and the core text too. The further reading sections at the end of each part and section have been carefully compiled to be as up to date and expansive as possible. In effect they are a set of reading lists that can be recommended to students and other readers as they study the arguments made in the various readings.

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