Table Of ContentTHE PLANETARY GENTRIFICATION
READER
Gentrifcation is a global process that the United Nations now sees as a human rights issue. This new
Planetary Gentrifcation Reader follows on from the editors’ 2010 volume, The Gentrifcation Reader, and
provides a more longitudinal (backward and forward in time) and broader (turning away from Anglo-/
Euro-American hegemony) sense of developments in gentrifcation studies over time and space,
drawing on key readings that refect the development of cutting-edge debates.
Revisiting new debates over the histories of gentrifcation, thinking through comparative urbanism
on gentrifcation, considering new waves and types of gentrifcation, and giving much more focus to
resistance to gentrifcation, this is a stellar collection of writings on this critical issue.
Like in their 2010 Reader, the editors, who are internationally renowned experts in the feld, include
insightful commentary and suggested further reading. The book is essential reading for students and
researchers in urban studies, urban planning, human geography, sociology, and housing studies and for
those seeking to fght this socially unjust process.
Loretta Lees is Director of the Initiative on Cities at Boston University, Boston, USA.
Tom Slater is Professor of Urban Studies at Columbia University, New York City, USA.
Elvin Wyly is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm
(Musqueam) Territory, Vancouver, Canada.
The Planetary
Gentrifcation Reader
Edited by
Loretta Lees
Tom Slater
and
Elvin Wyly
Cover image: The cover image ‘Xian Village Guangzhou (2015)’ is a photograph by John
van Aitken and Jane Brake, Institute of Urban Dreaming (https://iudblog.org). It is part
of IUD’s ongoing witnessing (through photography, writing and other artistic methods)
of the dispossession and displacement produced by contemporary strategies of capital
accumulation centred on housing. The photograph was taken when they visited Xian urban
village, Guangzhou, China. It captures the dispossessions, ‘witnessing everyday life amongst
the rubble’, caused by planetary gentrifcation.
First published 2023
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ISBN: 978-1-032-37656-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-37654-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-34123-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003341239
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Contents
Introduction ix
PART ONE THINKING ABOUT GENTRIFICATION TODAY 1
Introduction to Part One 3
1 What time is gentrifcation? 5
Suleiman Osman
2 Gentrifcation 9
Elvin Wyly
3 Beyond Anglo-American gentrifcation theory 18
Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales
4 Revisiting ‘the changing state of gentrifcation’ 32
Manuel B. Aalbers
PART TWO PLANETARY GENTRIFICATION 43
Introduction to Part Two 45
5 Planetary rent gaps 47
Tom Slater
6 The discursive detachment of race from gentrifcation in
Cartagena de Indias, Colombia 66
Melissa M. Valle
7 The fre this time: Grenfell, racial capitalism and the urbanisation
of empire 82
Ida Danewid
8 In debt to the rent gap: Gentrifcation generalized and the frontier
of the future 101
Hamish Kallin
vi COnTEnTS
PART THREE GENTRIFICATION AND COMPARATIVE URBANISM 113
Introduction to Part Three 115
9 The geography of gentrifcation: Thinking through comparative
urbanism 117
Loretta Lees
10 Hybrid gentrifcation in South Africa: Theorising across southern
and northern cities 132
Charlotte Lemanski
11 Comparative approaches to gentrifcation: Lessons from the rural 147
Martin Phillips and Darren P. Smith
12 Is comparative gentrifcation possible? Sceptical voices
from Hong Kong 174
David Ley and Sin Yih Teo
PART FOUR GENTRIFICATIONS BEYOND ANGLO-AMERICA 181
Introduction to Part Four 183
13 Prolonging the global age of gentrifcation: Johannesburg’s
regeneration policies 187
Tanja Winkler
14 Desakota and beyond: Neoliberal production of suburban space
in Manila’s fringe 205
Arnisson Andre C. Ortega
15 Socio-spatial legibility, discipline, and gentrifcation through favela
upgrading in Rio de Janeiro 226
Thaisa Comelli, Isabelle Anguelovski, and Eric Chu
16 Housing transformation, rent gap and gentrifcation in Ghana’s
traditional houses: Insight from compound houses in Bantama,
Kumasi 248
Lewis Abedi Asante and Richmond Juvenile Ehwi
PART FIVE PLANETARY GENTRIFICATION AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONS 271
Introduction to Part Five 273
17 Holiday rentals: The new gentrifcation battlefront 275
Agustín Cocola-Gant
18 The impacts of Airbnb in Athens, Lisbon and Milan:
A rent gap theory perspective 285
Alberto Amore, Cecilia de Bernardi and Pavlos Arvanitis
COnTEnTS vii
19 Platform-mediated short-term rentals and gentrifcation in Madrid 300
Alvaro Ardura Urquiaga, In˜igo Lorente-Riverola and Javier Ruiz Sanchez
20 Postsocialism and the Tech Boom 2.0: Techno-utopics
of racial/spatial dispossession 317
Erin McElroy
PART SIX RESISTING PLANETARY GENTRIFICATION 331
Introduction to Part Six 333
21 Resisting gentrifcation 336
Sandra Annunziata and Clara Rivas-Alonso
22 Resisting the politics of displacement in the San Francisco
Bay Area: Anti-gentrifcation activism in the Tech Boom 2.0 356
Florian Opillard
23 A city for all? Public policy and resistance to gentrifcation
in the southern neighborhoods of Buenos Aires 374
María Carla Rodríguez and María Mercedes Di Virgilio
24 When art meets monsters: Mapping art activism and
anti-gentrifcation movements in Seoul 390
Seon Young Lee and Yoonai Han
Index 401
Figure 1 State-led gentrifcation in Douar Wasti, Casablanca, Morocco.
Photograph: Stefano Portelli
INTRODUCTION
GENTRIFICATION AS A PLANETARY FIELD
It is now over a decade since we frst published TheGentrifcationReader in 2010. This Reader is
a separate collection but one that follows on from the frst. Over the past ten years, gentrifcation
studies have taken off globally. Gentrifcation studies is becoming less dominated by an Anglo-
or Euro-American focus. Scholars around the world are researching this problematic process.
Indeed, a recent bibliometric analysis of gentrifcation that scanned articles published in journals
since 1979 shows gentrifcation to be a ‘planetary feld’ (Uribe-Toril, Ruiz-Real and De Pablo
Valenciano, 2018; see Figure 2).
not surprisingly, this planetary feld is dominated by the English-speaking world – in order
of infuence, the top three being the US, the UK, and Canada. Yet this refects what has been
written since 1979. Moving forward, this is less likely to be the case. In the 2000s, non-English
publications on gentrifcation have been growing. Uribe-Toril, Ruiz-Real and De Pablo Valenciano
(2018) found that ‘English is the dominant language and only Spanish, German, Portuguese and
French have a relevant (<1%) position’ but that Chinese is rising fast. Liu, Zhu, Li, Sun, and Huang
(2019)analyzed the literature on gentrifcation in China between 1996 and 2017, again based on
bibliometrics, fnding it has become ‘a topical word in scholarly discussion’ (see Figure 3). They
argue that a Chinese linguistic scholar introduced the concept of gentrifcation into China for the
frst time in 1993, and they discuss subsequent mentions and research on the process: from Zhou
and Xu’s (1996)‘Shenshi-fcation’ (shenshi means ‘gentry’ in Chinese), which, as they say, made
little sense given there is not a gentry, as such, in Chinese society; to Meng (2000) and Sun’s
(2000)‘Zhongchanjieceng-fcation’ (zhongchanjieceng means ‘middle class’ in Chinese), which
is also problematic given that there is no uniform defnition of ‘middle class’ in China. Interestingly,
there is no uniform defnition outside of China either. Liu, Zhu, Li, Sun, and Huang (2019) argue
that China’s gentrifcation research took off signifcantly in 2008, probably impacted by the global
fnancial crisis and accelerating urban transformation in China. They say,
There are signifcant signs showing the future trends of gentrifcation will move to the con-
struction of a theoretical system of gentrifcation with Chinese characteristics, gentrifcation
consequences evaluation and urban policies, new types of gentrifcation, gentrifcation driven
by cultural consumption and authenticity protection of gentrifcation-stricken historical and
cultural heritages, application of new technology to gentrifcation research, and relationship
between shantytown renovation and gentrifcation in China.
But what does building ‘a theoretical system of gentrifcation with Chinese characteristics’ mean?
How might it be done? These are the kinds of questions that this Planetary Reader considers.
Language, and in that the linguistics of gentrifcation, is important. There has been much
debate over whether the English term ‘gentrifcation’ translates into other contexts (for example,
Ley and Teo, 2014, with respect to Hong Kong), but as Shin and Lopez-Morales (2018: 16) say,
‘does it really matter whether or not gentrifcation as a term exists in a particular locality?’ They,
