Speaking gentrification in the languages of the Global East

A regional perspective on gentrification

Once again, regions, for all their ambiguities, have become central conceptual building blocks in much geographical and related research (for a summary, see Jones and Paasi, 2013). It is the very ambiguity of regional definition that allows for the development of regionalist discourses, the pursuit of elite projects via regional institution-building and the transformation of national into global capital using regional centres as staging posts (Ching, 2000). These ambiguities are very much present in the global region called Asia-Pacific, Pacific Asia, Pacific Rim or East Asia depending on the ideological loading one wishes to impart. Commentators have generally seen this region as market-infused or state-dominated, depending on their outlook. If arguing that it is market infused, they point to family-based Chinese business operating across the Taiwan Strait and from Singapore, to a history of Japanese corporate investment in China and South East Asia, to Korean infrastructure and city-building investments in China and Cambodia, and so on (Percival and Waley, 2012; Yeung, 2010). For many others, the hallmark of the East Asian development process is the strong (if actually quite small) developmental state (Johnson, 1982; Wade, 1990). What is clearer is that, ironically perhaps in this context, there has been only a hesitant process of regional institution-building, a consequence in part of Washington’s spoiling tactics and in part of regional contestation (Beeson, 2007). China and Japan are the main regional protagonists, and at the same time the principal antagonists.

In this commentary on the papers published in this special themed issue, I use the term Global East to refer to East Asia, however the boundaries are drawn and embracing the porosity of the concept of region. ¹ The Global is a marker of theoretical avoirdupois, setting East on a par with North. Global East serves therefore both to re-focus debate and destabilise preconceptions (Lees et al., 2015b). With its regional focus and its theoretical load, Global East is intended as a discursive device designed to calibrate (or perhaps re-calibrate) the balance between the expertise that comes from area specialisation and the engagement with theory without which knowledge will always be partial and painstakingly incremental. The contextualisation that a regional perspective allows for ought to be broad enough to lead to cross-fertilisation rather than fossilisation (Lees et al., 2015a). At the same time, it needs to guard against producing a continental exceptionalism that is little better than country level exceptionalism (Peck, 2015; Pow, 2012).

Looking from the Global East and reading the papers in this special issue, it soon becomes clear that none of them describes a process that conforms to a London or New York-centred Global North understanding of gentrification. Many authors specifically raise this point, and with varying agendas – one actually questioning the relevance of the concept (Yip and Tran, 2016). However, to obtain a fuller view of gentrification in the Global East it is necessary also to look beyond the papers in this special issue and extend discussion and incorporate further work on China and Japan.

The paragraphs that follow will attempt to do this by building a typology of gentrification, bearing in mind the importance of a conceptual structure for meaningful comparative work (McMichael, 1990; Peck, 2015; Tilly, 1984). A reading of the papers in this special issue, together with other papers especially on China and Japan, would suggest a four-fold typology of gentrification in East Asia. The first is what might be called slash-and-build gentrification, a massive process of accumulation by dispossession in the inner city, one that is clearly discernible, widely evidenced and orchestrated by the state, a combination of state-led and new-build gentrification (Shin, 2016). ² In Shanghai and Beijing, state agencies have overseen the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, mainly to the urban periphery, to create space for apartment blocks for the wealthy middle class (Broudehoux, 2007; He, 2007). This has often been a violent process, the violence sometimes psychological as evidenced for Guangzhou by Shin (2016). Shin and Kim (2016) identify similar processes in Seoul, where the South Korean state has engineered completely new housing landscapes designed almost exclusively for the rising middle classes. While the primary role is played by the state, a closely related property-hungry corporate sector forms an important accomplice, particularly in Seoul.

The second type involves the selective conversion of districts with characteristic vernacular housing into chic city quarters with upmarket restaurants and boutiques. This project of aestheticisation might be called orientalising gentrification because it attempts to sell a version of the past using an aesthetic that, ironically, sometimes harks back to the colonial era. There are numerous sites of orientalising gentrification in East Asian cities. Jou, Clark and Chen (2014) write about the gentrification of the Yongkang–Qingtian–Wenzhou area of inner Taipei as ‘commodification of cultural and historical heritage’, partly abetted by eco-conscious civil society groups. Dihua Street and its surrounding district in Taipei’s historical centre appears to be undergoing a similar process (Jou et al., 2014; Tan and Waley, 2006). In Singapore, as Chang (2016) relates, the state has engineered an analogous situation where old shophouses in Little India are preserved and turned over to artists to be used as studios. The old centre of Hanoi around Nha Tho Street too has undergone an aestheticised transformation, but one that perhaps relates more closely to Singapore’s Chinatown than it does to Little India (Yip and Tran, 2016). In China, the principal sites of orientalising gentrification (among many others) include Xintiandi and Taikang Road in Shanghai and parts of Beijing around Beihai Park (Broudehoux, 2007). Qin Shao’s (2013) moving account of the dispossession of a family from its home to make way for the Xintiandi development highlights how the state and the corporate sector can act in unison, but often with the initial key input coming from the state. While Tokyo has figured much less in gentrification debates, a process of orientalising gentrification can be discerned in many parts of inner city south west Tokyo such as Harajuku and Shibuya. These and similar neighbourhoods were once mixed communities. However, during the bubble economy of the 1980s, many residents were driven out, sometimes violently (Waley, 1997). In their place came not only housing for the increasingly prosperous middle classes but also the boutiques, bijou cafes and bistros where they could shop and eat.

Both the above two types of gentrification are likely to affect city blocks and even whole areas, as for example in inner city Shanghai. Gentrification in East Asian cities, however, can also be isolated, discrete – a tower block here, another over there. This tower-block gentrification, piece-meal and jagged, is readily discernible in Japan. Lützeler (2008) has identified gentrification of city centre and waterfront areas in Tokyo, where he shows a process of ‘gradual and spatially isolated forms of residential displacement’ as a result of the construction of upmarket condominiums in previously industrial areas, often on the site of displaced factories and yards (p. 298). Hirayama (2005)’s reference to high-rise gated communities scattered around the city supports this reading of a gentrification process in Tokyo, while in Kyoto Fujitsuka (2005) has described a process of lot by lot gentrification of the traditional kimono-making quarter of Nishijin in the 1980s. The case is further strengthened by the work of Sorensen, Okata and Fujii (2010) on the regulatory environment that has precipitated the construction of high-rise residential towers throughout Tokyo and other Japanese cities. In Hong Kong, it is also at the scale of the individual high-rise building, sometimes constructed on consolidated lots, that actual or potential gentrification occurs, as detailed by La Grange and Pretorius (2016; see also Ley and Teo, 2014).

Slash-and-build and orientalising gentrification are both processes that occur in city centre and inner city areas. Tower-block gentrification is likely to follow a similar locational pattern. But gentrification occurs too on the edges of East Asian cities, where the transformation of the environment has in many places been rapid and violent. In particular in China, accumulation by dispossession and displacement have occurred on a massive scale (Shin, 2013; Webber, 2002). Farmers have been dispossessed of land and livelihood in order to realise the utopian fantasies of growth-obsessed politicians and developers who construct all sorts of monuments to urban ambitions (Jiang, 2014). This might be termed rice-paddy gentrification, in reference to its location in the paddy fields that surround many of the major cities of East Asia. ³ The rampant transformation of urban peripheries occurred at an early point around Jakarta (Dick and Rimmer, 1998; Firman, 2004; Leisch, 2002). More recently, not least thanks to the involvement of Singapore-based Indonesian companies, a similar process has been observed around Phnom Penh (Percival and Waley, 2012), Saigon (Douglass and Huang, 2007) and Hanoi (Monthéard, 2010). Interestingly, Hudalah, Winarso and Woltjer (2016) describe a somewhat different form of gentrification on the edge of Bandung. Here, low-income residents stand in danger of being deprived of their land rights by the forces of incoming property developers allied to civil society groups. The accumulation by dispossession characteristic of what I have called rice-paddy gentrification occurs not only on the urban edge but also in the marginal spaces that border the North-South Rail Link in Metro Manila. Here, as Choi (2016) observes, lack of land rights has facilitated and hastened the removal of low-income residents without formal title.

These types cannot of course be definitive or all-encompassing. They interpret gentrification in spatial terms and, for example, take no explicit account of the motives of gentrifiers in terms of cultural reproduction (Wu, Zhang and Waley, forthcoming). The construction of a typology can only avoid the accusation of being itself an orientalising instrument if it is exploited to inform the project of comparative urbanism – made to work, that is, alongside and in contrast to gentrification processes elsewhere in the world. It is to this comparative engagement that we turn now.

Comparing gentrification from East outwards

The comparative urbanism project has been criticised for highlighting contextual difference, telling many stories but failing to provide an overarching narrative, a point cogently made in recent papers by Peck (2015) and López-Morales (2015). At the same time, it has struggled to create a centre of theory making in the South (Roy, 2009). Intra-regional comparative work provides a forum for the extraction of a number of dynamic elements that can then be deployed in inter-regional urban comparison. In this sense, the intra-regional inquiry can be used to provide a structure for inter-regional comparative work by drawing attention to the modulations which give local shape to state and capital. This can be related to McMichael’s (1990) ‘incorporated comparison’, which seeks to use conceptual threads to make sense of varying conditions around the world. Certainly, conceptual footholds of some sort are required in order for comparative work to be more than the sum of its parts (López-Morales, 2015; Peck, 2015; Waley, 2012). It also requires a field of inquiry within which the comparative work is conducted. Gentrification fulfils this role well.

This commentary now attempts to undertake an exercise in comparative urbanism by looking out from the Global East and fitting the East Asian experience into a narrative of planetary gentrification. The exercise is necessarily cursory and exploratory. The slash-and-build gentrification of a city like Shanghai or Seoul has significant common denominators with the type of far-reaching predatory state-led gentrification that López-Morales (2011, 2015) identifies in Santiago de Chile. It finds echoes too in the revanchist gentrification of south central London in areas like Elephant and Castle and Lambeth (Hodkinson and Essen, 2015; Lees, 2014). These forms of new-build gentrification speak of the state’s leading role in precipitating gentrification, in London locked into a strategic alliance with private capital, in Shanghai occasionally ‘cross-dressing’ as capitalised corporation, in Seoul working in conjunction with construction companies associated with the country’s leading corporations (Shin and Kim, 2016).

Orientalising gentrification can be seen as an instance of worldwide retail gentrification and tourist gentrification. Similar processes have been evidenced by writers in various cities around the world. Zukin (2008), for example, argues that preservation in parts of Brooklyn means a commodified consumption of space that excludes residents of long standing. History can be referenced too (Jacobs, 1992), but sometimes the references are inverted, as when bars and restaurants sport fake colonial décor. Orientalising gentrification finds a Latin American equivalent in the favela chic that Cummings (2015) sees as an accompaniment to favela tourism and a harbinger of gentrification. While the state is involved through its pacification programme, its role is in no way comparable to the prominent if divergent state interventions to create Xintiandi in Shanghai and transform Singapore’s Little India. The urban aestheticisation process that this type of gentrification entails can in places – for example, Lagos and Accra – be transposed from a neighbourhood to a pan-urban scale, with an accompanying use of violence to enforce the moral imperative of a clean (read elite-oriented) landscape (Gillespie, 2015). In Singapore, the state facilitates aestheticisation; in Accra and Shanghai, it enforces it, whether directly or indirectly via private developers.

The process of tower-block gentrification and the human dilemmas and suffering it can cause are vividly described in Aravind Adiga’s novel Last Man in Tower (2011), in which he tells the story of one man’s struggle against property developers intent on replacing his cooperative housing with an apartment block for Mumbai new money, part of a process similar to that analysed by Harris (2008) in his intra-regional comparative work on gentrification in Mumbai and London. Not only is tower-block gentrification the outcome of a relaxation of state planning rules, but it is at least in the Japanese context the product of a change in the housing regime that has seen the state withdraw from provision and financing (Hirayama, 2007). This is, however, less geographically focused and less sharply etched on the urban terrain but nevertheless bears some similarities to the process of rent-gap capture by urban developers seen by López-Morales (2015) as occurring in certain Latin American cities. Tower-block gentrification through the construction of concentrated swathes of large-scale condominiums is a primary characteristic of gentrification processes, especially but not uniquely in North American cities like Toronto (Kipfer and Keil, 2002). In all these cases, state strategies are apparent; it is the task of a planetary comparative approach to paint a more nuanced picture of the state’s involvement and strategic alliances.

Gentrification on the outskirts of cities is inevitably path dependent in its development. This is clear, for example, when relating the rice-paddy gentrification that finds form in the gated and ‘bundled cities’ that dot the periphery of Jakarta to the sort of gentrification that occurs when injections of capital disrupt former urban-edge apartheid townships, such as that of Gugulethu as discussed by Teppo and Millstein (2015). Different again in the type of gentrification that they represent are the barrios privados, the gated complexes, that have sprung up around Buenos Aires, often in close proximity to shanty towns (Carroll, 2007; Thuillier, 2005). Comparative work might focus on who has been or is being dispossessed in these processes and what the provenance of the capital being deployed is.

Comparative urbanism is an explicit attempt to move away from Anglo-American centred theory (Lemanski, 2014; Robinson, 2011). The space created by the Global East can be used to sidestep or better to deconstruct the dominant dualism of Global North and Global South. Seeing gentrification from the Global East also blunts the inherent othering of the Global South that the dominant dualism enshrines. Put differently, it provincialises the script emanating from the Global North by shrinking it so that it fits within a busier conceptual space. To place Seoul alongside London and Jakarta beside Buenos Aires within a structured framework forces a train of thought that goes beyond a facile recognition of difference and undertakes a search for the place of universals like social injustice and the exercise of power (Lees et al., 2015a). In this quest, gentrification, as a mid-level theory, helps us seek a balance between the general and the particular, and travel beyond obstacles posed by the unique versus universal debate that (perhaps inevitably) characterises so much work in social theory.

Comparative gentrification and the quest for theoretical purchase

What does gentrification in the Global East tell us about gentrification more generally? How does it inform our understanding and help us re-theorise gentrification? Should we indeed amend definitions of gentrification? I will argue here that there are four constitutive elements to gentrification: neighbourhood class conversion (referred to by Lees et al. (2015b: 444) as social cleansing), displacement of lower-income residents, the exploitation of rent gaps for profit and the upgrading of properties and neighbourhoods (Clark, 2005; Slater, 2015; Smith, 1996). As in the Global North and Global South, so in the Global East, gentrification generally adheres to at least three of these elements. Nevertheless, the dynamic forces that destabilise and reconstitute urban neighbourhoods are not consistent across global regions, nor even in some cases within global regions.

We can however draw a few approximate conclusions. First, state-led gentrification is practiced throughout the Global East (Ley and Teo, 2014). It is overt in Chinese and South Korean cities and evident but less overt in Taipei (Huang, 2015; Jou et al., 2014), while in Japan the state sets the regulatory parameters that encourage various forms of gentrification. Slash-and-build gentrification is rendered simpler to execute not only because of the power of the state, but also because of the frequently sub-standard nature of the housing that is demolished (Shin, 2016). These factors together help to explain both the greater physical and psychological violence of the process but also an apparent greater readiness to accept displacement. Secondly, there is a distinctive culture of property (Ley and Teo, 2014; Shin and Kim, 2016). Property-hungry capital, often in the form of very large corporations (including in the construction industry), sees urban land as a terrain for money-making (Machimura, 1992). In Japan’s bubble years, corporate profits were invested in property. More recently, the Chinese state has created exchange value out of property on a massive scale. It follows from this that the ownership of land is of crucial importance. In Chinese cities, land is owned by the state and either allocated or leased out. In Taipei, the state owns about 40 per cent (Huang, 2015). But in Japan, land is largely privately owned (often in Tokyo by corporations), and here the rights of land and property holders are relatively strong (Sorensen, 2010).

These conclusions highlight two worldwide processes: the state’s quest for a form of economic growth impervious to social justice issues and the empowerment of capital that sees a profitable berth in land and property. But at the same time, looking from the Global North, they might suggest some paradoxes. If gentrification tends to involve large-scale, and sometimes quite violent displacement, why would it appear that there has been less resistance? And why has there been so little discussion and so sparse mention of gentrification, with the discursive focus on emancipatory terms such as urban renewal (Ley and Teo, 2014). Both these paradoxes are apparent only when seen from the Global North. In the case of the first, a combination of strong state and weak housing has conspired to limit resistance to displacement. In China, protests against land grabs and property demolition have been widespread but ultimately futile, while in Japan as in Korea resistance has, in the broadest of terms, been successfully coopted (Shin and Kim, 2016). At the same time, the obstacles (whether material or cultural) to onsite upgrading of vernacular houses, especially in Japan, have led to a greater degree of acquiescence among some occupants to distant relocation however ostensibly inconvenient and unjust. It is, however, vital at the very least to bear witness to the falsity of the paradox, and to chronicle resistance.

The second paradox can be, if not explained, at least approached by considering both the institutional structure behind the use of the term and by the term gentrification itself (Marcuse, 2015). The institutions – the wealthy centres of ‘learning’ and publishing – are located almost exclusively in the Global North. Hegemonic theories are inevitably expressed in the languages of the Global North (predominantly English). English’s status as a world language only serves to reinforce the power of Anglophone theoretical constructs (albeit occasionally translated from French or German) (Aalbers, 2004; Ley and Teo, 2014; Paasi, 2005). The power of capital that emanates from the Global East might shift paradigms somewhat, but the languages of ‘learning’ are likely to remain those of the Global North, and this will tend to perpetuate the monocentric terrain of theory-making unless there is constant vigilance, a vigilance that can be materialised in the form of working and writing ties among researchers from different regional berths. As for the term itself, gentrification is hard to translate into language worlds that are distant from English. In English the term’s very specificity has enabled it to become a cipher for the damage inflicted by global processes of urban change. When translated into languages like Chinese or Japanese, as Shin (2016) points out, it becomes either quaint or pedantic. If transposed, it is traduced, losing its critical edge. Merrifield (2013) has proposed the term neo-Haussmannisation, which in some ways better reflects the extent and violence of the process in many parts of East Asia, but fails to resolve the problem of translation. The paradox, however, is artificial. As in some other parts of the world, the term might be absent but the process it describes is painfully present.

This commentary has embraced comparative urbanism as a decentring of theory-making (Lemanski, 2014; Robinson, 2011). Yet if decentring is total, it leads to incoherent fragmentation (Peck, 2015). By formulating a regional perspective through the lens of a Global East, the commentary has suggested a way beyond a conceptual map that is either flat or characterised by one peak.