Travelling concepts and universal particularisms: A reappraisal of gentrification’s global reach

Abstract

Some concepts travel worldwide, although they remain unobtrusively attached to the contexts in which they were produced and, therefore, are insufficiently abstract and general. Gentrification is a travelling concept with lingering attachments to the Anglo-American urban context. Three issues related to gentrification’s global reach are discussed in this paper. The first is the definition of gentrification. The simple definition adopted by the current gentrification research agenda leads us to accept gentrification’s global reach literally by definition. The second issue is the question of contextual boundaries. Boundaries that are too broad and ill-defined – such as the metropolis of the Global North versus the metropolis of the Global South – conceal what contextual difference may be about. The third issue is the reification of cultural differences, which may lead to them being used to explain attitudes towards gentrification, even though such attitudes could be explained by more prosaic socioeconomic motives compatible with Western rationalism. This paper concludes that the metamorphoses of gentrification through its different waves in the Anglophone world do not provide the script for understanding other cities’ urban histories and making sense of their urban restructuring processes. These cities must realize that new processes emerging under increasingly neoliberal policy orientations are regressive compared with previous arrangements, especially when they tend to exclude political alternatives. The Anglo-American world may have been a pioneering laboratory for the application of gentrification policies, but other parts of the world have shown more effective resistance that can be an asset in future struggles and sociopolitical arrangements and make a difference in people’s lives.

Keywords

Abstraction core and periphery contextual diversity gentrification urban renewal

Introduction

This paper comes from lifelong experience doing research with borrowed concepts and theories. At first, this does not sound strange, as it is the usual way research is performed by most of us who only marginally – if at all – contribute to devising new concepts and theories. However, for those who work outside the core of the academic division of labour, the issue is not only about working with borrowed concepts and theories, but also about borrowing these tools and using them in contexts that are different from those in which they were initially developed. In principle, concepts and theories are made to travel. The process of abstraction through which they are constituted involves focusing each time on what is considered essential; this enables comparison and generalization that eventually leads to overcoming contextual barriers. However, not all concepts and theories can travel with the same ease; those that are highly abstract are, in general, more suitable for travelling, while those at a lower level of abstraction are usually more closely tied to specific contextual parameters.

Travelling concepts and theories

I will briefly discuss three general issues related to travelling concepts and then examine the concepts of segregation and gentrification in this light. I will focus much more on the latter, since the debate on gentrification is very timely and the question of its global reach is the subject of a discussion I have been taking part in for the last few years (Maloutas, 2012a).

The first general issue is the specificity of space-related concepts and theories. Abstraction is a process that enables travelling, since it is a process of de-contextualization. However, in disciplines examining spatial processes, most of the time the content of spatiality cannot be relevantly reduced to a geometrical or other form of abstract spatial dimension. Some 30 years ago, Andrew Sayer (1984: 132–136) commented extensively on the difficulty of producing meaningful theoretical constructs for geography at high levels of abstraction.

It is, nevertheless, clear that throughout the history of disciplines concerned with the spatiality of social life, several concepts and theoretical constructs have burst beyond their initial contextual limits and have been tried in – or imposed on – different contextual realities through a process of halfway de-contextualization. By this term, I refer to processes of abstraction and theory building that lead to concepts and theoretical constructs that are only seemingly disentangled from the specific geographic and socioeconomic contexts in which they were born. The problem of this halfway de-contextualization emerges when these concepts are not sufficiently abstract and these theories are not sufficiently general, but are treated as if they are.

The second general issue is the meaning of context. Literary or philosophical approaches to context (as ‘context is all’ for Margaret Atwood in the Handmaid’s Tale or the impossibility of meaning outside context for Frege or Wittgenstein) raise our awareness of the importance of context but can hardly act as a practical guide for the way we should handle contextual causation in urban geography and sociology.

Context is not something fixed and permanent; its content is related each time to the issue at hand. In practical research terms, context could be assumed to be the interrelated assortment of specific parameters in a local setting that may lead a particular process to produce importantly different outcomes from those theoretically expected.

In a recent book I co-edited with Kuniko Fujita (Maloutas and Fujita, 2012) about the importance of contextual diversity in spatial patterning and the social impact of residential segregation, we defined as major contextual parameters the ways that the market, the state and civil society are imbricated in each setting. We stressed the importance of different welfare models or varieties of capitalism, as well as the specific and durable shapes of local socio-spatial realities (i.e. built environments and social relations inscribed in property patterns, urban histories and ideologies).

On this basis, we could conclude that inadequate abstraction in the process of theorizing and a lack of contextual awareness are responsible for problems in the travelling of concepts and theories. However, matters are also a bit more complex, and this is mainly because concepts and theories travel in an uneven world. This brings me to the third – and last – general issue I want to discuss in this section.

Concepts and theories do not travel in every possible direction and in random ways. They systematically travel much more frequently from core to peripheral regions and, in so doing, they become part of the mechanisms and power relations that reproduce geographic unevenness not only in the academic division of labour, but also in all aspects of socioeconomic life.

The power relations on which this uneven concept-travelling is founded relate to the uneven geographical distribution of academic organizations and resources, the primacy of English as a publishing language and the homogenized prerequisites for academic careers around the world. These increasingly depend on core procedural models, institutions and resources, including the power structures and practices in international academic publishing, etc. (Garcia-Ramon, 2003; Hadjimichalis and Vaiou, 2004; Minca, 2003; Paasi, 2005; Vaiou, 2003). It is very difficult to escape the reproduction of these power relations even when producing radical theory; concepts and theories that travel are to a large extent agendas imposed on the periphery independently of their content. Following and to some extent paraphrasing dependency theories – from Frank (1978) and Amin (1976) to Wallerstein (1979) – and post-colonial approaches of cultural imperialism (Said, 1993; Spivak, 1988), we can claim that theory is usually a gaze from the core, and it has been part of the colonial, imperialist or otherwise dominant way of understanding, giving meaning to and conquering the periphery. Moreover, the contours of unevenness are increasingly moving beyond the delimitation of national borders, and peripheral regions are largely expanding within core national academic systems and urban networks.

When theory is ‘imposed’ on the periphery, it usually implicitly assumes either an evolutionary relation between the core and periphery (as in implying that the periphery will experience in the future what the core has experienced in the past¹) or a relation of unequal importance, in the sense that what happens at the core is much more important and affects the periphery in a catalytic way. In both cases, the periphery is expected to be systematically attentive to what happens at the core, but the reverse is not necessary, if not irrelevant. These implicit assumptions legitimate the very unequal geographic distribution of theoretical and empirical work on urban issues.

The case of segregation and gentrification

My claim here is that theoretical propositions and concepts in human geography and urban studies are usually bound to remain context dependent. Segregation and gentrification are not highly abstract constructs like capital or surplus value, and their assumed universal relevance – which derives from their unduly simple definitions – does not rid them of their indelible contextual attachments. Discussing briefly the concepts of segregation and gentrification, I want to bring to the fore the way their contextual origins – which are usually left aside or forgotten – act as a kind of deforming lens when they are focused on different contextual settings.

Segregation

Segregation is a concept conceived and elaborated within intense ethno-racial divisions and high levels of immigration in industrial US cities during the first half of the 20th century. In early Chicago School conceptualizations, human ecology and subsequent approaches (like social area analysis and factorial ecology) and measuring tools (segregation indices and especially the index of dissimilarity) were tightly related to a binomial reality of black and white populations clearly separated in space. Later studies on the more complex social segregation landscapes in Europe and elsewhere have been inclined to use these approaches and measurement tools as the general theoretical and methodological canvas on which they weaved their own explanatory attempts – even though this was often done in a critical way. The progressive erasing of the contextual origins of segregation in the process of halfway de-contextualization means that those origins have become implicit and carried forward, affecting ways of seeing and interpretations within the various contexts in which this concept has been applied due to its assumed universal relevance.

Segregation is a typical mid-range concept and a classic concept–metaphor that maintains ambiguity between universal claims and specific historical contexts. Following Moore, the universal relevance of such concepts is to a large extent catachrestic:

Concept–metaphors are examples of catachresis, i.e. they are metaphors that have no adequate referent. Their exact meanings can never be specified in advance – although they can be defined in practice and in context – there is a part of them that remains outside or exceeds representation. The purpose of concept metaphors is not to resolve ambiguity, but to maintain it […,] to maintain a tension between pretentious universal claims and particular contexts and specifics. (Moore, 2004: 71)²

But what is the problem? The problem is that segregation implicitly brings meaning that is relevant to its birth context but is not contained in its simple and general definition, that is, ‘the residential separation of subgroups within a wider population’ (Johnston et al., 1986: 424). Such implicitly bundled meaning lies, for instance, in the following impressions and assumptions:

the impression that the spatial concentration of a social group is unequivocally negative, especially if it is a group at the lower end of the social hierarchy;

the impression that the spatial concentration of the poor unequivocally brings a powerful neighbourhood effect that curtails life chances and social mobility;

the impression that areas with an important concentration of lower social groups tend to become ghettos;

the assumption that the spatial concentration of the rich is not part of the problem;

the assumption that spatial distance equals, more or less, social distance.

These notions are not totally unfounded; they offer a partial view, and this is why they can usually persuasively act as deforming lenses in different contextual realities. In Southern Europe, for instance, urban areas in decline are easily labelled ‘ghettos’, even if their features are quite different from those of real ghettos. In Athens, the term is applied to central neighbourhoods (Arapoglou, 2014) simply because their migrant populations have increased and become more visible – without, however, becoming majoritarian – while a portion of middle-class households have continued their long-term relocation process to the suburbs.³

Sometimes assumptions about the unequivocally negative nature of segregation affect urban policies in perverse ways: they pave the way for gentrification with the social mixing strategies they legitimate (Bridge et al., 2012; Lees, 2008). In the same vein, neighbourhood effects are assumed to be much more important than they really are. Consequently, these impressions and assumptions overlook the more intricate relations between social and spatial distance – which may be socially and politically important – in contexts much less segregated in terms of neighbourhood profiles compared with where segregation was initially developed as a concept.

Gentrification

Gentrification is a process of segregation in the sense that eventually it leads to more segregation, even though in its first stages it increases the social mix in working-class areas where incoming middle-class households displace lower social strata. Even though ‘in terms of numbers of people and neighborhoods, it is a smaller and arguably less significant issue than deepening urban poverty, continued racial segregation, and cumulative disadvantage’, it has attracted a lot of attention since it ‘has changed the look and feel of many neighborhoods and created a collective poster child for urban revival’ (Zukin, 2016: 204). This attention has been hugely amplified by the fact that gentrification has mainly emerged in core metropolises of the Anglophone world.

Some years ago in a paper published in Critical Sociology on the contextual limits of gentrification (Maloutas, 2012a), I argued against the supposedly inter-contextual reach of gentrification proposed by the new gentrification research agenda.⁴ My main argument was that gentrification is a concept highly dependent on contextual causality, and its universal use does not remove its contextual attachment to the Anglo-American metropolis. In fact, its universal use de-contextualizes the process and eventually dissimulates these attachments. My second argument was that looking for gentrification in increasingly varied contexts displaces emphasis from causal mechanisms to outcome similarities across contexts, leading to a loss of analytical rigour. My third argument was about the ideological and political impact of equating all the different forms of urban renewal with gentrification, which projects gentrification’s neoliberal frame of reference on the various geographical and historical contexts where urban renewal has been taking place.

That paper attracted some attention in the years that followed, especially from researchers working on gentrification processes outside Anglo-America, who mostly used it as a backdrop reference to support – or just to mention – the importance of context in gentrification research.⁵

Several authors who used that paper were critical of my arguments. In most of them, the main claim is that I unduly limit the range of gentrification by linking it too tightly to its original Anglo-American context. Here is one example:

[T]he authors disagree with Maloutas (2012a) that the concept of gentrification has become less useful in analyzing socio-spatial change. Rather, by abstracting from historically specific contexts like deindustria-lization and highlighting the fundamental quest for economic growth that drives processes of regeneration, gentrification, and displacement, analyses adopting the broader definition are more useful precisely because they do focus public debate on the ideological and ethical questions involved in favoring some users over others. (Lim et al., 2013: 200)

Two of these papers, an article by Ley and Teo (2014) and the introduction to Global Gentrifications (Lees et al., 2015b), have been quite elaborate in criticizing my views. This led me to reformulate and expand some of my initial ideas. I summarize my response to these critical comments in the three issues that I will discuss here.

The first issue is the definition of gentrification and, specifically, how by adopting different definitions we may be led to different answers with respect to the concept’s global reach. If, for instance, we adopt Clark’s (2005: 257) simple definition of gentrification as a neighbourhood’s inflow of higher status groups and outflow of lower status groups linked to a considerable reinvestment of fixed capital, this literally leads us to accept gentrification’s global reach by definition.

The second issue is the way we understand and term contextual boundaries. If we use extremely broad and, therefore, ill-defined categories to contextually differentiate gentrification sites – such as the metropolis of the Global North versus the metropolis of the Global South or the Western versus the non-Western metropolis – we lose grasp of a meaningful part of what contextual difference is about. This leads to neglecting varieties of cap-italism, as well as any sociopolitical arrangement other than over-bearing neoliberal ones and, in fact, equates any form of urban renewal with gentrification. In this sense, politics become impossible in today’s rapidly globalizing capitalism by presuming that neoliberalism will inevitably prevail at all levels and homogenize all other forms of sociopolitical arrangement, unless some unpredictable force produces a revolutionary change in the dominant socioeconomic system.

The third issue is the reification of cultural differences, which may lead to using such differences to explain attitudes towards gentrification, even though those same attitudes could be explained by more prosaic socioeconomic motives compatible with Western rationalism.

Definitional issues

In a central Tokyo neighbourhood, Cybriwsky (2011) has charted the incursion of Japan’s dokken kokka, the construction state, a longstanding alliance of powerful politicians and leading construction and land development companies. This coalition is engaged in aggressive redevelopment, removing smaller-scale apartments and commerce and replacing them with office buildings, high-rise luxury apartments, up-market retailing, and arts facilities, leading to stage-managed settings for wealthy locals and expatriates. But is this truly gentrification? ‘Yes, of course it is gentrification, without a doubt!’ (Cybriwsky, 2011, cited in Ley and Teo, 2014)

Why should this be considered gentrification ‘without a doubt’? Probably because it conforms to a small number of characteristics considered fundamental by those who support gentrification’s global reach: new investment in particular urban areas and change in the local population profile following or leading the inflow of higher status groups and/or uses and the displacement of less profitable ones.

The simple definition of gentrification formulated by Clark (2005: 257) guarantees a priori the global reach of gentrification, since the only thing needed is a change in an area’s population due to the inflow of higher status groups and the outflow of lower status groups associated with a reinvestment of fixed capital. Clark’s simple definition of gentrification follows or drives the main tendency of the gentrification literature, which is to bring everything together and devise a large number of variants (like studentification or touristification) within this large heterogeneous whole that denote differences in gentrification processes through time (consecutive waves) or space. The important question, therefore, is not whether we can find phenomena that conform to these few conditions across the urban world, but whether the many different phenomena that we can bring under the same umbrella constitute a meaningful whole.

Appraising this tendency to contain every form of urban renewal in the gentrification literature and research agenda, I claimed that:

Gentrification increasingly becomes a mere keyword for its fuzzy and ambivalent content,⁶ i.e. a signifier related to an aggregate of gentrification aesthetic and local ‘social upgrading’ rather than an articulated account of the underlying socioeconomic and political mechanisms and processes that produce it. (Maloutas, 2012a: 39)⁷

Similarities and regularities of outcomes of urban renewal overtake the importance of its underlying processes and, since such similarities can be eclectically found almost everywhere across the urban world, some consider this sufficient proof of gentrification’s global reach. Through this path, we are led to the theoretical banality that within our unequal capitalist societies, groups with more resources will appropriate residential and other locations formerly occupied by less affluent groups – if there is new investment that upgrades the value of these locations and if processes of place allocation are sufficiently commodified (Maloutas, 2012a: 41).

Lees et al. (2015b: 7) claim also that my argument about the contextual attachment of gentrification to the experience of cities in the Anglophone world ‘seems as problematic as arguing that Marx’s notion of the working class equals only the physical and psychological attributes that Engels described for the British and German proletariat in the mid-1800s’.

My argument is that gentrification is a mid-range concept and not a highly abstract construct like capital, surplus value or the working class, ‘and the effort to simplify its definition and broaden its applicability will not transform it into such a construct due to its indelible contextual attachments’ (Maloutas, 2012a: 40). These contextual attachments go beyond the requirements of the simple definition of gentrification: they relate to urban histories that may have produced gentrifiable urban areas and building stocks, as well as to broad sociopolitical traditions and arrangements that affect the shape of urban restructuring initiatives, their agents and their actual outcomes.

I will paraphrase and apply a similar argument to one I formulated on segregation (Maloutas, 2012b: 3). Gentrification is a context-bound concept, and this is important in two ways: firstly, in the form of varied urban settings around the world involving multiple versions of gentrification that are not amenable to simple and universal explanations of their formative processes, their patterns and their impact; secondly, as the limited ‘shared understanding of reality’ (Kazepov, 2005: 6) that derives from binding the concept of gentrification to the context of the Anglo-American metropolis of the last quarter of the 20th century, which has to be considered when the concept travels worldwide.

I use context mainly as a reminder that expected outcomes deriving from theoretical claims are often contradicted by outcomes whose understanding entails taking into account contingencies not included in theoretical models. Concepts and theories are always context dependent, and the degree of this dependency varies in relation to their specific object. Gentrification is context dependent in the sense that its patterns and social impacts are determined by the combined effect of mechanisms and institutions involving the market, the state, civil society and the specific and durable shape of local socio-spatial realities. Theoretical models usually take into account part of this interrelation – the part considered necessary to explain observed or expected outcomes – and, to a large extent, disregard the rest. In recent decades, the market is usually privileged in theoretical constructions that have a particular focus on economic restructuring. This predilection for market impacts is not unrelated to the contextual attachments of gentrification to the Anglophone world.

By ‘context’ I refer to the specific intertwining of four major spheres: (1) the economic (exchange) sphere that mainly focuses on labour market conditions and on market access to housing; (2) the state (redistribution) sphere that covers housing and public services allocation, as well as local regulation regimes; (3) the social (reciprocity) sphere that includes social and family networks, churches and other local voluntary organizations. ‘Context’ also extends to (4) the specific and durable shape of local socio-spatial realities, that is, built environments and social relations inscribed in property patterns, urban histories and ideologies. The first three derive from Polanyi’s (1944) modes of economic integration, while the fourth involves the physical support of gentrification processes and the social relations inscribed in it. This understanding of contextual elements is not fundamentally different from the ‘contingencies’ identified by Marcuse and Van Kempen (2000) affecting the impact of global forces on socio-spatial urban forms, and from Hill and Fujita’s (2003) or Kazepov’s (2005) elaboration of urban systems’ embeddedness in wider contexts of social, institutional and economic relations.

This definitional issue can lead to a never-ending discussion of the appropriate limits of abstraction that concepts such as gentrification can and should reach. The answer is not obvious. The more we simplify the definition of gentrification, the more we ascribe a dominant, determining and disciplining role to global economic forces and the less space we leave for other factors (e.g. political rapports des forces and arrangements) that may facilitate, mitigate or oppose the expected impact of global forces. On the other hand, the answer depends on the scope of analysis each time. The narrower the scope (e.g. designing public policy to monitor urban renewal projects in a particular area of a city’s downtown), the more the concept becomes either too general or misleading, requiring it to be used with context awareness in order to be relevant. Following Atkinson, ‘we have tended to label too many kinds of neighbourhood change as gentrification and this elasticity has reduced the bite of critical studies of its localized appearance and has diminished policy-maker interest as a result’ (Atkinson, 2008: 2634).

An encouraging development in this matter is the work of several scholars investigating gentrification-like processes in Latin American cities (Delgadillo, 2016; Janoscka and Sequera, 2016; López-Morales, 2016). These scholars focus on configurations of socio-spatial change in these cities that are significantly related to contextual causality – for example, the critical function of public institutions that is not part of the agent-led gentrification model, the importance of appropriating cultural heritage to dominate space or the encroachment of informality through increased commodification of urban structures and practices – in order to assess the impact of specific gentrification-like processes on issues such as the social profile and the form of displacement or the active or passive role of middle-class gentrifiers. By dealing with contextual causality, these authors are much more alert to contextual parameters, having also capitalized on previous debates on the relevance of gentrification in that part of the world. In this sense, their work has become analytically, and politically, more relevant. Similar attention to contextual causality is paid by Franz and Torri (2017) in their discussion of gentrification in six European cities with very diverse outcomes depending on factors such as the combined effects of the structure and trend of their socio-demographic profiles, their policy orientations and the impact of the crisis on them.

Another example is Athens, Greece, where gentrification is increasingly discussed even though its trace in the transformation of neighbourhoods’ social profiles remains marginal (Alexandri and Maloutas, 2010). Research focused on the features and impact of the apartment buildings of the 1960s and 1970s, which dominate in the city’s housing stock, appears much more productive than that focused on the meagre gentrification-like processes. In fact, these apartment buildings seem to oppose gentrification by enabling or preserving a peculiar form of vertically hierarchized class and ethnic cohabitation in several areas near the centre (Maloutas and Karadimitriou, 2001; Maloutas and Spyrellis, 2016), although other conditions favourable for gentrification have existed for a long time: large investment in the city centre related to the 2004 Olympics; the presence of potential gentrifiers as suppliers, buyers or enablers; and acute neighbourhood problems and stigmatization that could legitimate gentrification as their potential solution coupled with a complete absence of anti-gentrification policies or concern about its potential impact.

So, the choice is ultimately between an unduly generalized concept that should be used with caution (i.e. with context awareness) and a series of related but different concepts describing processes of urban renewal in more contextually specific terms. Today, discussion of this choice is futile, since the term ‘gentrification’ has already been widely adopted as a synonym for any form of reshaping downtown areas, precluding other options. The benefits of this lie in bringing different processes of urban renewal together in the same global discussion. This is facilitated by Clark’s new proposal for gentrification as a ‘generic’ concept or ‘an adventure of ideas’ (Clark, 2015) that reduces expectations of strict empirical consistency. However, this change in the nature of the concept may not substantially alter gentrification’s effect as a travelling theory, since its implicit contextual attachments remain. In fact, the disadvantages lie in these attachments; that is, the dissimulated differences that relate to the path dependence of processes and to the changing dynamics of power relations among social and political actors involved across different types of processes. This dissimulation usually works at the expense of processes that are analytically more distant from the core of the academic division of labour as they tend to be read through the core’s experience, which coincides to a large extent with the experience of the Anglophone urban world.

My conclusion on this issue remains more or less the same: since we can no longer escape this concept because it has acquired a substance of its own, transgressed the limits of academia and become a sociopolitical issue and a stake in itself – at least in some countries – we should constantly challenge it by revealing and recalling its implicit contextual assumptions and comparing them each time with the contextual realities of the analysis at hand. This is mainly a task that researchers outside the Anglo-American core should carry out, ‘even though researchers within that core would have plenty to gain from an increased awareness of the contextual limits of their own tools’ (Maloutas, 2012a: 44). At the end of the day we should –following Smart and Smart (2017) – see gentrification as a research topic rather than an explanatory theory.

Contextual boundaries

The second issue about gentrification that I want to discuss concerns contextual boundaries. The argument I defended about the importance of contextual attachments demands a relatively subtle delimitation of the diverse contexts of gentrification. For that reason, I described certain relevant features of the metropolises of the Anglophone world related to the particular path of urban history followed by the most prominent of these cities as they became industrialized (Maloutas, 2012a). I insisted mainly – following Fishman’s Bourgeois Utopias (2008) – on the choice of the elites of these cities to abandon the centre to growing industrial activities and the working class. More than a century later, these cities were rapidly deindustrialized, and large areas near their centres became favourable settings for a ‘back to the city’ movement – literally by capital and to some extent metaphorically by the middle classes – stimulated by the creation of large rent gaps (Smith, 1979). The centres of major cities of the Anglophone world became favourable settings for gentrification not only because they offered abundant gentrifiable space, but also because this was combined with neoliberal regulation resulting in direct pro-gentrification policies of urban renewal and the increased commodification of housing. This favourable setting was not present in most other metropolises of the world – as, for example, in Paris, where the elite never quit the centre (Preteceille, 2007), or in Vienna, where the specific weight of public housing still remains overwhelming, thus reducing the margins and the impact of gentrification.

Several authors use the crude duality ‘metropolis of the Global North versus metropolis of the Global South’ to indicate contextual difference. In so doing, they seldom explore it operationally in terms of the distinctive features of the two groups of cities and, especially, the ways these features may differently affect gentrification processes. These two groups – at the same time polar, but also all encompassing – are usually discussed as contextual opposites in a rather intuitive and imprecise way.

By not defining contextual diversity in precise terms that may be important for understanding gentrification, Lees et al. (2015b), and also Ley and Teo (2014), reduce contextual diversity to the very broad differences between cities of the Global North and the Global South or between Western and non-Western cities. This enables adoption of the simple definition of gentrification to prove its presence in cities across different contexts. The two poles are only intuitively mentioned as vague contextual opposites, and this puts many in-between regions, such as Southern Europe in the first case, or Japan and South Korea in the second, uneasily in either part. Lees et al. (2015b) in fact adopt this broad duality in the way they addressed a series of questions to the authors of their edited volume. They appeared to assume that gentrification was undoubtedly working in the cities of the Global North/Western World and questioned whether it was also working in other sites – de facto presumed to be outside the Global North – or if some other ‘endogenous’ concept (obviously destined a priori to be of local importance) would be a more appropriate description of local urban restructuring processes.

At the same time, Lees et al. (2015b) claim that my argument about the contextual attachment of gentrification to the American metropolis is epistemologically blurry, and they rhetorically ask whether these cities have indeed particular features or were just the first to be scientifically studied. This question would be more interesting if it were reversed: were these cities studied first because the dynamic of changes to their centres’ restructuring needed to be dealt with urgently – as was the case earlier with the booming changes in early 20th-century Chicago – or for some other reason? The context of the booming industrial and immigrant metropolis, as well as the political context of interwar USA, are well reflected in the formation of the Chicago School and the human ecology approach, even though this relation was eventually eclipsed by the status acquired by human ecology (i.e. that of a universal approach to urban sociology). The same applies to the study of gentrification. The metropolises of the Anglophone world were studied first because it was there that gentrification became an issue much earlier.

In the section ‘gentrification in comparative perspective’ (Lees et al., 2015b: 4–5), it is accepted that there are differences between North American and West European cities, but this is done in a rather all-encompassing way, which can lead to claiming that New York is not only different from Mumbai, but also from Los Angeles or Chicago. By not clearly defining the terms of comparison, everything can be similar and different at the same time, and gentrification can be detected everywhere. The only criterion remaining is the simple definition of gentrification, whose implicit contextual attachments are thus inadvertently discarded, since their role is obliterated along with contextual subtleties.

If, on the contrary, we follow Bourdieu and Wacquant and their 1999 paper on cultural imperialism, we can obtain a better grasp of contextual difference and can argue that the implicitness of contextual attachments is not the product of some random and inconsequential process. They forcefully stress that it is the effect of ‘cultural imperialism [that] rests on the power to universalize particularisms linked to a singular historical tradition causing them to be misrecognized as such’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999: 41). The main issues they discuss (‘race’, ‘underclass’ and a few others) relate to the ways concepts and theories travel – in their discussion between the USA and France – and eventually impose meanings generated or acquired in the USA as universal.

Context, in the way I understand it regarding gentrification, makes a difference both in terms of the path dependency that influences the formation of the built environment (the physical setting of potential gentrification processes) and the profile of sociopolitical arrangements that either energetically shape urban processes or remain idle and contribute their shape in a more passive way. If this more explicit meaning of context is not taken into account, a contextually biased vision is implicitly adopted. This vision is closer to the market-dominated context of the Anglo-American metropolis and assumes an ever growing urban restructuring on the gentrification mode, at least until it reaches its social and political limits. This vision, however, is exaggerated even in the Anglo-American context. Following Zukin (2016: 203):

[T]here are failed examples […] of gentrification […] to change a neighborhood’s reputation. Or it may take a very long time for them to do so. What really makes gentrification possible is a convergence toward geographically targeted investment on the part of private capital and public policy makers.

This convergence is more difficult in contexts less imbued by and more resistant to economic liberalism. Therefore, whether context matters for gentrification or, to put it another way, whether gentrification is a global process, may be answered differently depending on the way we define both.

Gentrification and cultural differences

The crude contextual divide for gentrification mentioned earlier brings me to the last issue I want to discuss. By using the Global North/Global South or the Western/non-Western city divide in reference to contextual diversity, we run the risk of identifying eclectically and arbitrarily some of their distinctive features and of reifying or essentializing their assumed importance for gentrification. One way that this crude divide may blur the analysis of gentrification-like processes is by obliterating different sociopolitical arrangements within the Global North or Western part of the divide, which is crucial because – as I argued earlier – it facilitates equating urban renewal with gentrification. Another way to blur the analysis is by reifying or essentializing the importance of cultural differences in determining housing practices and political behaviour: if cultural differences are taken on board as a relatively independent item, important socioeconomic factors can be glossed over.

To discuss this issue, I examine the main argument in the Ley and Teo (2014) paper about gentrification in Hong Kong. They start by summarizing my argument in a very accurate way in order to deconstruct it with reference to urban renewal processes in Hong Kong. Their main objective is to analyse what they consider to be a paradox about Hong Kong: that although gentrification is increasingly present in urban renewal processes, the term is barely used in academic or political or media discourses.

Their main idea is that positive cultural and ideological predispositions to urban renewal – related to the rise of home-ownership and social mobility – have acted as a glorifying smokescreen concealing the highly unequal social impact of the building sector. This situation began to change when class-related analyses originating in the gentrification literature started dissipating this smokescreen (Ley and Teo, 2014: 1286):

With the dissemination of a class analysis, more discussion of gentrification in Hong Kong might be expected. So while regional contexts undoubtedly bring significant variations, we conclude that the tenacious culture of property in Hong Kong has obscured the working of a familiar set of class relations in the housing market, relations satisfactorily described by the concept of gentrification, albeit gentrification in a distinctively East Asian idiom. (Ley and Teo, 2014: 1302)

The smokescreen, however, was effectively dissipated with the help of new developments in the building sector. These developments disillusioned householders, whose equity position in terms of housing investment deteriorated, mitigating the effect on their social mobility (Ley and Teo, 2014: 1301).⁸

On the other hand, the physical forms of urban renewal processes have converged between Anglo-America and East Asia:

We have seen that the evolution of gentrification in Euro-America from its initial theme of home renovation through sweat equity to a current preponderance of large new-build properties completed by development companies brings it closer to the paradigm of Asia Pacific. (Ley and Teo, 2014: 1301)

However, the most important thing is whether the social impact of urban renewal has been similar and whether what eventually converged was mainly the physical form; or, was the impact different (in this case less unequal) and brought closer to gentrification following the workings of global forces that eroded non-neoliberal aspects of East Asian capitalism? It seems that in the Anglo-American metropolis, urban renewal has been changing in physical form while preserving its social-impact profile, and in Hong Kong (and probably in several other East Asian cities) the physical form was more or less preserved while its social-impact profile progressively changed.

Ley and Teo (2014: 1293) offer plenty of evidence of the advantages that Hong Kong residents could obtain in the past from urban renewal processes (namely access to better social housing or access to home-ownership, whose rate increased from 25% in 1980 to 50% in 2001 [Yip et al., 2007]). These were real advantages that enabled social mobility, and urban renewal did not need some unwarranted cultural or ideological predispositions to become popular. On the contrary, it was these real advantages that created such positive predispositions.

Processes of displacement have taken a peculiar turn in the experience of urban renewal in Hong Kong: ‘Often the conflict was less about the demolition than it was about the scale of compensation […] through which a majority of tenants and owners can move into better apartments’ (Susnik and Ganesan, 1997 cited in Ley and Teo, 2014: 1296).

Indeed this opportunity is substantial enough that the URA [Urban Renewal Authority] has to conduct a ‘freezing survey’, with a fixed date to confirm legal residency, for experience has shown that households will enter, if necessary squat, in designated redevelopment areas so that they can establish residency and claim eligibility for a compensation package. (Ley and Teo, 2014: 1300)

It seems, therefore, that ‘neighbourhood change, to which Euro-Americans would apply the signifier gentrification, provides in Hong Kong an opportunity for residential upgrading for those who are displaced’ (Ley and Teo, 2014: 1296).

The negative developments for householders at the end of the 1990s, compared with the huge profits of the large development corporations, brought about a more critical stance against developers and the enabling state:

[T]he negative equity position of householders made the huge profits of the large development corporations much less palatable. The synergies between government and the property tycoons became too transparent in large projects, leading to a growing suspicion of ‘collusion’ among members of a growth coalition[.] (Ley and Teo, 2014: 1301)

It also brought about more references to gentrification, since new processes started having important, negative effects that degraded the position and prospects of householders. In this sense, these processes started looking more like the negative urban renewal codified as gentrification – even though these references never reached a substantial level in the local English press and even less so in the Chinese press (Ley and Teo, 2014).

I can understand and accept this reasoning, especially the part differentiating the impact of former processes involving high rates of home-ownership and increased social mobility versus more recent negative developments in the local land and housing market that increased spatial inequality in a city where income inequality was already very high (Yip, 2012). However, I would hesitate to link this change primarily to dissipated cultural barriers and ideological predispositions. I would rather emphasize the material conditions that changed considerably over the years and eventually brought the effective social outcome of local urban renewal processes closer to gentrification and to its negative reputation in those regions where it was academically and politically identified much earlier. I think that the authors are projecting onto Hong Kong the politically antithetical meaning that urban restructuring acquires in opposed political discourses within the Anglophone world; namely the critical approach to urban renewal expressed by the gentrification literature versus the positive approach expressed by urban developers’ lobbies that it is a panacea for all sorts of urban ills. Their contrasting interpretations of the same process are projected onto a context where the evolution of urban renewal did not bring new forms of gentrification to replace previous ones, but gentrification-like processes to replace socially less aggressive social justice arrangements in the building and housing sectors. Moreover, these previous arrangements were related to an era when the East Asian developmental state was more vibrant and Hong Kong benefited from its position as a Western outpost in red China’s underbelly.

Conclusions

There is no question that whatever sociopolitical arrangements were established in developmental capitalist societies in East Asia, in welfare state societies in Western and Northern Europe or in populist–clientelist regimes in Southern Europe or Latin America, the overall outcome of urban restructuring was usually to the benefit of hegemonic classes. However, the more equilibrated sociopolitical rapport des forces in welfare states provided considerable shelter against gentrification-like processes by better protecting former residents or by aiming to preserve the social mix in upwardly mobile neighbourhoods by other means. The same can be argued about developmental capitalist societies that produced similar social effects in a more indirect way by privileging national(ist) objectives that needed some degree of social redistribution to be accepted as such (Fujita, 2003; Hill and Kim, 2000). In the case of Hong Kong, in particular, beneficial effects – such as reduced segregation – also resulted from entrepreneurial strategies to manage the marketability of very large housing projects that had to involve socially and demographically different segments of the market (Yip, 2012). In Southern Europe, post-war authoritarian regimes were compelled to make concessions in order to strengthen their political power. These concessions were usually of the clientelist–populist mode and involved housing mainly by providing socially diffused access to home-ownership – and hence to social mobility – thus creating all sorts of barriers to gentrification when interest in urban renewal emerged in the cities of this region.

What is important, therefore, in many cities outside the Anglophone world is not to learn how to read class relations in processes of urban restructuring – in many of those cities there is a long history of class struggles and class analysis related to space (e.g. Coing [1966] for Paris or Smart and Smart [2017] for Hong Kong, where there is ample literature about urban conflicts in previous decades) – but to realize that the new processes emerging under increasingly neoliberal policy orientations are regressive compared with previous arrangements, especially since they tend to exclude political alternatives in favour of neoliberal economic rationality. The metamorphoses of gentrification through its different waves in the Anglophone world are not a script that should be imposed in order to understand other cities’ urban histories and to make sense (in class terms) of their urban restructuring processes.

Thus, I cannot but agree with Butler (2007: 162) that the concept of gentrification ‘comes bundled with a set of assumptions about the neoliberal nature of the world that originated in the socioeconomic urban landscapes of North America plus a few other sites in the Anglophone world’; and even more with his concern ‘that there is now an expectation of what we should expect to find which blinds us to the continued diversity of consequences’ (2007: 167).

Today, when neoliberal policies have increased inequalities to a level that even experts of the International Monetary Fund consider untenable for future growth (Cuélaud, 2015; Ostry et al., 2016); when neoliberal capitalist globalization has proven insufficient and often harmful in regulating conflicts; when the European Union – the belated ardent convert to neoliberalism – is having trouble pursuing austerity policies, dealing with the new refugee and migrant waves, containing the expansion of the extreme right and, ultimately, surviving within the new geopolitical landscape, it may be justified to consider whether neoliberal regulation is becoming increasingly shaky at the same time as it is becoming increasingly aggressive. In addition, it looks a bit odd to turn for analytical (and political) inspiration to the urban history of a part of the world where political resistance to the growth of neoliberal policies was obliterated earliest. The Anglo-American world may have been a pioneering laboratory in the application of such policies, but other parts of the world have shown more effective resistance (sometimes as an unintended consequence of specific contextual factors) that could be an asset in future struggles and sociopolitical arrangements and compromises, making a difference in people’s lives until the day when social justice is no longer an issue.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on the plenary talk ‘Contextual diversity and urban social change’ at the 10th European Urban & Regional Studies Conference in Chania, Crete (16 September 2016). A previous version under the title ‘Provincial cosmopolitanism? The limits of urban research with borrowed tools’ was presented at the lecture series The Next Urban Planet, Green College, UBC in Vancouver, hosted by E Wyly and D Ley and supported by the Alexander Onassis Foundation – USA (21 October 2015).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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