Abstract
Matthias Bernt has achieved for Neil Smith's (1979) rent gap what David Harvey (2023) has done for Marx's Grundrisse. Bernt's (2022) Commodification Gap translates multiple dimensions of Smith's “modes of thinking” and “modes of writing” (Harvey, 2023, p. x, p. ix) for new generations of urban analysts and activists, while foregrounding the ways competitive struggles over housing, home, and community across multiple generations are rendered into the “immense accumulation of commodities” that structure lives and afterlives on a commodified urban planet (Marx, 1867, p. 43). Bernt deploys a forensic historical materialism of housing, property rights, and urban restructuring in London, Berlin, and St Petersburg, to analyze how frontiers of current change interact with intergenerational palimpsests of law, regulation, investment, and political struggle. For Bernt, the rent gap is a necessary but not sufficient driver of gentrification: the rent gap, as commonly understood and applied, is just one manifestation of historically and geographically contingent processes of market and non-market institutions, regulation and de-regulation, commodification and de-commodification. Bernt theorizes gentrification as a Polanyi process, in which economic markets are embedded in non-market institutions of state and society – of legal and institutional power, cultures of property, social movements, and popular resistance. Bernt develops a powerful theory of the commodification gap – the nexus between a pure, commodified calculus of potential and capitalized ground rent, versus partial de-commodification structured by state regulation and civil society. To synthesize a “bewildering diversity” of state and market transformations over the past century in the UK, Germany, and Russia, Bernt (2022, p. 122) identifies no fewer than a dozen distinct types of commodification gaps.
It is hard to overstate the value of this contribution. The commodification gap reveals the complex, multiple dimensions of gentrification entangled with political struggle. Bernt's magnificent achievement provides emancipatory hope and strategic possibility, in the spirit of Immanuel Wallerstein's response to Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal mantra that “there is no alternative.” Forget TINA, Wallerstein reminded us many years ago; instead, remember TATA: There Are Thousands of Alternatives.
Everyone interested in gentrification should read this book. But read it all, and read it as Bernt wrote it – carefully. The skim can be dangerous and deceptive, especially with section titles like “Why the Rent Gap Isn’t Enough” and “Where the Rent Gap Falls Short.” In order to situate the empirical research and to explicate the distinctive theoretical contribution, Bernt positions the work as a challenge to the economic land-market logics of Neil Smith's rent gap, as well as classical definitions of gentrification going back to Ruth Glass. This is a good tactical move, and it's understandable why Bernt chooses it. But now that Bernt has achieved this impressive empirical analysis and theorization of the commodification gap, it's worth reconsidering the opposition. Smith and Glass would see Bernt's valuable analysis as entirely consistent with their understanding of the evolutionary injustices of gentrification. Smith and Glass – and gentrification – are now widely misunderstood, as the discursive, material, and performative dimensions of competitive urbanism are fragmented and recombined on the cognitive assembly lines of cosmopolitan-capitalist “factories of fragmentation” (Harvey, 1992).
Three issues are most important. First, Bernt's sophisticated analysis of the contextual embeddedness of housing and land markets in state power is precisely what we need today to grasp the full significance of Smith's (1982) examination of gentrification as the leading edge of a long-term process of uneven development in a relentlessly globalizing restructuring of urban space and capital accumulation. Smith first developed the rent gap as a direct attack on the false-consciousness empiricism of demand-side ideologies of “consumer sovereignty” in neoclassical economics. Significant elements of the theory reflected the unique circumstances of the United States in the late twentieth century urban crisis of America's northeastern Rust Belt. Yet all of Smith's work foregrounded the role of state power in the creation and manipulation of rent gaps as intergenerational waves of gentrification became “entirely entwined with global events” in a “greater synergy with global processes.” Bernt's excellent research extends, refines, and sharpens this important lineage.
Second, there is the matter of scale, in both time and space. Bernt's intimate historical-materialist archaeology of St Petersburg, Berlin, and London is a comparative work of exceptional depth and analytical power. One result is a compelling taxonomy of twelve distinct forms of the commodification gap, reflecting durable yet changing multi-scalar institutional environments that vary between and within states, cities, neighborhoods, and even individual land parcels and buildings. Behold the mathematical combinatorics: three cities, at least thirty-six embedded manifestations of commodification gaps … and we’ve just begun on the five hundred twelve cities in the world with populations over a million, not to mention the innumerable constellations of mid-tier cities and tiny towns and villages of an urbanizing planet. Bernt (2022, p. 210) is absolutely correct to remind us that “[i]nstead of one gentrification with a capital G, one should … speak of a multiplicity of gentrifications.” Yet it is imperative that we not forget that gentrification is “indeed a universal phenomenon” (Bernt, 2022, p. 207). The seeming contradiction reflects not only contingent constellations of law, state power, and social mobilization – but also the ways the narrative commodification of urbanism (Beauregard, 1993) propels the strategic industrialization of contingency, ephemerality, polyvocality, and difference (Smith, 2010).
The multiplicity of gentrifications brings us to the third issue. This also involves time, space, and scale – but in long-term, intergenerational ways. Challenging dominant portrayals of gentrification as a teleological series of linear stages in neighborhood-scale changes that produce agglomeration effects of displacement and exclusion, Bernt analyzes multidimensional, non-linear processes of de-regulation and re-regulation, of disinvestment and reinvestment that play out in complex, non-Euclidian, post-Cartesian geometries of power, profit, and resistance. This is most vivid in Bernt's fascinating and eloquent analysis of the ‘splintered’ geography of kommunalkas in St Petersberg – literal fractals of state/capitalist transformation interlacing transnational geopolitics with the daily lives of households and families in individual flats. This spatiotemporal sensitivity suffuses the entire analysis of “manifestations of gentrification” that “are but a symptom of different ways in which real estate and housing markets are ‘embedded’” within particular state formations (Bernt, 2022, p. 210). Again, however, Bernt's exquisite achievement is in analytical and political harmony with the spirit of Glass's understanding of gentrification. Yes, everyone knows that in 1964 Glass offered a strange new word to describe curious changes in a few specific neighborhoods in London. But (for entirely understandable reasons) it is rare to encounter a student, journalist, developer, or activist who has actually read Glass’s (1964) full chapter, or contemporaneous works in which Glass (1962, p. 218) diagnosed planetary-scale sociocultural evolutionary tensions in which the “criteria for differentiation are elusive” because of obsolete, one-dimensional assumptions of “fixed boundaries, irrespective of the scale and the vantage point of observation.” Glass viewed gentrification as a multidimensional manifestation of intensified “neomalthusian” human competition in “a city which illustrates the principle of the survival of the fittest – the financially fittest, who can still afford to work and live there” (Glass, 1964, p. xix, xx). The details of specific building types or neighborhood spatial patterns – and even the (militant?) particularities of unique regimes of planning and state authority – matter less than the fundamental essence of competition. In Glass’ time and place, intensified competition was shaped by the recombinant neoliberal re-animation of eighteenth-century laissez-faire with nineteenth-century Social Darwinism to attack welfare-state collective consumption. At the same time, the metropole was de-stabilized by the shifting intersectional cultural politics of immigration and the accumulated historical debts of an imperialism undermined by a polycentric world system with uneven yet insistent movements of decolonization. Such struggles continue, and “the ‘colonizing’ drive of the higher classes” in the “inner city taken over by non-working classes” (Glass, 1973, p. 177, p. 262) is now thoroughly transnational and global yet locally specific, embedded, and embodied. Despite all that has changed over the last six decades, there can be no doubt that the universal constant of today's planetary urbanization is – same as it ever was – competition. In the West, Glass’ attack on the incessant reproduction of a Darwinian urbanism of the ‘survival of the financially fittest’ is as relevant as ever. Elsewhere, in the vast and complex non-West rest of a reascendent urbanizing world (Arrighi, 2007), competition is often manifest in more collective forms – among families, faiths, linguistic and ethnocultural communities, nations, and trans-national diasporas. Culture mediates economics, and especially in non-Eurocentric standpoint epistemologies, culture constitutes economics. This is the core lesson of half a century of postmodernism, the cultural turn, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, multiple waves of feminist theory, critical Indigenous studies, and queer theory. Yet the materialist performativity of culture conceals the universality of the production of space in a planetary, transnational urban “factory of fragmentation” (Harvey, 1992). In contemporary cognitive capitalism, cultural innovation is valorized by dialectical challenges to even the slightest hint of universality: these challenges themselves are lucrative fields of “entrepreneurial capitalistic activity” (Harvey, 1992, p. 125) that enroll non-capitalist histories, ancestries, and non-Western futurities of anticolonial sovereignty and transnational hybridity into The Project (cf. Gibson-Graham, 1993). The universal Project is competition. This is not a simplistic, vulgar base-superstructure Althusserian assertion (although History does indeed seem to be blazing its trail through the multiform constellations from local tradition to international circumstance – international urban circumstance; compare Althusser, 1967, p. 32 to Boggs and Boggs, 1966). Rather, what is crucial is an acknowledgment of the multidimensional metaphysics of space and time that constitute the embedded context of human competition on an urban planet. As just one example, Black Quantum Futurism artists, performing on unceded, ancestral Indigenous territories in one of the planet's most highly capitalized rent gaps, emphasize that “the quantum mechanics of time, space-time, causality and interaction” are best understood using “Afrocentric practices … rather than Eurocentric colonizing structures of space, time, and reality” (quoted in Derdeyn, 2023, p. C3).
Apologies for the cryptic jargon. I’m trying to respect word limits while doing justice to every word Bernt wrote in this wonderful book. Let's just say that Glass would be inspired by the way Bernt (2022, p. 218) situates his meticulous analysis in relation to Tom Gillespie's (2020, p. 599) theorization of the “incremental and contested commodification of state land” in Africa's cities. The complex, contextually-embedded “nexus between commodification and decommodification” (Bernt, 2022, p. 218) of housing and land etches a universality-particularity dialectic of space-time at the scale of the planet and beyond, through intersectional encounters of materialist and metaphysical moral claims among today's collectives – and many generations of ancestors and descendants.
Bernt's (2022, p. 204) commodification gap reveals “constellations of property rights and bargaining positions” that reconfigure space, time, and gentrifications that are at once collective and competitive, positional and planetary. In Hawai’i, Mark Zuckerberg's purchase of a $100 million, 700-acre former sugar plantation involved secretive shell companies and a partnership with a Métis Portuguese-Indigenous Hawai’ian retired professor to dispossess the ancestral land claims of a hundred descendants of an immigrant dating back to the Kuleana Act of 1850. The Professor earned a PhD in Geography, and applies Harvey's analysis of time-space compression in an essay on the Hawai’ian spirituality of the voices of ancestors everywhere, “in the seas, the streams, the skies and everything else that comprises ‘āina [land] in its broadest sense” (Andrade, 2014, p. 20). In Kumasi, Ghana, Paul Akaabre (2021) documents how nineteenth-century British colonial land lease systems morphed into a postcolonial privatization system in a 1969 constitution – culminating half a century later in the eviction of Lebanese and Nigerian shopkeepers when the ruler of the Ashante Kingdom began enforcing the policy of end-of-lease reversion to the customary chief in a society where land is sacred. Here, land belongs to dead ancestors and unborn descendants, and cannot be mindlessly bought and sold by those living solely in the present. In the Vancouver metropolitan region of British Columbia, Craig Jones (2020) analyzes how a few families from the millions displaced by Syria's civil war were accepted as government-assisted refugees by Canada's federal government, and then a local immigrant services society struggled to find them rental homes in one of the world's most expensive land markets. They wound up in ‘long-term temporary’ accommodation in a modest, aging suburban apartment complex, only to be displaced by a developer backed by Canadian public-service pension funds, tearing down the buildings to make way for the sustainability spectacle of high-density, transit-oriented development. Meanwhile, after generations of legal struggle and twenty-first-century Supreme Court decisions belatedly recognizing the strictures of a Royal Proclamation issued in London in 1763, three of the 204 BC Indigenous nations on whose territories the present-day City of Vancouver is built “now own more private property than any other developer in the region” (Khelsilem, 2021). Reading these kinds of events with the forensic analytical infrastructure developed in Matthias Bernt's Commodification Gap helps us to understand what it really means to think about – and to challenge – the relentless capitalization of urban life at the scale of the planet and beyond.
