Dialogues in Human Geography

The epistemologies and politics of comparative research are prominently debated within urban studies, with ‘comparative urbanism’ emerging as a contemporary lexicon of urban studies. The study of urban gentrification has, after some delay, come to engage with these debates, which can be seen to pose a major challenge to the very concept of gentrification. To date, similar debates or developments have not unfolded within the study of rural gentrification. This article seeks to address some of the challenges posed to gentrification studies through an examination of strategies of comparison and how they might be employed within a comparative study of rural gentrification. Drawing on Tilly (Big structures Large Processes Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage), examples of four ‘strategies of comparison’ are identified within studies of urban and rural gentrification, before the paper explores how ‘geographies of the concept’ and ‘geographies of the phenomenon’ of rural gentrification in the United Kingdom, United States and France may be investigated using Latour’s (Pandora’s Hope. London: Harvard University Press) notion of ‘circulatory sociologies of translation’. The aim of our comparative discussion is to open up dialogues on the challenges of comparative studies that employ conceptions of gentrification and also to promote reflections of the metrocentricity of recent discussions of comparative research.

Smith and Phillips make a powerful case both for investigating rural population change within much of the Global North from a class-foregrounded gentrification perspective and for undertaking this investigation in an internationally comparative manner. Neither aspect has been sufficiently developed within scholarship to date. While endorsing such a call, this commentary briefly presents three additional contextual framings: describing and explaining the very late coming of age of explicit ‘rural gentrification’ research; reiterating the challenge that geographical transferability of concepts and terminology presents; and insisting on the central but not exclusive role class must play within critical discourse on populations in the contemporary countryside.

This commentary focuses on gentrification in urban and rural contexts, focusing on five points: the tradition and the use of comparative approaches in gentrification studies, epistemological issues around the concept of gentrification, the opportunities for productively engaging findings from ‘rural gentrification’ studies for a better understanding of urban phenomena and the blurring of differences between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ in an age of planetary urbanization.

My response to Phillips and Smith’s, ‘Comparative approaches to gentrification’ begins by acknowledging that the piece represents an important step toward greater clarity within the discussion of gentrification. From there, I lobby for the expansion of the means of comparison beyond those focused on in the piece. The alternate means of comparison that I propose are what are commonly referred to as cultural narratives and my contention is that by comparing and contrasting the stories that people rely upon to represent, explain, justify, and recount their behavior, either as creators or consumers of gentrifiable space offer another significant means by which to understand the relationship(s) between differing gentrification events. Drawing on preexisting research in the rural American West, I offer brief examples of how this method can be applied to explain and describe and thereby compare the actions and motives of gentrifiers.

Phillips and Smith extend debates about comparative epistemologies onto both the process and concept of rural gentrification. In doing so, they illustrate the forms of comparative research, their various critiques and limitations, and the different ways comparative strategies can illuminate new understandings of rural gentrification. Their opening dialogue connects the field of rural geography more directly with theoretical conversations taking place largely in the realm of urban geography, and I find their explication of the various comparative strategies useful in thinking about the ways in which one might approach comparative research. I, however, also find their discussion of comparison somewhat “flat” in the sense that they emphasize comparison between places (north vs. south, urban vs. rural, etc.). Comparison between places is certainly one approach that can generate new understandings of a spatial phenomenon, but comparison across scales—both spatial and temporal—also has the potential to reveal new ways in which the movement of people, capital, and ideas produce and reproduce contemporary landscapes.

Phillips and Smith’s attempt to refresh (rural) gentrification theory is successful as they provide a prolific set of epistemological comparative threads and substantiate this position via analysis of the UK, France and the US cases. Nevertheless, in my opinion, academia should go beyond the Western European/North American comfort zone and embrace theoretical and epistemological complexity, the currently extended and variegated planetary space presents.

In response to the five commentaries on our paper ‘Comparative approaches to gentrification: lessons from the rural’, we open up more ‘windows’ on rural gentrification and its urban counterpart. First, we highlight the issues of metrocentricity and urbanormativity within gentrification studies, highlighting their employment by our commentators. Second, we consider the issue of displacement and its operation within rural space, as well as gentrification as a coping strategy for neoliberal existence and connections to more-than-human natures. Finally, we consider questions of scale, highlighting the need to avoid naturalistic conceptions of scale and arguing that attention could be paid to the role of material practices, symbolizations and lived experiences in producing scaled geographies of rural and urban gentrification.