Globalizing the Sociology of Gentrification

Abstract

How can the gentrification scholarship of US urban sociologists be enhanced by expanding beyond the confines of the Global North to include empirical and theoretical analyses of Southern gentrifications? This article engages the debate around the utility of the gentrification concept outside of postindustrial Northern cities. It argues that, in contrast to geographers and other interdisciplinary urbanists, many US-based sociologists have unduly overlooked or minimized two aspects of gentrification that may be more clearly observed in the Global South: the roles of local political-economic forces and the state. This article also notes what the discipline of sociology can add to apt explorations of gentrification in the Global South. It marries the oft-disparate discourses of sociologists of gentrification primarily in North America and Western Europe with geographers and other urbanists conducting gentrification research in the Global South in order to globalize the sociology of gentrification.

Once a marginal topic during the 1960s and 70s, gentrification is now considered the largest subfield in urban studies (Lees and Phillips 2018). British sociologist Ruth Glass injected the term “gentrification” into urbanist lexicon when she sought to capture local inequality and class struggles in her book, London: Aspects of Change (1964), by discussing how “the working-class quarters of London ha[d] been invaded by the middle classes upper and lower” who replaced modest homes for more upscale accommodations and displaced the original working-class inhabitants (xviii). Since then, debates over how to define gentrification have become an ever-evolving, core element of the gentrification literature, in addition to debates about its causes, outcomes, where it takes place, and its emblematic features (Brown-Saracino 2010).

While the 2000s and 2010s saw a globalizing of gentrification case studies, the term “gentrification” is still not especially common in academic or public discourse in regions like Asia Pacific (Ley and Teo 2014), India (Doshi 2015), or Latin America (Betancur 2014) (although there are examples of its adoption by grassroots activists in places such as Mexico; López-Morales et al. 2016). However, the concept of gentrification is gaining prominence in transnational academic discourses, with two books (Lees et al. 2015, 2016), numerous articles, a few special issues of journals (e.g., Janoschka et al. 2014; López-Morales et al. 2016; Shin et al. 2016; Visser 2002), and convenings in Santiago, Chile; Singapore; and London focused solely on demonstrating theoretically and empirically the use of gentrification as a “planetary” concept. Such works are increasingly shifting the discourse and research on how gentrification operates in general terms and getting scholars to home in on its location-specific particularities.

In spite of this globalizing of the interdisciplinary study of gentrification, US-based sociologists working on the topic have remained North-centric, limiting their studies largely to major cities in the United States and Europe (e.g., New York, Chicago, and London). What do the subfield of gentrification studies and, in particular, the sociological gentrification scholarship lose by constricting the explorations of gentrification in this way? What approaches and knowledges must be applied to adequately reverse such patterns? The goal of this article is neither to reify geographical boundaries or disciplinary silos, nor to provide a compendium of the extensive and steadily growing gentrification research in the Global South (that has already been thoroughly executed by the aforementioned scholars). Rather, it offers the following more modest interventions: (1) to assert that the gentrification scholarship of US urban sociologists can be enhanced by expanding beyond the confines of the Northern locales we typically assess to include empirical and theoretical analyses of Southern gentrifications; (2) to provide the dimensions that have been identified by other urbanists as central to gentrification in the Global South and should, therefore, be incorporated into sociological examinations of these spaces; and (3) to indicate how the work on gentrification in Southern cities could potentially be enhanced by the use of a more sociological lens. While I refer primarily to the patterns of development and gentrification as they pertain to Latin America, some of these references will be consistent with broader patterns across the Global South, to which I also refer when possible.

I first consider why US urban sociologists have limited their studies of gentrification to North American cities by briefly discussing the current leading debates in the sociological gentrification literature and the resulting diminished role of the state in their analyses. I then discuss the fervent debate, primarily among geographers, on the relevance of the term “gentrification” in non-North American/Western European contexts and the process by which they began to globalize the term, so as to provide a springboard from which US sociologists can leap forward and avoid their early pitfalls. I continue by identifying what could be gleaned from the examinations of the spatial, class-based change processes, often classified as gentrification, by urban scholars in contexts that are geographically, epistemologically, and ideologically rooted in the Global South.

I argue that, in contrast to geographers and other interdisciplinary urbanists, many US-based sociologists have overlooked or minimized two aspects of gentrification that may be more clearly observed in the Global South. The first aspect is the local political-economic forces, including institutional arrangements, development histories, and forms of coloniality. These forces have resulted in unique urban/suburban spatial organizations related to informal housing settlements often referred to as “slums,” sites of centrality, and the hybridity of uses within cities. The second aspect is the prominence of the state as a driver of gentrification, including its marked use of extra-economic force, promotion and facilitation of mega events, and marshalling of support in conjunction with international organizations and private actors to advance heritage tourism and historical preservation. I am not arguing that there has been a total lack of attention to these factors in the United States, but that the roles in which they play in the Global South have been documented more extensively. I contend that the nearly exclusive focus on US cities has led US sociologists to pay less attention to these factors. As a consequence, they underestimate the importance of characteristics that may also be quite relevant for understanding gentrification in the United States.

I conclude by noting what the discipline of sociology can add to apt explorations of gentrification in the Global South. These include a keen focus on sociopolitical polarizations rooted in differences other than class, rich studies of social movements, and methodological interventions grounded in decades of deft application to the study of gentrification. In doing all of the above, I ultimately marry the oft-disparate discourses of sociologists of gentrification primarily in North America and the United Kingdom with geographers and other urbanists conducting gentrification research in the Global South in order to globalize the sociology of gentrification.

The Sociology of Gentrification

The gaze of US-based sociologists of gentrification has been fixed upon the Global North and thus has tended to overlook Latin American, African, and Asian cities (and their peripheries) as sites of empirical investigation and theorization. This insularity is unsurprising given what Roy (2009:820) calls the “EuroAmerican hegemony of urban theory.” The broader field of urban sociology in the United States is not especially transnational, notwithstanding the distinguished contributions of sociologists like Sharon Zukin, Saskia Sassen, Javier Auyero, Philip Kasinitz, Manuel Castells, and Michael Burawoy. It is therefore almost expected that urban sociological research would circumscribe gentrification studies within its own US borders. However, it is also likely that US-based sociological gentrification scholarship has limited its geographic scope for other practical reasons. In the first place, US sociological gentrification studies are still contending with the significant local and regional heterogeneity of Global North contexts (Brown-Saracino 2017) and some argue that this heterogeneity has yet to be fully captured (Billingham 2015). Scholars may be understandably reluctant to introduce more complexity from other geographies to such research.

Lastly, the shift in priority to the effects of gentrification and whether displacement is in fact an outcome of gentrification processes has minimized interest in the mechanisms engendering gentrification, which discourages examinations of interconnected causes across the globalized world. When gentrification scholarship first became “mainstream” within urban studies in the 1980s, the central debate was about gentrification’s causes and was essentially represented by two factions, those whom considered gentrification to be a function of production, structural constraints, and the capitalist economy (often associated with Neil Smith), and those who believed that gentrification’s primary drivers were consumer demand, choice, and culture (often associated with David Ley) (Lees et al. 2010).

Over the past 30 years, the primary contention within US sociological gentrification studies has shifted from this debate about the causes of gentrification to one about gentrification’s impacts and potential means to ameliorate its effects (if actually perceived as negative and substantial) (Brown-Saracino 2017). Those who conduct qualitative gentrification research tend to employ micro-approaches and see gentrification as a highly detrimental transformational process, one whose hallmark is displacement, while quantitative gentrification scholars take a more macro-approach across regions, cities, and neighborhoods, and generally see gentrification as less consequential to the residents, communities, and institutions so central to qualitative analyses (Brown-Saracino 2017). Causal factors are still addressed in the sociological literature; however, they often combine supply- and demand-side explanations and never definitively conclude that there is a direct causal relationship between gentrification and effects such as displacement (Hwang and Lin 2016).

While the effects of gentrification processes are critical, a more expansive examination of how enabling conditions (related to state power, political regimes, and economic markets) and contingent factors (such as who constitutes gentrifying groups (Betancur 2014)) differ across national contexts would generate a fuller understanding of how dispossession happens. This return to causes, but with reference to a widened assemblage of possibilities, would minimize absolutist language and hegemonic understandings that center North American and European middle-class gentrifiers, economic trajectories, political histories, and property regimes. Not only does this approach avoid uncritically translating and extracting gentrification theories of the Global North and applying them uniformly to the Global South, but it also enriches gentrification studies in Northern cities by illuminating which factors have become mistakenly universalized with time and frequency of use in Northern contexts.

Interdisciplinary scholars conducting research in Southern contexts have maintained a focus on the broader state and market-based structures that cause gentrification. In contrast, US-based urban sociologists’ shift in attention from the causes to the outcomes of gentrification has led them to unduly attenuate the state’s significant role in gentrification processes. This is not to say that the state’s role is negligible in US accounts. The urban growth strategies of the state and specific interest groups, particularly those related to the real estate industry as outlined by Molotch (1976) and Logan and Molotch (1987), became crucial to analyses of city boosterism and gentrification. Zukin (1996) addressed the pacification and beautification projects employed by the state to make urban spaces consumable by gentrifying classes. The support of local government has been touted in urban sociology as a “precondition” for urban rehabilitations associated with gentrification (Zukin 1987:132). However, in spite of these contributions and others to our understandings of gentrification, state involvement is not sufficiently present in US sociologists’ contemporary analyses of economic and spatial restructuring associated with gentrification processes.

Loïc Wacquant has similarly pointed out that gentrification scholars have tended to downplay the state’s complicity in gentrification processes. Wacquant (2008:202) implored “students of gentrification [to] recognize that the primary engine behind the (re)allocation of people, resources and institutions in the city is the state” and that the state has a crucial role in producing “not only space but the space of consumers and producers of housing.” The role of the state, particularly in the context of neoliberal urbanism in both the South and capitalist nations in the industrialized North, continues to be most frequently engaged by geographers who regularly dissect how state intervention impacts gentrification through extra-economic force using zero tolerance policing, what Smith (1996) sees as a return to revanchism; urban planning, including relaxed zoning, public housing demolition and historic district preservation; and the cultivation of a social and political climate designed to incentivize investment, including the use of favorable loans to developers and potential gentrifiers and utility and property tax changes (e.g., see, Aalbers 2019; Goetz 2011; Hackworth and Smith 2001; Weber 2002; Wilson 2004; Wyly and Hammel 1999).

Defining Gentrification from the Global South

When urban geographers began their initial forays into studies of gentrification outside of the Global North at the turn of the 21st century, they often employed an overly uniform approach to cases of Southern gentrification (for examples, see Atkinson and Bridge 2005; Porter and Shaw 2008; Atkinson 2003), running counter to anticolonial approaches to knowledge production now frequently associated with comparative urbanism (e.g., see McFarlane 2010; Parnell and Robinson 2012; Robinson 2004; Roy 2009). For example, the former frequently couched discussions within the familiar theoretical understandings and experiences of advanced capitalist economies, not fully integrating the realities of developmentalism, universalism, and categorization that had all greatly affected how space was transformed in Southern cities (Lees 2012). While it is laudable that these earlier documentations of gentrifications outside of the Global North pushed Southern locations onto the urbanist gentrification agenda, there was still much work to be done to engage with these sites using alternative paradigms that neither ignored extant differences nor overemphasized them.

A marked shift in the globalization of gentrification studies began when Harris (2008) used a comparative approach in his examination of gentrification in Mumbai and London in order to challenge the Eurocentric and diffusionist logic about the “global spread of gentrification” (2407) that presumed an outgrowth of gentrification from what has become known as the global “core” to the global “periphery.” This and work from other urbanists who followed the example of Harris would be radically different from the earlier attempts at focusing on Southern cities. This work was rooted more in indigenous epistemologies and was committed to bringing Southern cities into the research as equal sites of investigation, sites which could themselves have already been engaged in processes that mirrored gentrification and did not necessarily flow from the North (López-Morales 2015).

Since this globalizing of gentrification studies began, there has been a debate among urbanists, primarily outside of US sociology, about the applicability of the concept of “gentrification” in settings removed not only from the postindustrial London context from which the concept was conceived by Glass in 1964, but those located completely outside of the Global North. Arguing that the concept can indeed travel, Smith (2002), among others, states that a generalized form of gentrification has emerged that now makes it a global urban strategy. On the other side of the debate are scholars who reject the application of a gentrification lens in contexts that do not closely mirror that in which it was originally conceived (e.g., see Boddy 2007; Ghertner 2014; Maloutas 2012). While I will not fully rehash the polemic, I will state that I recognize the admonitions of scholars such as Ghertner (2014) who have concerns about the potential loss of analytical clarity and the importance of accurately identifying processes of urban change to avoid eliding critical particularities, and Maloutas (2012) who argue that labeling as gentrification the multitude forms of urban regeneration across space and time has the potential to incorrectly project neoliberal ideology and practice. We must avoid hastily adopting terms and taken-for-granted assumptions about the mechanisms and outcomes of class-based spatial transformations in the Global South when such assumptions stem from sites and epistemes of the Global North. Similarly, we cannot perpetuate diffusionist logic that concludes that gentrification has simply “spread” from central cities in the Global North to Southern cities and is basically a form of “imitative urbanism” (Lees 2012:156).

With these deliberations in mind, I hold that it is neither necessary nor advantageous to completely abandon knowledge about these types of change processes as we move across contexts. Rather, it is crucial to assess what we are learning in light of what we believe we already know, given the various specificities of the underexplored sites of the Global South, and maintain a willingness to unlearn our inherited knowledges if they prove false or extraneous. I, therefore, agree with scholars who argue that a broader definition of gentrification facilitates better thinking and learning across contexts, and that referring to apt urban change processes in the Global South as gentrification can generate political and social benefits. While scholars like Maloutas (2012) argue that there is a danger in abstracting and generalizing the concept of gentrification to subsume a vast array of development processes and geographical locations, I contend that there is intellectual value in the creation of “generic theoretical categories” that cut across boundaries, as opposed to the continued detachment and isolation of cases from different locations because they have differing geographies and historical trajectories (López-Morales 2015:564). A more inclusive definition can account for a diversity of contexts and contingencies and various geographies of gentrification (Lees et al. 2007). To this end, I find utility in the following generic definition by Clark (2005) as it is intended to be both elastic and focused, eliminating what are deemed unnecessary qualifiers, and allowing for an incorporation of the specificities of individual cases and a judicious interrogation of the wider shared relations that are present across spaces:

Gentrification is a process involving a change in the population of land-users such that the new users are of a higher socioeconomic status than the previous users, together with an associated change in the built environment through a reinvestment in fixed capital. . . (p. 258)

To be clear, the change in population is one I attach to displacement, as I see displacement as requisite for gentrification. Such a definition can account for the similarities that exist across geographic boundaries with regard to the processes, policies, and practices that further capitalist accumulation; similarities that make the contemporary use of the term “gentrification” apropos in the Global South.

Insights from Southern Gentrification Studies

In this section, I highlight two key insights from the interdisciplinary scholarship on gentrification in Southern cities about the: (1) the impact of local politicoeconomic forces, including institutional arrangements, development histories, and forms of coloniality and; (2) the prominence of the state as a driver of gentrification processes. This list is not meant to be exhaustive but provide points of departure for a more global urban sociology of gentrification. Attention to these considerations enables productive comparative theorizing about the structural dimensions and location-specific contingencies that induce gentrification and expand uneven redevelopment processes, which continue to disproportionately affect the already marginalized residents of this planet. Overlooking them can prompt a sociological analysis that is rife with false causalities, overgeneralizations, and misinterpretations about key elements in the spatial grammars of gentrification.

Local Politicoeconomic Forces, Including Institutional Arrangements, Development Histories, Forms of Coloniality, and Unique Urban/Suburban Spatialities

Every mode of production yields its own space. As a consequence, urban space has evolved in different forms and at different paces depending on the historical context of economic development (Lefebvre 1992). The term “Global South” is a relational one, as it is meant to analogize the relationship between the “core/centre” and “periphery” of the global economy (Prebisch 1950), and typically refers to the regions of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. While it would be unjust to overgeneralize such vast spaces and populations, the nations and territories of the Global South are grouped as such because they have been subject to distinct, yet relatively consistent patterns of underdevelopment and exploitation through colonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, and neo-imperialism.¹ They have, subsequently, experienced significantly divergent patterns of industrialization and economic development from those of the capitalist industrialized nations of the Global North (Garrido et al. this issue). For example, in the case of Latin America, the hegemonic position that real estate took as it replaced industrialization does not mirror the intensity of that of the North (Betancur 2014).

Any interrogation of gentrification in Southern locales must begin with an understanding of the broader economic forces that have shaped the development economies of the Global South and the local political regimes that are also responsible for producing distinct southern spatialities, since differing processes of spatial restructuring have led to differing processes of gentrification. As Betancur (2014) suggests, when analyzing gentrification outside of more widely studied Global North contexts, one should address the structural enabling conditions as they relate to shifts in the broader modes of politicoeconomic development, such as regime shifts. Attention should equally be given to the contingent factors that are based upon specific geographic and spatial contexts that mediate and shape gentrification such as rent production, reproduction, and capture, state regulations, the rise of middle-class groups and the production of gentrifiers and gentrifiable areas, civil society formation, subaltern urbanism, and informality (Betancur 2014; Lees et al. 2016).

Between the 1940s and the 1980s, many cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America saw the first massive migrations of people from the sites of agricultural production on the country sides to urban locations (Garrido et al. this issue). Urban regions were not fitted for the sheer volume of people who would come to take residence and seek employment, resulting in high unemployment and an increase in informal labor and housing settlements, which were often overcrowded and lacked proper access to water, sanitation, electricity, health care, and education. While informal housing exists in the Global North, the scale remains a distinct feature of Southern cities, with a third of those living in cities in the Global South in informal housing settlements (problematically referred to as “slums”) and the absolute number of residents on the rise (Villareal, this issue). While some informal housing settlements are on the periphery, others are prominently featured within cities like Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and have, therefore, become major targets for massive destruction and displacement (Cummings 2015; Lees et al. 2016).²

The “gentrifier” plays a key role in cultural discussions about the factors spurring gentrification in the Global North. Consumption-side explanations assume a particular kind of middle-class consumer whose preferences for “a gentrification aesthetic” (Bridge 2001) led them to abandon the suburbs and flock to the city, making them responsible for the shifting tide of housing and neighborhood desirability and, subsequently, price augmentation. However, the suburbanization associated with early- to mid-twentieth century industrialization in Europe and the United States did not take place in the Global South (Lees et al. 2016; Ren, this issue). The degree to which more affluent groups moved out of the center cities differs from city to city in Latin America. The group who constitutes the middle class in Southern literature on gentrification often does not mirror that of the North. The middle class in Southern cities is far more diverse in terms of tenancy type and income, being both landlord and tenant, bourgeoisie, and “aspiring bourgeoisie” (Lees et al. 2016:83). The share and compensation of those in high service jobs is still lower in Latin America than in North America, making the middle class in Latin America a smaller proportion of the population (Betancur 2014). There are, thus, potentially far fewer middle-class gentrifiers in Latin America than in the United States.

The Prominence of the state as a Driver of Gentrification Processes

The state, both “neoliberal and authoritarian,” through public policy, economic investment, and physical control, has been noted by Southern scholars as being the primary driver of gentrification, its role exceeding what it has been in Northern cities (Lees et al. 2016:109; López-Morales 2015). One reason the state is believed to play a more significant function in gentrification processes in the Global South is that, in order to begin to create new physical spaces for the increases of capital, they must first generate “spatial capital” (Rérat and Lees 2011) through massive infrastructure development and the upgrading of land that had often once been public (Lees et al. 2016).

Extra-economic force and market-based approaches are often mutually reinforcing mechanisms engendering gentrification-related displacement. The state’s use of coercive force to evict neighborhood residents frequently precipitates, is carried out in conjunction with, or is used to bolster market-induced displacement. For example, scholars suggest that state entrepreneurialism has led to the total transformation of cities like Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, through a series of tactics including the military occupation of the favelas, globalizing mega-events, and large-scale state-led urban development projects (Lees et al. 2016; Ribeiro and Junior 2007). In cities like Rio, there has been an increase in what is known as the domestication and pacification of informal housing settlements through state violence (Cummings 2015), which is considered one of the most significant strategies for urban spatial restructuring in Latin America (López-Morales et al. 2016). Existing racial and ethnic oppressions are often intensified, with dislocations realized and justified through the policing of racialized spaces. Scholars, journalists, and activists have documented the relationships between anti-Blackness and policing in countries like Brazil (see, e.g., Holloway 1993; Smith 2016) and this relationship has worsened since the increase in state-led pacification projects in favelas, which evoke the promise of a more sanitized city, better suited for the influx of residents, and businesses deemed racially and financially acceptable.

In the government’s capacity as “city maker” in the Global South, it has worked to rebrand at an international scale through the creation of mega events such as the Summer and Winter Olympics, FIFA World Cup, expositions, political summits, conventions, and other festivals that can bring acclaim to cities and nations. These mega-events, along with large construction projects and urban “regeneration” schemes, represent a form of state-led speculative capitalization (López-Morales et al. 2016) that can hasten and magnify the scale at which the state uproots populations. An insistence on selecting the ideal spaces for temporary mega events has led to the massive permanent displacement of communities who find themselves situated within or near these choice sites. For example, in 1977, one year before Argentina hosted the World Cup, the shanty town Bajo Belgrano was eliminated through the Eradication Plan carried out by the civil-military dictatorship. Only a few months after the ‘78 World Cup, about 50 percent of residents had been cast out of their homes (Bellardi 1986). The land was gradually redeveloped in the 1990s and 2000s into what are now luxury condominiums (Shin and López-Morales 2018), a process that fits Clark’s broader definition of gentrification in spite of it not being designated as such at the time. Brazil has become notorious for its dislocation of communities for both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, a pattern of dispossession that has continued to have dire consequences. For example, when Brazil hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2014 police killings in Rio de Janeiro increased by 40 percent as a result of “public security” plans (Amnesty International n.d.). Military-style Police Pacification Units (UPPs) became a permanent fixture in select favelas (Cummings 2015) and in the seven years that followed the announcement of the Olympic games, Rio’s security forces killed over 2,500 people, the majority of whom were young Black men (Amnesty International n.d.).

Heritage tourism and historical preservation driven by the state tend to play a greater role in gentrification-led displacements in the Latin American region than in the Global North (Janoschka et al. 2014). In 1977, the Organization of American States devised an agenda, known as the “Quito Letter,” to transform historic centers in Latin America into heritage tourism hot spots (Lees et al. 2016). These transformations have continued to take place through concerted efforts by local and state governments, the private sector, and international financial and cultural institutions like the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and UNESCO. The rehabilitation of historic centers in cities like Cartagena, Colombia (Valle 2018), Quito, Ecuador (Carrión 2005), and Puebla, Mexico (Jones and Varley 1999), has been used as the crux of city- and country-wide revitalization efforts. These projects embody not just middle-class consumption and cultural preferences but the potential transformations of the reputations and economic structures of entire cities, nations, and regions. The preservation of architecture and historical memory often comes at the expense of the people inhabiting these spaces, those who become objects to be cleansed away in the sanitation projects that governments and private developers feel are necessary to attract tourism, what some refer to as tourism gentrification or “touristification” (Cócola-Gant 2018).

Globalizing the Sociology of Gentrification

Scholars insist that using gentrification as a framework to evaluate apt spatial transformations can serve in the symbolic and material struggles against various forms of displacement³ (Janoschka et al. 2014; Lees et al. 2016; López-Morales et al. 2016; Shin et al. 2016; Slater 2009). I do not agree that it is necessary to use the concept of gentrification in resistance struggles, as individual activists and organizations have been combatting urban displacements in the Global South for centuries without the language of the North (Weinstein, this issue). However, I do see the utility in embracing a term that can facilitate a transnational movement among the economically, politically, and socially marginalized in urban spaces around the world.⁴ Sociologists should include insights from the interdisciplinary global studies of gentrification, which have long been committed to delving into a broader host of conceptual issues and urbanization processes.

Sociologists of gentrification can contribute to this body of knowledge by employing some of the methodological and theoretical strategies that they have been applying in Northern locales to processes of urban transformation and displacement in the Global South. For example, relational ethnographies⁵ of Southern sites of gentrification would demonstrate the intricacies of the relationships between the many social actors responsible for and living through gentrification. US urban sociologists have been conducting nuanced micro- and ethnographic sociological analyses of various processes that are taking place under the conditions of gentrification in Northern cities. While there have been very few studies of this kind by Northern sociologists in Southern locales, the use of such approaches could provide in-depth encounters with those experiencing gentrification in the Global South.

While categories of social, economic, and political difference are referred to in the gentrification research of some geographers and other urbanists (e.g., see Doshi 2013 for discussions of differentiated dispossession based upon class, ethnoreligion, and gender), analyses related to such polarizations generally seem to be absent or somewhat superficial. For example, when it comes to categories such as race, scholars, government officials, urban planners, and private developers alike tend to reinforce the notion of “colorblind” or “race-neutral” urbanism, which fails to address race and racism as intrinsic features of urban development (Valle 2017). Race and ethnicity may not be the most salient categories of difference depending on the locale (e.g., see Garrido, this issue), but a social scientific attention to the underexplored, yet germane categories associated with the societies’ subaltern groups could provide an additional layer of information by which to make sense of the gentrification landscape. Similarly, activism and social movements still remain underinvestigated and undertheorized in the studies of gentrification (Lees et al. 2016). Given the significant roles that sociologists have played in the development of social movement theory, it is a logical lens through which to understand the collective responses to both the economic and political projects of gentrification by the state and others with capital significant enough to bring about spatial change.⁶

Sociological macro-approaches can be extremely helpful in establishing comparisons, paying attention to the politics of measurement, and capturing the statistical existence of the cost of neoliberalism and its victims, which neoliberalism typically invisibilizes (Lees et al. 2010). Quantitative sociologists have done extensive work around measuring the location, existence, and intensity of gentrification (e.g., Hwang and Sampson 2014; Timberlake and Johns-Wolfe 2016). Their combined methodologies and theoretical questions could also add to the intersectional complexity of the explorations of gentrification in Southern cities.

In addition to contributing to the work in the Global South, there are spaces for rigorous comparative sociological work between southern and northern locations, incorporating the aforementioned considerations to note points of similarity and difference. We can deterritorialize our work, to the extent that we are worlding the studies of gentrification, and simultaneously emplace it by acknowledging place-specific contingencies. The scholarship on Southern gentrifications is bourgeoning and constantly shifting our apprehensions, especially of the causal mechanisms and conditions under which gentrification can emerge, persist, and be reproduced in other locations. With a greater degree of circumspection, global urban sociologists can sharpen how we theorize process, problems, and solutions related to gentrification.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Marc Lamont Hill, Liza Weinstein, and the external reviewers for their insightful feedback on this article.

1.

For stages of Third World development, see Almeida (2016) and the work of .

2.

For a discussion of “slum” evictions in South Africa and India, see Weinstein, this issue.

3.

See, for the various forms of displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods.

4.

One can still argue that this presumes that existing terms employed in Southern contexts could not apply to the North, as if only ideas of the North can be universal.

5.

For explanations and examples of this relational approach, see Emirbayer (1997), Auyero (2001), Mische (2011), and .

6.

For examples of sociological research on resistance to gentrification in the United States, see review by .

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