Abstract
The first time I heard about this collective work was in 2017 in the RC21 Leeds Conference, where the authors presented their work, entitled ‘Looking for the DNA of gentrification’ after its original publication in French by Éditions Amsterdam. I was impressed with the idea that PhD students, who all studied gentrification in a different field – whether a metropolis or a shrinking city – from France, Portugal, Spain, and England could join efforts to publish collectively. This is rare and valuable in the individualistic academia, where young scholars might have difficulty in forming collaborations and co-authoring.
The authors underline the plurality of gentrification depending on the local contexts with different structures and agents. Yet they also claim that there are commonalities behind these multiple phenomena of gentrification that they define as ‘the DNA of gentrification’ (p. 26). They analyse these ‘overarching structural lines’ (p. 35) under three headings of structures, policies, and inhabitants. Although this thematic organisation of the book seems well suited to its purpose, it would be easier to read if the cases were handled separately. In addition, I would suggest making all the chapters anonymous so that co-authorship as the distinguishing quality of the book was stressed just as in the well-prosed introduction.
The longitudinal perspective taken by the authors in their gentrification research enables them to observe the changes in their study neighbourhoods multidimensionally. The multiple methods, ranging from in-depth interviews, visual methods, document, and statistical analyses render the research undertaken robust and reliable, and the resulting book rich in material. A second strength is the book’s emphasis on change and a rejection of simple dichotomies in the mainstream gentrification research, such as the gentrifier-gentrified or long-term residents-newcomers. The authors aim to show the grey areas in the socio-spatial positionings on the gentrification field, including the immigrant newcomers; daily visitors; local policymakers, whose policies unintentionally result in gentrification; long-term residents, who benefit from gentrification, and neighbourhoods which gentrify residentially, but not commercially or school-wise. A social agent can even change position – from gentrifier to the gentrified or vice versa – during her own life trajectory.
The book’s deconstruction of the binary oppositions in gentrification research turns into a slight disadvantage when the authors reflect their mind into some of their ‘research objects’ for empathising with others. This common methodological fallacy of social scientists was identified by Pierre Bourdieu in his Collège de France seminars on general sociology in the early 1980s. For example, a respondent comments about the neighbourhood’s secondary school by saying that ‘it’s not mixed there, you know. It’s completely segregated, with 80, 90 per cent of kids from African and North African families’ (p. 221), but the chapter author still interprets this as a middle-class sentiment against diversity at school to reproduce one’s social class privileges. Although the author is making a very Bourdieuan reading in terms of education as a means of maintaining social class privilege, she is methodologically false for not really listening to what the respondent is actually saying.
All this ‘cosmopolitanism’ in gentrifying neighbourhoods resonates well with earlier debates made by David Harvey (2020), Helene L’Heuillet (2016), Jane Jacobs (1961), Richard Sennett (2019), Slavoj Žižek (1997), and Stavros Stavrides (2019) to name a few on multiculturalism, postmodernism, and living together with unfamiliar others as well as the ideal distance to avoid the extremes of racism and assimilation. The topics of post-industrial urban changes, such as gentrification, degentrification and immigration, and their social repercussions that are covered in the book are also observed in other cities, where only ‘Africanization’ (p. 200) of a neighbourhood by the concentrating immigrants becomes, for instance, Arabization, depending on their place of origin. This book is thus a valuable contribution to the international gentrification literature and any effort to understand the increased de- and re-territorialisation of our times through the direct experiences of people from all social strata on a daily basis.