Description
This book pays homage to Neil Smith’s ideas, offering a critical approach and rich collection of insights that draw on Smith’s work for inspiration and debate. With interdisciplinary and international contributions from leading experts, the book demonstrates the impact of Smith’s ideas on understanding the role of urbanisation in general and gentrification, in particular, in contemporary society. The book demonstrates how gentrification varies significantly from city to city, across different cultural and political-economic regimes, and in terms of the timing of urban transformations.
This collection provides a forum for debate for those working in urban regeneration and citizenship, and those directly affected by the processes and problems arising from gentrification. It will be of interest to students and scholars in urban geography, urban sociology, cultural studies, and wider social and urban theories.
Table of Contents
Foreword
David Harvey
Part 1: Neil Smith: A Tribute
1. Neil Smith and gentrification
Abel Albet and Núria Benach
2. A political-geographic project against capitalism: an essay on the work of Neil Smith
Luz Marina García Herrera and Fernando Sabaté Bel
3. The apocryphal diary of Neil Smith
Fernando Sabaté Bel
Part 2: On Gentrification and the Rent Gap Theory
4. The state of gentrification has always been extra-economic
Hamish Kallin
5. Gentrification: disaster, necessity, opportunity? Notes for a critical use of the concept
Francesco Indovina and Oriol Nel-lo
6. Towards a theory of gentrination: global capital flows and the reshaping of the global semi-periphery. The cases of Greece and Brazil
Antonis Vradis
7. Making rent gap theory not true
Eric Clark
8. Rent gap theory is a political resource
Ernesto López-Morales
Part 3: Dispossession and Class Struggle
9. From Boise to Budapest: capital circulation, compound capitalist destruction, and the persistence of homelessness
Don Mitchell
10. Revanchism, ignorance and class struggle in austerity Britain
Tom Slater
11. The class gap in gentrification: a political reading of the rent gap hypothesis
Marc Morell
12. The new urban frontier everyday evictions: contemporary state practices of revanchism
Vickie Cooper and Kirsteen Paton
13. Capturing urban rent through evictions: home dispossessions in the historic centre of Palma (Majorca)
Sònia Vives-Miró and Onofre Rullan
Part 4: Policies and Strategies
14. Financialised rent gaps and the public interest in Berlin's housing crisis: reflections on N. Smith's 'generalised gentrification'
Laura Calbet i Elias
15. Beyond the 'revanchist city': when public policies softly support gentrification in the name of social mix. The case of Inner Paris
Anne Clerval
16. Urban regeneration, rent and labour: insights from Barcelona's 'Knowledge District'
Greig Charnock, Hug March, Thomas Purcell and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz
17. A disappearing world: the ever-expanding 'frontier of gentrification' through the eyes of Porto's historic centre long-time residents
João Queirós
18. Architecture of violence: 'anti-beggar architecture' as the 'eureka' of urban regeneration
Sonia Maria Taddei Ferraz, Luis Gustavo Rosadas Campos, Mayra Duarte Lima, Paula Ramos Corrêa Carvalho de Mendonça and Leticia Lyra Acioly
Part 5: Activism and Resistance
19. The urban frontier: gentrification as ideology and class politics in the remaking of marginal urban space
Catharina Thörn and Katarina Despotovic
20. Alternative geographies for social action in Medellín
Eryka Y. Torrejón Cardona
21. Alternative narratives from an invisible city: gentrification, counter-proposals, and women activism
Maria del Socorro Pérez Rincón Fernández
22. The onslaught against the Greek squatting movement and the value that it produced
Myrto Dagkouly-Kyriakoglou
23. Revanchism and the racial state: Ferguson as 'internal colony'
Deborah Cowen and Nemoy Lewis
Part 6: Neil Smith and Beyond
24. Gentrification and the urban struggle: Neil Smith and beyond
Núria Benach and Abel Albet
