Revisiting Displacement Through New Forms of Gentrification

Abstract

The last three decades has witnessed a proliferation of discourses produced by central and local governments on economic growth and urban development, all of which are embodied in projects developed by public-private sector cooperation, and which serve as the major tool to reorder and reproduce cities through new ways of capital accumulation. With reference to the evolution and changing meanings of gentrification, this study aims to discuss the frameworks in which these projects are to be considered as new forms of gentrification rather than as urban regeneration projects. Offering residential or multi-functional uses for middle-or upper-middle classes, these projects often pop up in neighborhoods of low-income inhabitants, and mostly involve the demolition of existing social housing or squatter settlements, thus causing severe forms of displacement and dispossession among former inhabitants. In this sense, it is necessary to create an overview of the concept and forms of displacement generated by new-built gentrification and the methodological questions in studying it. As a means to grasping the global geography of gentrification in its multiple forms and consequences, a new perspective of comparative urbanism and a place-based approach is indispensable. This study emphasizes the need to re-conceptualize both gentrification and displacement with reference to their various manifestations in different urban geographies, and thus offers a theoretical outline to frame displacement as a systematic result of gentrification, which, in its new forms, operates as today's major neoliberal urban strategy.