Book review: planetary gentrification by Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales

The first book in Polity’s ‘Urban Futures’ series, in Planetary Gentrification authors Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales bring together recent urban theory, postcolonial critique and a political economy perspective to offer a globalised take on gentrification. This book is a crucial synthesis of established approaches to gentrification and more recent theoretical developments and is also an excellent example of co-authored scholarship, finds Geoffrey DeVerteuil

Any space left? Homeless resistance by place-type in Los Angeles County

This study develops a more nuanced concept of homeless resistance, incorporating a range of resistance behaviors (exit, adaptation, persistence, and voice) that bridge the gap between current frameworks that either romanticize or ignore it. We also consider the possibility that different kinds of space may theoretically allow for different kinds of resistance. To this end, we employ an ecological approach to homeless space by classifying Los Angeles County into three place-types (prime, transitional, and marginal). We empirically consider the issue of resistance within the hardening context among a group of 25 homeless informants, focusing on whether and how some of them have exercised their voices and sought to ameliorate one or more aspects of their situation, as well as how resistance may vary by place-type

Towards a contextual approach to the place–homeless survival nexus: An exploratory case study of Los Angeles County

The characteristics of the immediate locale greatly affect the ability of homeless people to adapt to life on the street and in shelters, with different types of places nurturing different circumstances for survival. Current conceptualizations of the place–survival nexus are too narrow, relying on small-scale, intensive studies of particular places that are known to sustain homeless survival while ignoring more suburban and exurban locales, as well as failing to set these places of survival within the larger socio-economic spaces of the metropolitan area. Further, the literature is heavily qualitative, lacking any kind of ‘‘big picture” quantitative assessment of the nexus. In response, we contribute to the place–survival nexus literature by developing a typology of space for homeless survival and then use interview data to examine the variation in survival strategies across three types of urban space in Los Angeles County. Our results speak to how our innovative and exploratory approach enabled a broader, more extensive and variegated understanding of place–survival among homeless people than previous studie

Post-welfare city at the margins? Immigrant precarity and the mediating third sector in London

The putative post-welfare city is marked by a debate between continuity with previous welfare structures, versus a radical break whereby new, more punitive measures prevail. Seeking to clarify the role of the third sector at the margins of the debated post-welfare city, margins which can be characterized by a stigmatized and abandoned clientele, I focus on organizations serving precarious migrants in London. There were 15 interviews of third sector organizations across well-served, inner boroughs (Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets) and less well-served outer boroughs (Brent, Hounslow). The results indicated a mixed intermediary role for third sector organizations: strong in compensating and filling the gaps from an absent state, yet rather weak in contesting or challenging the overbearing state on behalf of their clients. More generically, the results also underlined the importance of looking beyond the labor market to appreciate the intricacies of social reproduction among precarious populations, as well as recognizing important continuities in support systems that belie a radical break with previous structures

Can resilience be redeemed? Resilience as a metaphor for change, not against change

Resilience has been critiqued as being regressively status quo and thus propping up neo-liberalism, that it lacks transformative potential, and that it can be used as a pretence to cast off needy people and places. We move from this critique of resilience to a critical resilience, based in the following arguments: (i) resilience can sustain alternative and previous practices that contradict neo-liberalism; (ii) resilience is more active and dynamic than passive; and (iii) resilience can sustain survival, thus acting as a precursor to more obviously transformative action such as resistance. These bring us more closely to a heterogeneous de-neo-liberalized reading of resilience, explicitly opening it to social justice, power relations and uneven development, and performing valuable conceptual and pragmatic work that usefully moves us beyond resistance yet retaining (long-term) struggle

Overseas investment into London:Imprint, impact and pied-a-terre urbanism

This paper focuses on the spatial imprint and social impacts of the emerging geographies of concentrated overseas investment into London’s high-end real estate market, particularly the boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea. Framed by literatures on the 1% and the super-rich, and based on a mixed methodological approach of qualitative interviews with intermediaries and a quantitative mapping of overseas investors using 2011 census data, the results speak to the pervasive nature of “safe-haven” seeking in London real estate and its attendant transnational provenance set within a laissez-faire regulatory framework. In so doing, it makes an important contribution to the geographies of the super-rich, the class geographies of London, and the broader sense that overseas investors are producing what we call “pied-à-terre” urbanism which builds on a conventional gentrification framework (exclusionary displacement and a more affluent incoming group) but also exceeds it in several ways, leading to an increasingly socially attenuated landscape. This exceeding relates to: a different kind of rent gap, in that it is not speculative but safe-haven seeking, a guaranteed return on investment, and occurs without previous disinvestment; the agents are not traditional gentrifiers; the transnational nature of the process, with no attachment to particular places like in the traditional gentrification model; and a process focused on super-prime areas and completely independent of the existing gentrification process in London

Urban inequality revisited: from the corrugated city to the lopsided city

In this forum paper, I revisit the rich and coherent literature on inequality from the 1990s, immersed in radical urban studies and Marxist political economy, and apply it to recent transitions in city fabrics, that is the built environment and the social worlds around it. Some city fabrics reflect powerful interests, while others are more everyday and mundane. Recently, there has been the sense that powerful fabrics have increasingly encroached upon or erased everyday ones. I use urban vignettes to visualize the shift from the corrugated city, where there was a rough balance between powerful and everyday fabrics, and the lopsided city, where powerful fabrics seek to displace and dominate. This transition requires a more robustly class-driven analysis than what is currently used in urban studies, itself fragmented. In response, I articulate a focused yet balanced analysis of the lopsided city in conversation with certain key legacies of the 1990s literature on inequality: studying the extremes, building theory on empirical richness, paying attention to the city fabric, a concern for social justice, the importance of formal mechanisms in the city (e.g. the state and developers), and balancing fragmented and totalizing views of the city. However, certain aspects of the 1990s literature have aged less well, such as the obsession with the dystopic, the narrow focus on global cities of the Global North, and the ‘all-or-nothing’ (universalistic) notions that class should dominate urban analysis

Between the cosmopolitan and the parochial: the immigrant gentrifier in Koreatown, Los Angeles

This paper questions the currently lopsided relationship between the cosmopolitan and the parochial, in which the former is favored both conceptually and empirically. In response, we propose a relational framework for bringing them into conversation, simultaneously recasting and re-animating longstanding debates via three framing devices – the process of relationality/territoriality, disposition, and spaces of encounter – embedded in and through the subject of the immigrant-gentrifier in Koreatown, Los Angeles, itself a novel category that has hitherto eluded systematic research. We present the results of 25 interviews of Korean immigrant-gentrifiers and 10 key informant interviews. The results constitute a parochial critique that emerges as a series of conflicted paradoxes but also productive tensions: between an ostensibly transnational process compromised by a profoundly homegrown, parochial set of investors and outlooks; between a set of dispositions that seek inner-city diversity and density, yet simultaneously sheltered from its spillover costs; and spaces of encounter marked by a gap between the promise of truly open spaces and the reality of guarded and self-segregated ones. Ultimately, this paper does double duty – conceptually rebalancing the cosmopolitan-parochial relationship, but in doing so empirically elevating the emergence of the understudied immigrant-gentrifier category

Revisiting the emerging lopsided city

In the context of an ongoing conversation about cities and inequality, I offer a critical but not contrarian set of responses to the very generous commentaries provided by the five peer reviewers. I hope to use this space to both clarify and nuance some of my original provocations around the emerging lopsided city and the value of revisiting insights on inequality generated in the 1990s