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

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

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

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

Post-revanchist cities?

This intervention focuses on how national-level rhetoric aimed at impugning “others” has thrived of late, but how concomitantly 1990s-style urban revanchism has faded in cities that were once punitive crucibles against the homeless. Using Los Angeles as case study, I argue that the recent trend has been to grudgingly support the homeless, increasingly via taxpayer initiatives, leading to a potential but stymied post-revanchist city. If the spirit of revanchism remains, it is through the persistent NIMBY opposition to housing the homeless

Slow scholarship, the slow city and counter-visual practices.

Slow scholarship offers an alternative way to do research, yet its implications for visual practice and production remain implicit. In this article, I translate and apply key notions of slow scholarship to visual practice and production, in particular that slower can be a better and more care-full way of doing research. This gap is filled by re-purposing existing methods (time-series, inconvenience sampling, replicable) to capture what I deem the “slow city,” that is the everyday fabrics of urban areas that tend to be ignored and vulnerable to slow violence. My own counter-visualization applies these insights through three case studies, which map onto longitudinal methods (slow violence, care-full research) and translocal, replicable methods (the untagged city)

Reversing the dominant directionality: Evidence of the East Asian model of gentrification in LA's Koreatown

Reversing the usual directionality of gentrification theory and process emanating from Anglo‐American models, we work from an East Asian model of gentrification via Seoul to see whether it has been emulated in the Global North, in this case Koreatown, Los Angeles. Focusing on the style, density, scale, scope and pace of the East Asian model and using interviews with 25 Korean gentrifiers and 10 key informants alongside secondary data, the results showed a mix of explicit emulation (density, new‐build) and no emulation at all (slow pace, small‐scale, punctuated scope), yielding a distinctly hybrid, Los Angeles‐style model that builds up a wider geography of gentrification

On the edge:changing geographies of the global city precariat in London and Hong Kong

Global cities are marked by precarity, yet little attention has been paid to the spatial overlap between work precarity among migrants and third sector organizations that sustain them. In this paper, we estimate the location of precarious work migrants in two global cities, London and Hong Kong, for both the 2001 and 2011 censuses, using a variety of spatial demographic and quantitative techniques, and then analyze the spatial overlap between this population and immigrant-serving third sector organizations. The results suggest both similarity, in particular between accommodation and work precarity, and difference, with an increasingly tenuous overlap in London by 2011

Welfare reform, institutional practices and service delivery settings

The 1996 U.S. welfare reform legislation promises to fundamentally restructure the ways in which local institutional practices and clients interact within welfare neighborhoods. Focusing on the neglected scale of the service delivery setting, I conceptualize the implications of federal welfare reform for institutional practices and examine actual institutional outcomes within the University Park neighborhood in Los Angeles. Employing a multimethod approach, I use descriptive and inferential statistics as well as qualitative case studies to seek evidence of change within and across three components: welfare reform as external burden and opportunities; welfare reform promoting internal reconfiguration; and welfare reform impacting service delivery settings. The overall results are mixed, with change concentrating in the first and second components, in terms of greater client and institutional need as well as superficial administrative changes. Change to service delivery settings manifested itself more subtly in the reallocation of resources toward mothers with children and employable clients and away from serving the difficult-to-employ and single adult