Differential productions of rural gentrification: illustrations from North and South Norfolk

This paper focuses attention on the making of space for rural gentrification, both discursively and materially. The paper emphasises the differential constructions of gentrification within urban and rural studies. Connections are drawn between production-side theories of gentrification, notions of the ‘post-productivist countryside’ and studies that have related rural demographic change and gentrification with planning and property relations. Drawing on these three sets of ideas, the paper explores gentrification in rural Norfolk. It is argued that the contemporary geography of rural gentrification may in part reflect historic structures of landownership as well as settlement classifications associated with the land-use planning system. Country and District level analysis is followed up by detailed study of gentrification of two villages in Norfolk, which highlights how gentrified rural spaces may be produced in rather different way and through different agencies, and as a result takes different forms.     

Property-based redevelopment and gentrification: The case of Seoul, South Korea

The urban experiences of South Korea in times of its rapid urbanisation and economic growth show that wholesale redevelopment had been a dominant approach to urban renewal, leading to redevelopment-induced gentrification. This was led by a programme known as the Joint Redevelopment Programme, transforming urban space that was once dominated by informal settlements into high-rise commercial housing estates. This paper tries to explain how this approach was possible at city-wide scale in its capital city, Seoul. Through the examination of redevelopment processes in a case study neighbourhood, it puts forward three arguments. First, the development potential arising from the rent gap expansion through under-utilisation of dilapidated neighbourhoods provided material conditions for the sustained implementation of property-based redevelopment projects. Second, this paper critically examines the dynamics of socio-political relations among various property-based interests embedded in redevelopment neighbourhoods, and argues that external property-based interests have enabled the full exploitation of development opportunities at the expense of poor owner-occupiers and tenants. Third, South Korea had been noted for its strong developmental state with minimum attention to redistributive social policies. The Joint Redevelopment Programme in Seoul was effectively a market-oriented, profit-led renewal approach, in line with a national housing strategy that favoured increased housing production and home-ownership at the expense of local poor residents’ housing needs.     

Gentrification and the suburbanization of poverty: changing urban geographies through boom and bust periods

Many postindustrial cities across Europe and other contexts are marked by growing social–spatial inequalities, housing liberalization, and gentrification, which limit the housing options of low-income households. We investigated changes in the residential moves of different low-income households (working poor, low-to-middle income, and unemployed) in the Amsterdam and Rotterdam urban regions for the time period 2004–2013. We found an overarching trend for the suburbanization of poverty toward the urban peripheries and surrounding regions. While this trend appears to be relatively crisis resistant in the tight Amsterdam housing context, it is more cyclical in Rotterdam and has slowed following the global financial crisis. Low-to-middle income and unemployed households are increasingly moving to the urban regions surrounding cities, particularly to higher density satellite towns. Nevertheless, a growing number of working poor households remain highly urbanized, employing various coping strategies to acquire housing. This paper reveals how the suburbanization of poverty is both a direct process of poor households moving from city to suburb, and a broader indirect process caused by exclusionary mechanisms such as the decreasing accessibility and affordability of inner-urban neighborhoods, which reflect broader changes in the geography and socioeconomic patterning of urban regions.     

Dis/possessive collectivism: Property and personhood at city’s end

This article uses the case of anti-eviction politics to examine the urban land question. Following the ideas and practices of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and its global interconnections, it traces the potentialities and limits of poor people’s movements as they battle displacement and enact a politics of emplacement. In doing so, it seeks to expand existing understandings of dispossession. Drawing on critical race studies and postcolonial theory, the article pays attention to the relationship between property and personhood in the context of long histories of racial exclusion and colonial domination. It asks: what politics of home and land is possible outside the grid of secure possession and sovereign self? The work of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign points to how various modes of collectivism can be asserted through practices of occupation as well as through global frameworks of human rights. Challenging the secure categories of property and personhood through which liberalism is constituted, such politics is attuned to the present history of racial banishment but is also subject to aspirations of resolution and possession.