The Commodification Gap. Matthias Bernt
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literature. Moreover, due to the concentration of academic institutions in London, I profited enormously from the background knowledge and advice provided by fellow researchers who have studied London for decades. I also interviewed a limited number of experts on the neighbourhood I researched, including real estate managers and planners. In addition, compared with Germany and Russia, the range and the quality of statistical data is excellent and the data was accessible.
My research on Prenzlauer Berg differs from this. Prenzlauer Berg is not only the place I have lived in for most of the last 30 years, but it is also a neighbourhood that I have studied intensively since I became an academic. As a consequence, most of the data and much of the interpretation included in this book are based on past work that I have brought together and updated for this study. Methods used here include a literature review, the analysis of public planning documents, interviews and participant observation in numerous events, meetings and public hearings over the last three decades.
St Petersburg has been a completely different affair. The term gentrification has hardly made it to Russia thus far, and the number of studies on this phenomenon is very small. Moreover, in Russia, the transition from socialism to capitalism has resulted in taking away resources from the academic system to such a degree that urban research is generally fairly weak (when compared with the West). The staggering lack of resources has also contributed to isolating many Russian scholars from discussions in the West and this has been changing only very recently. Moreover, official statistics are notoriously unreliable in Russia. In order to grasp the dynamics under which gentrification operates there, I therefore had to do primary research. In this, I was supported by Russian colleagues who were enthusiastic about the issue and willing to invest their time and intellectual resources. Together with them, I organised a Research Laboratory in 2015 at which we discussed the applicability of Western literature to the Russian situation and performed empirical research in two neighbourhoods destined for larger urban renewal projects in St Petersburg. We applied a mix of document analysis, expert talks and intensive site inspections accompanied by interviews with residents to obtain an understanding of the actual developments on the ground. For a number of reasons, this work was never finished – yet it provided invaluable insights that helped me to understand the specificities of the situation there.
I proceed as follows: having sketched my approach in the previous pages, Chapter 2 re‐examines the rent gap. Its task is to recapitulate the central features of this theory, as well as to discuss its limitations. Doing so, I try to avoid ‘the booby trap of the stalemate between “production” versus “consumption” explanations’ (Slater 2017, p. 121) that has occupied gentrification research for a long time (for summaries of these debates see Lees et al. 2008; Brown‐Saracino 2010). I find that the arguments brought forward in this debate have reached a point of saturation where conceptual progress becomes unlikely and I aim at new lines of questioning. The main message I develop in this chapter is that the rent gap theory is indispensable for explaining gentrification, but too abstract and oversimplifying. I discuss five major problems in this context that point to the limits of this theory. These are: a lack of attention towards barriers to capital flows; the problematique of connecting the scales at which potential and actual ground rents are produced; the implications of a nomothetic conceptualisation of land rent; the limitations of a unidirectional understanding of property relations as ‘control’; and turning a blind eye towards the actual conditions for the realisation of rent increases and the role that the state plays in this. On this basis, Chapter 3 provides a first look into the institutional parameters that frame the operation of gentrification. It analyses the different housing systems in the UK, Germany and Russia through a historical perspective that highlights the strategies, ideologies and struggles that have shaped the design of the diverse institutions at different points of time and discusses the implications of these for the operation of the rent gap. Taking a long‐term perspective, I focus on the changing conditions for reinvestment in the housing stock, roles of tenures and rent laws, and identify 12 commodification gaps (see Table 3.6) relevant for the operation of gentrification in the UK, Germany and Russia at different times. Together, these gaps guide the analysis of the cases on the neighbourhood level that follows and are further refined through empirical examination. Chapters 4–6 apply this framework to the neighbourhood level and examine the operation of gentrification in the neighbourhoods of Barnsbury (London), Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin) and the centre of St Petersburg (Russia). Finally, Chapter 7 discusses the implications of this analysis for the theorisation of gentrification. It revisits the main themes, discusses the findings of the empirical observations and suggests a reconceptualisation of gentrification. It refines the commodification gap as a new theoretical concept and argues for a reorientation of gentrification studies.
Notes
1 1 In a similar vein but with different language, David Ley has characterised the gentrification concept as ‘promiscuous’ and as having ‘a never‐ending appetite to include more and more areas into its study’ (presentation at the RGS‐IBG Annual International Conference 2016, ‘Planetary Gentrification’, Authors‐Meet‐Critics session, 31 August 2016, London).
2 2 While the debate following Jennifer Robinson’s book Ordinary Cities (2006) has become too extensive to be repeated here, three accusations can be summarised that form the core of many postcolonial critiques (see McFarlane 2010). First, it has been argued that urban studies have been dominated by Western parochialism and it has been suggested that theories and methodologies that were developed in the West were too easily applied in settings ‘foreign’ to their place of origin. Second, there is criticism that urban studies have been marked by a tendency to study the ‘usual suspects’; without including more dissimilar contexts, the opportunity to learn from differences is severely diminished, resulting in dominating paradigms being reinforced. Third, it has been pointed out that much of the debate has been marked by a search for ‘superlative’, ‘archetypal’ and ‘paradigmatic’ cities (see Beauregard 2003; Brenner 2003), leaving little space for cities that would not fall into this realm.
3 3 I acknowledge that demand‐side explanations have helped a great deal in understanding gentrification, and I also accept that supply will never be delivered without demand, so understanding the demand for inner city housing and the underlying social, demographic and cultural patterns is important. Nevertheless, I refrain from including this wing of explanations in my study. This is for two reasons. The first is that gentrification has changed since the 1970s and it has become emancipated from the ‘back to the city movements’ experienced in the USA and the UK at that moment in time. Theories developed against this background have, therefore, lost much of their former explanatory power. Providing evidence that gentrification in today’s Mumbai, Moscow or Mexico City differ from those in Islington or the Lower East Side 30 years ago hardly comes as a surprise and, as a consequence, I find the benefit of such an undertaking questionable. This is also supported by studies from the Global South, most of which show only weak interest in the Western imagination of gentrification as an influx of middle‐class professionals, artists or hipsters and their usual consumption patterns.
4 4 I should emphasise that this treatment of the term excludes a number of developments that appear in the literature but, in my view, should not be counted as gentrification. Thus, an ‘incumbent upgrading’ of the social structure resulting from an improvement of the social status of sitting residents should not be counted as gentrification because it hardly involves displacement. Neither should publicly financed improvements be regarded as gentrification, as long as they are not connected to market mechanisms and undertaken for the sake of a return on the capital invested. State‐led displacement motivated by reasons other