The Commodification Gap. Matthias Bernt
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as either a general feature of capitalism or a local experience – as argued in the debates in Prenzlauer Berg that I have described – thus, rests on a false dichotomy. However, this treatment is not unique to Berlin. Quite to the contrary, the difficulty of balancing historical and geographic particularities with the status of gentrification as a general theory has been a problem that has occupied urban scholars for a long time. Gentrification studies have been characterised by a progressing seesaw motion between universalising and individualising approaches for decades. When the term gentrification was invented by Ruth Glass, it primarily reflected on a very British (and to some degree even London‐based) experience. Picking up on historical English class structures, the term gentrification had both a descriptive and an analytical edge, but always with a close connection to London. This is also reflected in the title of the book: London: Aspects of Change. Only a few years after the development of the term, it travelled to the other side of the Atlantic and stimulated a first wave of studies in North America. Here, the background was a novel and counterintuitive ‘back to the city’ movement of middle‐class households experienced after decades of ‘urban crisis’ and ‘white flight’, for which new explanations were needed. In this context, gentrification appeared as the term du jour to describe a new phenomenon. By and large, two major forces were seen as driving it – and both seemed to be of universal value (at least in Canada and the USA): (i) the sociocultural transformations accompanying the dawn of a post‐industrial society, resulting in the rise of a new middle‐class and (ii) the discovery of inner cities as a renewed terrain for investment strategies. Both transformations made up the core of explanations for gentrification back then and for more than two decades ‘gentrification debates battled back and forth over the “post‐industrial, new middle‐class thesis” and the “rent gap exploitation thesis” over what had caused the rise of gentrification’ (Shin and López‐Morales 2018, p. 15). While gentrification expanded fast as a research field and became a major battleground of scholarly debates, differences between the place of its origin (London) and cities like Philadelphia, New York, Vancouver and others were hardly raised as a matter of concern.
In a second wave, the gentrification concept travelled back and forth across the English Channel to Western Europe, i.e. to a context that had also experienced deindustrialisation, suburbanisation and the growth of a service economy, but with some delay and a different history of urbanisation and housing. Here, too, empirical studies (by and large) stayed with the concepts imported from the USA/UK. At the same time, the particularities of West European cities, as opposed to those in the UK and the USA, were raised as issues of concern and attributed to ‘contextual factors’ or ‘modifications’. If the first phase of gentrification studies had been uninterested in the issue of comparability, the contributions in this second phase were marked by attempts to contextualise what was still seen as a global phenomenon explained by universally valid theories.
From the late 1990s, this mood changed considerably. In the USA and the UK, gentrification had become such a cottage industry of academic career building that not only were more and more studies produced, but also more and more phenomena that were not included in the classical gentrification canon were now characterised as gentrification. Research emerged about commercial gentrification (Bridge and Dowling 2001), new‐build gentrification (Davidson and Lees 2005, 2010), tourist gentrification (Gotham 2005), rural gentrification (Phillips 1993, 2004), studentification (Smith and Holt 2007), super‐gentrification (Lees 2003; Butler and Lees 2006) and other forms of upgrading that did not follow the traditional demographic, cultural, and spatial patterns known from earlier gentrification studies. This expansion of gentrification research led to a growing sense of frustration among urban scholars, and more and more academics came to see the concept as overstretched1 (see Bondi 1999; Lambert 2002; Hamnett 2003; Butler 2007; Maloutas 2007, 2012, 2018).
Where the concept of gentrification was applied outside its places of origin, critiques were even stronger. Thomas Maloutas argued (in the context of Athens) that gentrification was ‘a concept highly dependent on contextual causality and its generalised use will not remove its contextual attachment to the Anglo‐American metropolis’ (Maloutas 2012, p. 33). The concept, he claimed, would be ‘detrimental to analysis, especially when applied to contexts different from those it was coined in/for’ (Maloutas 2012, p. 44). As a consequence, Maloutas demanded that the concept of gentrification not be used outside the Anglo‐Saxon world and that more localised concepts and descriptions be found and used.
With the advancement of postcolonial approaches, these concerns have gained growing acceptance in the subsequent decade and are now widespread in the field of urban studies.2 Nowadays, more and more scholars tend to see gentrification as an urban phenomenon rooted in very specific experiences realised in a handful of Western metropolises in the second half of the twentieth century (see Bernt 2016a). To an increasing extent, the concept is portrayed as overstretched (Schmid et al. 2018) and blamed for oversimplifying essentially variegated urban experiences by ‘blindly apply(ing) theories from the West’ (Tang 2017, p. 497). Some authors have even gone so far as to claim that the concept of gentrification has ‘displaced and erased alternative idioms and concepts that may be more useful for describing and analysing local processes of urban change’ (Smart and Smart 2017, p. 519) and have suggested that the concept of gentrification ‘should be laid to bed … among those 20th century concepts we once used’ (Ghertner 2015, p. 552). In this view, gentrification is successively seen as a thin theory, considerably overstretched and not capable of integrating new developments.
While doubts and reservations about the concept of gentrification have become stronger than ever before, the last few years have also seen a remarkable expansion of empirical research on the subject carried out on an increasingly global scale. These days, scientific papers on gentrification come from all continents, including places as different as Yerevan (Gentile et al. 2015), Mexico (Delgadillo 2015), Copenhagen (Gutzon Larsen and Lund Hansen 2008), Manila (Choi 2016) and many more. A research group around Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López Morales has alone produced two volumes and two special issues that have applied the concept of gentrification to empirically studying many places around the globe (Lees et al. 2015, 2016; López‐Morales et al. 2016; Shin et al. 2016). Building upon this work, Lees et al. argue that gentrification has indeed become a ‘planetary process’, and defend the application of the gentrification concept as follows:
We have considered whether the concept of gentrification has global application, and whether there really is such a thing as gentrification generalized. After much research and international discussion … we have concluded YES – as long as we keep gentrification general enough to facilitate universality while providing the flexibility to accommodate changing conditions and local circumstances.
(Lees et al. 2016, p. 203)
In summary, it can be said that today the urban studies world in general is split by a schism between the custodians of general (usually Marxist) theories and those criticising their Eurocentric implications. Yet, there are also voices that break out of this either‐or way of arguing. Applying the concept of gentrification to cities in the Global South, researchers have found new ways of productively working with differences (for an overview see Lees et al. 2015; Shin and López‐Morales 2018; Valle 2021) in the subsequent years, which have opened up new perspectives on the debate. Two issues stand out here:
First, manifold contributions have highlighted that capitalist markets in land and housing are limited in many cities in the Global South. Instead, hybrid arrangements of property rights are common (Lemanski 2014) and large parts of the housing stock are managed as informal housing (Ghertner 2014; Doshi 2013, 2015; Cummings 2016; Gillespie 2020). In effect, customary and state land tenures instead of private property are the rule, rather than an exception, in many countries. As a consequence, the movement of capital is limited in much of the Global South and gentrification is only possible when these limits are removed. The simultaneous existence of commodified and non‐commodified land has given rise to a ‘real estate frontier’, i.e. an ‘interface between real estate capital and non‐commodified land’ (Gillespie 2020, p. 612), which advances through the