The Commodification Gap. Matthias Bernt
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forms of land allocation cannot be taken for granted here, but need to be actively produced. Non‐commodification, or decommodification, is central here, and gentrification is only brought into being through a process of ‘primitive accumulation’ in which non‐capitalist forms of tenure are actively attacked and abolished.
Closely related, research on gentrification in the Global South has repeatedly emphasised the centrality of state agency and extra‐economic violence as a driver for gentrification (see Islam and Sakızlıoğlu 2015; Shin and Kim 2016; Shin and López‐Morales 2018; Valle 2021. This argument has most thoroughly been developed by the geographer Gavin Shatkin (2017), who depicts how state interests are at the core of land monetisation in Asia. While Shatkin finds the specifics of gentrification theory (as formulated by Smith 1979 and others) of limited relevance for his cases, he still insists that it can provide useful insights. For the case of Southeast Asia, Shatkin argues that state actors are the main players in the real estate market. They use land rent capture for their own empowerment, as a source of revenue for the state, or redistribute the profits to key allies of the ruling elites. In turn, state actors become interested in maximising their control over land markets and exploiting the rent gap to its maximum. What makes this conceptualisation interesting is that it dissociates gentrification from its attachment to a specific geographic and socioeconomic context and uses the rent gap in a purely analytical form. For Shatkin, gentrification is not of interest per se, but rather one of a number of concepts combined to explain the complex development of state–business relations in real estate development in Asia.
This treatment resonates well with the discussion of a ‘triangular entanglement of state, market, and society’ described as the driver of ‘three waves of state‐led gentrification’ investigated in China (He 2019). In her work, He describes how ‘gentrification has become an integral part of the making of the modern competitive state in China’ and analyses how ‘the state’s endeavour in extracting values from land/housing redevelopment [operate] through market operation’ (He 2019, p. 33). Contrary to Western ideas about the predominance of markets in allocating land, He insists on including the developmentalist state in the analysis in China and emphasises that markets can only be understood as working in tandem with the state and societal forces. This, in turn, makes visible the limits of a restrictively economic explanation of gentrification that focuses mainly on the effect that markets play.
Summing up, the perspectives on the usefulness of the term gentrification in the urban studies community are more controversial than ever before. After half a century of research, gentrification is intensively brought into question as a concept today and the scientific community finds itself split into two camps. On the one hand, many scholars attack the ‘diffusionist’ practice of exporting the Western concept of gentrification to contexts where it is not seen as applicable. They claim that gentrification has been overstretched as a theory and has become a Procrustean bed for the analysis of essentially different urban experiences. On the other hand, we find academics ferociously defending the usefulness of the concept, calling for more flexibility and attacking what they see as ‘fossilization, rather than contextualization’ (Lees et al. 2016, p. 7). Third, we find contributions (positioned at the margins of this debate) that offer a third way to solve the problematique by decontextualising gentrification theory (see also Krijnen 2018) and using it as a conceptual device to be combined with other instruments.
This book aims to advance this debate beyond the dichotomist treatment of the ‘universality vs. particularity’ binary. The major theoretical proposition is that land rent capture and capital accumulation and, thus, gentrification can always and everywhere only be understood as embedded in specific institutional contexts. Institutional contexts and economic dynamics can, therefore, not be separated but, instead, need to be integrated into the analysis.
Against this background, the book at hand provides an attempt to put the ‘state question’ at the centre of the explanation and rethink the relationship between markets and states in the field of gentrification. It does so through three empirical case studies that lay out how this relationship has developed in three neighbourhoods located in different countries, and uses this material to produce a novel concept.
How to Compare? Why Compare?
The ambition of this book is thus directed towards theory building, which will be achieved through a comparison of empirical materials. But how can gentrifications happening in different cities and at different times be meaningfully compared? Answering this question demands some reflection on the ways in which comparisons are composed, why they are done and how the similarities and differences observed can be brought together. Against this background, this chapter now lays out the basic etymological and ontological orientations of this study and presents its methodological design.
Separating the shared essence of a phenomenon from its various expressions is an epistemological problem that puzzled even ancient philosophers. It has proven to be so fundamental to our understanding of the world that wrestling with it has resulted in fundamentally different axiomatic positions and practices in scientific research. In this sense, the difficulty of coming to grips with the applicability of the gentrification concept beyond the classical cases of the UK and USA described above reflects a deep‐seated problem faced by social science in general.
Crucially, in conceptualising gentrification as either a universal phenomenon or a specific local experience only relevant to a handful of cities, the proponents of the described debate have entered the rocky waters of comparative methodologies. While doing so, they have necessarily taken on board a series of long‐established methodological problems that come along with the comparison of complex social phenomena.
The first is the use of comparison. Why are comparisons done? What is the point of comparing urban change in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s with something that is going on in, say, Bangalore today? In fact, there are many reasons for carrying out a comparative study. The aim could be to explore whether a theory developed about the causes of gentrification (e.g. middle‐class invasion, the rent gap, or cultural upgrading) holds true when some of the variables it is built upon vary. Alternatively, one could examine a small number of cases holistically to see whether similarities or differences observed between the cases can be related to causal conditions. These two ways of proceeding can be termed as variable‐oriented vs. case‐oriented strategies of comparison (Ragin 1987, pp. 54–55). Some authors have also argued for comparison as a mode of thought, enabling ‘defamiliarisation’ and assisting in uncovering the hidden assumptions a theory is built upon (Robinson 2006; McFarlane 2010). In this view, studying a process in a non‐familiar environment (e.g. gentrification in a shrinking city) could function as an eye‐opener and allow factors and connections that are hidden elsewhere to be revealed.
No matter the particular motivation, the essential goal of all comparison is not to describe something, but to understand and explain it. The point here is to ask the reasons why a particular comparison is made. If apples and bananas are compared with donkeys, we need to have an idea about what constitutes fruits in contrast to animals. Yet, what exactly is the link between a theory, say about fruits, and the need to compare? While most comparative researchers agree that comparisons refer to theory, there is no privileged stage of theory building in which it is most appropriate. Comparing can, thus, contribute to uncovering the limits of a theory, it can help to draw a contrast between cases and it can be used to suggest testable hypotheses. These hypotheses, in turn, can create demand for a new theory that can then be tested again by including new cases (Skopcol and Somers 1980). The relation between theory building and empirical comparative work is, thus, cyclical and there is no hierarchical (but rather a mutually reinforcing) relationship between theory and comparative empirical observation.
The current treatment of gentrification in urban studies as either a particular local experience, or a planetary urban phenomenon, occupies an uneasy position when examined against these potentials (see also Bernt 2016a). While individualising accounts have proven to work well for attacking the usefulness of gentrification theory for a specific case, they more often than not leave one wondering whether the problem is just a misclassification of an individual case (e.g. when the gentrification concept is applied to cases where gentrification