Gentrification

The Term

Although Ruth Glass first published the term gentrification in a 1964 book, it is rumored that she first used the term gentrified in an unpublished study of housing in North Kensington in 1959. The history of the term is a little ambiguous. Indeed, although the term gentrification was first used in reference to processes of residential change in inner London in the 1960s, Eric Clark argues that gentrification may have a much longer history: He states that the 19th-century Haussmannization of Paris could also be conceived as a process of gentrification. Yet the process that most scholars write about and are familiar with is a post–World War II one; it is also a very Anglo-American one rooted in the social and economic changes occurring in postwar cities in Britain and North America. These changes were deindustrialization, suburbanization (White flight in the United States and class flight in the United Kingdom), disinvestment and ethnic or class ghettoization in the inner city, the transition to a postindustrial society and a postmodern culture, and most important, the rise of what David Ley called a “new cultural class”—a liberal new middle class that was predisposed to central city living. The specific geography and history of the term gentrification has meant that the term itself has had to be quite elastic to incorporate all these new developments. Authors such as Liz Bondi urged researchers to let the term collapse under the weight of this burden. Luckily this has not happened and, if anything, researchers are including more and more under the umbrella of gentrification. The goal is to retain the politics of the term, for gentrification is now a very political word, a word so political that many urban policies worldwide promoting gentrification avoid the term. Gentrification still refers to an unequal process whereby low-income residents are displaced, directly or indirectly, from their homes and businesses. As urban scholar Chester Hartman has said and a younger generation of scholars are restating, these people should have “the right to stay put.” Such debates link well to debates over the right to the city and the just city.

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