Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Notes on the editors
- Notes on the contributors
- Foreword
- One Introduction: ‘gentrification’ – a global urban process?
- Two Unravelling the yarn of gentrification trends in the contested inner city of Athens
- Three Slum gentrification in Lisbon, Portugal: displacement and the imagined futures of an informal settlement
- Four City upgraded: redesigning and disciplining downtown Abu Dhabi
- Five Confronting favela chic: the gentrification of informal settlements in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Six Rethinking gentrification in India: displacement, dispossession and the spectre of development
- Seven The prospects of gentrification in downtown Cairo: artists, private investment and the neglectful state
- Eight Widespread and diverse forms of gentrification in Israel
- Nine The endogenous dynamics of urban renewal and gentrification in Seoul
- Ten Value extraction from land and real estate in Karachi
- Eleven Gentrification in Buenos Aires: global trends and local features
- Twelve Promoting private interest by public hands? The gentrification of 223 public lands by housing policies in Taipei City
- Thirteen The making of, and resistance to, state-led gentrification in Istanbul, Turkey
- Fourteen Gentrification, neoliberalism and loss in Puebla, Mexico
- Fifteen Capital, state and conflict: the various drivers of diverse gentrification processes in Beirut, Lebanon
- Sixteen Gentrification in Nigeria: the case of two housing estates in Lagos
- Seventeen Gentrification in China?
- Eighteen Emerging retail gentrification in Santiago de Chile: the case of Italia-Caupolicán
- Nineteen Gentrification dispositifs in the historic centre of Madrid: a reconsideration of urban governmentality and state-led urban reconfiguration
- Twenty When authoritarianism embraces gentrification – the case of Old Damascus, Syria
- Twenty-one The place of gentrification in Cape Town
- Twenty-two Conclusion: global gentrifications
- Afterword The adventure of generic gentrification
- Index
Fourteen - Gentrification, neoliberalism and loss in Puebla, Mexico
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 March 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Notes on the editors
- Notes on the contributors
- Foreword
- One Introduction: ‘gentrification’ – a global urban process?
- Two Unravelling the yarn of gentrification trends in the contested inner city of Athens
- Three Slum gentrification in Lisbon, Portugal: displacement and the imagined futures of an informal settlement
- Four City upgraded: redesigning and disciplining downtown Abu Dhabi
- Five Confronting favela chic: the gentrification of informal settlements in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Six Rethinking gentrification in India: displacement, dispossession and the spectre of development
- Seven The prospects of gentrification in downtown Cairo: artists, private investment and the neglectful state
- Eight Widespread and diverse forms of gentrification in Israel
- Nine The endogenous dynamics of urban renewal and gentrification in Seoul
- Ten Value extraction from land and real estate in Karachi
- Eleven Gentrification in Buenos Aires: global trends and local features
- Twelve Promoting private interest by public hands? The gentrification of 223 public lands by housing policies in Taipei City
- Thirteen The making of, and resistance to, state-led gentrification in Istanbul, Turkey
- Fourteen Gentrification, neoliberalism and loss in Puebla, Mexico
- Fifteen Capital, state and conflict: the various drivers of diverse gentrification processes in Beirut, Lebanon
- Sixteen Gentrification in Nigeria: the case of two housing estates in Lagos
- Seventeen Gentrification in China?
- Eighteen Emerging retail gentrification in Santiago de Chile: the case of Italia-Caupolicán
- Nineteen Gentrification dispositifs in the historic centre of Madrid: a reconsideration of urban governmentality and state-led urban reconfiguration
- Twenty When authoritarianism embraces gentrification – the case of Old Damascus, Syria
- Twenty-one The place of gentrification in Cape Town
- Twenty-two Conclusion: global gentrifications
- Afterword The adventure of generic gentrification
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In 2002, Neil Smith published a characteristically provocative article in which he claimed that gentrification, which had ‘initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets’ of cities in the advanced capitalist world, had become a ‘thoroughly generalized’ ‘urban strategy’ (Smith, 2002, p 427). The incidence of this strategy was, he argued, now ‘global’ and a ‘consummate expression of neoliberal urbanism’ (Smith, 2002, p 446). Smith acknowledged the rescaling of urban relations in a more global economy, but he took aim at writers who regarded the process as driven by finance and consumption, arguing that globalisation was based on production, albeit now in broader and more tightly connected circuits of capital and culture. Smith, however, paid little explicit attention to the relation between culture and gentrification, and he illustrated his claims of a global urban political economy from the experience of New York City.
In this chapter, I want to consider Smith's broad arguments in and from the perspective of Mexico. Specifically, the chapter revisits the city of Puebla, the site of a set of articles that had their point of departure in whether the debates surrounding the ‘ideal type’ of gentrification as conceptualised in the North could ‘travel’ and offer analytical traction in the South (Jones and Varley, 1994, 1999). I outline the arguments of this research later in the chapter. However, for now, it is useful to note that we perceived gentrification in Puebla at that time to be very different from what we understood to have happened in New York City, London or Vancouver. What was unclear to us then, however, and what I want to explore in this chapter as I take the experience of Puebla forward, is whether the particular form of gentrification in the 1990s represented a ‘variation’ on a norm or a different process. In particular, this chapter considers how gentrification is affected by the changing processes of urban change in neoliberal times.
Following Smith, the link between gentrification and neoliberalism requires some specificity. I am cautious about making a claim that gentrification is intrinsically linked with neoliberalism or that the latest ‘phase’ of one is coterminus with the most recent iteration of the other.
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- Global GentrificationsUneven Development and Displacement, pp. 265 - 284Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2015