Resisting Planetary Gentrification: The Value of Survivability in the Fight to Stay Put

Abstract

In-depth studies of and attempts to theorize or conceptualize resistance to gentrification have been somewhat sidelined by attention to the causes and effects of gentrification in the now rather extensive gentrification studies literature. Yet resistance to gentrification is growing internationally and remains a (if not the) key struggle with respect to social justice in cities worldwide. In this article, we address this gap head on by (re)asserting the value of survivability for looking at resistance to gentrifications around the globe. U.S. urban scholars have been at the forefront of writing about resistance to gentrification, especially in cities like San Francisco and New York City, but in a situation of planetary gentrification it is imperative that we learn from other examples. Critically, we argue that practices of survivability can be scaled up, down, and in between, enabling the building of further possibilities in the fight against gentrification, the fight to stay put. There needs to be a stronger and more determined international conversation on the potential of antigentrification practices worldwide and here we argue that survivability has a lot to offer these conversations.

针对反抗贵族化的深度研究与理论化或概念化的企图, 在今日相当广泛的贵族化研究之文献中, 多少因其对贵族化的导因与效应之关注而被排除在外。但反抗贵族化的行动, 在全世界中皆逐渐增加, 并维持作为全世界城市中有关社会正义的主要 (若非唯一重要的) 斗争。我们于本文中, 透过 (重新) 评估存活性在检视全球反抗贵族化中的价值, 直接应对上述阙如。美国的城市研究者, 身处书写反抗贵族化的前沿, 特别是在旧金山与纽约市中, 但在全球性的贵族化境况下, 我们必须从其他的案例中学习。我们批判性地主张, 存活性的实践, 能够上、下调整尺度, 或位居其中, 从而推进打造对抗贵族化的未来可能——一个为了留下来的斗争。对于反贵族化的全球实践, 必须有更强大且更为坚定的国际对话, 而我们于此主张, 存活性对此般对话贡献良多。

Los estudios a profundidad de la resistencia al aburguesamiento, y los intentos para teorizarla o conceptualizarla, han sido marginados en cierta medida por la atención que se concede a las causas y efectos del aburguesamiento o gentrificación en la literatura de estudios de este fenómeno, ciertamente muy extensa en este momento. Pero la resistencia a la gentrificación está creciendo internacionalmente y se mantiene como una lucha clave, por no decir la lucha clave, con respecto a la justicia social en las ciudades de todo el mundo. En este artículo abordamos de frente esta brecha (re)afirmando el valor de la supervivencia para observar la resistencia a la gentrificación alrededor del globo. Los eruditos urbanos de los EE. UU. han estado en la línea de avanzada de la producción de artículos acerca de la resistencia a la gentrificación, especialmente en ciudades como San Francisco y Nueva York, pero en una situación de gentrificación planetaria es imperativo que aprendamos de otros ejemplos. Críticamente, sostenemos que las prácticas de supervivencia pueden escalarse hacia arriba, hacia abajo o en el medio, facilitando la construcción de mayores posibilidades en la lucha contra la gentrificación, la pelea por permanecer en el sitio. Se necesita una conversación internacional más fuerte y determinada sobre el potencial de las prácticas anti-gentrificación a escala mundial, y aquí sostenemos que la supervivencia tiene mucho por ofrecer a estas conversaciones.

Key Words:

• planetary gentrification
• resistance
• survivability

关键词：:

• 全球贵族化
• 反抗
• 存活性。

Palabras clave:

• gentrificación planetaria
• resistencia
• supervivencia

Over the past fifty years, gentrification scholars have produced one of the largest literatures in urban studies, yet until more recently there have been relatively few academic studies of resistance to gentrification. Detailed studies of antigentrification protests, struggles, and activism have been sidelined by attention to the causes and effects of gentrification. Academic writings on resistance to gentrification are now growing, perhaps not surprising given the fact that resistance to gentrification is growing internationally and remains a (if not the) key struggle with respect to social justice in cities worldwide. In this growing literature, though, there has been little consideration of what constitutes (successful) resistance and how gentrification scholars conceptualize resistance. In this article, we mull over these issues, focusing specifically on the value of survivability as a practice of resistance that we think deserves much more attention from gentrification scholars.

Survivability is a critical concept, we argue, that holds real promise for a properly global gentrification studies. Vinthagen and Johansson (2013) discussed how survivability is constantly negotiated in and through informality, invisibility, temporalities, and the limits to solidarity. Given that informality is a new area in global gentrification studies, it also makes good sense to draw on work from development studies¹ in a Global South context where survival is a matter of daily life. In addition, the concept of survivability introduces a welcome perspective of individual action into the field of gentrification studies, which has perhaps tended to make assumptions about the collective nature of resistance. Indeed, in this article we make the crucial point that any understanding of resistance to gentrification needs to be tempered by the fact that individuals need to focus foremost on their individual survival and welfare, in addition to that of their families. In reality, planetary resistance to gentrification is composed of both overt opposition and everyday (often invisible) resistances, which are entangled and in a constant process of becoming.

Like Harvey (1973), we see social justice as contingent on the nature of urbanization and urbanism and something that is inherently geographical. Harvey wrote Social Justice and the City spurred on by events in U.S. cities in the 1960s and by the work of Marxists interested in community-based urban social movements; forty years later, in Rebel Cities, Harvey (2013), like ourselves, was spurred on by similar yet different events. Our focus on social justice and the city in this article is specific to escalating processes of planetary gentrification and resistance to them. Unlike Harvey (1973), we take our lens further than Anglo-American cities and, in so doing, pay proper attention to more cosmopolitan readings of gentrification and resistance to it. Unlike Harvey (2013), we seek to provide a deeper framework for researching social struggles and their internal dynamics. We are also three female scholar-activists writing in a sea of male urban geographical scholarship, so the result is perhaps a different reading of resistance to gentrification and the fight for social justice in the city (cf. Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Ours is a neo-Marxist reading of gentrification and resistance to it that harnesses the power of Marxist analysis at the same time as enabling the epistemic authority that comes out of marginalized people's everyday lives. Following Koopman (2015), we look at resistance through critical engagement with the politics of everyday life.

It is interesting to note that Harvey (1973) said a lot about gentrification without actually mentioning the word. He talked about how the spatial structure of the city will change if the preferences of richer groups change. Indeed, he stated, “They can with ease alter their bid rent function and move back into the centre of the city” (135). His discussion of the elimination of ghettos, polarization, Hausmannization, and what he called “urban renew” are all questions that are at the center of twenty-first-century gentrification studies if in a different way, even if in 1973 he did not consider the spread of gentrification beyond the central city and beyond the Global North. What Harvey (1973, 2013) did not do was investigate urban social movements fighting for social justice in any detail or, for that matter, individuals fighting for the survival of themselves and their families. Revisiting resistance to gentrification and (re)asserting the value of survivability is especially important in the context of the everyday, visceral realities of eviction and displacement or threat of eviction and displacement due to gentrification globally.

Studies of resistance to gentrification usually talk about it in relation to eviction, yet eviction is a process that has been described as the most understudied mechanism of reinforcing inequality (Desmond 2016) and it remains a hidden housing problem (see Hartman and Robinson 2003). Urban scholars have sought to conceptualize the right to the city, the right to stay put, but they have spent less energy on conceptualizing the actual fight to stay put in the face of gentrification. In focusing on the fight to stay put, in this article, we hope not only to put research on the everyday resistances of ordinary people at the center, not the margins, of gentrification studies but also to inform that literature by attention to practices of survivability.

Resistance to Planetary Gentrification

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Hackworth and Smith (2001) proclaimed that resistance to gentrification was all but dead, but since the global financial crisis and Arab Spring, this is no longer the case. In recent years, antigentrification resistance has made international headline news, as Gezi Park in Istanbul, Occupy London, and the Tsunami Tour in Rome, among others, testify to. Not since the Tompkins Square Park riots in New York City (see Smith 1996) had antigentrification resistance made headline news. Resistance to gentrification has also transcended the neighborhood and indeed city scale to become national; for example, the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement in South Africa. There is also now recognition that antigentrification resistance outside of the Global North is not new, for resistance to gentrification was happening in South Korea in the 1980s before gentrification authors in the West even began to discuss a global gentrification. It began to organize systematically and was supported by other social movements such as the democracy movement and the labor movement (Lees, Shin, and Lopez-Morales 2016).

Outside of the detailed discussions of Chester Hartman's scholar-activism in San Francisco (see Hartman 1974, 1984; Hartman, Keating, and LeGates 1982), until more recently, discussions of resistance in the gentrification literature have tended to be sketchy, with little to no in-depth research involved. There is evidence now that this is changing, however, as the recent special issue of Cities (Goetz 2016) on resistance to the gentrification of public housing around the globe attests to. The literature on resistance to gentrification has also, until recently, been dominated by European-American case studies, when in a situation of planetary gentrification it is imperative that we learn from examples outside of Europe and North America. The gentrification literature has said even less about successful resistance (one exception is NION in Hamburg; see Novy and Colomb 2013), although it would seem that “success” is on the increase as the new gentrification tax in Vancouver and the Milieuschultz Law in Berlin attest to. In London, campaigners fighting against the gentrification of Europe's largest public housing estate also had a rare win (Braidwood and Dunton 2016). There has, however, been discussion of successful resistances in the Global South, and it is here that the Global North would do well to learn.

In an antidisplacement campaign run in the Coyoacan neighborhood in Mexico City, artisans and street vendors successfully practiced antigentrification strategies by organizing outdoor exhibitions aimed at tourists and the media alike (see Crossa 2013). In Chacao, Venezuela, women mobilized against the gentrification of their barrio (see Velásquez Atehortúa 2014). Their resistance was also peaceful, but it was helped by the support of the Socialist majority in the National Assembly, who then passed a series of reforms that supported the People's Power (El Poder Popular). The government allowed the barrio women to build a pioneers’ camp (a Campamento de Pioneros) on the land to begin the process of building a Socialist community for 600 families. This became a new model of social policy development that involved people contesting neoliberalism by the marginalized being involved in executing government programs. In partnership with the Socialist state, they could stand up to the power of real estate elites, bankers and developers, and so on. In so doing, they successfully fought off an urban renewal project that was to gentrify the Old Market in Caracas. Betancur (2014) argued that unlike in the Global North, gentrification in Latin America has run into stubborn resistance from the (informal) self-help and self-employment spaces in which the lower classes live. As a result, gentrification has been much more limited than expected. Indeed, in Lima, residents organized around the Comite Promotor para la Renovacion Urbana with Renovacion urbana sin Desalojos (Urban Renewal without Evictions; International Alliance of Inhabitants 2008) and in Colombia opponents of gentrification named the Office of Urban Development the Office of Urban Displacement! What does success really mean in terms of resistance to gentrification, though? Is success purely about winning the fight to stay put? What if the fight to stay put is lost, but the fight has mobilized national or international attention? A struggle might lose on one level but obtain incredible visibility able to inform other levels of action. Defining successful resistance is both important and strategic.

Samara, He, and Chen (2013) claimed that consciousness of the “right to the city” and cross-class alliances are increasingly being formed in newly industrialized countries. We would add that this is also the case in less industrialized countries also being affected by the speculation in the secondary circuit of capital that is the defining feature of twenty-first-century planetary gentrification. For example, the Mahigeer Tahreek (indigenous coastal fisherfolk communities of Pakistan) movement successfully fought off attempts to gentrify Karachi's coastline (and privatize its public beaches) from global capital and Dubai- and Malaysia-based real estate companies (see Hasan 2015; see also Hasan 2012). In 2007, they wrote a letter, “Development to Destroy Nature and Displace People,” the outcome of discussions between various stakeholders but especially local communities. As well as outlining the destruction of nature—from green turtles, to mangroves, to fish and birds—they also were clear that it would displace people, the fishing communities who had been living on the coast for centuries. The project, it was claimed, would affect their livelihoods, which were based on subsistence fishing and beach leisure activities. Despite more than 100 villages being in the project area, their future was not mentioned at all in the project proposal. The letter also claimed that given that lower- and lower-middle-class Karachiites would not be able to go to the beach, this would increase the divide between the rich and poor in society. The letter was followed up by public demonstrations and a press campaign. Meetings were held with the Chief Secretary along with prominent civil society individuals, and because of opposition from all segments of society, the developer, Limitless, backed out of the project in 2009.

Resistance to gentrification is not a singular entity; there are many different forms and practices, and these need to be researched in context. Furthermore, the concept of resistance itself can be highly relative and context dependent, and there is an urgent need to unpack it further. There have been a number of recent reviews of the literature on resistance to gentrification (e.g., Gonzales 2016; Lees and Ferreri 2016; Annunziata and Rivas-Alonso forthcoming). In their detailed review of the academic literature,² Annunziata and Rivas-Alonso (forthcoming) usefully identified the main practices as institutional prevention, the implementation of public housing policies, enforcing tenants’ protections, and community planning tools (e.g., Newman and Wyly 2006); mitigation measures, delaying eviction, compensation (e.g., Kolodney 1991; Gallaher 2016); plus legal strategies and counternarratives (e.g., Blomley 2004); and the production of alternatives (see Holm and Kuhn 2011; Janoschka 2015). Resistance to gentrification, of course, can encompass a number of these different practices enacted simultaneously or consequently by the same or different groups. Much less attention, however, has been paid to practices of resistance that draw on the strategic mobilization of identity and cultural practices deeply rooted in the everyday (see Soymetel 2014). Practices that are not overtly antagonistic and not very visible can produce resistance and indeed can demonstrate more innovative approaches to survival in the face of gentrification.

There is a tendency for global scholars to articulate resistance at an abstract level; for example, Leitner, Sziarto, Sheppard, and Maringanti (2007) and Mayer (2009) seek solidarity across different classes to challenge the uneven spatiality created by neoliberal governance and globalization. This can appear grounded at times; for example, Routledge (2012) discussed their performances on the ground, but grounded is not contextualized and being against capitalism and neoliberalism per se is not necessarily the same as being against gentrification. Other work has tried to connect the local with the global context; for example, Maeckelbergh (2012) connected neoliberalism, the outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, and its three by-products—the housing crisis, gentrification, and foreclosure—through East Harlem–based social movements’ autonomous struggle.

There is also a significant difference between the storming the barricades type of antigentrification battle and the everyday practices of resistance (Lees 1999). Fighting gentrification does not always have to be confrontational; indeed, direct confrontation is too dangerous (or even less likely to succeed for cultural and political reasons) in some parts of the world, as seen in the case of Chinese resisters adopting “rightful resistance” (Erie 2012). When faced with rent hikes or eviction from their homes, displacees often simply prioritize the moment. Considering all of the different practices people employ to stay put is important if we want to escape analysis that merely describes landscapes of despair and offers little more than blanket statements about neoliberal hegemony. The reality is that everyday millions of people faced with gentrification and threatened by displacement and eviction face situations that are not as black and white as some of the gentrification scholarship would have us believe; delicate decisions have to be made in relation to the present and presumptions about the future. These decisions are more often within a world of shrinking possibilities as the paths for capital accumulation are stabilized further. Following Koopman (2015), we turn now to look at resistance to gentrification through critical engagement with the politics of everyday life. We argue that “staying put” is not just a seductive slogan; critically, it is a matter of survivability, and that survivability is part of the fight to stay put.

(Re)asserting the Value of Survivability in Resisting Gentrification

The value of survivability in gentrification studies was noted in a discussion of the differentiated ideas of resistance, reworking, and resilience with respect to state-led gentrification in London (Lees 2014). Drawing on Katz (2004), it was suggested that we consider “an oppositional consciousness that achieves emancipatory objectives (resistance), an impact on the organisation of power relations if not their polarised distribution (reworking), and an enabling of survival in circumstances that do not allow changes to the causes that dictate survival (resilience)” (Cloke, May, and Johnsen 2010, 12). DeVerteuil's (2016) recent work on resilience to gentrification in Los Angeles, Sydney, and London has also recognized the utility of the notion of survivability. Deeper conceptual work needs to be done, however. In thinking more about how gentrification scholars might conceptualize survivability, we can learn from resistance studies; for example, Vinthagen and Johansson's (2013) epistemological framework for the study of resistance that includes (1) repertoires of everyday resistance practices, (2) the relationships of agents, (3) spatialization, and (4) temporalization of everyday resistance. They also suggested intersectionality as the way forward, for it allows us “to capture the construction of multiple and shifting identities of agents of resistance and the interplay between these, as well as the contradictory positions of being both dominant and subordinate, depending on which system/context/relationship subjects are positioned and position themselves in” (Vinthagen and Johansson 2013, 424).

In our Introduction, we mentioned that Vinthagen and Johansson (2013) discussed how survivability is constantly negotiated in and through informality, invisibility, temporalities, and the limits to solidarity. Informality is an essential part of everyday survival, and studies of informality in the gentrification literature have looked beyond ambiguous homeownership situations to the eviction of street vendors and other informal activities from central cities (see Lees, Shin, and Lopez-Morales 2015, 2016). The way in which informality is enacted allows for different escape routes, and the most effective networks of support are embodied in informality; in connections, whether acquaintances or family relations, social capital is mobilized when there is a need for help and where the promise of a future leverage widens the possibilities available. Regulating visibility is a key tool to stay put. In more authoritarian settings, the more visible someone is, the bigger the risk of being made to disappear. In this context, those affected by gentrification fine-tune their visible involvement depending on the circumstances, what there is to gain or lose. Those in more precarious positions might decide to step back, get involved in movements in subtler ways, and eventually make use of more visible tools of protest if momentum is gained. Making the invisible visible is a political act (Lees and Ferreri 2016).

Vinthagen and Johansson (2016) were interested in “how everyday resistance in the form of activities, social relations and identities, is spatially organized and how everyday resistance is practised in and through space as a central social dimension” (425). The issue of the spatiality of resistance opens up a whole set of issues around positionality, marginality, and scale, for resistance is “localised, regionalised and globalised at the same time that economic globalisation slices across geopolitical borders” (Chin and Mittelman 1997, 35). Inasmuch as resistance is spatialized, however, it is also temporarily organized. Hartman, Keating, and LeGates (1982) pointed out how acting timely is crucial in stopping demolition, eviction, and displacement. Solidarity networks can solidify or dissipate depending on how well a position is negotiated, and when survival is compromised, solidarity among those under threat can be limited.

Harvey (1973, 2013), among others, would argue that resistance is oriented toward the change of a larger system that perpetuates injustice, but this is not always possible, and it pays little attention to the smaller, more intimate scale of resistance to gentrification. This is where the value of survivability as related to everyday practices comes in. The concept of survivability, we would argue, can be used to scale up from the micro to macro scales of resistance (from the individual to the neighborhood, city, nation, and internationally; see Smith 1992); in addition, scaling can be done in between. The value of a scaled survivability is that it enables us to focus both on the survival of the collective and also critically of the individual. The potential of individual practices of resistance, which have often been much more successful than big organized resistance (Vinthagen and Johansson 2013, 2016), have been overshadowed in the gentrification studies literature. Indeed, it is important to study resistance at the micro scale because we are confronted by a coherent and hegemonic urban neoliberal order that pushes people into vulnerability and survivability. Survivability allows us to talk radically about geography, the focus being on the fundamental, material need to survive. Heynen (2006, 191) related survivability to “meeting basic human needs”; feminist geographers such as Katz (2004) have discussed the relationship between survivability and social reproduction and define survivability as a precondition for resistance.

Chatterton and Heynen (2011) also defend a renewed focus on the everyday tactics of resistance in the face of the fact that a far-reaching revolution is rarely possible and this allows us to redefine resistance as always relational, situated in space, as a multiplicity of actions, not necessarily emancipatory or oppositional. These everyday resistances can often occur where we do not necessarily expect them to, they can be visible or invisible (we would argue that the invisible practices need much more attention), they can be intentional or nonintentional, and they are not necessarily politically conscious. We recognize, as Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay (2016) pointed out, that vulnerability can be both a result of resistance, especially in the increasingly violent contexts in which resistance to gentrification takes place, and a precondition. As they explained, the body itself is put at risk, but vulnerability also anticipates resistance when resisting people are extremely precarious individuals. When people organize, their precarious position is exposed, politicized, and performed bodily. As collective infrastructures fail, vulnerability, and with it the possibility of resistance, emerges. Törnberg (2013) stressed the need to explore how the materiality of things influences resistance, urging us to consider survivability as a key component within processes of resistance, as access to fundamental material goods become the priority.

In thinking about survivability, we can also draw on Holloway's (2002, 2010) work (which itself draws on the struggle of the Zapatista movement of Chiapas, Mexico), which breaks with the traditional left in arguing that the possibility of revolution resides in day-to-day acts that refuse domination by capitalist society rather than seeking power through state apparatuses. His is a more optimistic view of resistance, one that the South African, antigentrification, shack-dweller movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, lauds as “refreshing in the sense that it engenders hope,” breaking with the traditions of authoritarian and vanguardist leftism in Marxist revolutionary struggles (Abahlali 2016). He is interested in the ordinary politics of ordinary people, what Abahlali baseMjondolo calls “living politics.”

For Holloway, as for many fighting gentrification, resistance occurs in and through the cracks in capitalism, in interstices. He recognized that the most violent force is the force of the state (and we see this in the state's heavy involvement in planetary gentrification) and restores human beings—individuals—in struggles. Drawing on Holloway, survivability is a moment, even explosion, of creation where the state is pushed aside but, significantly, it will not always have momentum. We must not overemphasize continuity, as survivability might not last, but this does not make it any less successful or important, because simply surviving is also a matter of dignity and self-esteem (what Holloway calls the refusal to accept humiliation and dehumanization). This does not, however, rule out the fact that context-dependent relationships can develop between everyday practices and organized struggle (DeFilippis and North 2004). The everyday building of solidarities in place is important and can at times be scaled, and individuals and neighborhoods can act as both platforms for the organization of resistance and objects of resistance (Butler et al. 2016).

Conclusion

We have begun the work here of developing an analytical framework for researching resistance to gentrification globally that is strengthened by attention to survivability in everyday practices of resistance. We argue that research on resistance to gentrification needs to extend much more toward individual, as well as collective, actions that are not organized, formal, or necessarily public or even intentionally political, actions that are linked to configurations of power in everyday life. We have found in our own scholar-activist research on resisting gentrification³ that resistance is not always a call to arms and a storming of barricades. More often it is small-scale, haphazard, and simply reactive practices of survivability, which in some cases eventually spark collective organizing but in others do not. Resistance to gentrification can constitute a small-scale (geo)politics undertaken by rational, emotional, and embodied urban citizens; some of their acts are visible, some invisible. Through a postcolonial lens, survival per se can be seen as success in the face of brutal, hegemonic practices. Attempts to pacify, impose social and cultural norms, and evict can be met with subaltern insurrections: the ability of not conforming to imposed norms, of continuing to relate to the city as an “other” in the face of acute marginalization and indeed criminalization. Bayat's (2007) critique of Scott's (1985) “weapons of the weak” pushes the idea of the mere defensive mechanisms of the disenfranchised toward a notion of active, “offensive” mechanisms that go on to build further possibilities. Our notion of survivability reflects the ability of threatened people to act on their agency.

Prioritizing basic material needs, like a home, is fundamental to survival. Anchoring resistance in the material, fundamental logic of survival, as Chatterton and Heynen (2011) suggested, moves us away from binary interpretations of resistance and allows us to focus on contradictions, the different identities produced, and the various scales where a reworked concept of resistance is performed. Indeed, scale is important, for although surviving and staying put are key areas for actions, at some point more organized resistance could be needed either to hold on to that survivability or to scale up the fight. Butler et al. (2016) argued that we need platforms because without them we cannot mobilize. We would argue that platforms can occur from practices of survivability, but there is no demand that they do so. Survivability gives dignity to those threatened by gentrification, but it also has the potential to be scaled up, down, and in between the individual and the collective. Scaling it up to the city level and globally in the fight against gentrification (Smith 1992) is perhaps easier than scaling down, and this could have implications for the right to the city, national, and global movements. In future research on resistance to gentrification, cases should be examined as the loci where relationships are established. In so doing, we might look again at Massey's (2005) work on the reclaiming of spaces as “the product of interrelations,” where actors become entangled with each other more or less willingly and where battles of all sizes are won sometimes by the sheer ability to belong to a threatened landscape.

There needs to be a stronger and more determined international conversation on the potential of all antigentrification practices worldwide. We hope that this brief article goes some way toward starting such an international dialogue, the aim being to forge more successful resistances to gentrification. As part of this conversation, gentrification researchers must also ask probing questions of themselves in relation to ethics, positionality, and their working with marginalized or vulnerable groups in everyday resistance against gentrification—failure to do so will only reproduce the hegemony of gentrification itself.

Acknowledgments

We thank the referees for their very useful comments and Nik Heynen for his patience but, more importantly, we thank the brave people we have been working with fighting gentrification.

Additional information

Funding

The following research grants underpin this work: EU Grant No. 625691; ESRC 2017-2020, “Gentrification, Displacement, and the Impacts of Council Estate Renewal in C21st London” (PI: Lees,L., CoIs: Hubbard, P. and Tate, N) [ES/N015053\1]; EU FP7-PEOPLE-2013 Marie Curie Action Fellowship 2014–2016, “AGAPE: Exploring Anti-gentrification Practices and Policies in Southern European Cities” (PI: Lees, L. CoI: Annunziata, S.); Antipode Activist Scholar Award 2012 “Challenging ‘The New Urban Renewal’: Gathering the Tools Necessary to Halt the Social Cleansing of Council Estates and Developing Community-led Alternatives for Sustaining Existing Communities” (PI: Lees, L. CoIs: London Tenants Federation, Richard Lee/Just Space and Mara Ferreri); Leicester University Impact Fund, 2015–2016.

Notes on contributors

Loretta Lees

LORETTA LEES is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. She is an international expert on gentrification and her most recent book, Planetary Gentrification (with Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto Lopez-Morales), is the launch text for Polity Press's new Urban Futures series. Since 2009 she has coorganized The Urban Salon: A London Forum for Architecture, Cities and International Urbanism (see http://www.theurbansalon.org/). She is also an activist-scholar who for the past decade has been involved in fighting the gentrification of council estates in London, where she lives. Her expertise has been used in two public enquiries, and she is currently continuing this work in a three-year Economic and Social Research Council project collating evidence on displacement.

Sandra Annunziata

SANDRA ANNUNZIATA is a lecturer in urban theory and urbanism in the Department of Architecture, University of Roma Tre, Italy, and an Honorary Research Fellow in Geography at the University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. She has a degree in architecture and urbanism and a PhD in urban studies, the latter of which won the 2010 Giovanni Ferraro National Award in Italy. She recently completed a European Union project with Loretta Lees on antigentrification policies and practices in three southern European cities—Rome, Madrid, and Athens. The research involved working with groups resisting gentrification in all three cities. She is currently writing up the results as an antigentrification toolkit for southern European cities and continuing her activism in Rome.

Clara Rivas-Alonso

CLARA RIVAS-ALONSO is a PhD student in Geography at the University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Her PhD is an investigation into everyday practices and perceptions of resistance in a neighborhood in Istanbul under threat from state-led gentrification, Okmeydani. Undertaking ethnographic research on resistance, she lived in Okmeydani during the recent Turkish government crackdowns. She is interested in the more invisible solidarities that escape institutional attempts at rent extraction. A scholar-activist, she argues that the current global urban condition calls for more innovative methods of resistance.

Notes

1. On the need to strengthen the nexus between development studies and gentrification studies, see Lees (2012), although, interestingly, this has faced some kickback from some development geographers.

2. Annunziata and Rivas-Alonso (forthcoming) argued that the most useful academic writings on resisting gentrification are from scholar-activists who are involved in the fight to stay put (e.g., Hartman, mentioned earlier, and, more recently, The London Tenants Federation, Lees, Just Space, and SNAG [2014]; for the Swedish version, see Thörn, Krusell, and Widehammar (2016); see also Andrej Holm's (nd) blog. They argue that it is not academic texts but handbooks, blogs (see http://35percent.org/), mapping (antievictionmap.org), passionate writing (Colau and Alemany 2012), documentaries and movies, and artist-activist works (see lefthandrotation.com) that have the most practical value. They are, first of all, accessible and easy to read and understand; do not intellectualize the problem at stake; and go directly to possible solutions. They are written for and with communities and imply the participation of those directly affected by displacement (see also Annunziata and Lees [2016] on resistance to gentrification movements in southern European cities).

3. We have not the space here to reflect on our own personal experiences and contributions as scholar-activists involved in resisting gentrification in London, Rome, Istanbul, and elsewhere, but such reflections are important in a neoliberal academic environment that leaves little time or energy for deep community work. Any academic investigation of survivability entails working with vulnerable people (threatened with eviction or displacement) in the field, and we also need to be resilient (to survive emotionally, personally) as researchers in the face of disturbing, vicious gentrifications that disrupt and ruin people's lives. We also have an ethical responsibility not to exploit these awful stories of poverty, pain, and oppression for academic gain or intellectual ruminations.