Gentrification in Latin America: some notes on unity in diversity

ABSTRACT

Various spatial practices have been subsumed under the label “gentrification,” inadvertently often giving two false impressions: first, that the displacement of low-income residents in the wake of a process of renovating houses in so-called blighted areas and the arrival of upper-class newcomers is something new in urban history; second, that the same processes and dynamics can be found everywhere in the world. Both assumptions must be strongly challenged. In this commentary, the author discusses to what extent the contributions in this special issue challenge these assumptions, and points to further dimensions of gentrification – in particular the mainstream reaction to resistance against gentrification – that have yet to be fully debated.

KEYWORDS:

• Gentrification
• Latin America
• history
• processes
• mainstream reaction

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues Ernesto López-Morales, Hyun Bang Shin and Loretta Lees for their invitation to write this overview on this special issue of Urban Geography. Their many suggestions for revision were very useful. The remaining faults are of course mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Janoschka and Sequera (this issue) correctly mention it in relation to Latin American authors. However, linguistic nationalisms aside, the main problem is of course not the word as such, but the conceptualization (and the theoretical principles that underlie it).

2. Besides shedding light on the particularities of present-day gentrification in Rio de Janeiro (especially the “Porto Maravilha” project: see Tomazine, 2015a, 2015b), Eduardo Tomazine has also examined the “early incarnations” of “gentrificação” in that city in his PhD thesis (currently being prepared under my supervision), such as the Reforma Pereira Passos at the beginning of the 20th century.

3. In real life, the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood (a former working-class residential area in Manhattan, especially of Irish-Americans) has been gentrifying since the 1990s.

4. For a detailed account of the militarization of the urban question in Rio de Janeiro, see Souza (2008). Tomazine (2015b) offers an interesting discussion about the connections between recent “public safety” policies and gentrification; Gaffney (this issue) also mention these connections, though in a less profound way.