Gentrification studies and cultural colonialism: Discussing connections between historic city centers of Mexico and Spain

ABSTRACT

In the last 2 decades, gentrification has emerged in Spanish-speaking urban studies as a powerful and controversial concept that revitalizes the debate on urbanization processes. However, some scholars have opposed gentrification as an alien notion and a spurious generalization from the experience of cities in the Global North, useless for urban studies in the Global South. In this context, the aim of the article is to defend current scientific work on gentrification that bridges diverse urban geographies. We also challenge a rigid and reductionist division of the urban world into a few homogeneous regions by engaging with current debates on comparative studies. We propose a dialogue between the Mexican and Spanish cases of gentrification, connecting these processes in distant urban regions. The main finding is that, despite enormous contextual differences, there is common ground for gentrification studies in Mexico and Spain in the recent historical processes of urban renewal of historic centers for touristic exploitation.

KEYWORDS:

• Gentrification
• touristification
• cultural colonialism
• historic centers
• comparative studies

Colonial concepts?

A key concern of critical Latin American urban scholars today is the existence of a colonial relationship with the English-speaking academy. Many scholars have warned of an intellectual or epistemic dependence on English-speaking publications, concepts and theories that are uncritically imported en masse into Latin America (Gilbert, 2017; Beigel, 2013, 2016; Rivera Cusicanqui et al., 2016; Gudynas, 2017). Latin American academics tend to be described as passive subjects, who must spend a period of training in the core countries, where they adopt theories and concepts that work there and then try to replicate them in their places of origin (Delgadillo, 2014). This is also a concern for Spanish scholars, as García-Ramón (2012) points out that English-speaking countries have imposed their research agendas on an international scale and, therefore, their concepts have been adopted by the semi-peripheries and peripheries.

The influences of postcolonial theory on urban studies in the last 2 decades have involved questioning the universalization from the European or Western experience (Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2016). In the context of critical social science, there has been a tendency to emphasize the scientific viewpoint from the West, propagating accusations of Eurocentrism, leading to the assertion of false generalizations (Maloutas & Fujita, 2016) in what has been termed a kind of theoretical parochialism (Robinson, 2016). The postcolonial framework has also denounced patterns of spread of trends, theories, paradigms, etc., which tend to follow a direction from the central countries to the peripheries of global capitalism, due to the greater resources and capacity for diffusion of universities in the central countries, especially in the Anglo-American world, and which also includes the theories, concepts, and fashions of critical academy (Delgadillo, 2013; Robinson, 2006). Latin American decolonial theory arises largely from this concern, calling for the recovery of the continent’s own epistemic traditions that have been overshadowed by cultural colonialism (Grosfoguel, 2006; Mignolo, 2008). However, these approaches have been cautioned as potentially entailing a relativism that makes comparative thinking or general theorizing problematic or even impossible (Aalbers, 2022; Scott & Storper, 2015).

Gentrification studies, which are deeply rooted in Anglo-American academia and have increasingly proliferated in the Spanish-speaking world in the last decade, have not escaped these controversies, as recent debates show. From a postcolonial perspective, Ghertner (2015) and Maloutas (2012) have criticized global gentrification studies as a false generalization based on the experience of Anglo-American cities. This position is shared in publications in Spanish, such as the controversy raised by Garnier in Spanish journals (Garnier, 2017, responded to by Díaz-Parra, 2018) and in America´s Spanish speaking countries, specifically in Mexico, where Pradilla (in Delgadillo, 2013) and Ramírez (2017) insist on the erroneousness of these concepts. For these critics, gentrificación is a neologism introduced in America´s Spanish speaking countries by foreign authors, who analyze the local reality through Anglo-American lenses and methodologies, which cannot be applied to the urban experience of other cultural regions. For this reason, authors such as Giglia (2017), despite their critical stance toward neoliberal urbanism, disavow its use and prefer to use the term urban renewal.

On the opposite side of the debate, López-Morales (2015) and Lees (2012) have defended gentrification as a planetary phenomenon, focusing mainly on gentrification as an urban policy involving global strategies of capital accumulation. Other scholars, while criticizing an overextension in the use of the term, consider gentrification in Latin America as a general but diverse phenomenon, resulting from the rationality of capitalist urbanization (Díaz-Parra, 2021). By this trend, Hiernaux (2016) proposes to overcome the quagmire of global versus local by acknowledging the existence of urban restructuring phenomena on a global scale, including gentrification. However, his findings show that gentrification is adapted to local realities, distancing itself from the ways in which the phenomenon plays out elsewhere. In this trend, scholars writing in Spanish language have tended to propose new names for these restructuring processes or multiple adjectives to describe the particularity of the process in America´s Spanish speaking countries, such as “Latino gentrification” (Inzulza-Contardo, 2012) or “Creole gentrification” (Hiernaux, 2016), distancing themselves from debates in core regions.

This paper approaches this controversy with different objectives. On the one hand, following Robinson (2016), we agree that we need a comparative investigation of diverse cases, rather than more similar and geographically close ones, focusing on relationships and connections. On the other hand, following Varley (2013) and Aalbers (2022), we are interested in challenging arguments that limit comparative understanding or theory-based empirical work, specifically in gentrification studies. Following Aalbers (2022, pp. 1–2), we advocate “relational and comparative global housing studies that go beyond North/South and East/West binaries and dichotomies.” We therefore aim to make the case for current studies of gentrification in diverse and distant urban geographies, with a focus on the Spanish-speaking world, which is peripheral within the international academia. We propose that gentrification scholars must challenge the rigid division of the urban world into a few homogeneous regions (Global North and Global South) as incommunicable blocs, engaging with current debates on comparative studies.

Specifically, our aim is to analyze the possible connections between gentrification studies in Mexico and Spain through an extensive literature review. We focus on a key aspect that is shaping gentrification in Spanish and Mexican cities: state-driven reinvestment in historic city centers over the last half century, oriented toward the tourist economy. In what sense is gentrification an expression of a colonial relationship or of academic imperialism? To what extent do gentrification processes and literature in Spain and Mexico have a colonial relationship? Can we find a common narrative in gentrification studies for these two distant urban regions, acknowledging their shared history and their wide differences?

Methodology

This paper attempts to answer these questions by analyzing the literature on gentrification and urban studies in Spain and Mexico. We have conducted a comprehensive review of the literature on gentrification in Spanish-speaking countries, establishing an implicit dialogue with the Anglo-American gentrification literature and an explicit dialogue with key works and Spanish-speaking schools of urban studies. We consider it key to understanding the connections between Mexican and Spanish gentrification to pay attention to the literature on urban heritage and historic city centers.

We searched for articles in Spanish using the term gentrificación, which is currently widely used in Spanish. To do so, we tried some of the main databases specializing in the scientific output of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal). The one that most closely matched the type of journals in which gentrification studies are being published is Redalyc. It returned a list of 946 articles in Spanish with references to gentrificación. Most of the papers were published in Mexican journals, while Spanish journals were in fourth position. Mexico, Spain, Chile, Colombia, and Argentina together accounted for 88% of the articles found. 82% of the publications were published after 2010. First, we sought to analyze the process of dissemination of these types of studies in Spanish-speaking countries. To this end, we focused on older articles, mainly from the 1990s and 2000s, when the Spanish-language literature on gentrification was scarcer. Previous bibliographic reviews on gentrification or discussion articles were very useful and allowed us to locate works that dealt with the same issues using alternative terms (elitization, ennoblement, and others). We also alternatively consulted other Ibero-American databases, mainly Dialnet, where we found a smaller number of documents but older papers (1991) with references to gentrificación. Secondly, we focus on the cases of Mexico and Spain. The Redalyc search engine is limited when it comes to performing advanced searches of this type. It only allows us to distinguish by country of production, language, and year. We conducted a search over the last ten years for publications referring to gentrificación, a period in which most of the publications with the term appear. Between 2012 and 2021, 258 articles were published in Mexican (183) and Spanish (75) journals. Of these, we discarded 48 articles in which there was no relationship with the object of study. The rest of the articles were divided into articles focused on gentrification processes and others that touched on the subject only partially. Here, we identified those that studied cases in Spain (31 articles) and Mexico (66), the type of sectors on which they focused (historic center, peri-central neighborhoods, rural gentrification, peripheral areas, the city, or cities, urban region, and the state as a whole); we also identified the articles in which the issue of tourism and/or heritage was of central importance.

The paper also benefits from our personal experience: we are a Mexican and a Spaniard, having lived and worked as academics in both countries. We are therefore connected to Euro-American research networks working in Spain and Latin America, for example, the Contested Cities (funded by Marie Curie Actions, European Union) and Conflictos Urbanos Iberoamerican Network (at the Asociación Universitaria Iberoamericana de Postgrado (Postgraduate Association of Ibero-American Universities). We have been engaged in research and debates on gentrification for nearly 2 decades, participating in research projects, conferences and seminars in Mexico, Spain and elsewhere in Latin America, gaining experience that is crucial for the understanding of urban studies in Spanish-speaking countries and their debates around gentrification.

The spread of gentrification: Between terminological controversy and regional debates

Gentrification emerged in the 1960s in the UK, and by the 1980s the concept was widespread in urban debates in English-speaking countries. However, the discussion spread to other parts of the world, so that by the mid-1990s it began to permeate analyses of the urban question in Europe. In the case of southern European cities, specifically in Spain, it is interesting to note that it was a journalist, Gabancho (1991), who first used the term gentrification to describe the transformation of the historic center of Barcelona. The same year, the term appeared in a book chapter on urban decay (Ferrer & Moreno, 1991). Shortly after, Vázquez (1996) hesitantly used the term to explain the residential transformation of the historic center of Madrid. A few years later, Sargatal (2001) and Tabakman (2001) analyzed the urban reform of the Raval and Casc Antic of Barcelona and Alcolea (2001) the historic center of Madrid through the lens of gentrification. These authors approached the subject tangentially, detecting the first symptoms of urban changes coinciding with the mutations of Anglo-American cities. They also hispanified the term (gentrificación) and, although they probably did not consider it, they began to generate a debate on the use of the concept.

The dissemination of the term in Spain generated some discomfort from the outset, probably due to the crude adaptation of such a British neologism into Spanish. García Herrera (2001), who had worked and collaborated with Neil Smith (García Herrera et al., 2007), was the first to point out the lack of consensus regarding the direct translation into Spanish, suggesting elitización as a synonym for gentrification in Spanish-speaking urban studies. Duque (2010) responded to García Herrera’s work later, opting to use the English term gentrification in works written in Spanish. Díaz-Parra (2013) would then defend a pragmatic position, pointing to the lack of acceptance of the term elitización within a decade and the increasingly widespread use of gentrificación. Simultaneously, other authors denied such processes based on morphological differences between Mediterranean and Anglo-American cities. This is the case of Rius (2008) and Maloutas (2012), and the subject of the controversy revived by Garnier (2017), who denounced the empty nature of the concept. Despite this, recent research has highlighted the existence of gentrification processes in urban Spain (Duque, 2016; Soriando and Ardura, 2017 or; Sequera, 2020) and their usefulness in critically addressing urban restructuring and the appreciation of the real estate market in certain areas of medium and large cities.

In America´s Spanish speaking countries, between the 20th and 21st centuries, foreign scholars introduced analyses of gentrification, scrutinizing the urban realities of the continent with an Anglo-American lens. This is the case of Jones and Varley (1999), who argued that the historic center of Puebla (Mexico) was undergoing a process of gentrification due to the implementation of government policies to promote cultural heritage. The research was not widely disseminated in Spanish-speaking urban studies, although it was translated into Spanish a few years later. Previously, in the 1990s, some authors had touched tangentially on the subject, using other terms, such as aristocratization (Hardoy & Gutman, 1992). In Argentina, Carman (1999) developed a pioneering study on the process of transformation of the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Abasto, calling ennoblecimiento (ennoblement) the process of displacement of traditional residents and attraction of new wealthy neighbors, without going so far as to offer a discussion on the appropriateness of the term. In the change from the 20th to the 21st/at the turn of the 21st century, several works began to mention gentrification as the objective of urban renewal projects in Latin American city centers, as in the case of Hiernaux (1999) on city of Mexico, Ciccolella (1999) on Buenos Aires, De Mattos (1999) on Santiago de Chile and Mertins and Muller (2000) on Bogotá.

After the rather standalone work of Jones and Varley, the proximity to the French-speaking world led a couple of geographers from those latitudes to be the first to take an interest in researching gentrification in Mexican cities. The work of Hiernaux (1999; 2003) and Melé (2005) focused on the processes of social change in Mexican historic centers based on reinvestment, but they encountered a refractory environment for the adoption of the anglicism among Mexican urban scholars (Delgadillo, 2013). However, with the turn of the millennium, there was an explosion of work on gentrification by young academics, many of them linked to European-funded research projects and networks (Contested Cities) that encouraged comparative studies. This is the case in the work of Salinas-Arreortua (2013), Hernández Cordero (2015), and Díaz-Parra (2015) but also of older authors such as Delgadillo (2016) and Olivera and Delgadillo (2014). In parallel, other works have continued to question the appropriateness of the concept and the lack of rigor in its use (Ramírez, 2017 or Salas et al., 2018). Many of the publications of this period reproduce Anglo-American discussions, adopting either supply-side or demand-side explanatory approaches. Attempts have also been made to show the particularity of gentrification in Latin America. Thus, terms such as criollo (Hiernaux, 2016) or light (González, 2010) gentrification have been coined, which have mainly referred to how the reinvestment and displacement of vulnerable populations in central areas has developed in Mexican cities, leading to the attraction of visitors and consumers in public spaces rather than to the arrival of middle-class residents. Inzulza-Contardo’s (2012) Latino gentrification connects with this trend, which argued for densification processes in pericentral areas of Chilean cities as a particular form of gentrification for Latin American cities (see also, Contreras, 2011). At that time, Chile positioned itself as a pole of academic production on gentrification. Based on the experience in Chilean cities, Sabatini et al. (2008) also spoke of Latin American-style gentrification, while López-Morales (2013) put forward an interpretation of the rent gap theory. These discussions have also proliferated in Argentina (Herzer, 2008; Lacarrieu, 2018; Rodríguez & Di Virgilio, 2016; Di Virgilio, 2020) and there have also been comparative studies that generally include Mexico, Argentina, Chile and/or Brazil (López-Morales et al., 2021; Rasse et al., 2019). Comparative studies have also appeared between both sides of the Atlantic, such as Mansilla’s (2019), which compares a “tourist gentrification” between neighborhoods in Berlin, Palma de Mallorca and Quito. In the latter city, the literature on gentrification and touristification exploded in the wake of Rafael Correa’s government’s programs to attract European postdoctoral researchers to its university system (Martí-Costa et al., 2016 or Durán, 2015).

The introduction of gentrification in the Spanish-speaking world has therefore oscillated between doubts about its applicability and reflections on the particularity of the processes in one country or another, or in one region or another. Although many works have tried to identify a particular pattern for gentrification in Latin America, the results have not always been satisfactory. Some of the aspects that have been taken as characteristic are the absence of displacement (Sabatini et al., 2008), the prominence of bohemian groups (Jaramillo, 2015) or densification (Contreras, 2011; Inzulza-Contardo, 2012). However, these tend not to be exclusive to Latin America, nor are they generalizable to the region (Díaz-Parra, 2021). Rather than looking for features that homogenize and differentiate a cultural region, it seems more attractive to follow Robinson’s (2011) calls to investigate connections between cities or regions regardless of their geographical proximity. The phenomenology of gentrification can vary and does not necessarily respond to a border or series of borders. As an example, the following sections will examine the connections between gentrification in Mexico and Spain.

Latin urbanism and the return to the built-up city

The most lucid critics of the term gentrification, both in Latin America and continental Europe, base their primary argument on the structural differences between the Anglo-American city model and its recent dynamics with respect to other urban regions. Although we do not consider that the existence of differences in the urban structure bequeathed by history is a sufficient argument to reject a priori the existence of gentrification, it is a key element that can generate similarities and differences with respect to the configurations of the phenomenon.

Gentrification in Mexico can be characterized in relation to a wide range of topics. While in Spain the themes of creative cities, planning, and urban renewal are more common, in the case of Mexico, research linking gentrification to the displacement of street commerce, gated communities, policing of public space and socio-spatial segregation prevail. Commercial gentrification has a wide relevance in both Mexican and Spanish cases, usually connected also to tourist-related gentrification in historical city centers. However, in Mexico, studies on rural gentrification have been more prominent than in Spain. Even if most of the research on gentrification focuses on Mexico City, there is a wide range of studies on rural places or towns also connected with the tourist industry. On the contrary, studies of gentrification in peripheral areas are rare, both in Mexico and Spain, where most case studies focus on central enclaves, especially historic quarters.

So, when comparing Mexico and Spain, historic centers, historic heritage, and tourism seem to play a key role. This would potentially generate substantial differences in the ways in which the phenomenon develops in Mexican and Spanish cities in comparison, for example, with Anglo-American or Chilean cities. In Anglo-American urbanism, where gentrification began to be studied, typical city models are based on one or several business and financial centers (or Central Business Districts, CBDs), which in the case of British cities is largely based on the redevelopment of the pre-modern city, also greatly affected by the bombings during World War II (Knox & Pinch, 2014; Pacione, 2009). For their part, many Mexican and Spanish cities are made up of large historic centers, which have at least partially maintained their residential use. In the case of Spain, they tend to be of medieval origin but were greatly transformed during the heyday of the Hispanic empire by baroque urbanism. In the Mexican case, the Creole cities, when created ex novo or over old indigenous cities, are some of the greatest exponents of this baroque urbanism (Hardoy et al., 1978; Herrera & Pecht, 1976). On the other hand, typically Anglo-American suburbanization is of lesser importance. This form of low-density urban growth has been a key feature of Anglo-American urban models since the garden city of the 19th century (Hall, 1996). These models were unfortunately or rather marginally exported to other urban regions. Differences in urban history explain the divergence in the status assigned to the term suburbanization itself, usually understood in Spanish as self-built neighborhoods lacking the minimum conditions of urbanization or even shantytowns. As a mass phenomenon, Anglo-American-style suburbanization did not arrive in Spain as a fashionable trend until the 1980s (Susino & Calvache, 2013). In Mexico, suburbanization has been mainly lower class, while the model of peripheral gated communities for the middle and upper classes did not begin to spread massively until the 1990s, due to the security crisis in Mexican cities (Cabrales & Canosa, 2001).

In classical theories of gentrification, the opposition between middle-class suburban neighborhoods and the CBD plays a fundamental role. The idea of “the return to the city” in the classic debate between Ley (1996) and Smith (1996) refers to the displacement between the suburbs and the CBD’s bordering neighborhoods, which were largely disinvested during most of the 20th century. While the logic of disinvestment and reinvestment that underlies the income gap formulation, as well as middle-class consumption patterns, may operate in very different urban realities, the return to the city discourse is radically altered by differences in the internal structure of cities in the English and Spanish-speaking regions.

The decline of central areas, and often their ghettoization during the 20th century, is common to Anglo-American, Spanish and Latin American cities despite their differences in urban structure. However, many large Latin American and Spanish cities have experienced their own return to the city, in their case, to historic centers. The urban theory and political practice of the return to the built-up city has been a feature of the last half-century in Mediterranean and Latin American cities. This links two aspects of gentrification in Mexico and Spain, the prominence of state-led policies and their presence in historic centers (Salinas-Arreortua, 2013 or Díaz-Parra, 2014). Regarding renewal policies in historic centers, there has been a wide dissemination of the return to the built-up city discourse among architecture and urban planning professionals, which explains to some extent the shift in urban policy in recent decades, both in Spain and Mexico.

The influence of UNESCO has been decisive in the dissemination of this type of model in Latin America, especially in Mexico, where several historic centers have been designated as World Heritage Sites (Delgadillo, 2011; Melé, 2005). The international congresses on heritage organized by UNESCO (Amsterdam 1975 and Quito 1977) were very influential in this trend. UNESCO proposed strategies at the international level for the urban improvement of cities with important historic architecture. The theories of cultural heritage and the critique of functionalist urbanism had a wide political relevance in Italy. In this trend, since the 1970s, many Italian historic centers were restored, Bologna being a paradigmatic case (García-Vázquez, 2004 or Fernández-Salinas, 1994). In Spain, the first democratic local governments (1979) proposed a similar turn in urban policy (Martínez, 2001; Tomé, 2007). This new urbanism in Spain had a common discourse based on the demand for a return to the built-up city and the enhancement of urban heritage. Under this slogan, a series of plans were drawn up with a tendency toward austerity, focusing their attention on the city center and the restructuring of the built space (Gaja, 1992, p. 38; Fernández-Salinas, 1994, p. 128). In this framework, what is known as the Barcelona Model became paradigmatic, spreading rapidly throughout Latin American cities (Jajamovich, 2013).

Intervention in the historic areas of city centers in Latin America also began in the 1980s (Mertins, 2006). International conferences and supranational bodies extended their influence in the region in this and the following decade, reflecting in the ideas of the architectural community and in urban planning. These ideas became widespread in the 1990s following the creation of the Latin American and Caribbean Cities Network, whose initial seminar was held in Paris in 1998. The network focused on historic centers under renewal and was promoted by UNESCO. Subsequently, the Latin American and Caribbean Organization of Historic Centers was created in Quito, Ecuador. Carrión (2001, p. 30) points to the introduction of new urbanization trends under what he again calls the “return to the built-up city.” He defines it as the shift from an urbanism based on peripheral expansion to one based on the upgrading of the existing city (Ibidem, 2010 and 2013). From a critical point of view, Delgadillo (2008) refers to this trend as the conjunction of forces that, with different interests and intentions, try to reverse expansive urban growth and the abandonment of central areas and to make real estate and tourism businesses based on the heritage of historic city centers. These discourses have influenced the planning processes of renewal projects in many historic centers in the region, including the large cities of Mexico (Díaz-Parra, 2014). In both Spain and Mexico, the renewal of historic centers has been a strong stimulus for the tourist economy, being the focus of many of the gentrification studies.

Studies on gentrification, historic centers, and tourism

In Mexico, the first work to use the notion of gentrification is that of Jones and Varley (1999), which deals with reinvestment in the historic center of Puebla. Subsequent research has also tended to take historic city centers as a case study, especially in Mexico City and its successive rounds of renewal and reinvestment since the last decades of the 20th century (Hernández Cordero, 2015; Hiernaux, 2003; Melé, 2005). In recent years, research outside the capital has grown (Hernández Cordero, 2019), with publications on gentrification in cities such as Querétaro (Nicolás & González-Gómez, 2014), Guanajuato (Navarrete, 2017) or again Puebla (Carriles & Pliego, 2021), invariably focusing on the consequences of reinvestment and renewal of historic central neighborhoods. In Spain, meanwhile, early research on gentrification also dealt with historic neighborhoods in Madrid and Barcelona (Alcolea, 2001; Sargatal, 2001; Tabakman, 2001) and only occasionally other main Spanish cities (Herrera, 2003). The paradigmatic cases of gentrification have invariably been in the historic neighborhoods of large cities, generally residential districts that had suffered profound policies of disinvestment and eviction of slums, such as the Raval in Barcelona (Sargatal, 2001), Lavapiés in Madrid (García, 2014), La Alameda in Seville (Díaz-Parra, 2009), or the Albaicín in Granada (Duque, 2016). Almost half of the articles published in Mexico (44%) and Spain (45%) in the last decade deal with historic centers, historic neighborhoods, or central or pericentral enclaves. In addition, approximately a third of the articles published in Mexico and Spain referring to gentrification had a relevant focus on the issue of built heritage.

At the same time, the historic centers of Mexico and Spain show great differences. The decline of the population in these spaces has been, in general, more forceful in the large Mexican cities. This has also been linked to tertiarization, but informal trade and its capacity to generate higher rents has been decisive in the expulsion of other uses (Coulomb, 2009). Also, if relative overcrowding is a characteristic aspect of Latin American urbanism in the last half century (Castillo & Pradilla, 2015), the role of historic neighborhoods as the first destination of migrants has also been more relevant to the present day. The reinvestment of Spanish historic centers has also been much more forceful and has taken place earlier. This is a determining factor in the way gentrification evolves in both countries: Mexico emphasizes the displacement of street commerce and popular uses of public space, while Spain emphasizes much more residential gentrification.

Another of the main points in common in the studies on gentrification in Mexico and Spain is the relevance of the tourist economy in this type of process. Both in the articles published in Spain and those published in Mexico, the focus on tourism is very common, which usually appears as a main factor in the development of gentrification processes. In recent years, the terms tourist gentrification and touristification have also spread between scholars. In the last decade, 45% of articles on gentrification in Spanish journals and 33.3% in Mexican journals had a relevant focus in tourism, referring to tourism gentrification or, at the very least, considering tourism as a key factor in gentrification processes.

Currently, both economies have a common denominator: the importance of inbound tourism. In 2019, the WTTC (World Travel and Tourism Council) ranked Spain as the OECD country with the economy most dependent on tourism, contributing 14.3% of GDP and creating nearly 3 million jobs that year. In Mexico, the importance of this sector is also decisive, contributing 10.3% of GDP, being one of the most dynamic engines of the economy until 2019 and contributing 7 million jobs that year. Following Gormsen’s (1997) somewhat Anglocentric classification, Spain’s southern Mediterranean coast would become part of a second tourist periphery in the second half of the 20th century, as an international destination for “sun and beach” tourism for northern Europe, while Mexico would enter a fourth phase of integration of the tourist periphery from the end of the 20th century, initially also as a sun and beach tourism space within the Caribbean Sea region (mainly the Riviera Maya in the Yucatán peninsula, with Cancún being a well-known destination). The tourist economy has radically conditioned the urbanization of the coastline, and since the 1980s, with the processes of diversification of the tourist stock (Richards, 2001), it has begun to have an impact on the cities, mainly through the exploitation of the cultural heritage concentrated in their historic centers.

Although Mexican and Spanish cities have been attracting foreign visitors for more than a century, there has been a notable increase in urban tourism in recent decades. The enhancement of different types of heritage has become a key strategy within an urban policy framework in which attracting visitors is a priority objective. Thus, to a large extent, the success or failure of policies for the rehabilitation of historic centers over the last 4 decades is undoubtedly linked to their potential as tourist focal points (Delgadillo, 2009; Marchena & Repiso, 1999). The development of information technologies and, above all, the so-called peer-to-peer collaborative economy have encouraged this type of tourism and its introduction in traditionally residential historic centers (Cocola-Gant & Gago, 2019). Currently, the role of city centers in Mexico and Spain in attracting visitors is fundamental. This implies a competition for central spaces for tourist activity against other land uses, which seems to combine or overlap with gentrification (Jover & Díaz-Parra, 2020).

Many of the works on gentrification in Mexico’s historic centers have not been able to account for residential gentrification, but rather for the constant introduction of tourist and local consumers to areas of national heritage, both in the pioneering works on Puebla (Jones & Varley, 1999) and in the latest generation on the historic center of Mexico City (Coulomb, 2009). Several studies have drawn attention to the importance of culture and heritage in gentrification processes in Mexico (Checa-Artasu, 2011; Hiernaux & González, 2014). For its part, Spain has become an example of how cultural infrastructures and bohemian environments have been fundamental in driving urban renewal processes in degraded historic residential areas (Delgado, 2008; Zulaika, 1997), which have generally been integrated into preexisting tourist circuits.

This being so, in Spanish cities, attention has been drawn to how tourist rentals are driving people out of historic centers by replacing permanent rentals, which has been labeled as tourist gentrification (Cocola-Gant, 2020). Furthermore, Jover and Díaz-Parra (2020) have proven that the transformation of residential rentals into tourist rentals has displaced previous waves of residential gentrification by young middle-class households. However, much of the current work on gentrification in Spanish cities focuses on its relation to the tourist exploitation of historic centers, usually focusing on Madrid or Barcelona (Barcón et al., 2021; Crespi-Vallbona & Mascarilla-Miró, 2018; Gil & Sequera, 2018; Hernández Cordero & Eneva, 2016), but also on secondary cities such as Málaga (García et al., 2019) or Granada (Rodríguez-Medela et al., 2018). The link between gentrification and tourism is a less explored topic in Mexico, although some of the first works on the subject have been developed there (Hiernaux & González, 2014). However, there is an emerging body of research focusing on the tourism-driven transformation of historic centers (Mexico City, San Cristóbal, Puebla and many others), which tends to speak of “tourist gentrification” (Carriles & Pliego, 2021; Hernández Cordero & Fenner, 2018; López Sánchez et al., 2019; Navarrete, 2017; Neri, 2020). In both Spanish and Mexican cities, when it comes to central neighborhoods, it seems essential to value the role of tourism and the exploitation of cultural heritage. Although some complaints about the use of the concept have referred precisely to an excessive attention to central heritage areas (Ramírez, 2017), this attention seems amply justified in both cases.

Conclusions

It seems appropriate to distinguish the problem of false generalization from this of the academic/cultural imperialism/colonialism, in the sense that the transfer of a concept or theory from the central to the peripheral regions of global capitalism is not sufficient reason to reject its explanatory potential. Colonialism would not (necessarily) be found in the theory of gentrification, but rather in the existence of power structures that support the dissemination of knowledge, in which it is necessary to adopt well-regarded academic fashions in the core countries to publish in prestigious journals and publishers that guarantee academic visibility (Robinson, 2011). In general, words and concepts are not colonial or decolonial in and of themselves. Power relations and the networks and mechanisms of transmission and dissemination of knowledge and culture in today’s world are (neo-)colonial, insofar as they stem from relations inherited from a colonial context.

Mexico and Spain share a peripheral position in the international academy, that is, the peripheral position of the Spanish language in relation to the English language. In turn, Spain’s geopolitical position in the European Union, as a periphery of the core of global capitalism, allows academics access to funds and dissemination mechanisms that place the Spanish academy in an obvious advantageous position. We can see this in the way the EU funds projects and networks, including those in which the authors of this paper have been involved, that have been key to elevating gentrification studies in Latin America. These projects and networks that adopt a politically progressive and epistemologically critical perspective are, however, inevitably involved in imperialist/colonial logic, mechanisms and relations that are part of an unequal and hierarchical global academy. At the same time, this is not a sufficient condition for accepting or dismissing the validity of a theory or concept. As Zapata (2018) reminds us, no scholar or academic group is left out of these complex power relations in the international academy (nor in its national context, for that matter). For example, the wide diffusion of decolonial theory in the current landscape of critical scholarship is related to its status as discourses developed (to some extent) in U.S. universities with a central position in the circuits of knowledge dissemination (Ibidem). Instead of discarding concepts or notions because of their origin in English-speaking universities, the Spanish-speaking academy could be more productive by promoting critical dialogs and exchanges, seeking the production of pluricentric knowledge, without forgetting the hierarchical and unequal conditions of the international academy.

The problem of spurious generalizations, due to these unequal and hierarchical structures, is real and we must be aware of it. However, we will not solve it by dividing the world into two remnants or by substituting one parochialist theory (Robinson, 2006) for many others. Such broad and strict categorizations run the risk of being exaggerated, as if merely locating a case in the Global North or the Global South, in Latin America or in Europe, were sufficient to explain the ways in which urban phenomena develop. This article has challenged some of these prejudices that the academy continues to exploit. Homogeneity within large blocs is easily questionable, while it is possible to find connections and similar shapes in urban forms between distant realities.

Searching in any Ibero-American scholarly database, it is easy to conclude that gentrification is not an older or a more settled concept in Spain than in Spanish speaking countries in Latin America. In the database search, we do not find a greater importance of gentrification studies in Spain compared to Mexico or other Latin American countries (Chile, Colombia, and Argentina). In addition, the use of the term encounters similar reluctance in both countries. The relationship between Mexican gentrification studies in Spain is not just an extrapolation of the experience of Spanish urban studies to Mexico or from English-speaking countries to Spanish-speaking ones. Scholars in both countries are inspired by and cite Anglo-Saxon debates on gentrification, but we do not believe that it is simply an export of a rigid model as some critics claim (Delgadillo, 2013) or a left-wing political-ideological cliché as some others would think (Ramírez, 2017). Although we can find loose uses of the term gentrification (Díaz-Parra, 2021), most scholars are using these debates to shed some light on recent transformations in urban central areas, for which we have not previously been able to find a name. As a result of this research, similarities are found with the logic of gentrification in English-speaking countries and strong differences in the resulting forms. There are good reasons for this, as we share well-established institutions and ideologies that control current urban development. This is the case of the Latin discourse of the return to the built city. This urban theoretical trend follows again the path from the core to the periphery in the diffusion of ideas, sponsored by international institutions (UNESCO). Moreover, these theories crystallize into concrete policies, institutions, and spatial practices that connect the processes of gentrification in Latin America and Mediterranean Europe. The comparative exploration of current urban studies literature in Spanish-speaking countries that we made undoubtedly shows these connections between regions. Of course, the outcome of the application of an urban policy model cannot be homogeneous in Mexico and Spain (and not even within these countries) as there are serious contextual and historical differences.

We have shown relevant connections between the processes of gentrification in Spain and Mexico that allow for a common narrative. The study of Ibero-American databases clearly shows how gentrification studies in Mexico and Spain are closely related to historic centers, built heritage, and tourism. The existence of large and preserved historic city centers crystallizes as part of the common history of both countries. It is in these spaces where policies of “return to the built city” have taken place, aimed at the tourist exploitation of their heritage. The symbolic value and potential derived from this type of enclaves is hardly comparable to that of other cities in other regions of the world. The processes of the appreciation of heritage, led by rather more centralized states compared to Anglo-American ones, is a fundamental part of these transformations. The important role of tourist use, as opposed to other types of economic exploitation, also reflects the role of many of these cities and their form of incorporation into global capitalism.

If we expect to find processes with mimetic forms and appearances, we will probably be disappointed. Currently, gentrificación in Spanish literature refers to a wide range of socio-spatial phenomena, with strong differences with the paradigmatic cases of Anglo-American big cities. However, we also find consistency with more widespread and general definitions. In most cases, when referring to gentrification, we are describing a production of space for progressively more affluent users (Hackworth, 2002, p. 815) and a change in the population of land-users due to reinvestment of the built environment (Clark, 2005, p. 258). However, some uses in rural and peripheral areas have cast doubts because they could be stretching the concept too far (Díaz-Parra, 2021). On the contrary, the strongest case for gentrification studies in Spanish speaking countries, specifically in Mexico and in Spain, is currently in the reinvestment and renewal of central areas for progressively more affluent residents and/or users. This is a widespread phenomenon in certain historical and geographical contexts and strongly linked to the dynamics of the urban land market that prevail in today’s world. In this sense, gentrification within urban studies offers an interesting thread for both case studies and comparative studies.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the research project P18-RT-2427 (PAID 2020).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agencia de Innovación y Desarrollo de Andalucía [research project P18-RT-2427 (PAIDI)].

Notes on contributors

Iban Diaz-Parra

Iban Diaz-Parra is an Associate Professor of Human Geography at the University of Seville. He has a degree in Anthropology and a PhD in Geography. His work focuses on residential segregation, gentrification and social impacts of urban tourism, and he has conducted research on these topics in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and big Andalusian cities. His work has also been published in Progress in Human Geography, Urban Studies, Cities, and Tourism Geographies.

Adrián Hernández Cordero

Adrián Hernández Cordero is the Head of the Sociology Department at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa Campus. He holds a PhD in geography from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is currently. His PhD thesis won first place in the Historic Centers Research competition. His main research lines are gentrification, touristification, and urban consumption.