Gentrification, urban policy and urban geography

ABSTRACT

Despite recognition that gentrification around the world is state-led – and that gentrification is in of itself de facto an urban policy – few scholars writing about gentrification, including urban geographers, have engaged purposively with urban policy, urban policy makers and other institutional actors. Building on my particular commitment to putting mitigations and solutions to gentrification on the policy table, I once again call for scholars of gentrification to work with policy makers and other institutional actors, to make our research on the negative impacts of gentrification known and to develop alternative and better policy practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban policy
• geography
• gentrification
• solutions

Nearly 20 years ago now I wrote a commentary (Lees, 2003) that called for increased dialogue between academic researchers of gentrification and policy makers. My call was off the back of Ron Martin (2001) and Danny Dorling and Mary Shaw’s (2002) call for a ‘policy (re)turn in geography’. It is interesting that even today despite the significant growth in gentrification studies, recognition that gentrification is a policy in and of itself (Lees & Ley, 2008), and that gentrification is state-led and global (Paton & Cooper, 2016; Lees et al., 2016), few gentrification scholars, especially in urban geography, engage properly with urban policy and in that urban policy makers. I remain unusual in doing so, especially in the UK, yet this has not been easy.

Early on I was told by critical urban geographers (with whom I identify/ied) that I should not be talking to, or working with, policy makers (and the state) to change policies that promote or lead to gentrification, I should be protesting out on the street. This got quite heated at the 2007 AAG conference in San Francisco, where I did an invited plenary for a session titled ‘Reclaiming the City’ organized by the journal City. Here, I had geographers in the audience yelling at me not to get ‘in bed with’ (as they saw it) policy makers; although Sir Peter Hall (the other invited plenary speaker) supported my stance, the audience’s opinion was reinforced on the stage by comments from Bob Catterall (the co-organizer of the session and solo editor of City). This ‘critical geography’ position or concern, of course, was pointed out by Harvey (1974), summarized nicely here by Boyle et al. (2020, p. 98):

lest their intellectual labor be appropriated, academic freedom impaired, and capacity for criticality compromised, there must exist a clear distance if not dissonance between scholars and the corporate state, construed as a “proto-fascist” technocratic instrument to preserve and strengthen the status quo.

But without dismissing these concerns, I have always been my own person and I feel strongly that in fighting gentrification all options should be on the table – with, in, and against the state and dealing with policy makers! As a result, I declined to publish in City for over a decade, and when I finally did (when a new editorial board replaced the solo editor) ironically, it was about the success of fighting gentrification through the state apparatus of a public inquiry (see Hubbard & Lees, 2018).

It is also ironic that those urban geographers, and indeed gentrification scholars, who have been the most critical of human (and urban) geography, for (in their words) playing superficial theoretical origami (Hamnett, 2001) or simply ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ (Hamnett, 2003), rather than engaging in applied geography targeted at real-world issues, have themselves not worked with policy makers in trying to mitigate the negative impacts of gentrification. What we have had in gentrification studies, and from urban geographers, has often been high-quality critique of policies that have promoted processes of gentrification. Both discursive critique and more in-depth analysis of policy impacts on the ground. However, much less work has been done on: (i) trying to communicate these findings beyond an academic or activist audience, or local communities, to policy makers and others promoting and supporting gentrification (like developers, city officials, etc.); and (ii) on developing policy alternatives, solutions to gentrification, to put on the table. There are lots of preaching to the converted in gentrification studies about its negative impacts but much less taking research evidence on its negative impacts to those who believe in gentrification or claim that there is no alternative. Surely, the whole point of critical urban geography is to create, engender change.

But this has not always been the case – in the 1970s and 1980s gentrification scholars, especially those in the United States, were much more likely to operate outside the ivory tower of academia using their expert knowledge on gentrification in the fight against it. The scholar-activism of Chester Hartman in the 1970s is a now-classic example of this. His 1974 book Yerba Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco told of the resistance of a low-income community to the post-war urban renewal that was destroying inner-city communities across the United States. Their neighbourhood was to be slum cleared and redeveloped/rebranded as Yerba Buena (an early example of renaming neighbourhoods to market their gentrification). Hartman provided detail on how the community organized itself on the ground and through the courts to resist, led by an organization called ‘Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment’ (TOOR). He showed how they were aided by liberal lawyers and academics from the nearby University of California, Berkeley, and other non-profit organizations. TOOR won some impressive gains under the slogan ‘We won’t move’, including replacing low-rent public housing. Significantly, Hartman called for legal controls over urban renewal policy. Hartman’s subsequent writings came out of the San Francisco-based ‘Anti-Displacement Project’, and scaled up as a national campaign to protect affordable housing occupants from the displacement pressures of gentrification during the 1970s across the United States (see Hartman et al., 1982). Hartman engaged with public policy, policy makers and the state. More recently, we can see similar commitment in the work of, for example, gentrification scholar Derek Hyra who has served as the Chair of a Redevelopment and Housing Authority in the United States and fed his research about the gentrification of public housing projects through to the Authority and indeed to the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Insights-Ensuring-Equitable-Growth.pdf) or in Erin McElroy’s Anti-eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) (https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/project/anti-eviction-mapping-project-san-francisco/).

In the UK, there has been much less of this engagement, and in general gentrification (and geographical) scholarship has tended to prioritize theorizing and conceptualizing – what Bordo, 1986, calls ‘the Cartesian masculinization of thought’ – over engagement with policy and policymakers. Academic prestige still comes from theorizing, from ‘thinking’ rather than from ‘doing’, despite the growth of scholar-activism in human geography.

But how can we not be focused on public policy when

More than ever before, gentrification is incorporated into public policy – used either as a justification to obey market forces and private sector entrepreneurialism, or as a tool to direct market processes in the hopes of restructuring urban landscapes in a slightly more benevolent fashion (Wyly & Hammel, 2005, p. 35)?

Over the past decades or so I have provided evidence on the detrimental impacts of gentrification at three public inquiries (see Hubbard & Lees, 2018; Lees et al., 2020; Lees & Ferreri, 2016), to the Haringey Scrutiny Committee on the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), to policy makers across four Southern European cities and to NGOs in the United States and beyond. I have also co-produced two toolkits to explain how policy is used to sell and indeed produce gentrification to help local communities under threat understand the complexities (see London Tenants Federation, Lees, Just Space and SNAG, 2014; Annunziata & Lees, 2020) and a website (https://www.estatewatch.london/, see London Tenants Federation, Just Space, & Lees, 2021). In addition, I am the outgoing Chair of the London Housing Panel – having worked with the GLA and Trust for London for two years on housing issues, policy and practice in London. So what have I learned that might be helpful for geographers and gentrification scholars of the future? What are the opportunities and risks?

The opportunities are – to learn from others who do not share your own worldview; to learn from those who are ‘disciplined’ differently, even not disciplined at all; to stop gentrification and keep low-income communities in place; to develop long-term relationships with policy makers, city officials, etc., as a first step towards changing their mindsets.

The risks are – to personal safety; litigation; professional reputation; increased workload and the exhaustion and burn out that comes with that (some of these I discuss in Herzfeld and Lees, 2021, as they relate also to being a scholar-activist); and ironically (given the British REFs impact push) damage to academic careers.

We should all know by now that high-quality (gentrification) research is not enough, it needs to be synthesized and made readable in different ways for different audiences. It must be relevant to the policy maker or city official, so we need to understand policy and governance processes. Our engagement must be long term, it is about building relationships, it is not a one-off feat. We need to be flexible to be able to address whatever emerges. In engaging you need to persuade others that your research is valid, is useful; is rigorous, ethical, social science; and as much as it can be (if it ever is) – apolitical.

In addition, before engaging at all we need to develop a ‘Theory of Change’. A Theory of Change is a methodology for thinking through and promoting social change that considers achievable goals and seeks to evaluate the change. Following criteria such as plausibility (considering the logic of outcomes), feasibility (considering whether it can achieve the outcomes and impact desired) and testability (whether we evaluate the success of what we are doing), it identifies a model of change that is a planned, strategic (but flexible) route to the outcome we want – here preventing and stopping gentrification – by engaging with public policy, its creators and also its practitioners (those who use it or act on it), e.g. developers, city governments, borough councils, and so on. If we want our research to change minds, which I do – a theory of change must have its assumptions about how the change might happen and why constantly questioned. Although theorizing gentrification across both the global North and South has begun to be discussed in gentrification studies, it is also time now to discuss how we might operationalize a theory of change too. The basic tenets of the theory of change would remain but how it might be operationalized would need to be attuned to different parts of the world – considerable thought would be needed when using it in, for example, authoritarian states, like Russia, China, the UAE, etc. or in relation to different housing tenures – from formal to informal, owner-occupier to renter.

We know what gentrification is, we know what causes it, we know what its effects are, we know increasingly about what works in resistance to gentrification, but we have had very little from gentrification scholars (in particular urban geographers) in terms of alternatives. And until more recently, I have been as guilty of this omission as anyone else. Instead, recent debate in gentrification studies has been (yet again) over the term itself (Ghertner, 2015), and this can be easily characterized using Hamnett’s (2003) phrase – ‘fiddling while Rome (and indeed all cities faced with gentrification globally) burns’. Gentrification scholars must now come up with alternatives and solutions to gentrification and these will likely be different in different places. As said, any theory of change will need to be operationalized differently across the global North and South – as it is applied to different geographies of gentrification. We cannot just continue debating, posturing, critiquing, desiring nor waiting for the overturning of capitalism. We need to be more creative, which might (but also might not) mean being less academic. Preventing and stopping gentrification is not enough. We need to be able to put alternatives on the table, such as the decommodification of housing, Community Land Trusts, Coops, etc.; but not as abstract alternatives/solutions that we are not involved or engaged in/with (as we did in Lees et al., 2008).¹ Rather we need to do the work of being involved in creating such solutions. Urban geographer, activist and practitioner Jess Steele is one of the few to have done this, in her work on community-led regeneration, on self-renovating neighbourhoods as an alternative to gentrification (see Steele, 2018). Policy makers and those who gentrify need to be shown alternatives – to do so we need, as urban geographers and gentrification scholars, to engage with them.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Loretta Lees

Loretta Lees is an incoming Director of the Initiative on Cities at Boston University in the U.S.A. She was previously a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Leicester, and before that at King’s College London, in the UK. She is a long time scholar-activist who has worked with a number of communities being displaced by gentrification. She was awarded the 2022 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award by the Urban Affairs Association, U.S.A. She is the outgoing Chair of the London Housing Panel. She is internationally known for her research on gentrification/urban regeneration, global urbanism, urban policy, urban public space, architecture and urban social theory. Loretta is the co-author of Defensible Space: Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice (2022); Planetary Gentrification (2016); and Gentrification (2008); in addition to a number of edited collections.

Notes

1 Note: Since 2008, I have been heavily involved in fighting gentrification and putting alternatives on the table (see London Tenants et al., 2014; Annunziata & Lees, 2020).