Gentrification Is Inevitable And Other Lies

From the author of the best-selling Feminist City, this urbanite’s guide to gentrification knocks down the myths and exposes the forces behind the most urgent housing crisis of our time. Gentrification is no longer a phenomenon to be debated by geographers or downplayed by urban planners—it’s an experience lived and felt by working-class people everywhere. Leslie Kern travels to Toronto, Vancouver, New York, London, and Paris to look beyond the familiar and false stories we tell ourselves about class, money, and taste. What she brings back is an accessible, radical guide on the often-invisible forces that shape urban neighbourhoods: settler-colonialism, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and more. Gentrification is not inevitable if city lovers work together to turn the tide. Kern examines resistance strategies from around the world and calls for everyday actions that empower everyone, from displaced peoples to long-time settlers. We can mobilize, demand reparations, and rewrite the story from the ground up.

When a recent wave of condominium development overtook Toronto, women emerged as powerful consumers, and reports claimed that home ownership was offering young, single women freedom, financial independence, and personal security. Sex and the Revitalized City examines the truth of these claims by exploring the phenomenon from the perspective of women condo owners and planners and developers. This fresh perspective on urban revitalization reveals that condo ownership is not freeing women from constraints – neoliberal ideologies are remaking women's relationship with the city in the image of fast capital and consumer citizenship. Women's emancipation through condominium ownership is a marketing ploy rather than a major shift in gender relations.

Hamilton’s industrial age is over. In the steel capital of Canada, there are no more skies lit red by foundries at sunset, no more traffic jams at shift change. Instead, an urban renaissance is taking shape. But who wins and who loses in the city’s not-too-distant future? Is it possible to lift a downtrodden, post-industrial city out of poverty in a way that benefits people across the social spectrum, not just a wealthy elite? In Shift Change, author Stephen Dale sets up “the Hammer” as a battlefield, a laboratory, a chessboard. As investors cash in on a real estate gold rush and the all-too-familiar wheels of gentrification begin to turn, there’s still a rare opportunity for both old-guard and newcomer Hamiltonians to come together and write a different story—one in which Steeltown becomes an economically diverse and inclusive urban centre for all. What plays out in these pages and at this very moment is a real-time case study that will capture the attention and the imagination of anyone interested in equitable redevelopment, housing activism, and social justice in the North American city.

Offering a new theoretical framework for understanding gentrification and displacement, this timely Research Agenda focuses on resistance as the central research area in this subject field. Arguing that the future of gentrification research should focus on accomplishing the end of gentrification, chapters provide practical organizing and policy strategies using international case studies which are rooted in community-based research.

"In Slow and Sudden Violence, Derek Hyra weaves together a persuasive unrest narrative, linking police aggression to an ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression. By delving into the real estate history of the St. Louis region and Baltimore, Hyra shows how rounds of urban renewal decisions to segregate, divest, displace, and gentrify Black communities advance neighborhood inequality. Despite moments of racial political representation, repeated decisions to 'upgrade' the urban fabric and uproot low-income Black populations, result in Black poverty pockets inhabited by people experiencing chronic displacement trauma and unrelenting police surveillance. These interconnected sets of accumulated frustrations powerfully culminate and surface when tragic and unjust police killings occur. To confront the core components of U.S. unrest, Hyra suggests we must end racialized policing, stop Black community destruction and displacement, and reduce neighborhood inequality"--

This book straddles two worlds and attempts to bring them together: that of Lefebvre's Marxism on the one hand, and that of real estate development on the other. Lefebvre has now become a household name amongst many contemporary Marxists, especially those with an interest in urban planning and certain quarters of the architectural profession, however his work is far less well known by real estate professionals, whether investors, developers, brokers, or, indeed, policymakers. Marxism and Real Estate: Taking Lefebvre Seriously has both a large scope and a very bold aim – to use an explication and analysis of the work of Henri Lefebvre not only to present a critique of development, but, also to draw these two worlds together. It therefore, first, aims to present the arguments of this increasingly well-known French Marxist philosopher, sociologist, and pioneer of urban studies; second, to situate contemporary real estate development in the light of Lefebvre's work; and third, to analyse the potential application of Lefebvre’s work to each of the major components of contemporary real estate, to use Lefebvre's work in order to recommend practical action for developers, working alongside planners and architects, to influence the future of global real estate. As well as its direction at developers themselves, this book should be of interest to economists, real estate researchers and professionals, planners, urban studies scholars and, of course, to those interested in the application of Lefebvre's work to real estate.