Session proposal: Posting Gentrification for Urban Redevelopment

Organised  by Carolyn Cartier (University of Technology Sydney) and Solly Benjamin (Indian Institute of Technology Madras)

This session places the familiar concept of gentrification in uncomfortably critical light. Posting gentrification, like the late 20th century posting of structuralism, cannot be the end of gentrification but rather posts fundamental questions and correctives, seeking to critically refocus on more discrete (empirical) and broader (theoretical) realities of urban redevelopment. In the way that structural theory sought sociological norms, finding absence and lack in ‘other’ people and places, the early 21st century call to identify gentrification globally, led by researchers in the UK and North America, has promoted mimetic gentrification globally – identifying the ‘appearance’ of gentrification in the built environment yet distanced from fundamental ‘unseen’ questions about culture, land, property, capital, political economy, and the role of the state and state power. In 2024 – marking 60 years of ‘gentrification’ – this session proposes a range of interventions en route to substantial new research on urban redevelopment. At least eight themes for reevaluation stand out: the word itself, its travels, miscues and confrontations; the limitations of visual built environment for evidence and over-reliance on it; the tendency to ‘surface’ sites and locations without history and the nature of those histories; the evacuation of critical analysis from the concept or the gentrification of gentrification and the implications; the contradiction between the would-be global phenomenon of ‘gentrification’ and the attenuation of western urban theory; the implications and complications of geographies and methodologies by cardinal directions (eastern, northern, southern western) including the ‘model’ of ‘northern theorist-southern empiricist, the possibilities of theorizing from context and multiple points on the compass; and the contributions of the work of Wing-Shing Tang to rethinking urban redevelopment. New research on urban redevelopment includes among other topics: multiple languages of gentrification and urban redevelopment; ethics of methodology; state-led urban re/development; differential modes and practices of property ownership or housing occupancy; historical practices and forms of land tenure and land rights and palimpsests of land and planning law; the contradictions and irrationalities of urban planning; post-gentrification imaginaries of future urban housing; and comparative urbanisms including not-post-socialist urbanism.