Читать книгу The Commodification Gap - Matthias Bernt - Страница 10

In the late 1990s, Prenzlauer Berg, a neighbourhood in East Berlin, experienced rapid changes. After decades of decay, more and more of its dilapidated residential buildings were bought up by investors, renovated and rented out with considerable price increases. Grey and weathered facades turned into colourful yellow, lilac and pale blue. The smell of coal produced by oven heating disappeared. The place became fashionable and more and more media reports came up with stories about Berlin’s new ‘in‐quarter’. Accompanying this, the composition of the population changed too, with newcomers tending to be younger, better educated and, as time went by, also richer than the established residents. Together with this new population came a wave of newly established bars, clubs, restaurants, boutiques, etc.

So far, the story hardly sounds spectacular – even readers who have never heard of Prenzlauer Berg will most likely be aware of similar changes in other neighbourhoods and cities. In fact, what happened in Prenzlauer Berg has been experienced in many places in the world, before and since. The term gentrification has now become the most common term used for this kind of urban transformation. The theme has become so omnipresent that hardly any international conference that is focused on the urban proceeds without presentations on gentrification. Stacks of books have been written on the subject and in many countries the term has entered everyday vocabulary. Gentrification, however, was a term invented by the British‐German sociologist Ruth Glass, who described it as early as 1964, in the following words:

One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle‐classes – upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages – two rooms up, two down – have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses, downgraded in an earlier or recent period – which were used as lodging houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation – have been upgraded once again… . Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district has changed.

(Glass 1964, pp. xviii–xix)

Changes from shabby and modest to elegant and expensive were, of course, exactly what activists in Prenzlauer Berg had in mind when they started using the term gentrification to depict the changes they saw happening in their neighbourhood in the late 1990s. They were met by sharp opposition. Public officials and urban planners, but also Berlin‐based urban scholars, took the claim that the changes taking place in the quarter could be termed as gentrification as an insolent provocation (see Winters 1997; Häußermann and Kapphan 2002). Interestingly, the arguments brought forward at that time were neither confined to questions of data interpretation, nor did they move quickly to the possible implications for public policies and planning. More often than not, a rejection of the argument came together with de facto claims about the ontological status of the concept of gentrification. A larger group of critics posited that the concept of gentrification was developed in the contexts of the USA and the UK, with their untamed laissez‐faire capitalism (and had limited value beyond these locations). European cities, in contrast – and Berlin, in particular – would be marked by stronger urban planning, more welfare state assistance and highly developed tenant rights that together would protect the city from the excessive development experienced elsewhere. Altogether, this would make the concept of gentrification inapplicable. A second group of critics addressed the situation from another direction. They argued that gentrification was a necessary and unavoidable companion of capitalist land and housing markets. As long as there was capitalism, there would be gentrification. Talking about rent regulations and planning strategies would, therefore, only turn attention away from problems that were systemic in nature.

Thus, whereas one line of critiques emphasised the particularities of Berlin and set them in contrast to a perceived Anglo‐American ‘normal’, the other managed to do exactly the opposite and abandoned the specificities of Berlin to make a global critique of capitalism. Unwittingly, both perspectives made an age‐old choice known from the field of comparative social research: analysing the same situation and empirical data, the first argued in a clearly individualising way, whereas the latter rested on a universalising form of explanation. The outcome was diametrically opposed positions.

What both perspectives had in common, however, is that they effectively cushioned Berlin’s planning and renewal policies against criticism. If planning, welfare protection and tenant rights were so strong that gentrification could not happen here, why change anything? If gentrification was so deeply embedded in the nature of global capitalism, why should one expect local policies to make a difference? In summary, while coming from opposite directions, both critiques effectively shielded the policies of ‘Careful Urban Renewal’ exercised in Berlin at those times (see Chapter 5 for details) against criticism and helped in defending the status quo.

With this study, I want to suggest a different perspective on gentrification. I will show that gentrification is, indeed, a universal phenomenon that reflects general conditions set by capitalist land and housing markets, yet at the same time, it is only made possible through specific institutional constellations. Gentrification, I argue, is at the same time economically and politically determined. It rests on historically specific entanglements of markets and states, expressed in multiple combinations of commodification and decommodification. Analysing the historically specific nexus between commodification and decommodification in driving gentrification is, therefore, central to this book.

What is meant by decommodification and commodification? Under capitalism, most housing is produced for the purpose of being sold as a commodity in the market. At the same time, housing is an essential human need. Most societies have, therefore, found ways in which the production and/or consumption of housing is completely or partly sheltered against the markets, so that its character as a commodity is limited and/or restricted. Thereby, commodification and decommodification stand in a dialectical relationship. Commodification happens when the social use of housing is subordinated to its economic value. When housing is commodified, it can be treated as an investment and can be purchased, sold, mortgaged, securitised and traded in markets. Decommodification occurs when exactly the opposite is taking place (see Esping‐Andersen 1990, p. 22). When the provision of housing is rendered as a right and/or when a person can maintain accommodation without reliance on the market, or when the conditions in the markets make it impossible to trade housing or invest in it, the commodity status is loosened and housing becomes decommodified.

With this study, I argue that it is only when decommodification is limited to a degree that allows for satisfactory rates of return on investment in housing that upgrading becomes lucrative for investors and gentrification is achieved. This is what I call the ‘commodification gap’. I argue that it lies at the heart of what makes a difference when comparing gentrification across varied contexts. The major point here is that the general dynamics of commodification are universal in capitalist societies, whereas the ways in which markets are embedded into societies and the variations in which social rights are perceived, negotiated and legislated are not.

The treatment of gentrification as either a general feature of capitalism or a local experience – as argued in the debates in Prenzlauer Berg that I have described – thus, rests on a false dichotomy. However, this treatment is not unique to Berlin. Quite to the contrary, the difficulty of balancing historical and geographic particularities with the status of gentrification as a general theory has been a problem that has occupied urban scholars for a long time. Gentrification studies have been characterised by a progressing seesaw motion between universalising and individualising approaches for decades. When the term gentrification was invented by Ruth Glass, it primarily reflected on a very British (and to some degree even London‐based) experience. Picking up on historical English class structures, the term gentrification had both a descriptive and an analytical edge, but always with a close connection to London. This is also reflected in the title of the book: London: Aspects of Change. Only a few years after the development of the term, it travelled to the other side of the Atlantic and stimulated a first wave of studies in North America. Here, the background was a novel and counterintuitive ‘back to the city’ movement of middle‐class households experienced after decades of ‘urban crisis’ and ‘white flight’, for which new explanations were needed. In this context, gentrification appeared as the term du jour to describe a new phenomenon. By and large, two major forces were seen as driving it – and both seemed to be of universal value (at least in Canada and the USA): (i) the sociocultural transformations accompanying the dawn of a post‐industrial society, resulting in the rise of a new middle‐class and (ii) the discovery of inner cities as a renewed terrain for investment strategies. Both transformations made up the core of explanations for gentrification back then and for more than two decades ‘gentrification debates battled back and forth over the “post‐industrial, new middle‐class thesis” and the “rent gap exploitation thesis” over what had caused the rise of gentrification’ (Shin and López‐Morales 2018, p. 15). While gentrification expanded fast as a research field and became a major battleground of scholarly debates, differences between the place of its origin (London) and cities like Philadelphia, New York, Vancouver and others were hardly raised as a matter of concern.

In a second wave, the gentrification concept travelled back and forth across the English Channel to Western Europe, i.e. to a context that had also experienced deindustrialisation, suburbanisation and the growth of a service economy, but with some delay and a different history of urbanisation and housing. Here, too, empirical studies (by and large) stayed with the concepts imported from the USA/UK. At the same time, the particularities of West European cities, as opposed to those in the UK and the USA, were raised as issues of concern and attributed to ‘contextual factors’ or ‘modifications’. If the first phase of gentrification studies had been uninterested in the issue of comparability, the contributions in this second phase were marked by attempts to contextualise what was still seen as a global phenomenon explained by universally valid theories.

From the late 1990s, this mood changed considerably. In the USA and the UK, gentrification had become such a cottage industry of academic career building that not only were more and more studies produced, but also more and more phenomena that were not included in the classical gentrification canon were now characterised as gentrification. Research emerged about commercial gentrification (Bridge and Dowling 2001), new‐build gentrification (Davidson and Lees 2005, 2010), tourist gentrification (Gotham 2005), rural gentrification (Phillips 1993, 2004), studentification (Smith and Holt 2007), super‐gentrification (Lees 2003; Butler and Lees 2006) and other forms of upgrading that did not follow the traditional demographic, cultural, and spatial patterns known from earlier gentrification studies. This expansion of gentrification research led to a growing sense of frustration among urban scholars, and more and more academics came to see the concept as overstretched¹ (see Bondi 1999; Lambert 2002; Hamnett 2003; Butler 2007; Maloutas 2007, 2012, 2018).

Where the concept of gentrification was applied outside its places of origin, critiques were even stronger. Thomas Maloutas argued (in the context of Athens) that gentrification was ‘a concept highly dependent on contextual causality and its generalised use will not remove its contextual attachment to the Anglo‐American metropolis’ (Maloutas 2012, p. 33). The concept, he claimed, would be ‘detrimental to analysis, especially when applied to contexts different from those it was coined in/for’ (Maloutas 2012, p. 44). As a consequence, Maloutas demanded that the concept of gentrification not be used outside the Anglo‐Saxon world and that more localised concepts and descriptions be found and used.

With the advancement of postcolonial approaches, these concerns have gained growing acceptance in the subsequent decade and are now widespread in the field of urban studies.² Nowadays, more and more scholars tend to see gentrification as an urban phenomenon rooted in very specific experiences realised in a handful of Western metropolises in the second half of the twentieth century (see Bernt 2016a). To an increasing extent, the concept is portrayed as overstretched (Schmid et al. 2018) and blamed for oversimplifying essentially variegated urban experiences by ‘blindly apply(ing) theories from the West’ (Tang 2017, p. 497). Some authors have even gone so far as to claim that the concept of gentrification has ‘displaced and erased alternative idioms and concepts that may be more useful for describing and analysing local processes of urban change’ (Smart and Smart 2017, p. 519) and have suggested that the concept of gentrification ‘should be laid to bed … among those 20th century concepts we once used’ (Ghertner 2015, p. 552). In this view, gentrification is successively seen as a thin theory, considerably overstretched and not capable of integrating new developments.

While doubts and reservations about the concept of gentrification have become stronger than ever before, the last few years have also seen a remarkable expansion of empirical research on the subject carried out on an increasingly global scale. These days, scientific papers on gentrification come from all continents, including places as different as Yerevan (Gentile et al. 2015), Mexico (Delgadillo 2015), Copenhagen (Gutzon Larsen and Lund Hansen 2008), Manila (Choi 2016) and many more. A research group around Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López Morales has alone produced two volumes and two special issues that have applied the concept of gentrification to empirically studying many places around the globe (Lees et al. 2015, 2016; López‐Morales et al. 2016; Shin et al. 2016). Building upon this work, Lees et al. argue that gentrification has indeed become a ‘planetary process’, and defend the application of the gentrification concept as follows:

We have considered whether the concept of gentrification has global application, and whether there really is such a thing as gentrification generalized. After much research and international discussion … we have concluded YES – as long as we keep gentrification general enough to facilitate universality while providing the flexibility to accommodate changing conditions and local circumstances.

(Lees et al. 2016, p. 203)

In summary, it can be said that today the urban studies world in general is split by a schism between the custodians of general (usually Marxist) theories and those criticising their Eurocentric implications. Yet, there are also voices that break out of this either‐or way of arguing. Applying the concept of gentrification to cities in the Global South, researchers have found new ways of productively working with differences (for an overview see Lees et al. 2015; Shin and López‐Morales 2018; Valle 2021) in the subsequent years, which have opened up new perspectives on the debate. Two issues stand out here:

First, manifold contributions have highlighted that capitalist markets in land and housing are limited in many cities in the Global South. Instead, hybrid arrangements of property rights are common (Lemanski 2014) and large parts of the housing stock are managed as informal housing (Ghertner 2014; Doshi 2013, 2015; Cummings 2016; Gillespie 2020). In effect, customary and state land tenures instead of private property are the rule, rather than an exception, in many countries. As a consequence, the movement of capital is limited in much of the Global South and gentrification is only possible when these limits are removed. The simultaneous existence of commodified and non‐commodified land has given rise to a ‘real estate frontier’, i.e. an ‘interface between real estate capital and non‐commodified land’ (Gillespie 2020, p. 612), which advances through the enclosure of uncommodified land. Other than in the Global North, market‐based forms of land allocation cannot be taken for granted here, but need to be actively produced. Non‐commodification, or decommodification, is central here, and gentrification is only brought into being through a process of ‘primitive accumulation’ in which non‐capitalist forms of tenure are actively attacked and abolished.

Closely related, research on gentrification in the Global South has repeatedly emphasised the centrality of state agency and extra‐economic violence as a driver for gentrification (see Islam and Sakızlıoğlu 2015; Shin and Kim 2016; Shin and López‐Morales 2018; Valle 2021. This argument has most thoroughly been developed by the geographer Gavin Shatkin (2017), who depicts how state interests are at the core of land monetisation in Asia. While Shatkin finds the specifics of gentrification theory (as formulated by Smith 1979 and others) of limited relevance for his cases, he still insists that it can provide useful insights. For the case of Southeast Asia, Shatkin argues that state actors are the main players in the real estate market. They use land rent capture for their own empowerment, as a source of revenue for the state, or redistribute the profits to key allies of the ruling elites. In turn, state actors become interested in maximising their control over land markets and exploiting the rent gap to its maximum. What makes this conceptualisation interesting is that it dissociates gentrification from its attachment to a specific geographic and socioeconomic context and uses the rent gap in a purely analytical form. For Shatkin, gentrification is not of interest per se, but rather one of a number of concepts combined to explain the complex development of state–business relations in real estate development in Asia.

This treatment resonates well with the discussion of a ‘triangular entanglement of state, market, and society’ described as the driver of ‘three waves of state‐led gentrification’ investigated in China (He 2019). In her work, He describes how ‘gentrification has become an integral part of the making of the modern competitive state in China’ and analyses how ‘the state’s endeavour in extracting values from land/housing redevelopment [operate] through market operation’ (He 2019, p. 33). Contrary to Western ideas about the predominance of markets in allocating land, He insists on including the developmentalist state in the analysis in China and emphasises that markets can only be understood as working in tandem with the state and societal forces. This, in turn, makes visible the limits of a restrictively economic explanation of gentrification that focuses mainly on the effect that markets play.

Summing up, the perspectives on the usefulness of the term gentrification in the urban studies community are more controversial than ever before. After half a century of research, gentrification is intensively brought into question as a concept today and the scientific community finds itself split into two camps. On the one hand, many scholars attack the ‘diffusionist’ practice of exporting the Western concept of gentrification to contexts where it is not seen as applicable. They claim that gentrification has been overstretched as a theory and has become a Procrustean bed for the analysis of essentially different urban experiences. On the other hand, we find academics ferociously defending the usefulness of the concept, calling for more flexibility and attacking what they see as ‘fossilization, rather than contextualization’ (Lees et al. 2016, p. 7). Third, we find contributions (positioned at the margins of this debate) that offer a third way to solve the problematique by decontextualising gentrification theory (see also Krijnen 2018) and using it as a conceptual device to be combined with other instruments.

This book aims to advance this debate beyond the dichotomist treatment of the ‘universality vs. particularity’ binary. The major theoretical proposition is that land rent capture and capital accumulation and, thus, gentrification can always and everywhere only be understood as embedded in specific institutional contexts. Institutional contexts and economic dynamics can, therefore, not be separated but, instead, need to be integrated into the analysis.

Against this background, the book at hand provides an attempt to put the ‘state question’ at the centre of the explanation and rethink the relationship between markets and states in the field of gentrification. It does so through three empirical case studies that lay out how this relationship has developed in three neighbourhoods located in different countries, and uses this material to produce a novel concept.