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Necessarily, this leads us to matters of causation and explanation. How can empirical facts be connected to theory? How can we determine that something we can see and document can meaningfully be called ‘gentrification’? While the popular image of gentrification, reflected in a now globally popular blend of artists and cappuccino places, renovation activities and rising housing costs, seems to suggest an easily recognisable picture on the surface; however, the underlying substance of gentrification is more difficult to track. The reason for this is the fundamental philosophical difference between the essence of a phenomenon, its manifestation and its description. For this reason, this section will discuss ontological and epistemological problems of causation and conceptualisation, thereby sharpening our understanding of the relationships between concrete phenomena, abstraction and causation, as well as laying out some basic ideas about the value and the pitfalls of connecting empirical phenomena and theory. In what follows, I base my arguments on what has become known as ‘critical realism’ in the philosophy of social sciences (Bhaskar 1975; Harré 1986; Stones 1996; Yeung 1997; Sayer 1992, 2000).

One of the most common fallacies to be found in gentrification research is the treatment of gentrification as a ‘real’ phenomenon, instead of as a concept. More often than not, one encounters phrases like ‘gentrification has become a global phenomenon’, ‘gentrification has expanded beyond its places of origin’, ‘gentrification has reached into new neighbourhoods’, etc. What these phrases have in common is that they reify gentrification. They treat gentrification as something that has an equivalent in reality, i.e. as an objective fact that can be measured, described and assessed visually. If one examines the definition(s) of gentrification more closely, however, it soon becomes clear that what is usually referred to as gentrification is a bundle of empirically observable phenomena, rather than a singular object. Most importantly, these are:

1 an immigration of middle‐class households into areas where they were not prevalent before;

2 investments to upgrade houses and infrastructure (e.g. shops, or restaurants);

3 purchases or rentals of homes by more affluent buyers/renters;

4 rising house prices or rents;

5 a decline in the number of working‐class and other low‐income groups living in the area; and

6 a change of the social character of a neighbourhood.

In terms of observation, these are distinct empirical objects. What gentrification theories do is bundle together these objects under the term gentrification. The problem is that all these properties are also linked to social relations outside of gentrification. The immigration of middle‐class households has, thus, been linked to broader social, cultural and demographic shifts in Western societies (Ley 1996); the investment of money into housing has been connected to the growing financialisation (Aalbers 2012, 2016; Haila 2016) of the real estate sector; and the decline of working class housing occupants has been explained as an outcome of the professionalisation of occupational positions in ‘knowledge economies’ (Hamnett 2003), etc. Thus, what is usually coined gentrification is not only a wide umbrella, but the phenomena covered by it are co‐determined by factors that stand outside neighbourhood change. It is, thus, easily understandable why gentrification has been termed a ‘chaotic concept’ (Beauregard 1986) that lumps together unrelated phenomena and diverse explanations.

But what then is the ontological status of gentrification? What is the relationship of empirically observable phenomena to the concept? Different ontological positions allow different answers. Thus, from a positivist point of view, a bundle of empirical phenomena could be labelled gentrification as long as the term accurately describes patterns of similarity and regularity with which phenomenon A (say the renovation of dilapidated houses) is followed by phenomenon B (say a decline in the number of poor households). From a hermeneutic standpoint, the term gentrification would make sense only in so far as it was able to reveal the meanings that are attributed to the actual actions underpinning the process. Calling something gentrification would, thus, be adequate when the term could be found in actual discourses and used by actual actors, e.g. to demarcate social demands discursively. A realist understanding of the question would look rather different and, under this view, putting together phenomenon A (a renovation of dilapidated houses) and B (displacement of poor households) under a concept X (like gentrification) would only be justified if one was able to establish a causal relation between the two. The major consequence of a realist approach to gentrification is that conceptualisation, not research methods, is put at the centre.

Yet, how then can causality be built and examined? At the most fundamental level, each concept or theory is an abstraction. It must abstract from the particular conditions of a specific case and select those constituents of the case that have a significant effect that might also be found in other cases. In other words, the multiple elements of a concrete object must be isolated from each other, examined one by one and then recombined to form concepts that reflect the concreteness of their objects. The difficult point about abstractions is that they require the separating out of the kind of relationship that a particular element has to the concrete totality of which it is a part. In this respect, it is crucial to distinguish between external or contingent relations and internal or necessary relations (Sayer 1992, pp. 89–90). External or contingent relations can be found when two objects can exist without each other. Sayer (ibid.) uses the example of a person and a piece of the earth for this; though their interference can have significant effects, each of the two can exist without the other. By contrast, the relationship between a master and a slave or a tenant and a landlord is internal: both entities form a social relation that ceases to exist without both elements being part of it. Third, it is possible to identify asymmetrical internal relations. These appear when ‘one object in a relation can exist without the other, but not vice versa’ (Sayer 1992, p. 90). Sayer provides the example of the state and council housing; states can exist without council housing, but no council housing can exist without a state.

Clarifying the type of relationships that link the different elements of an object to each other is the first step towards conceptualising, as it forces the researcher to explain what it is about an element that makes it a necessary part of a relationship. With regard to gentrification, the questions would thus be: What is it about phenomenon A (renovations of dilapidated houses) that enables it to cause phenomenon B (displacement of poor households)? Why and how are renovations done and how does this relate to the likelihood of poor households being displaced? Is there a phenomenon C (say an immigration of middle‐class households) that necessarily goes together with phenomenon A to achieve phenomenon B?

In this sense, causation is the identification of the actual mechanisms producing the event (as different from identifying patterns of regularity). This, however, leads to new problems as the ‘open systems’ character of the social world leads to situations in which the same causal power can produce different outcomes in different contexts, or different causal mechanisms can work at the same time. As multiple causation is fundamental to social phenomena, it follows that a particular event (e.g. the displacement of low‐income households) can involve several causal mechanisms that may or may not internally be related to each other. Depending on the conditions, the same mechanism can produce different results, or different mechanisms can lead to the same outcome. If one was to relate this approach to the example of gentrification, the research design would become even more complex: not only would a causal relation between A (renovations of dilapidated houses) and B (displacement of poor households) need to be established and the impact of the intervening variable C (immigration of middle‐class households) be explained, but research would need to expand to other contexts in which the impact of C (immigration of middle‐class households) would possibly be neutralised by variable D (say strong welfare support) or intensified by E (say ethnic discrimination). From this, theorising would move backwards and re‐examine the causal relationship between renovation activities and displacement established at an earlier stage of research and reformulate the theory on this basis.

The realist approach towards theory building is, thus, built upon empirical observation and abstraction. It starts with a theory, but moves on to empirical data capable of inducing an alternative conceptualisation, and then moves back to revising the original theory, thus producing a need for new empirical observation and so on and so forth. The actual processing of research is, therefore, highly iterative. It implies a back and forth between inductive and deductive cycles of data collection and explanation in which deduction helps to identify the object of interest and suggests explanations about the mechanisms at play, whereas induction provides data that is to be explained and tested. Both the use of data as an illustration of theoretical arguments and the use of empirical data to falsify a theory without giving any specificities that would allow for alternative conceptualisations are seen as preliminary stages in the development of new knowledge that need to be overcome by the development of new theories.