ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the exploitative class relationship of the rent gap, the creation and appropriation of value, and overcomes the actual role of the state in gentrification by carving out a political project that is not severed from its material urban conditions and that it is based upon the efforts of those who labour the city. Each moment of the rent gap is laboured by distinctive groups: the often disdainfully portrayed lumpen-class and the so-called middle classes, which otherwise prove to be politically irrelevant for change. Class and the productive matter that shapes it are not alone in their dealings with the inexorable expansion of capital in the urban environment. The role of the State was therefore twofold: to produce a distinct urban space for possession by the upper classes, and thereby to provide substantial investment opportunities for private capital.
