ABSTRACT
In a time when gentrification has become the dominant form of urban transformation, it is easy to believe that the natural evolution of a city benefits everyone. Terms like renewal, vitalization, renaissance, inclusion, mixed-use city, attractiveness and sustainable urban development throw a mystifying veil over the process, obscuring the fact that gentrification benefits some groups at expense of others. Gentrification is facilitated through political control of land use and capital flows. In The New Urban Frontier, Neil Smith shows how gentrification is fostered and driven by unequal distribution of power and resources in the city. A new perspective on urban development, in which the 'city as brand' took on an increasingly prominent role, followed in the wake of the shipbuilding collapse of the 1970s and 1980s. Kvillebacken was marketed as a new city district in Gothenburg and a display window for sustainable development. Time, according to Smith, is a central strategic component of gentrification.
