ABSTRACT
The metaphor of colonization is frequently used to characterize contested urban dynamics. It is less common for researchers to elaborate on how neocolonial forces actually shape urbanization today. A comparative volume on gentrication, for example, identies gentrication as ‘a new urban colonialism’ (Atkinson and Bridge 2005). Yet most contributions to this book do not examine any substantive connection between colonialism and gentrication beyond casual analogy. The meaning of the colonial in relation to colonial history remains vague if present at all, as does the rhetorical suggestion here that gentriers be called colonizers (ibid.: 14). In the francophone context, Jean-Pierre Garnier (2010: 12) occasionally deploys the notion of colonization to illustrate how the French state, landed capital and petty-bourgeois class fractions reclaim the remaining working-class neighbourhoods in east-central Paris and some adjacent suburban municipalities. Here too, colonization is used to describe class-based, state-led and land-rentinduced displacement. The specically neocolonial aspects of these processes remain opaque.
