ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the reputational gap can help to explain the process of gentrification in areas where the rent gap seems to be open, but ineffectually so. It outlines Craigmillar's historical trajectory from rural fields to maligned council estate in the space of 60 years, before showing how poverty and tenure are stigmatised, and set to contrast against the 'ideal' place imagined in the council's planning documents. The chapter proposes that an emphasis on symbolic metamorphosis – between the denigrated present and the promised future – is necessary to the invocation of rent gaps in situations where the latter may be ineffectual in economic terms. It also suggests that the 'causal story' in Craigmillar was very much one of territorialised stigmatisation, grounded in poverty but articulated through tenure, both of which were then held up against the notion of 'untapped potential'.
