ABSTRACT
The displacement of low-income, racialized, and otherwise marginalized households is an enduring feature of capitalist urban development in much of the world. This chapter focuses on methodological challenges – and opportunities – in researching housing displacement, and the fourth relates to the recent ‘phenomenological turn’ in displacement research. Asher Ghertner argues that gentrification theory 'fails in much of the world' because it assumes that private property is 'already the exclusive, or predominant, form of tenure in the places it seeks to describe'. While the contributors to this collection employ a variety of different methods ranging from quantitative spatial analysis, via community-based research and mapping of evictions, to qualitative interview-based and ethnographic methods most seem to agree on the difficulty of charting and evidencing displacement. Taking the phenomenological – experiential and embodied emotional – dimension of displacement seriously compels us to rethink our established methods for charting and measuring displacement.
