ABSTRACT
Saskia Sassen offers a benchmark argument about the importance of local place in the new globalism. The post-1990s generalization of gentrification as a global urban strategy plays a pivotal role in neoliberal urbanism in two ways. First, it fills the vacuum left by the abandonment of twentieth-century liberal urban policy. Second, it serves up the central-and inner-city real-estate markets as burgeoning sectors of productive capital investment: the globalization of productive capital embraces gentrification. Neoliberal urbanism is an integral part of this wider rescaling of functions, activities, and relations. It comes with a considerable emphasis on the nexus of production and finance capital at the expense of questions of social reproduction. The emerging globalization of gentrification, like that of cities themselves, represents the victory of certain economic and social interests over others, a reassertion of economic assumptions over the trajectory of gentrification.
