ABSTRACT
While the term “gentrification” was coined in 1964 by Ruth Glass, the process of urban regeneration, of which gentrification is one form, has existed for a long time, and its features have both mirrored and shaped broader economic and social changes of each period. Gentrification since the mid-1970s in North American and British cities have also been shaped both by the broader economic and social changes resulting from a transition from the Fordism/Keynesianism complex to the post-Fordism/neoliberalism one, and by the concurrent rescaling of politics and economy between national, regional, and urban levels. This chapter examines how scholars have discussed, and debated over, the transformation of urban space under neoliberalization and post-industrialization. In particular, I attend to how these debates and discussions have been unfolding with respect to the processes of gentrification and militarization of urban space. This chapter also examines how gentrification and the militarization of urban space have been related to gradual changes in notions of justice, citizenship and the kinds of rights that people are entitled with, as well as the governmentalization of market rationality into wider fields of urban society. Studies of nightlife, which have researched the gentrification of nightlife in particular, show how crackdowns on nightlife are related to the broader move of punitive policing that is characteristic of cities that experience neoliberalization, post-industrialization and gentrification. This book is situated within these scholarly discussions, but I also maintain that the empirical and theoretical arguments that this book makes intervene in, complicate and enrich these discussions and debates.
