 start recording. So hi everyone and thank you for joining us today for this week's lecture and planning series presentation. Our speaker this week is Dr. Loretta Lee's Professor of Human Geography at the University of Leicester. My name is Jen Davis and I'm a PhD student here in Columbia's Urban Planning Program and I'll be moderating today's session. So I'll start with a few brief technical and logistical announcements and then I'll turn to introducing today's speaker. So during the talk I'd like to remind audience members to please meet their microphones. We'll be recording the lecture today so anyone in the audience who wishes not to be recorded should plan on turning off their video input. The chat box should be used only for discussion regarding the session. If you have any technical questions that apply only to you please feel free to message me privately or the other moderator for today's session, Stephanie Norgaard. And finally we encourage all of you to type questions into the chat box during the presentation. After presentation we'll have time for a brief Q&A. We'll start the Q&A around 2 or 2.15 p.m. so that we have time for questions at the end. I'll be coordinating the Q&A today with attention to diversity and inclusion. If you already have had a chance to pose a question please allow others to do so before asking another question. So with those logistic announcements aside I'd like to now turn to introducing today's speaker Dr. Loretta Lees. Dr. Lees is an urban geographer who is internationally known for her research on gentrification, urban regeneration, global urbanism, urban policy, urban public space, architecture, and urban social theory. She has been identified as the 17th most referenced author in urban geography worldwide and the only woman in the top 20. She has published 13 books, has over 60 journal articles and over 40 book chapters to her name. She is currently professor of human geography at the University of Leicester and previously was professor of human geography at King's College London. Dr. Lees has lived in London for over 20 years and is a regular commentator on urban issues. Today Dr. Lees' lecture called gentrification and displacement in London and beyond will tell the story of gentrification in London, the city where the term itself was coined in 1964. Lees will start with pioneer classic or first wave gentrification working through different mutations of the process over time from new build to super gentrification. She will finish a discussion of London focusing on state-led gentrification and the large scale displacements it has caused and is continuing to cause. Dr. Lees will conclude by arguing that gentrification always was and is global directing attention beyond London. So if you're ready now Dr. Lees, I'll pass things over to you. Okay, brilliant. Thanks guys and thanks for inviting me. It's my pleasure. I thought I'd talk about London because I think a lot of the stuff you do there is probably quite American focused and actually maybe even beyond the US but perhaps less on London. So I'm going to start by introducing you to the paragraph where the term gentrification was coined by a London based sociologist called Ruth Glass. She said in 1964, one by one many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes, upper and lower, shabby, modest mues and cottages, two rooms up and two down have been taken over when their leases have expired and have become elegant expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses downgraded in an earlier or recent period which we used as lodging houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation have been upgraded once again. Once this process of gentrification, the first time the term's used, starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the social character of the district has changed. So you can see that there's still some attachment to that classic definition of gentrification but as I'll show in this talk obviously the process itself is mutated over time since 1964. Now just to kind of set it in context, so why is gentrification being seen to be so important and why is it really I guess and I think it has actually dominated urban studies for the last certainly the last 20 years. I think there are four key reasons. Firstly it posed a major challenge to the traditional Anglo-American theories of residential location and structure. So if you look at the diagram on the right the typical kind of Chicago school urban evolution model where the more money you have the further away from the central city you want to move and it kind of equates with kind of American suburbanization processes etc. So obviously gentrification is the polar opposite of this. It's what it's kind of middle-class people wanting to move in the center of the city so they're going completely against the flow so as you can imagine it was a bit of a shock to all these kind of sociologist geographers and planners who'd been developing these particular models. Second gentrification regenerates but it does that at the expense of low income groups. It displaces lower income groups and it replaces them with higher income groups so when urban regeneration is sold to us as as as when sorry when gentrification is sold to us as urban regeneration we need to be very cognizant of actually what it is and what its impacts are and how it differs. Thirdly gentrification certainly now is a major leading edge of contemporary metropolitan restructuring and actually I would argue it even goes beyond the metropolis I think with the kind of implosion of urban and rural etc. through a kind of planetary urbanization processes we can talk about that spatially differently. It's certainly still the leading edge of neoliberal urbanism although of course there are big questions now about the post-COVID city and people leaving the city gentrifies in particular particularly in the United States actually. The other reason that I think it's continued to dominate urban studies is because there's been lots of attention to gentrification globally more recently of course gentrification is now a global process but in the work that I've done with also shown that gentrification actually has long been a global process it didn't just suddenly go global and it wasn't simply kind of the south copying from the north or the east copying from the west. So let's zoom in then on London and I'm going to go through the kind of different waves and I think it's probably quite interesting for most people because I think you guys probably rarely get this kind of picture of London. So what I'm going to look at is Islington which is an inner London borough that I live in actually and I'm looking at some of the kind of key areas of gentrification in that borough. So one of the locations I want to look at is Barnsbury which is one of these kind of classic areas of gentrification. So if you go back to the post-war years Barnsbury and inner London had obviously gone into decline in fact the entire country had gone into decline but that's a different story. Its upper middle class residents had begun to move out to the suburbs and the kind of swaves of suburban development suburban housing that was being built attracted them it's relatively cheap it's easy to get a mortgage similar kind of vein to what was going on in the United States. So what happened was in very similar vein to where Americans talk about white flight a similar process happened in London but where Americans talk about fleeing from race in white flight from people of color the residents of Barnsbury fled from the working classes and this is where you get this class-based dimension that's in the definition of gentrification. So for example Jonathan Rabanne commentator in the early 70s said a combination of class fear and railway engineering turned a vast stretch of residential London into a no man's land Camden town Holloway Islington all in London were abandoned to the hopelessly entrenched working classes because of course the railway and particularly the development of the tube line meant that people were able to get out to the suburbs but commute back into the city easily. So the properties that had been left behind rapidly went into multi-occupation in Barnsbury there was a large stock of privately rented accommodation most of it of course is located minutes from central London statistically Barnsbury was one of the areas of greatest housing stress in London and just to give you a flavor of this for example in 1961 the vast majority of people living in Barnsbury lived in shared accommodation most of them had no access to a bath most shared a toilet and all of them were living in overcrowded conditions so it's what we would you know call slum conditions in the city slum conditions so it's actually quite a strange environment for pioneer gentrifiers to want to move into. Pioneer gentrifiers began to move into Barnsbury in the late 1950s however it was extremely difficult to obtain funds during the 1950s and 60s to buy a property because most of inner London had been redlined by banks and mortgage and building societies seemed to be too risky they would fund you to buy a mortgage to move to the suburbs but not to the inner city. So house purchases at this time in the very early days of pioneer gentrification were usually by cash so they were cash buyers or it was through some kind of personal connection. The guy up at the top right was one example of one of these early pioneer gentrifiers his name was Harley Sherlock he was an architect and what he did is he bought these two houses in this image here for cash with friends in Canterbury which is adjacent to Barnsbury and what he did is he set up basically an architectural practice but he also lived there as well so you get this very early kind of sense of these kind of live work units as well and part of his architectural practice was about promoting the inner city and gentrification as a good thing. So for example he wrote a book called Cities are Good for Us where he kind of you know discussed the kind of what he considered to be the kind of positive experience of living in the diverse kind of inner city with access to locality and public transit etc but the main influx of pioneer gentrifiers really happened between about 1961 and 1975 for example the increase in professional managerial increased from 23 to 43 percent and the kinds of occupations of these pioneer gentrifiers tended to be things like university lecturers urban planners like you guys architects public sector workers like police officers school teachers social workers that kind of thing so a very kind of particular set of people and one thing that held them together they were overwhelmingly left-wing they voted for the labor party so as one of the pioneer gentrifiers a graphic designer who moved in at the time said I like the place because it's such a lack of the products of public schools my man and all that people aren't as affected as they are in Chelsea Hampstead or South Kensington now what that means to people in London is that these gentrifiers were trying to set themselves aside as somebody quite different in terms of middle-class identity from the traditional upper middle-class enclaves in London so they were kind of setting themselves aside identity-wise having trouble today it's not moving my slides on so if I do it that way I'm having to do it by clicking okay so building societies then obviously kind of recognizing that there was some kind of change going on and there was interest in moving into these areas began to take an interest themselves really after about 1972 when increasing numbers of the middle classes had kind of moved into the area and they did things like they would go and visit architects rehabilitated houses to see what them the the loans that they'd already handed out and achieved and because they were impressed by what the gentrifiers had done it meant that they began gradually to green line these neighbourhoods and it became increasingly easy to get mortgages the result of this then was a rapid tenorial transformation between 1961 and 1981 in particular in that 20-year period owner occupation increased from 7% to 19% furnished rentals declined from 14 to 7 and the bulk of the tenure which had been unfurnished rentals actually declined from 61% right down to 6.8% so this became known as the flat breakup market in other words these properties would get either bought or sold on to a developer they'd been in multiple occupation as flats and they would they would go back to their original use as a single family unit so they went from being flattered to being held being a single family home or a modernised house now there's lots of kind of policy and urban planning stuff that kind of acts as a context as to why some of this stuff happened so one of the turning points was 1957 the rent act in terms of gentrification because it gave well it allowed legally to give most rent control tenants six months to quit so whereas in New York you've still got semblances of rent control in London rent control got dismantled much earlier and landlords of course if they could get rid of their tenants could increase the rent or they could sell the property on tenants were forced to leave due to bribery and harassment and in the picture here I've got an example of one that became quite symbolic of this so this is Stonefield Street in the centre of Barnsbury and the property on the end there when the tenants were out at work the landlord actually got in builders to knock away the entire side of the house so when they got back from work they found that their bed and their property was basically all kind of facing the street and this is the kind of quite vicious activity that became known as rackmanism after the unscrupulous landlord Peter rackman which was about kind of intimidation in this particular property they actually had put a kind of steel pillar in the centre of the room right through one of the tenants beds and they wrote on it um you dirty filthy bastard so it got quite bad I mean there was even examples of guns being pulled on people which you don't expect in London but really quite severe kind of harassment and winkling to get people out so this in many ways became a symbol and there was a kind of fight back against this through the local kind of legal centre and ended up getting rebuilt etc another act that was really important was the 1969 housing act and what this did is it gave government a new commitment to rehabilitation instead of urban renewal so where there've been obviously lots of post-war slum clearance and urban renewal like in New York then government backed off from that a little bit and started to think about rehabilitation and renovating existing properties and what this act did is it provided local authorities with the power to allocate discretionary improvement grants to properties and these were about a thousand twelve hundred pounds for conversions from flattered or multiple occupation to houses the proviso was that these grants had to be met pound for pound by the improver or the developer so of course they automatically um favoured the more kind of better off person i.e the pioneered gentrifier or a developer who had money to be able to do that and it really kind of kicked off gentrification in Barnsbury so by 1972 nearly 60 percent of Barnsbury's housing had been rehabilitated that is gentrified and the new households were mostly middle-class owner-occupiers and then we see that uh house prices rose significantly so for example in one of the classic kind of gothic squares in the central Barnsbury Lonsdale square in 1966 you could buy property for about 9 000 pounds by 1972 so only six years later it was 35 000 pounds so a fourfold kind of increase in property prices so really significant so you can see very clearly here that classic gentrification that Ruth Glass was talking about of course behind all this there was lots of different kind of work going on so for example pioneer gentrification itself was very much part and parcel of the promotion of the kind of urban conservation and preservation movements in London pioneer gentrifiers were heavily involved in that so one of the associations that developed was called the Barnsbury Association led by Ken Pring who was a architect but he was also a key pioneer gentrifier in Barnsbury the whole idea was about preserving and enhancing the 19th century townscape I think and making arguments as to why it was unique so a bit like the brown stoning movement I guess in New York City and of course many of these people were well educated had contacts in Fleet Street they had contacts in Whitehall and they were able to get their ideas and their approach eventually accepted as official planning policy so Barnsbury became a conservation area ultimately and there's been lots written on this so for example Peter Hall the big kind of big guy urban planner so Peter Hall said you know that they became the kind of pundits the kind of heroes of planning in terms of how to improve a twilight area in terms of rehabilitation if you look down the bottom here Ken Pring himself became known as the man who saved Islington because of course by doing this what they did is they stopped for example the motorway in a bit like you know highway development in the US there was a motorway that was going to come right through Inner London and rip through the heart of Barnsbury demolish all of this property and none of that gentrification would have happened if these guys hadn't kind of stood up and kind of fought back you know to kind of stop the demolition at historically interesting buildings outside of that so obviously what we get then is a physical change and a social change so during the late 60s and early 70s that's when gentrification was it's most active and most visible and certainly this quotation here demonstrates the kind of visibility that on the ground so it says one of the tips of that whole iceberg of social pressures which is London is to be found in the Barnsbury district of Islington and it talks about the visibility the outward appearance of gentrification side by side with buildings that had not been gentrified so you've got these kind of houses that are gray and full of poverty and multiple multiple occupation next to those that are repainted and sharing wealth and that you could see this kind of all throughout the neighborhood and that people would find themselves kind of divided into camps the gentrifiers and the non-gentrifiers so we get a real sense of the kind of social change as well and the fact that it is very cheap by Jal particularly at that time of course one of the exemplars of this class difference was space so obviously if you're in a multiple occupied building type space is tight as opposed to a single family dwelling so one gentrifier remembers in 1977 four houses in Lonsdale square two of them contained single family middle-class owner occupants while the others the other two provided accommodation for 48 single working-class tenants in the furnished rented sector so when we're talking about multiple occupation we're talking about severe overcrowding and as the quote says here many of the working-class resented the influx of these chelseaites as they called them middle-class immigrants with totally different lifestyles and value orientations and conflicts began to emerge in fact these pioneer gentrifiers began to be kind of mocked in cartoon strips and this is one from the Times newspaper and you can see here it kind of mocked their kind of left liberal counter-cultural sensibilities the first one says not to worry daddy and I think spelling is elitist because there was a you know almost a kind of anti-educational kickback as well for many of these people and the other one says Simon which of these two dresses would you say was the more left of centre so you know kind of taking a pit that kind of piss out of their middle-class sensibility but their left wing identity and the last one here says I read this very sound Tory manifesto but it appears to be put out by the Labour Party so this is quite interesting because it's very indicative of this transition from old Labour to new Labour that was led by gentrifiers in many of these inner London neighbourhoods so that's politically quite an interesting one so one of the key issues around gentrification obviously when the process is happening in a neighbourhood is social mixing pioneer gentrifiers wanted to socially mix they were pro-diversity but what was actually the reality of that on the ground and here's two nice examples I think so Ken Pring the same pioneer gentrifier just talked about in Barnsbury he said the present trend towards the rising proportion of the middle classes and the population will continue this will help create a better social balance a better structure of community and the professional expertise of those guys will also benefit the underprivileged population so there was quite an arrogant sense that this middle-class kind of social capital will trickle down to the poor and of course we can see that in policy later other people other gentrifiers however were much more negative about actually how they wanted to mix and really if they really did want to mix so this one said this was one that was interviewed said I like to smile at them and stop for a talk in other words the working-class occupants but I don't really want anything to do with them I don't quite understand I don't think they quite understand why we want to pay so much money for these houses and go to so much trouble to live in these houses in other words the trouble of gentrifying which they don't like very much because of course most of the working-class population still aspired to move out to the suburbs because that was the kind of not the American dream but that was the London dream so that was kind of pioneer gentrification a classic or first wave gentrification so what happened in the 1980s was a second wave of gentrification and this was much more corporate in nature in nature so most of Barnsby had been gentrified but what happened is there was less pioneer gentrifiers doing the gentrifying it was much more development led by developers the people who were moving in were much more wealthy there were less likely to be public sector workers like police officers or social workers there were more likely to work in banking or management or you know kind of that kind of set of occupations so in other words kind of business types or corporate types and it equates in in many ways with the geographer David Lay's kind of notion from hippie to yuppie so the kind of counter-cultural first wave gentrifier eventually gets replaced by the young urban professional in this second and third wave of gentrification so certainly these corporate or second wave gentrifiers were less counter-cultural although there was still left wing their left wing politics were more centrist and this is what led ultimately to the development of new labour in other words kind of Tony Blair who came to power in 1997 and indeed Tony Blair actually lived in Barnsbury behind the scenes there was lots of kind of increases in public private partnerships as part of the development for example the local council twinning up with developers to develop housing etc and in the case of the picture on the right here the old agricultural hall became redeveloped as a business design centre and in many ways it was kind of symbolic of this kind of new corporate takeover in this second wave now alongside that corporate second wave we also have the arrival of loft living in islington and in london as well particularly in places like clarkinwell and partly this was due to the fact that a change of law allowed conversion from kind of old manufacturing buildings or warehouses stuff like that to residential and this this conversion really triggered this kind of loft living process so it started later i think in london than it did in new york city because it was kind of blocked by zoning and that kind of legislation but of course this kind of living is very different to the kind of gentrification in barnsbury it's much more about preserving the industrial past as opposed to a kind of residential past so it's quite a different flavour in terms of its architecture but of course the manhattan loft company and all these other kind of companies moved in and now it's a quite big deal meanwhile a third wave of gentrification begun to hit barnsbury this is a process that i've talked about in brooklyn and new york city but here is also happening in barnsbury that's super gentrification so in the i guess from about the mid 1990s barnsbury began to re-gentrify so people felt oh barnsbury had gentrified end of but in fact it wasn't the end of it it began to re-gentrify and in fact it began to super gentrify so a new super wealthy group of professionals began to move in buy up properties even from pioneer gentrifiers who then you know sold on and moved out very different people elite forms of education many of them public school educated by public we mean private school in the UK many of them have been to oxbridge so a very different kind of people they enjoyed very large salaries many of them had really big bonuses so they could come and be cash buyers many of them didn't even need mortgages and they were less interested in sending their children for example to the local schools they would send their children to private schools etc so quite a different kind of vibe so i'm going to that in big detail now more recently we have a newer process in islington and this is archway tower which is literally a five minute walk from my house where i'm sitting right as we speak so this is probably one of the more recent mutations of gentrification in islington it's private rental gentrification so archway tower is a big tower that became infamous in the 1980s as the kind of social security office in north london it became really famous in old punk songs who were kind of fighting against kind of economic decline due to factorism and unemployment and stuff like that so a company came in called essential living they bought up the building they clad it they completely refurbished it throughout so these are really high end furbished rental apartments there's a roof garden there's a pizza oven on the roof there's a movie theater there's a gym all the kind of things you expect now and charging very high rents and they came in saying actually that we are bringing rental gentrification from new york city to london and this is our first test case is what they actually said on their promo so it's kind of interesting anyway so of course the whole mantra is gentrification is great for everybody it's marketed as this process of positive class change but obviously it doesn't because there's this false proposition that somehow the social capital of the wealthy will filter down to the poor and the less educated and of course this was very much kind of part of mixed communities policy which developed which i'll talk very briefly about in a minute but certainly london at the moment is now perhaps what we might call hyper gentrified so like san francisco like vancouver in canada extremely high land values speculation money laundering overseas buyers and investment of course whether covet or brexit impacts this we don't know yet one of the last bricks in the wall has been public housing so council estates as we call it or what you guys call public housing projects and these are the things that i've been working on recently because they've been under attack lots of councils are handing over public housing to private developers particularly international private developers so what's happening now in london is different kinds of gentrification are kind of happening at the same time and you still have pioneered gentrifies but obviously way fewer of them but what's happening now is it's predominantly the state that's involved and one of their ways of doing this is that they've been promoting new bill gentrification so for example along the Thames they kind of zoned for what they call blue ribbon development along the Thames and this is the monta vitro building that nuts the normand foster designed in battersy right on the river Thames and you can see that i actually managed to get inside this building before it went on the market and you can see the photo i took out from the inside of the bedroom of this unit outside those are the kind of public housing projects that are literally 10 meters away from your from your window so you can see the kind of extremes of wealth and poverty juxtaposed this this new development was gated so they don't share a space so although there's no direct displacement because this is built on brownfield land there's indirect displacement because those gentrification pressures are pushing into those adjacent communities and neighborhoods now one of the things that's kind of helped the gentrification of public housing which is really one of the big things that's happening at the moment is mixed communities policy this was very much a policy that came out of of new labor it was seen as a kind of gentrifiers charter in many ways and you can see this correlation between barnsbury pioneer gentrifiers and how it bled into a new labor policy now of course mixed communities policy is very much the kind of trickle down economics that if wealthier people are moved into a poor deprived neighborhood somehow it will help you know elevate their standards of education that might help them get a job it might give them new networks that kind of stuff you guys are all very familiar with this because we very simply copied off your hope six program so basically we copied this not identically but near enough and of course i'm not going to go through this because that's your remit you all know all about that but i'll give you an example of of of something that became a symbol of this in london so the haygator state is a very large count or was a very large council estate in subark in inner london it's a stone's throw from west minster the haygator state was a large public housing project as you guys call it had 3000 tenants all of these people were displaced it was demolished the very last person to be forcibly removed was actually a high school teacher who had bought his three bedroom apartment through the right the government's right to buy scheme where you could buy a like a new ash you can buy public housing here thatcher's right to buy programs some of you might be familiar with so people who weren't renting as council tenants had to be bought out by the local council but they only offered him a quarter of what it would have cost him to buy another similar property nearby so he kind of stood his ground and refused to leave and eventually he was actually evicted by whole point security guards bizarrely and there was a whole who are about this the work that i did with some of the local activists in the area looked at trying to map where people ended up going where these 3000 people who'd been displaced went to and you can see here there's two figures one is for the council tenants who are paying council rent and you can see that they're displaced from the estate but they kind of displaced all over south london whereas a figure two we actually look at the leaseholders who actually owned their properties and they get displaced mostly out of london altogether because they could not afford to buy anything even vaguely similar in london whereas the council tenants in figure one either got rehoused somewhere else out else kind of in the kind of fringes of the borough or out of the borough okay so i can talk i can ask questions to answer questions about more later of course the impacts of this are quite clear social impacts destruction of social networks and family support that are in low-income communities economics of the leaseholders lost the investment in their property they lost their savings many of them because they had to spend their savings in buying another property many people lost their jobs because they had to move out and it was too far to commute there were cultural impacts community support networks were broken churches were shut down loss of sense of place health impacts mental and physical health impacts there were lots of examples of depression there are at least three cases of suicide that i know of of people who'd been displaced schooling so kids had to move either had to move from the school they were in or they had to travel long distances back to stay at the same school which of course impacted education so really quite negative severe impacts for this particular community and this is what it was replaced with so that's the estate on the left there so quite a large public housing estate 3000 people structurally sound beautiful mature trees and gardens completely demolished and it was rebuilt as elephant park and the entire thing was sold off plan in east asia so we can see quite clearly that this became a symbol the state led gentrification in london and the negative impacts of it and if you look at this diagram from a campaign group called concrete action you can see the scale of this state led what they call regeneration but actually is gentrification schemes across london now so you can see that you know any vestige of public housing is now under attack and that's kind of where we're at at the moment and once it's dismantled it's gone forever and that means that london is completely or in london certainly completely gentrified so that's the the the kind of case of that but then there's also other slightly different but similar things going on so some of these mega redevelopment projects like the redevelopment of the olympic site has obviously been a form of mega gentrification due to displacement not just residential displacement but also commercial displacement of businesses and you know there's all sorts of things going on there and some universities particularly for example university college london is heavily involved in this and there's been big kickback even from their own faculty one of the other big ones that got blocked was known as the haringay development vehicle here the london in a london borough of haringay was literally going to hand over all of its public housing and all of its public land to lend lease which is an australian international multi-national property developer luckily there was a whole public protest and kickback and that got stopped but there's still pressure for some of this to happen so it's still ongoing so the day-to-day reality of course is in the midst of all this many people in these communities are living in this kind of weird phenomenological kind of state of of weirdness whereby you know rich and poor people are living cheap by jowl so here we have you know really expensive kind of yuppie shops champagne and fromage in brickston market and here we have the traditional caribbean kind of fruit and vegetables that the market traditionally had sold two very different clientels there was also a whole saga last year about how many of these new developments that had allowed some measure of social tenants in them had rich doors and poor doors the poor doors were at the back of the developments and uh the less wealthy people had to go in through back alleys so they couldn't be seen and the big tower here strata tower which is an elephant castle the bottom 10 floors of this building were held for social housing tenants from the hay gate estate via a housing association they have a separate lift from all the other floors which has all the private housing so despite being premised on social mixing and mixed communities ironically they don't do that at all when it comes to the actual design of the buildings and the kind of neighbourhoods so i'm just going to finish briefly then saying well okay you know my work's been heavily on london because that's where i live but also in the last five to eight years i've been working on this process globally and i want to just say quite clearly that the gentrification was global even when ruth glass was talking about gentrification i think there there were lots of examples outside of london obviously um and it is global so just to give you an example if we go back in time historically we can now claim that gentrification for example housemenization is an example of gentrification so the large-scale redevelopment of whole swathes of central paris in the late 1800s that slum cleared in order to build high-end middle-class housing units and large kind of boulevards was very much an example of gentrification this would not have been an example of gentrification that ruth glass necessarily thought of at that time as gentrification but as the process has mutated we can now certainly think back on this and think about are there historical examples of gentrification back in time that we can look at but bringing us forward to thinking about it as the kind of global kind of epicentre at the moment around kind of neoliberal urban policy certainly one of the reasons that gentrification has taken off globally has been the ascendancy of the secondary circuit of real estate so just to give you a quotation here of my planetary gentrification book uh written with honan anesto residents of say uh legos chicarta or istanbul may reasonably expect that in cities of such size they'll be able to find a buyer for an apartment in the future while producing commodities the consumption or export is perceived as risky in other words real estate investing in real estate is now seen to be less risky than investing in manufacturing or industry or stuff like that and that's one of the reasons that gentrification has really taken off globally in the 2000s however even though neil smith said in 2002 gentrification has gone global in fact gentrification had been global before that and again you know we need to be very wary of these statements by people at certain periods of time so for example in our book we talk about the redevelopment programs in soul in south korea in the 1980s which demolish large swathes of central soul and redeveloped into kind of middle income housing with massive kind of evictions of low income people very much an example of gentrification but attached to a sense of modernization and progress so sold to people through this idea of modernization and progress but the evictions that happened were brutal and there were big riots against these evictions at the time and people have forgotten about all this i think or or it just doesn't register as gentrification so what's happening at the moment then there's this kind of different takes on this so in the global south reinvestment in the secondary circuit of capital is is happening in slightly different ways so for example in china you've got reinvestment in the secondary circuit happening at the same time as in the primary circuit so you've got real estate and industrial production being invested in at the same time as part of its modernization programs whereas in other places like debaille it's all about the secondary circuit it's about real estate okay so um debaille then of course we have what they call this kind of spectacular kind of urbanization and it is linked in many ways to these kind of different circuits of kind of what's perceived to be the place where you can make most money in profit i think china's a really really interesting case because in china the transition to a market economy has also been twinned with a real push to grow an urban middle class because that urban middle class then become the consumers for this new market economy so getting rid of the kind of crappy housing in the center of chinese cities redeveloping as middle income modernized as a progressive housing as the kind of thing goes has become quite critical as part of the modernization agenda in china and obviously there's been large-scale displacements many of the people who've been displaced have been pushed to the fringes of many of these big chinese cities like shanghai beijing and places like that so the displacements in the way that the gentrifications have been quite mega the displacements have been quite mega as well and just quickly just to give you some other flavors from around the world so these mega projects have really taken off this is eco-atlantic which we talk about in our plunge gentrification book in legos in nigeria this is reclaiming whole parts of the kind of coastline around legos to develop it as a new kind of what they're calling a new kind of mega district and again it's about their kind of global city aspiration it's about modernization and bill clinton's inauguration comments i think kind of sum up the insanity of this he said eco-atlantic will work to improve the economy of nigeria all over the world it will bring enormous opportunities i'm convinced that within five years people will be coming from all over the world to see this so you can see massive inflated aspirations of course what happened were lots and lots of people displaced particularly slum dwellers along the lagoon there there were 40 000 people displaced here so serious serious kind of displacement going on and what's essentially gentrification i'm just going to touch on two other things before finishing off of course we can now talk about slum gentrification this is a term that i think is beginning to be bounded around much more so certainly i can talk probably about the state-led gentrification of council states in london as an example of slum gentrification because the councils argue these are slums and therefore we need to get rid of them but in the same way there's been slum gentrification processes in brazil so you know villa ultra dromo next to the olympic site that the favela that really got kind of impacted by the olympic games and become quite infamous in many ways this was a community of fishermen who lived on the edge of the pond in when the 2016 olympics was announced in rio it was home to about 450 families who were living in very good well-built brick dwellings many of them worked locally they were educated these were sanitary they were energy supplies so not what we would normally think of as slum in many ways many of the residents were homeowners and they were constantly threatened with removal and pushed eventually and pushed more and more and more with lots of different arguments firstly they were seen to be a threat to the safety of the olympic athletes then they were seen then they would argue there were kind of high level of pollution in the pond and they shouldn't be there so lots of different ways that they were kind of pressurized and eventually the favela was demolished in 2016 and it's become quite symbolic of the impact of particularly the olympic games in terms of displacement as well as that in the run up to the olympics rio tried to kind of sanitize or kind of enact kind of zero tolerance policies like in new york city and favelas in rio again as an attempt to make it feel safer for people to go to the olympics and to to act as tourists around that part of this was about also developing a kind of favela chic so certainly when the rio police began to pacify the inner city slums and they inserted police pacification units in many of the favelas then murder rates went down and one of the organizations that represented a real estate in rio estimated that within 72 hours after the police took some of these favelas property prices jumped by 50 percent so you can see i mean it's fairly strategic in many ways so we ended up with luxury boutique hotels in the middle of favelas you can now go and have your tourist favela experience i mean it's kind of gross but it is what it is and one last one before i conclude because i think it's really interesting is is from india um so this notion of bourgeois environmentalism very much an example of gentrification in indian cities so the new middle classes of course in the global south are quite consumption orientated but at the same time many espouse green quality of life livable city credentials a bit like kind of pioneer gentrifiers did but if we take for example deli's bourgeois event bourgeois environmentalists you know they desired and they argued for and they lobbied for clean air and clean spaces but of course this lobbying became more important than lobbying for the conditions of slums in deli for you know shelter and for employment for the poor and of course these kind of middle class discourses kind of worn out so these indian gentrifiers wanted ordered environments like the ones in the image here safe hygienic unpolluted green un congested quality of life was important negated away from crime disease and from the other adjacent slum neighborhoods so they had parks for morning walks ashrams temples but of course this kind of bourgeois environmentalism or kind of greenwashing you might want to call it ignores basic concerns of the poor who were living cheap by jowl in terms of sanitation water and stuff like that so yeah so it's clear then that cities like mumbai south polo mexico city shanghai are now at the cutting edge of urban change if we think about gentrification as this kind of neoliberal edge active processes of gentrification in the usa and europe are nothing in comparison i think to some of the mega gentrifications and mega displacements going on in cities in the global south and down the bottom there i've got for example in istanbul there's been massive relocation of slum populations in istanbul right out 40 50 miles outside the city to the middle of nowhere so i actually visited some of these sites and there's literally nothing they build these properties put them in no schools no health centers no jobs and ironically many of these people have moved back and are actually homeless now living in the center of istanbul so really severe kind of negative impacts around gentrification and i think what's really interesting is that un habitat has finally woken up to this so in 2020 they actually finally said cities must be preventing not just social segregation but also gentrification and social apartheid and of course gentrification creates social segregation and social apartheid even when it espouses social mixity or mixed communities policy so i'm going to leave it there you've got any questions that would be great thank you so much for for your talk doctor at least that was fascinating so i think we'll move on to the q and a portion of the talk now so we have some questions teed up in the chat but anyone else who would like to ask a question feel free to type in your question there so our first question is from Stefan who asked you mentioned this briefly at the start of your talk but can you elaborate on the conceptual epistemic links between gentrification urban rural linkages and planetary urbanization in what ways are processes of operationalizing the hinterland connected to gentrification in the urban core and how have these relationships changed across different waves of gentrification yeah so an important question so even if you go back to that roof glass coinage of the term gentrification in that particular paragraph when she's talking about gentrification she's actually talking about a gentry as in gentrification who are moving into these urban areas but actually their real aspiration in life but they don't quite have enough money to do it it's for this kind of rural way of living so what happens is that rural way of living is brought into the inner city so if you think about the early days of habitat which was kind of the precursor to Ikea in in London you know strip wood floors you know wood burning stoves you know getting rid of wallpaper stripping back to the basics it was very much a rustic rural notion of living that then became embedded in kind of gentrifier identity so there's always been a relationship between urban and rural in gentrification from the very beginning what I think what's happened more recently is that as inner cities have kind of gentrified not only is that gentrification then bled obviously into inner suburban areas and you see this in New York in Queens and places like that but it's even gone beyond that now I think it's kind of bled into the outer suburbs so certainly in London now there are outer suburban areas that are densifying through processes of gentrification the building apartment units and stuff like that that weren't there before it's no longer kind of a low density environment it's building up and it brings with it that kind of urban loft living style kind of gentrifier kind of ascetic and then of course you have you know the fact that you know at the end of the day we're all urban now if you think about social media technology internet you know even if you live in a rural area you're not it's not like in the 1940s where if you lived in a rural area you didn't really have much sense of the urban in the same way unless you'd physically been there you know now even if you're living in an urban area and your education everything else you're kind of urban we're all urban beings certainly in the global north now so I think you know thinking about that in terms of gentrification is really important so you know when people are moving to rural areas now they take that urban sensibility with them as well and they try to recreate it in urban areas so now I think there's actually more of a correlation with that literature on rural and wilderness gentrification than there was even 10 years ago thank you our next question comes from Renjani who said it is interesting that gentrification seems to parallel political shifts in the labour party do you see the rise of Blairites and generally the more neoliberal turn of labour stemming from these spatial processes yeah and I mean actually that's something that eventually I'm going to be doing a project on so I'm really interested in how as a geographer you know our main interest is place and space and spatiality so how did how did these places these gentrifying neighbourhoods grow these kind of political value systems so I'm really interested in that kind of context so for example many of the early members of the new labour kind of clique in inverted commas they all lived near to each other in a kind of hybrid barnsbury and uh cannonbury which were all in islington they used to play football together they even had the soccer as you guys call it they had a football team called demon eyes which is a bizarre name but anyway so all these discussions about politics and mixity and diversity were kind of happening in these very localised ways so I think it's very interesting how gentrification in its early days in islington was about locality and the value of locality and the value of public spaces so I'm kind of interested in how it helped create the discussions that help create the kind of value systems that went into new labour and particularly the urban policy that new labour took forward which many people have critiqued as a kind of gentrified charter don't know that's a bit wobbly but anyway our next question comes from uh Joe who said here in the US there is an emerging EMB movement that argues that the solution to gentrification is to massively increase the housing supply it seems from your talk that UK slash US housing policy happens in tandem so curious whether that's the same movement or perhaps a similar policy move towards supply side solutions has happened in London yeah I mean this is one of the key questions so most government people would argue that the answer to the housing crisis is supply is to build build build build more houses but most activists on the ground would argue that that's a myth that actually there's plenty of property on the ground the problem is that property is in the wrong hand so it's either been handed to international investors and it's just ghost property so it's sitting there with nobody living in it or um you know different like for example different kinds of of kind of private rent sector that aren't being opened to a kind of wider set of consumers etc so there's lots of kind of pushback now particularly from activists and also arguing that you know if if we need to increase supply to deal with gentrification then why are you demolishing council estates for example it kind of it goes against the very sensibility of that that's the kind of the conversations that are going on at the moment but unfortunately governments are attached to supply because that's where the money's made Caroline said uh I'm curious what role you would say race plays in gentrification in London and how you would compare it to the US yeah I mean that's a really important question and a lot of the work that I've been doing on the demolition of council estates has been looking at race and ethnicity because many of the people that have been displaced are not not all of them but large numbers of them are non-white but that the kind of structures of racism and racial disadvantage in London are very different to what they are in uh not in the United States and I think one of the problems we have at the moment in the UK is that many social scientists draw on American literature on this and certainly um even in London many of the kind of localist activist groups particularly uh uh african-arabian groups for example in Brixton in south London you know they're using kind of American rhetoric and kind of Spike Lee stuff to kind of fight back but actually the problem is in London it's much more comp it's it's a very different kind of structure of racism and it's much more hidden and I think what's become very interesting just over the summer is that people are beginning to pull it apart and to show show it for what it is between Windrush you know and the kind of impact of Windrush between Black Lives Matter activities here you know the toppling of kind of slave owner statues and stuff like that so we're actually in a process of change at the moment in trying to conceptualize in the UK and in London you know what how can we theorize and conceptualize these structures of racism and in my case relate it to processes of gentrification in a totally different way to how it's been done in the US so it's early days here it's kind of emerging work uh it's a much more mixed racially London's much more mixed or ethnically much more mixed than even New Yorkers so it's quite complex so on a big public housing project it's not going to be predominantly Black it might have Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Somalian, Afro-Caribbean, Nigerian it might have you know all sorts of people so it is more complex. Let's see our next question comes from Jer who said thank you for this fantastic talk. How would you comment on the recent phenomena that happened during COVID when the wealthy population in London started to move to the countryside and the prices still haven't gone down how does that affect the urban areas but also the rural ones in the UK? Yeah I mean I think I think the newspapers including the American newspapers have really played up this kind of you know everybody's leaving the city the city's too scary it's too dense you're going to pick up COVID anybody has got money's going to move to the Hamptons or in our case move to Burke Hamster from London the reality of that is that that many people who had second homes went to their second homes they still retained their property in London so I don't think there's been an exodus in that sense. However there is a big question now in the kind of and in fact I've just written something with Derek Hyra who works in American University in Washington DC where we've been trying to think through what might be the impact of the post-COVID city beyond gentrification so people like Richard Florida are coming out and saying oh no gentrificationals you know the city's still great creativity will still be there but actually I think it's more complex than that I think people's relationship with the city is changing due to COVID and I think it was changing anyway and work practices and other stuff are changing so you know why would you spend you know 500 000 pounds on a loft unit in Clark and Well if you could buy you know four bedroom house somewhere else and you're still having to work from home so I think it's up in the air and but I do think it's overplayed at the moment this idea that everybody's suddenly leaving in a city I think is a bit overplayed in the media. Our next question is from Wen Fei who said you mentioned that gentrification is now state led but I wonder if you can speak to the role of government involvement throughout the different periods of gentrification it's my understanding that even the first wave gentrifiers were partially motivated by favorable credit incentives like renovation loans and the like yeah so I think I talked about that and I think I'm hoping that came through so I talked about the various housing acts and I talked about the home improvement grants in the early 70s that led to the kind of escalation of gentrification in Barnsbury the state the state has always been there floating in the background but what's happened is that over time the state has become a more powerful actor and they they've really latched on to this notion of gentrification and they've begun to push it forward particularly in terms of urban policy and social policy and really at the moment it seems to be the kind of key thing that's been put on the table for most cities certainly in the UK that gentrification is the way forward it's like there's nothing else on the table which is quite bizarre and I think it's our job as people who are kind of fighting these processes to try and get some alternatives on the table. Thank you our next question is from Valerie who said thanks for a great talk Dr Lees I'm wondering if you see a state-led counter solution to gentrification induced displacement for instance progressive electeds are promoting a green new deal for public housing here in the States or do you see solutions as being more rooted outside of the state like community land trust resident-led or resident-led cooperative and conversions? Yeah I mean it's interesting because that's that's the big debate here at the moment is between people who think we stay away from the state and the kickback needs to come back from community land trusts or cooperatives or stuff like that or people like me that actually say well the state needs to stand up and be accountable here and actually don't do something about this and actually I think we need both so what's really interesting ironically is today the the Labour Party who is I mean on the new leader of the Labour Party now is a bit more new Labour obviously than Jeremy Corbyn who didn't get through but they released a paper just today that does many of the things that you're talking about in the United States kind of talking about this kind of green deal that we should be refurbishing council of states instead of being demolishing and that was just released today and what's really interesting to me is that you know the irony of course is many of these Labour-led boroughs were the ones who were the most gung-ho about gentrifying so in a way they need to stand up and actually apologize first for what they've done before they take it forward so politically it's all a bit strange. Yeah I'm not seeing any more questions in the chat box so I think maybe I'll ask one question that I had which was so earlier you mentioned that ghost properties and absentee ownership have become sort of predominant trends and gentrifying cities do you have any policy recommendations on sort of how to push back on these trends where we see absentee ownership really starting to kind of overtake some cities? Yeah I mean it's beginning so for example due to lots of lobbying from housing activists and other people across London so the Mayor of London has now said that in new developments it should be the first offer for a property has to be somebody who's from London or from the UK and you know other cities have done that Vancouver and places in Berlin and places like that starting to play with these different ideas however you know that was you know 12 months ago I think we're in a different context now I think certainly for London Brexit and Covid is going to have a massive impact and I think we're going to be in a different city. You know you guys are just dealing with Covid which is pretty damn big but Brexit is a whole different ball game you know because are people going to feel confident investing? I don't know nobody really knows. Are people going to withdraw investment and if they do what will that mean for the property market? You know we've already had the impact also of Airbnb flooding the market because they couldn't rent them out as Airbnb they've all been put up for regular private rentals so now what's happened in London is that rents private rents in London have gone down and it's the only city in the UK where private rents have actually gone down this year every other city in the UK they've gone up and that's purely because Airbnb has just flooded the market so there's lots of stuff going on there's lots of weird little kind of things that I think make all of this quite questionable in terms of where we're going to be in five years from now certainly in London anyway. I bet so I'm not seeing any more questions in the chat box so if anyone would like to ask an additional question now would be the time. Okay so it looks like we'll maybe end a little bit early this afternoon but Dr. Lees thank you so much for taking the time to present today on behalf of GSOP and the urban planning program thank you so much we really appreciate you taking the time. Great okay we'll enjoy your day then thank you very much. Thank you. Bye.