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The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City
Why have so many central and inner cities in Europe, North America and Australia been so radically revamped in the last three decades, converting urban decay into new chic? Will the process continue in the twenty-first century or has it ended? What does this mean for the people who live there? Can they do anything about it?
This book challenges conventional wisdom, which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of new middle-class tastes and a demand for urban living. It reveals gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late twentieth century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban 'frontiers', the author explores the interconnections of urban policy, patterns of investment, eviction, and homelessness.
The failure of liberal urban policy and the end of the 1980s financial boom have made the end-of-the-century city a darker and more dangerous place. Public policy and the private market are conspiring against minorities, working people, the poor, and the homeless as never before. In the emerging revanchist city, gentrification has become part of this policy of revenge.
This book challenges conventional wisdom, which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of new middle-class tastes and a demand for urban living. It reveals gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late twentieth century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban 'frontiers', the author explores the interconnections of urban policy, patterns of investment, eviction, and homelessness.
The failure of liberal urban policy and the end of the 1980s financial boom have made the end-of-the-century city a darker and more dangerous place. Public policy and the private market are conspiring against minorities, working people, the poor, and the homeless as never before. In the emerging revanchist city, gentrification has become part of this policy of revenge.
288 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1996
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1003 people want to read
About the author
Neil Smith
241 books78 followersSeveral different Neils Smiths tend to collect here.
For the linguist, see Neilson Voyne Smith
For the author of Boo, and Bang Crunch, see Neil Smith
For the linguist, see Neilson Voyne Smith
For the author of Boo, and Bang Crunch, see Neil Smith
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
December 10, 2013
I first read this in 2001/2002 doing research to inform community organising around gentrification and displacement. I confess my non-theoretical self didn't much like it. Most of it was over my head, and what wasn't seemed so obvious. Even so, the desire to help support movement and stop gentrification was so clear I always did want to meet Neil Smith. I'm sad I didn't get to.
Now I find it much more useful, probably because I've done the hard work of going through Marx, figuring out Harvey's theory of rent and where the rent gap Smith relies on so much comes in and how differential and uneven development works and etc. I'm also a bit more forgiving of his needing to have impact in an academic environment that required (and still requires) convincing that gentrification was/is happening at all, that it would continue, and that it was/is an immensely painful, harrowing and heartbreaking process for those being forced out in which many people have lost everything.
It's a collection of previously published articles, and in a way that makes it a little disjointed. I wanted some things to be more integrated, particularly the way that local urban development and global forces interact. This especially as it is so key to always remember that the suburbs and the inner-cities are connected just as the city is part of national and international flows of capital and investment. Unable to redevelop a heavily built central city envirobement, capital rolled out to the suburbs. Leaving the inner cities to literally fall apart as landlords milked their buildings for all they could (no one actually living in those areas qualified for mortgages or loan capital given redlining), a few decades and some arson and demolition later, these same areas were newly ripe for renewal.
Thus there comes to be a growing difference between the current use of the land and the potential use of the land...and urban planning has for a long time been all about the 'highest and best use'. Not for people, but for profit. Thus despite the hype, gentrification is really a back-to-the-city movement by capital rather than people. (70) And this is where the global comes in, as most investors in gentrifying inner cities are not the proverbial plucky middle-class couple restoring a brownstone, but large multinational corporations looking for investments. Uneven development is not just a global feature, but a local and urban one producing periodic property booms
What I do quite like, however, is bringing all of the essays together you can see how Smith's thought progresses, and tries to answer some of the cultural questions around why certain areas are chosen and how discourse works to legitimise capital's power. My biggest critique is that while he gets class, and even does some work on gender, the racial analysis is almost entirely missing. I personally would argue that it is key to the process as in some ways Smith's own work makes clear. I love his calling out of how white gentrifiers talk about the city as another frontier they must conquer, how they see themselves as pioneers in some kind of wilderness inhabited only by the feral poor and some rats. But he doesn't go on to draw the parallels to how the entire country is founded on such ideas of conquest underpinned by a certainty of white privilege and ownership. Nor that the original frontier only disappeared with the final genocide of California's (and most of teh country's) Native peoples. Important to honor that difference I think, even while taking lessons about just what Americans are capable of, and how they justify just taking things.
By the final essay on the revanchist city he is finally starting to understand how race works here I think. He writes
From today's perspective it is hard to remember that there was a recession in the late 80s early 90s and people were arguing there was a process of degentrification. Not Neil Smith. His analysis was right in many ways, particularly that white people were getting meaner. That everthing would just get uglier if that were possible, and that more and ever more would be lost.
This book hits a lot of nails on the head I think, and its misses make you realise how much good work has been done in the past 20 years. Altogether though, it's a fairly depressing reminder of how long we have been fighting, and we haven't figured it out yet. There is much more about resistance in here than many another book of the left, but not successful resistance. Everyone here has been crushed, movement beaten back, nothing won. Nothing at all. And surely there must be some glimmers of hope.
Now I find it much more useful, probably because I've done the hard work of going through Marx, figuring out Harvey's theory of rent and where the rent gap Smith relies on so much comes in and how differential and uneven development works and etc. I'm also a bit more forgiving of his needing to have impact in an academic environment that required (and still requires) convincing that gentrification was/is happening at all, that it would continue, and that it was/is an immensely painful, harrowing and heartbreaking process for those being forced out in which many people have lost everything.
It's a collection of previously published articles, and in a way that makes it a little disjointed. I wanted some things to be more integrated, particularly the way that local urban development and global forces interact. This especially as it is so key to always remember that the suburbs and the inner-cities are connected just as the city is part of national and international flows of capital and investment. Unable to redevelop a heavily built central city envirobement, capital rolled out to the suburbs. Leaving the inner cities to literally fall apart as landlords milked their buildings for all they could (no one actually living in those areas qualified for mortgages or loan capital given redlining), a few decades and some arson and demolition later, these same areas were newly ripe for renewal.
Gentrification is a structural product of the land and housing markets. Capital flows where the rate of return is highest, and the movement of capital to the suburbs, along with the continual devalorization of inner-city capital, eventually produces the rent gap
Thus there comes to be a growing difference between the current use of the land and the potential use of the land...and urban planning has for a long time been all about the 'highest and best use'. Not for people, but for profit. Thus despite the hype, gentrification is really a back-to-the-city movement by capital rather than people. (70) And this is where the global comes in, as most investors in gentrifying inner cities are not the proverbial plucky middle-class couple restoring a brownstone, but large multinational corporations looking for investments. Uneven development is not just a global feature, but a local and urban one producing periodic property booms
the question of where this capital flooding into the built environment will locate has no automatic answer…underdevelopment of the previously developed inner city, brought about by systematic disinvestment, provoked a rent gap which, in turn, laid the foundation for a locational switch by significant quantities of capital invested in the built environment. Gentrification in the residential sphere is therefore simultaneious with a sectoral switch in capital investment. (86).
What I do quite like, however, is bringing all of the essays together you can see how Smith's thought progresses, and tries to answer some of the cultural questions around why certain areas are chosen and how discourse works to legitimise capital's power. My biggest critique is that while he gets class, and even does some work on gender, the racial analysis is almost entirely missing. I personally would argue that it is key to the process as in some ways Smith's own work makes clear. I love his calling out of how white gentrifiers talk about the city as another frontier they must conquer, how they see themselves as pioneers in some kind of wilderness inhabited only by the feral poor and some rats. But he doesn't go on to draw the parallels to how the entire country is founded on such ideas of conquest underpinned by a certainty of white privilege and ownership. Nor that the original frontier only disappeared with the final genocide of California's (and most of teh country's) Native peoples. Important to honor that difference I think, even while taking lessons about just what Americans are capable of, and how they justify just taking things.
By the final essay on the revanchist city he is finally starting to understand how race works here I think. He writes
This revanchist antiurbanism represents a reaction against the supposed ‘theft’ of the city, a desperate defense of a challanged phalanx of privileges, cloaked in the populist language of civic morality, family values and neighbourhood security. More than anything the revanchist city expresses a race/class/gender terror felt by middle- and ruling-class whites who are suddenly stuck in place by a ravaged property market, the trheat and reality of unemployment, the decimation of social services, and the emergence of minority and immigrant groups… (211)
From today's perspective it is hard to remember that there was a recession in the late 80s early 90s and people were arguing there was a process of degentrification. Not Neil Smith. His analysis was right in many ways, particularly that white people were getting meaner. That everthing would just get uglier if that were possible, and that more and ever more would be lost.
This book hits a lot of nails on the head I think, and its misses make you realise how much good work has been done in the past 20 years. Altogether though, it's a fairly depressing reminder of how long we have been fighting, and we haven't figured it out yet. There is much more about resistance in here than many another book of the left, but not successful resistance. Everyone here has been crushed, movement beaten back, nothing won. Nothing at all. And surely there must be some glimmers of hope.
November 19, 2022
As I delve deeper into housing and urban planning studies in my free time, this book kept coming up in other people's works. I figured, as any good academic would, that it was time I read the source material. And while it is incredibly dense and complex academic work, it is without a doubt the most rigorous political economic text on real estate capitalism I have yet encountered. Smith builds an incredibly strong case about the development of gentrification as the product of competing class tensions within a neoliberal society facing the declining rates of profit amidst the shift from production to consumption based economies. He situates this within the politics of "revanchism", or revenge, that leads this new consumption-based middle class to "retake" the city they once rejected to restore market profitability and protect the capitalist order. Truly a tour de force in its field, and it has only proven itself more and more correct with time. My only warning is this book is VERY academic and not for the faint of heart. Come prepared having read your political economic theory!
February 19, 2020
A foundational text about gentrification and the neoliberal city. I was pleasantly surprised at how readable, gripping, and well-written this book was (it certainly isn't as dense as I was expecting). The case studies are old but no less compelling or relevant feeling. Smith studied with David Harvey (who coined "uneven development" most famously), and this analysis fits nicely within that wheelhouse. One of the most interesting concepts from the book is that of the "revanchist city", which Smith describes as a revengeful and hateful city toward marginalized groups, "a reaction against the supposed 'theft' of the city, a desperate defense of a challenged phalanx of privileges, cloaked in the populist language of civic morality, family values, and neighborhood security" (211). Almost 25 years after its publication, this book feels as timely as ever.
March 25, 2024
An important if incomplete work. Smith analyzes the process of gentrification through the theory of the "rent gap", which says capital will flow to areas where the largest gap opens up between the potential rent at the "highest and best" land use and the value of the land at its current use. Smith shows this gap opens up largely due to depreciation cycles of fixed capital in the built environment. Starting in the early 20th century, it was more profitable for investors to allow capital in inner cities to simply depreciate instead of plowing more money in for maintenance or eliminating later profits through demolition -- and investing in properties that went against the current became riskier for financial institutions -- so they built the suburbs instead. This led to high land values in the urban cores and in the outer ring of suburban development, while inner cities experienced a wave of disinvestment and low land values. But as inner-city land depreciated, it eventually became the most profitable place to invest -- hence gentrification, a process which really picked up steam in the 1970s-80s.
My main problem with Smith's rendering is that it doesn't actually seem very consistently Marxist. The classical theory of rent, adopted and expounded by Marx, holds that the level of rent derives from one's holding the right to land which permits an inalienable natural advantage in productivity -- one that can only be exploited on that particular land, such as the fertility of soil, the abundance of minerals, or location near supplies of the necessary kinds of labor power and capital for one's business. Smith focuses almost entirely on residential gentrification, which doesn't produce anything, and seems to suggest that rent levels can be explained by tenants' or owners' ability to pay. While Marx didn't leave a clear explanation of how rent of non-productive land uses relates to that of productive uses in Capital Volume III, Smith's analysis still feels incomplete. More importantly than simple consistency, what I think he misses in not examining the relationship of production and consumption is the growth of new, capital-intensive industries which increasingly occupy central urban spaces, such as information and biotechnology. It's these industries which propel urban growth today and which attract large numbers of "yuppies" to gentrifying neighborhoods.
There's a wealth of information here though. Smith attempts a tentative sketch of the demographics of gentrifiers, at once familiar and intriguing -- they're largely white, higher-income professionals, but are also disproportionately gay or women; a sign that gentrification reflects a new set of conditions of social reproduction. He charts a series of case studies. There is Society Hill in Philadelphia, a postwar "urban renewal" project that both diverges from and foreshadows gentrification: it involved upper-class displacement of working-class residents of an urban core, but was state-led rather than market-led, with large subsidies and municipal financing of the project to absorb risk. And then there is a fascinating chapter with gentrification histories in Amsterdam, Budapest, and Paris to offer comparison to the North American experience, all of which show significant similarities despite the outsize role of state ownership and regulation in constraining the process in Amsterdam and the outsize role of privatization and globalization in "post-Communist" Budapest.
Much of the rest is technical in nature, attempting to chart the processes of gentrification through data analysis and visualization and speculating on its direction in particular neighborhoods. This is interesting, if not offering any core takeaways. Probably the absolute weakest part of the book, however, is its tendency to engage in moral polemics. The whole framing of the "urban frontier" is misleading, as the process of contemporary gentrification is wildly separate from settler colonialism in key respects. Equating the two can score a cheap political point but it does nothing to clarify the underlying dynamics. Though gentrification does involve the use of state violence, it only does so to enforce pre-existing market processes and relationships, not to geographically displace or annihilate pre-existing relationships to the land.
The concept of the "revanchist city" also seems entirely grounded in the experience of the 1990s and is very much divorced from the ideologies that buttress gentrification. Smith paints a dystopian picture of a rabid, white right-wing clamoring for revenge against various "marginalized identities" who have robbed them of their status and trying to "take back" the city with police power. But even if this 90s conservative police power set its sights on the multi-racial homeless and poor, who was it making way for? Socially progressive artists, intellectuals, and professionals, diverse along lines of gender and sexuality if not race. And if gentrification today still necessitates the use of police surveillance and force, it is this social set that calls them up -- today in the average gentrifying neighborhood, you are likely to find Black Lives Matter murals in close proximity to patrol cars.
My main problem with Smith's rendering is that it doesn't actually seem very consistently Marxist. The classical theory of rent, adopted and expounded by Marx, holds that the level of rent derives from one's holding the right to land which permits an inalienable natural advantage in productivity -- one that can only be exploited on that particular land, such as the fertility of soil, the abundance of minerals, or location near supplies of the necessary kinds of labor power and capital for one's business. Smith focuses almost entirely on residential gentrification, which doesn't produce anything, and seems to suggest that rent levels can be explained by tenants' or owners' ability to pay. While Marx didn't leave a clear explanation of how rent of non-productive land uses relates to that of productive uses in Capital Volume III, Smith's analysis still feels incomplete. More importantly than simple consistency, what I think he misses in not examining the relationship of production and consumption is the growth of new, capital-intensive industries which increasingly occupy central urban spaces, such as information and biotechnology. It's these industries which propel urban growth today and which attract large numbers of "yuppies" to gentrifying neighborhoods.
There's a wealth of information here though. Smith attempts a tentative sketch of the demographics of gentrifiers, at once familiar and intriguing -- they're largely white, higher-income professionals, but are also disproportionately gay or women; a sign that gentrification reflects a new set of conditions of social reproduction. He charts a series of case studies. There is Society Hill in Philadelphia, a postwar "urban renewal" project that both diverges from and foreshadows gentrification: it involved upper-class displacement of working-class residents of an urban core, but was state-led rather than market-led, with large subsidies and municipal financing of the project to absorb risk. And then there is a fascinating chapter with gentrification histories in Amsterdam, Budapest, and Paris to offer comparison to the North American experience, all of which show significant similarities despite the outsize role of state ownership and regulation in constraining the process in Amsterdam and the outsize role of privatization and globalization in "post-Communist" Budapest.
Much of the rest is technical in nature, attempting to chart the processes of gentrification through data analysis and visualization and speculating on its direction in particular neighborhoods. This is interesting, if not offering any core takeaways. Probably the absolute weakest part of the book, however, is its tendency to engage in moral polemics. The whole framing of the "urban frontier" is misleading, as the process of contemporary gentrification is wildly separate from settler colonialism in key respects. Equating the two can score a cheap political point but it does nothing to clarify the underlying dynamics. Though gentrification does involve the use of state violence, it only does so to enforce pre-existing market processes and relationships, not to geographically displace or annihilate pre-existing relationships to the land.
The concept of the "revanchist city" also seems entirely grounded in the experience of the 1990s and is very much divorced from the ideologies that buttress gentrification. Smith paints a dystopian picture of a rabid, white right-wing clamoring for revenge against various "marginalized identities" who have robbed them of their status and trying to "take back" the city with police power. But even if this 90s conservative police power set its sights on the multi-racial homeless and poor, who was it making way for? Socially progressive artists, intellectuals, and professionals, diverse along lines of gender and sexuality if not race. And if gentrification today still necessitates the use of police surveillance and force, it is this social set that calls them up -- today in the average gentrifying neighborhood, you are likely to find Black Lives Matter murals in close proximity to patrol cars.
January 9, 2008
Empowering analysis of the gentrification process. Because if you know what's happening you have a better chance of stopping it.
January 9, 2022
An essential read for researching gentrification and very interesting to learn about rent gap theory.
February 21, 2022
Good arguments but soooooo hard to read. Could have been 100 pages long.
October 6, 2022
Neil Smith está chalao
Read
October 8, 2025thesis book i need to reread without the frenzy of a university student in a losing battle against deadlines.
June 21, 2009
The most useful part of the book in terms of understanding cities is the chapter on the economic theory of gentrification, that economic incentives force landlords in a declining residential area to under-maintain their building, causing further deterioration of the neighborhood's housing stock until the buildings are so undercapitalized relative to the land value underneath that capital swooshes back in with rich people. (OK so this is kind of complicated for us non-economists but it's an important theory) The role of artists and the rhetoric of "urban pioneers" is very interesting too.
The downside that I kept thinking about in later chapters is that it's a shame that left-wing authors' writing tends to be very academic in tone compared to those of establishment thinkers. The content in this book is interesting if you can get past that. If you just want a good left-wing view of cities, Mike Davis' City of Quartz is much a more crisply-written and compelling read.
The downside that I kept thinking about in later chapters is that it's a shame that left-wing authors' writing tends to be very academic in tone compared to those of establishment thinkers. The content in this book is interesting if you can get past that. If you just want a good left-wing view of cities, Mike Davis' City of Quartz is much a more crisply-written and compelling read.
August 20, 2016
This is a truly wonderful book on gentrification. It analyzes the genesis, life, and (potential) demise of gentrification, both in terms of 'hard' economic data and in terms of a rhetorical analysis of the 'frontier' myths that accompany gentrification, both through close analysis of specific situations of gentrification and worldwide trends created through the spread of neoliberal economic policies.
My only critique would be that the book ends up adopting the frontier myth in various ways, and in doing so, skips over the fact that gentrification is a battle waged on colonized land. I think that metaphorical content of the book could be rather easily accounted for, though, and the rest of it is still invaluable, so I highly recommend this book.
My only critique would be that the book ends up adopting the frontier myth in various ways, and in doing so, skips over the fact that gentrification is a battle waged on colonized land. I think that metaphorical content of the book could be rather easily accounted for, though, and the rest of it is still invaluable, so I highly recommend this book.
September 23, 2009
Smith argues for a systematic understanding of gentrification, rather than a simple consumer-driven one. He does this in a convincing manner, relying heavily on a Harvey-esque examination of capital disinvestment.
My chief complaint is that after his fascinating introduction, Smith pretty much drops the cultural analysis of the "urban frontier" myth, which I found fascinating.
My chief complaint is that after his fascinating introduction, Smith pretty much drops the cultural analysis of the "urban frontier" myth, which I found fascinating.
May 25, 2007
I want to give this book a higher rating but its super dry and academicky. It is however a highly valuable contribution to the study of gentrification and holds many insights to the processes that reshape our cities.
March 18, 2012
interesting and convincing; perhaps not as tightly structured as it could have been.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews