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Richard J. Williams praises a complex even-handed analysis of what has happened to our cities
Gentrification has been great business for property people – and lately for academics, mainly in the social sciences. It isn’t by any means a new topic. The term was coined in 1964 by Ruth Glass, a German-born British sociologist, to describe changes she observed in the London of that time. Sharon Zukin’s groundbreaking study of gentrification in lower Manhattan, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (1982), is based on work done in the 1970s. To my mind, gentrification really went academically mainstream after the 2008 financial crash, when cities worldwide became unassailable as centres of financial power – and, as superstar economist Thomas Piketty explained to us, the rate of return on capital outstripped economic growth (or as he put it, r > g). In those conditions, gentrification was the...