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The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City N. SMITH, 1996 London: Routledge
262 pp.; L13.99 paperback; L45.00 hardback ISBN 0-415-13254-1 hardback; 0-415-13255-X paperback
This book is a selection of Neil Smith's key contributions to the study of gentrification and urban change over the past 20 years. Suitably updated and edited, these contributions tell the story of the urban reinvestment, one-sided boosterism and social restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s and the stalling of this process in the late 1980s recession to leave landscapes of social and economic fragmentation with rich and poor spatially juxtaposed producing an urban politics of revenge (revanchism), the scapegoating of the poor by the rich. His sustained materialist analysis is predicated on the changing flows of capital through the urban system with gentrification as a `leading edge' of a wider redifferentiation of space in late capitalism. As his work develops, this new frontier of capital is increasingly implicated with a frontier of social division and the ideological scripting of the city which underpins the gentrification movement.
Smith's starting-point in the late 1970s was the prior history of disinvestment in the central areas of US cities with post-war suburbanisation. Given the accessibility of central locations, this opened up a `rent gap' between actual land potential land rents (chapter 3). Gentrification was a particularly socially conspicuous way of closing the rent gap.
The rent gap thesis, which generated considerable debate (over its empirical relevance and theoretical priority) in the burgeoning literature on gentrification, is later connected to a broader view of uneven development (chapter 4) noting broader ebbs and flows of capital switching between different circuits of accumulation and different locations. The local edge of the switch from disinvestment to revalorisation in the central city property market is traced in a careful empirical mapping of the gentrification frontier (using the instrument of the length of property tax arrears) in New York City's East Village (chapter 9).
This production-side explanation is argued to bind-in other actors to smooth its progress. The section...