Gentrifier by John Joe Schlichtman

Author:John Joe Schlichtman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4426-2384-2
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

The Displacement Thesis versus the Old School Political Economy Thesis

Let us continue our conversation about displacement by reminding the reader of what we hope is now obvious: “clearly what makes the gentrification debate so difficult and so interesting is the interaction between our own political standpoint and the phenomenon.”90 Because gentrification is so qualitatively real at the neighbourhood and street levels, people’s tendency is to employ it as an explanation for urban changes that are actually linked to meso- and macro-level urban changes. In so doing we have not only divorced our biography from our ideas of the process, but we have let gentrification become the explanatory factor in understanding urban change rather than interpreting gentrification within broader changes.

In this section we refer to what Jason has termed the displacement thesis. In its simplest formulation the displacement thesis argues that displacement is an inherent and definitional component of gentrification. It assumes, first, that gentrification must be accompanied by displacement. But, second, it also often implies that, when displacement of lower-income residents occurs, it is the result of gentrification. In our view the danger of the displacement thesis is that it displaces our focus from a progressive urban agenda, such as cross-class alliances.91 In the displacement thesis, the best solution is for the gentrifier to stop the practice of gentrifying. To go “home” where they “belong.”

In such a view, “managing” gentrification is as naïve as “managing” weeds in a garden. “We don’t want to manage gentrification,” the sentiment says, “we want to eradicate it.” In one representative example, Loretta Lees et al. quipped, “one could argue that apartheid in South Africa had ‘positive benefits’ in terms of economic growth – but did the African National Congress wish to manage that process?”92

We juxtapose such a view against what Jason has termed the old-school political economy thesis. By this we mean, first, that there are political, economic, and social causes for gentrification and displacement. Adhering to this view, we see that gentrification can certainly correlate with displacement, but three acknowledgments must be made. First, and most basically, gentrification and displacement are not synonyms. Second, gentrification must not be the assumed cause of any observed displacement. Third, not all low-income residential movement is displacement.

The first model in figure 3 captures the bluntness of the way some deploy the displacement thesis in practice: it equates gentrification with displacement and misses broader causal flows. The second model presents a more reasonable causality in which capitalism’s current global restructuring is causing gentrification and gentrification is causing displacement. Two more plausible flows are considered. In the third model, capitalism’s current global restructuring is causing both gentrification and displacement and the latter two are independent of one another.

Figure 3: Displacement and Causality

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