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Why gentrification theory fails in ‘much

of the world’
D. Asher Ghertner
Published online: 30 Jul 2015.

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world’, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 19:4, 552-563, DOI:
10.1080/13604813.2015.1051745

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 CITY, 2015
VOL. 19, NO. 4, 552 –563, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1051745
Debates
Why gentrification theory fails
in ‘much of the world’
D. Asher Ghertner
I
n Schafran’s (2014, 321) paper for City’s
re-inaugurated Debates section, he
writes that ‘gentrification has never
been more relevant as a global urban
force’. Noting that ‘Mumbai is gentrifying,
Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:24 31 July 2015
Rio is gentrifying, Luanda is gentrifying’,
he argues that after 50 years of gentrifica-
tion scholarship, ‘critical urban studies
must continue to investigate and expose
the ongoing mutations of this paradig-
matic urban transformation’ (Ibid.).
Taking up Schafran’s call to ‘throw down
the gauntlet’, I want to ask whether gentri-
fication is really such a useful concept for
describing displacement in Mumbai, Rio
and Luanda. Is it time to lay the concept
to bed, to file it away among those 20th-
century concepts we once used to anticipate
globalized urbanization?
If by gentrification we mean nothing
more than a rising rent environment
and associated forms of market-induced
displacement, then gentrification does
indeed appear to be a global phenomenon.
However, as I recently argued with specific
reference to India (Ghertner 2014), this defi-
nition is so broad that it diverts attention
away from more fundamental changes in
the political economy of land in much of
the world.1 More specifically, I argued that
gentrification, as an analytic, renders
unthinkable and invisible the regulatory
and legal changes that underpin the most
violent forms of displacement taking place
in cities with enduring legacies of large-
scale public land ownership, common prop-
erty, mixed tenure or informality. This
includes China, post-socialist Europe, and
many Southeast Asian and sub-Saharan
# 2015 Taylor & Francis
African countries with enduring commu-
nist or socialist legacies (Rabé, Thongbonh,
and Vongsiharath 2007; White et al. 2012;
Kovac, Wiessner, and Zischner 2013).2 It
also includes India, a country where up to
25% of all land is commons, not including
the vast reserves of state-owned land
acquired over 40 years of socialistic land pol-
icies (Chopra and Gulati 2001).3 Cities with
large numbers of squatter and unplanned
settlements should also be included in this
category. ‘Much of the world’, in other
words, features a mix of public, common
and customary land uses. It is these non-
private tenure regimes that are being tar-
geted by the planetary trends of land priva-
tization, property formalization and tenure
regularization—the dominant drivers of
displacement over the past decade (Davis
2006; He 2007; Ghertner 2008; Abasa,
Dupret, and Dennis 2012; Payne and
Durand-Lasserve 2012; Wolford et al.
2013). Moreover, it is these processes of
land transformation that gentrification
scholarship has increasingly sought to
subsume within its remit.
To take but one example, Lees (2012) builds
her case for ‘Gentrification in the Global
South’ by referring to slum demolition in
India, Pakistan and Chile and similar forced
displacement from state lands in China—
what scholars (including those whose empiri-
cal insights Lees draws from) otherwise call
‘property market expansion’ (Shih 2010)—as
instances of gentrification. Defenders of the
application of gentrification theory to such
contexts—and there are many4—must hence
be understood to be making the implicit
assumption that these processes are simply
 GHERTNER: WHY GENTRIFICATION THEORY FAILS IN ‘MUCH OF THE WORLD’
variations of a more general trend already well
covered by the umbrella term ‘gentrification’.
This assumption needs challenging.
In my earlier paper, I hinted at a claim that
gentrification scholarship often follows a dif-
fusionist model of theory testing that uses
conditions ‘there’, in the South, to confirm
theory from ‘here’, in the North (cf. Abu-
Lughod 1975). Far more important than
rehearsing the now de rigueur postcolonial
gesture, though, is the need to recognize the
great political risks associated with ignoring
the rich lifeworlds sustained by diverse, non-
privatized land regimes. It is precisely such
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diverse forms of tenure, and the diverse econ-
omies they can enable, that are flattened when
subsumed within the gentrification rubric.
This is because gentrification theory’s greatest
flaw is its property-centrism, or its presump-
tion that private property is already the exclu-
sive, or predominant, form of tenure in the
places it seeks to describe. Thus, while gentri-
fication theory helps us see when rents are
going up and poor people are leaving their his-
toric neighborhoods, there is a more radical
transformation taking place in much of the
world: the elimination of the very possibility
of non-private forms of tenure.
Seeing like a capitalist?
Today’s urban revolution is a counter-revolu-
tion, by capital, against social uses of land that
cannot be alienated via the price mechanism
alone. Today’s urban revolution, in other
words, is about much more than rent, despite
Slater’s (forthcoming) argument that we
abandon ‘distinctions between the “Global
South” and the “Global North”’ and read all
land through the universal lens of gentrification
and the rent gap. Yes, global capital wants to
overcome spatial barriers to expansion and
capture planetary rent gaps, but the specific
means by which it is able to do so are what
require analytical and political attention.
What gentrification theory misses is that bar-
riers to corporate capital’s expansion in much
of the world differ from those in the West,
553
where individualized and property-based land
tenure is more or less universal. To ignore the
actually existing political struggles through
which large, contiguous swaths of land in
much of the world have retained non-market
functions (the 20th century’s socialist legacy),
as well as the struggles through which those
functions have been and are being privatized
(there is no single policy—mobile or not—of
land enclosure), is to reduce a complex history
and topography of urban struggle to the
smooth lines of a land-value curve. Or worse,
if (as Schafran [2014] reminds us) we are to
follow Harvey (1973, 137) and ‘wish the von
Thünen theory of the urban land market to
become not true’, then ignoring tenure diversity
is equivalent to reading von Thünen’s land
market rings (and the neoclassical economic
presumptions that back them) onto lands
where they do not exist. This is what I else-
where call a speculative reading that projects
onto the present a market future in which the
poor have already disappeared (Ghertner 2015).
Urban studies should avoid ‘seeing like a
capitalist’. Thus, while Slater (forthcoming)
states the common globalist trope that ‘the
circulation of capital within secondary cir-
cuits of accumulation is everywhere and
does not recognise or validate such distinc-
tions [between North and South]’, the
reality is that non-privatized lands (which
just so happen to be concentrated in the
South)5 represent obstacles that cannot be
overcome without special efforts: namely,
the application of extra-economic force.6
Because gentrification theory is agnostic on
the question of extra-economic force (Ghert-
ner 2014)—that is, because it treats displace-
ment as displacement, regardless of whether
such force is applied—its only answer to the
question of when and why state violence is
mobilized is the economic functionalism
that says ‘when capital so requires’.7
Scholars of urbanization in the South are
not engaged in ‘sub-disciplinary turf wars
over how various parts of the world should
be studied’ (Slater forthcoming) because they
are scared of smooth lines and never-ending
land-value curves. Nor are they describing
 554 CITY VOL. 19, NO. 4
‘postcolonial difference’ purely for the sake of
asserting difference (Scott and Storper 2015,
11) or rejecting ‘theories [read: gentrification]
that have proven more than adequate’ (Slater
forthcoming). Rather, they are noting pre-
cisely that these theories have proven less
than adequate in much of the world. If the
demand is for a non-Western contribution to
‘the logic and inner workings of urban
agglomeration processes and associated
dynamics of the urban land nexus’ (Scott and
Storper 2015, 12), here is one: tenure diversity.
For Scott and Storper, urban agglomeration is
the core of urban geographical theory. As I
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discuss below, tenure diversity can generate
distinctly pro-poor agglomeration effects
that often compete for land with, and are
ignored by scholarship on, growth-centric
agglomeration economies.
For the remainder of this paper, I therefore
seek to highlight the significance of tenure
diversity in much of the world and why this
diversity requires a different, and more rigor-
ous, set of analytics than that offered by gentri-
fication theory.8 While I earlier argued that
enclosures and urban revolution might
provide such analytical potency (points that I
maintain),9 I here contend that if critical
urban studies is to reach beyond its post-indus-
trial, Western confines, it has much to learn
from agrarian studies and (non-urban) political
ecology, especially regarding how customary
land use and intermediate forms of tenure can
sustain relatively equitable forms of social
reproduction—especially when compared to
those possible under conditions of outright
ownership.10 If we are witnessing planetary
urbanization, it is high time urbanists learn
from those who have been studying the agrar-
ian land systems that are being woven into
the urban fabric, their profound regional vari-
ations and their capacity to foster non-fully
marketized uses.
For tenure diversity
Understanding tenure diversity first requires
that we recognize and maintain the analytical
distinction between land already in property
form—land that is fully alienable and that is
controlled predominantly through the price
mechanism11—and areas where ongoing
struggles are taking place to prevent land
from acquiring such an alienable form—
efforts, we might say, to keep contiguous sur-
faces of the earth socially embedded in regu-
latory contexts that preclude outright market
exchange. There is a huge difference, for
example, between the relaxation of rent
control laws on already private land or tax
policies related to the re-development of
blighted property, on the one hand, and the
conversion of customary or public land uses
into private, alienable property, on the
other. The hypothetical ‘defender of gentrifi-
cation theory’ might not see this distinction
and ask: Aren’t all lands that are occupied
residentially or commercially, even if they
are officially state controlled or commons,
under private use? What is so significant
about the distinction between private and
non-private land tenure?
Besides the common empirical finding that
land distribution is more equitable in public
and customary tenure systems (Payne and
Durand-Lasserve 2012), the field of agrarian
studies has demonstrated how non-private
tenure regimes can both enable enduring
forms of smallholder accumulation (e.g.
Scoones et al. 2010) and nurture forms of col-
lective governance resolutely opposed to pri-
vatization (Berry 2009; Hausermann 2014).
How might such insights translate into
urban contexts? Treating land rights as
always necessarily embedded in social and
cultural systems of regulation, the agrarian
studies literature has been centrally concerned
with understanding the relationship between
tenure form, economic productivity, the dis-
tribution of accumulated surplus and political
rights. There have been fewer prominent
urban studies of tenure diversity, despite the
widespread prevalence of intermediate
tenure systems in refugee and transit camps,
urban villages, squatter settlements, regular-
ized slums, resettlement colonies and
unauthorized/illegal subdivisions (Payne
 GHERTNER: WHY GENTRIFICATION THEORY FAILS IN ‘MUCH OF THE WORLD’
2002). The literature on informality comes the
closest, but for the most part analyzes inform-
ality as a regulatory modality (Roy 2005),
giving less attention to the unique political
economic features of non-privatized land—
the gap gentrification theory is attempting to
fill (Lees, Shin, and Lopez-Morales 2015).
From the literature that does exist, we can
glean two powerful claims that help to under-
stand how tenure diversity can produce forms
and uses of urban space almost unimaginable
in privatized land systems.
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Occupancy without ownership
The first claim is that tenure diversity creates
opportunities for occupancy without out-
right ownership, allowing migrants to access
land from which they would otherwise be
priced out and restricting corporate capital’s
ability to appropriate space due to the
‘messy conditions’ and illegible titles it gener-
ates. Benjamin and Raman (2011, 49),
drawing on their research in urban India,
describe this in terms of ‘layered histories of
claims’, whereas Abasa, Dupret, and Denis
(2012, 5) term it ‘the many forms of ordinary
housing and law production’ in the Middle
East. To make concrete how locally
embedded land management systems work
(with the obvious caveat that they vary tre-
mendously from city to city), I draw from
Benjamin and Raman’s description of
Gudde, a settlement located in an elite area
of Bangalore dominated by the city’s cele-
brated information technology industry.
Benjamin and Raman (2001, 2011) give a
variety of examples of complex land tenures
that are difficult to describe concisely, so I
ask the reader to bear with me as I dip into
some local ‘messiness’. To a large degree,
the point is that these knotted terrains
cannot be disentangled from highly localized
histories, nor can they be rendered legible
outside of similarly localized land manage-
ment practices. This illegibility, as I will
show, is in part why they remain out of the
555
reach of corporate capital. To convey some
of the complexity of Gudde, a settlement
divided into old and new parts, each
embedded in different systems of land regis-
tration and authorization, I quote from Ben-
jamin and Raman (2011) at length:12
‘The old settlement is made up of two parts: a
resettlement colony, and a subdivision on
common land, where two caste groups viz.,
the Dalits [former untouchables who benefit
from special constitutional protections] and
the Thigalas [a designated “Backward Caste”
that receives designated state-level benefits
and protections] dominate. Until the mid
eighties, the allottees did not occupy land [in
the resettlement colony]. Initially, a group of
three men working in the same neighborhood
occupied the [subdivision] on the common
land with the assistance of a neighborhood
level political activist, and as is a common
practice, brought in their relatives to
consolidate their claims. What started as a
squatter settlement, gets more complicated: in
the mid 1980s, Praja Vimochana Sanga (PVS),
a political organization working for the
Dalits, mobilized poorer groups
predominantly from the Dalit caste to occupy
land [ . . . ]. Around the same time, a group of
Thigala caste households settled on the land
adjoining the resettlement colony. Following
this occupation, the Dalit movement
splintered into five groups at the state level,
which led to each of the groups capturing
different parts of city territories to settle their
constituency [in what became the new
settlement]. Three different groups claimed
barren land on the downward slope on four
sides of the hill in Gudde. By then, the
original settlers together with Thigala leaders,
taking advantage of the organized occupation
by PVS and other Dalit organizations,
occupied even more land including a plot for
their temple. They captured [waste] land that
was relatively inaccessible at the foot of the
hill, cleared it of undergrowth, and sold it to
members of castes other than Dalits. The
increase in the Gudde population provided
them with a political constituency to contest
the village council elections (and
subsequently, the municipal elections, as
these areas urbanized).’ (41)
 556 CITY VOL. 19, NO. 4
What Benjamin and Raman are describing
here is a pattern by which different state
and customary bodies provided land access
to particular ethnic and economic groups
based on socio-political compulsion, legal
requirements to protect ‘backward’ castes
(both Dalits and Thigalas) and those dis-
placed from slums, or caste/ethnic/linguistic
affiliation. The institutional bodies involved
in Gudde include the Municipal Corporation,
which established the resettlement colony
and issued allotment slips to its first residents
(‘the allottees’); the village panchayat—a five-
member village assembly, which is the oldest
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system of local governance in South Asia and
that gained constitutional recognition in
India in 1992—which governs common
land; and the Bangalore Development Auth-
ority, which controls waste or barren land—
a category rooted in colonial land revenue
law—within the urbanizable city limits.
Durand-Lasserve (2005), observing similar
processes in sub-Saharan African cities, calls
such systems of land allocation neo-custom-
ary tenures—or tenure systems in which stat-
utory bodies allow customary groups to
acquire or allocate vacant public or waste
land, typically via squatting. While Benjamin
and Raman’s above language of occupying,
capturing and squatting suggests that the
occupants were engaged in private takings,
their broader point is that as ethnic, caste or
class groups become economically settled,
they also acquire political clout and the insti-
tutional means to deepen de facto tenure
security. In the particular case of Gudde, as
the settlement population grew and became
a powerful political force in municipal gov-
ernment, a local leader won first the pan-
chayat election and then a seat in the
Municipal Corporation (Benjamin and
Raman 2011, 42). Land occupation, in other
words, became the foundation for group-
based political representation and broader
claims to the city (cf. Holston 2008).
What are the foundations for these claims?
In more historic settlements, land claims are
rooted in customary land recording practices.
This might take the form of a family’s
inclusion on a customary authority’s (such
as a panchayat’s) list of households with
access to the commons (for an example
from Syria, see Ghazzal 2012).13 It could
also take the form of special land rights pro-
visions for ethnic minorities, the poor or indi-
genous groups (Nuijten and Lorenzo 2006).
Historic claims to land can also be granted
through (more or less lenient) laws of
adverse possession—as in Brazil’s City
Statute, Trinidad and Tobago’s Certificate
of Comfort or Turkey’s Gecekondu land.14
Finally, land claims can be recognized
through customary tribunals, such as in
Egypt, which draw upon Islamic law to
recognize tacit permits and tenure (Denis
2012), or through religious tenure—in
Gudde, through the claim that the settlement
‘forms part of a sacred territory connecting
different hills’ (Benjamin and Raman 2011,
43), a type of argument with strong legal pre-
cedence in India as well as sub-Saharan and
West Africa (Berry 1992; Singh 2013).
For settlers who lack the ability to demon-
strate enduring customary use or state-
granted tenure, land claims must be built up
through what Eckert (2006) calls ‘unnamed
law’. Such unnamed law does not have a
single, statutory basis, but is rather produced
through norms established within what she
terms specific ‘regimes of governance’. One
prominent way this happens is through the
collection of records that tie one’s settlement
to specific state documentary circuits, impli-
cating the state in the life of that community.
Possessing allotment slips issued by the
municipal government, procuring a locally
registered ration card, receiving an official
electricity bill addressed to one’s home,
paying state property taxes or betterment
charges, or obtaining notary documents can
provide ‘proof’ of legality by nature of these
documents’ incorporation into normal
bureaucratic circuits, even though many of
these documents in themselves have nothing
to do with residential tenure (Holston 2008;
Ferrier 2012; Ranganathan 2014). Politicians
and bureaucrats acknowledge settlers’ docu-
ment-backed occupancy claims for a variety
 GHERTNER: WHY GENTRIFICATION THEORY FAILS IN ‘MUCH OF THE WORLD’
of reasons, including to cultivate vote banks,
because those documents demonstrate the
state’s active role in the formation of informal
settlements (Das 2011), and because of a lack
of institutional alternatives for mass housing
supply (Benjamin 2008; Abasa, Dupret, and
Dennis 2012). Payne and Durand-Lasserve
(2012, 33) describe ‘[t]his form of de facto
tenure [as] possibly the most common of all
urban tenure systems’, arguing that ‘By ensur-
ing that land [ . . . ] held under such tenure
systems cannot command the full price
which formal tenure would entail, low-
income households are able to live in areas
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that would otherwise be beyond their reach.’
While India may present a particularly
complex set of land arrangements, with mul-
tiple overlapping forms of tenure shaped by
pre-colonial agrarian systems,15 Mughal-era
land recording practice, colonial land
revenue law and post-colonial land reform
policies, most of the post-colonial world con-
tinues to be characterized by some mix of
pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial land
law and regulation (Berry 2009). This makes
the ‘bundle of powers’ that govern land
access highly location specific (Ribot and
Peluso 2003) and keeps land ‘embedded
mostly in local government land adminis-
tration’ (Benjamin and Raman 2011, 40). In
many instances, those who want to secure
or maintain tenure must also maintain phys-
ical occupation in the settlement. If you or
someone over whom you have clear influence
does not make use of the land continuously,
that land can find its way into someone
else’s hands—absentee landlordism is diffi-
cult to maintain. While gentrification theory
might look at such messy areas and empha-
size their depressed land prices, low levels
of capitalization and attractiveness to corpor-
ate capital, it is ill-equipped to tell us much
about places such as Gudde and the more-
than-economic constraints there to capital’s
expansion. As I now seek to show, gentrifica-
tion scholarship, and urban theory more gen-
erally, also offers little in accounting for the
economic and more-than-economic func-
tions those constraints serve.
557
Pro-poor agglomeration economies
The second major contribution of the litera-
ture on tenure diversity is the claim that
informal land settings create forms of pro-
poor economic clustering that are not, as in
traditional urban economic theory, ‘struc-
tured by market mechanisms generating
land prices that arbitrate uses and that
sustain distinctive patterns of spatial allo-
cation’ (Scott and Storper 2015, 8), at least
not in the sense of a smooth and clearly map-
pable land-value gradient. Based on research
in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, Benjamin
(2005) and Benjamin and Raman (2001)
have powerfully shown how forms of mixed
tenure provide diverse opportunities for
social reproduction and a type of, resonant
with the agrarian studies language, small-
holder accumulation. What enables such
forms of accumulation is the openness that
informal land settings provide for new
entrants (as above), which in turn enables
the formation and endurance of dense manu-
facturing, service and materials-processing
networks composed of different class
groups, with different skill levels, all func-
tioning in close proximity to each other.
The flexibility these land settings offer ‘in
terms of physical space, land use, and cost
for the different economies and their actors’
facilitate large and small firms to be clustered
nearby (Benjamin and Raman 2001, 60). On
the one hand, this provides larger firms with
both access to low-cost labor and the infor-
mal means to receive ancillary services such
as waste removal, scrap collection and
goods transportation. On the other hand,
such clustering—where large manufacturing
units on privately owned land sometimes
abut clusters of workshops, shanties and
warehouses on waste or unallocated public
land—provides new, unskilled entrants with
two things. First, new migrants can access
low-cost housing and, second, they can
acquire skills through everyday observation
of and participation in a dynamic economic
milieu. Being at the right place at the right
time is one such skill of market-timing:
 558 CITY VOL. 19, NO. 4
knowing, for example, when a wire manufac-
turing firm tends to move the piles of plastic
scrap it generates allows for ‘just-in-time’
service provision that both reduces contract-
ing costs for the firm and allows informal
workers to profit by insinuating themselves
into value chains. Savvy individuals are
hence able to learn from their environment
and add value to production networks by
serving as mobile, always-available goods
movers, fixers, mechanics and labor suppliers.
An individual who starts off as a waste picker
can, for example, gradually learn which
grades of plastic local scrap dealers and recy-
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clers want and from where those valuable
materials can be acquired. In diverse tenure
settings, where commons, waste land and
unconverted agricultural land can exist in
close proximity to planned industrial zones,
waste pickers can, as ethnographic research
has shown, first upgrade to scrap dealers
and subsequently make use of small empty
structures or land awaiting development to
aggregate collected materials and move up
the value chain to become larger traders and
materials processors (Simone 2010; Gidwani
2013). Again, resonant with the language of
agrarian studies and political ecology, these
settings feature complex chains of inter-
dependency between land users, the house-
hold, larger firms, the state and the world
market, which shape the capacity for squat-
ters, unauthorized land users and working-
class households to use local rents and low-
cost housing as a platform for small-scale
production. Were ‘market mechanisms gen-
erating land prices’ to operate as the key
arbiter of spatial allocation in such settings,
operational costs for firms would be higher,
and pro-poor skills upgrading would be
minimal.
Benjamin and Raman (2001, 1) call these
settings ‘dense local economic clusters
linked to real estate, trading, and manufactur-
ing’, echoing Scott and Storper’s (2015, 12)
description of ‘the basic character of urbaniz-
ation’ as ‘a grounded system of dense polar-
ized and interacting spaces constituting the
urban land nexus’. Simone’s (2010) writing
on the strategic use of the same land and
buildings by different users in Jakarta and
Johannesburg in overlapping, but not com-
peting ways (e.g. a shop by day, a discotheque
by night) strikes me as a related example of
economic activities made possible through
tenure systems defined by their non-exclusiv-
ity. Sims (2013) describes Cairo’s munatiq
‘ashwa’ia, or ‘random areas’, in terms of the
‘heterogeneous attributes of urban life’
found there, wherein high residential and
commercial densities enable both low rents
and otherwise coveted elements of city
living, such as ground-floor business, walk-
ability and a strong sense of local commu-
nity—the very thing that gentrifiers so
actively pursue.
What these writings collectively show is
that informality is much more than a mode
of survival or a regulatory regime. It is also
a mode of economic production and social
reproduction produced through the agglom-
eration of dense networks of mixed tenure
and rent that together can sustain large
numbers of the urban poor in productive,
labor-absorbing settings—settings that also
can offer health delivery, consumption and
educational efficiencies (Bhan 2015). If these
economic clusters were governed entirely
by the price mechanism, and were land
there to be titled and privatized, the opportu-
nity for such mixed-class land settings—
which Benjamin (2005) calls ‘productive
slums’—would not exist. Like the agrarian
studies literature’s examination of the disas-
trous effects of land enclosures, the neoliberal
attack on smallholder tenancy, or the use of
property formalization as an instrument of
land grabbing (Dwyer 2015); studies of
urban tenure diversity point to losses of
highly productive, pro-poor economies that
follow from tenure regularization and prop-
erty formalization, processes that are often
followed by land acquisition by large-scale
developers, typically backed by state
infrastructural investments (and riot police)
(Benjamin et al. 2007; Denis 2012). Is there
any writing in the gentrification literature
that recognizes the complexity of such
 GHERTNER: WHY GENTRIFICATION THEORY FAILS IN ‘MUCH OF THE WORLD’
transformations, and does gentrification
theory have the tools to account for what is
lost through them?
Get classy
Two further observations about the relation-
ship between class and rent in informal land
settings challenge standard arguments in the
gentrification scholarship. First, Benjamin
and Raman (2001) note that neighborhood-
wide infrastructure improvements and rising
rents do not necessarily contribute to the dis-
Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:24 31 July 2015
placement of the poor. Second, they note
how pro-poor outcomes often depend on
the poor’s ability to forge ties with local
elites involved in land development and man-
ufacturing. In areas where local elites are not
tied to local land development processes, they
find that the poor’s livelihood strategies are
often at greater risk. While gentrification lit-
erature celebrates mixed-class land use,
often taking a Jane Jacobs-esque tone of cele-
brating diversity as a resource for local resili-
ence and rich public life, the possibility of
elite landowners facilitating the poor’s ties
to local productive resources and land
access cannot be accounted for in the
narrow class language gentrification often
offers. This is not to claim that diverse
tenure settings are somehow innately egali-
tarian, or that ‘messiness’ and informality
are inherently pro-poor, free of commercial
influence or practiced only by the poor.
They are not (Roy 2002), but they often
provide a means for those formally excluded
from urban planning to invoke alternative,
non-statutory legal, moral and political fra-
meworks to access land, an option typically
unavailable in fully privatized systems.
This brings me to my final point. Gentrifi-
cation scholars often cling to the concept for
its strength in identifying processes of urban
class formation. Yet, to get etymological, the
term gentry fits awkwardly in many of the
non-Western contexts in which gentrification
is being applied. In Imperial China, the gentry
(shı̀ dàfū) referred to scholar-bureaucrats, or
559
civil servants appointed by the emperor for
their knowledge of Confucian literature. If
we are to follow the ‘high born’ connotation
of gentry, then gentrification in India may
actually be following its etymologically
correct root of high born castes displacing
the ‘ignobles’, or lower castes and outcastes.16
This is of course not the way the term is used in
contemporary scholarship. Furthermore, the
current moment of high born, or upper caste,
takeover in India is occurring not through
market power exclusively, but rather
through dominant agrarian castes’ ability to
leverage their land wealth, political influence
and violent control over lower castes to
create tight-knit real estate networks that are
capturing many of the profits from accelerat-
ing peri-urban development. A truly Indian
anti-gentrification politics would thus
necessitate not just a token critique of class
transformation, but a specifically Dalit cri-
tique. Whereas Dalit theorists argue that the
system of untouchability underpins the
general process of capital accumulation in
modern India (see Rao 2013), peri-urban
development must be seen to rely similarly
on caste and religious violence that dispos-
sesses tribals and outcastes of their customary
lands. The broader point is that reading class
as a universal category without studying
class formation as a process that articulates
with regional capitalisms that ‘primitively
accumulate’ through ethnic, religious, caste
and racialized violence dumbs down the soci-
ology of displacement at the precise moment
when—from the Modi moment in India to
Han chauvinism in China to anti-immigrant
nationalisms in Europe to #blacklivesmatter
in the USA—these forms of violence are
becoming increasingly central to the organiz-
ation of urban space.
To conclude, gentrification is taking place
in Mumbai, Rio and Luanda, but it is happen-
ing in those areas of these cities that are
already privatized, where diverse tenure
regimes have already been flattened, and
where displacement is now relatively small
scale. The limitation of gentrification, as an
analytic, is that it fails to grasp
 560 CITY VOL. 19, NO. 4
transformations in the peri-urban and outer
areas of post-socialist and post-colonial
cities where the most violent displacement is
taking place and where non-fully privatized
tenure endures. It is precisely these areas
that much of the new, Southern gentrification
literature has sought to subsume within its
remit, and it is in precisely these areas that
nobody cares about gentrification.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the
Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:24 31 July 2015
author.
Notes
1 For similar arguments with reference to Vietnam and
post-socialist Europe, see Yip and Tran (2015) and
Kovács, Wiessner, and Zischner (2013),
respectively.
2 Like China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cuba,
Cambodia and Laos, 20 Sub-Saharan African
countries nationalized land in the 1960s and 1970s
(Mabogunje 1992). While most have reversed this
approach (excluding Ethiopia and Rwanda),
customary and public lands are extensive in Sub-
Saharan Africa today, including in peri-urban
areas, even when they are not state recognized.
3 Until the late 1990s, all land in the urbanizable
limits of New Delhi, India’s capital city, was
officially state owned. As much as a third of this land
was acquired from the 1950s through the 1990s for
public purpose.
4 I would include the ‘planetary urbanization’
literature’s description of all displacement in the
global South as ‘neo-Haussmannization’ as an
example of this (Merrifield 2014), as though all that
needs to be known about displacement in the South
was already evident in 19th-century Paris.
5 The concentration of non-privatized lands in the
South is of course not a coincidence. Twentieth-
century nationalist movements and communist
revolutions were almost always wrapped up with
socialist ideals of collective and public ownership.
Nehru in India, Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in
Indonesia, Castro in Cuba, Goulart in Brazil, Mao
in China, and Nyerere in Tanzania all launched
ambitious policies of popular entitlement to land
and housing. Theories of urbanization that fail to
account for the enduring effects of these legacies,
that reduce them to a ‘market barrier’, or that ignore
the unique political economy and planning regimes
that they put in place are unlikely to tell us much
about the means, politics or consequences of
displacement in such settings.
6 See Searle (2014) for a brilliant example of how
real estate capitalists interested in pumping money
through the secondary circuit of capital do
recognize, and often actively seek to validate,
contra Slater, the North –South distinction.
7 I am here following Levien’s (2013) sympathetic
critique of Harvey’s use of ‘accumulation by
dispossession’. To summarize: if the capitalist class
has the means to use state power to dispossess, why
does it have to wait for economic crises to use such
means?
8 It should be obvious that I also think developing such
concepts requires deeply empirical and often
ethnographic field research: you cannot identify
variations in land tenure without being able to read
local, vernacular land records and without studying
how norms of legality are produced by those who
use them—that is, the praxeological.
9 For a useful example of how ‘urban revolution’ can
be used conceptually to account for patterns of
urban change and displacement that do not
conform to the post-industrial model Lefebvre
described, see Shin (2014) on China.
10 While recognizing the different value systems that
can be sustained by fully privatized and less-than-
fully privatized land tenure, we should avoid
exaggerating the separation between the two and
should recognize the huge range of tenure forms
that fall under the latter category, varying from
almost or partly legal subdivisions to clandestine
settlements. Some of these are predominately
regulated through the price mechanism, whereas
others are far less so. Many such tenures are a part
of what Baross (1990) calls a sequential land
market, where illegal housing can gradually
transition into outright ownership and become
governed less by locally embedded rules. Other
tenure systems, though, retain heavy customary
authority even amidst significant market pressure.
Squatter rights can be and are often sold, but
usually within local networks. The possibility and
form of social regulation is what requires attention
and is what I seek to highlight in this paper.
11 As Payne and Durand-Lasserve (2012, 12) note,
private tenure ‘permits the almost unrestricted use
and exchange of land’.
12 I have also taken the liberty to add brackets in some
places to provide the non-South Asianist with a
slight bit of contextual background.
13 Because each state in India has its own land
revenue codes, the nature of rights to the commons
and the definition of different types of commons
vary greatly from state to state. Describing the
revenue code for Madhya Pradesh, India’s second
largest state by land area, Ramanathan (2002,
 GHERTNER: WHY GENTRIFICATION THEORY FAILS IN ‘MUCH OF THE WORLD’
206) notes, ‘There are then at least three kinds of
common property regimes that are identified in the
Code’, not including forest areas, one of which
requires the revenue Collector (a state government
official) to maintain a list of provisions for common
use of ‘unoccupied lands’ (the nistar patrak).
14 Benjamin and Raman (2011, 44) assert that most
informal land settings go well beyond simple
‘adverse possession’ rights. This is because such
settings involve contestations within the state, as
different branches of the state themselves authorize
competing claims to land that cannot in a purely
technical fashion reach resolution.
15 Benjamin et al. (2007) note how the Government of
Karnataka’s electronic land registration and tenure
regularization program, called Bhoomi, reduced
the number of tenure systems in the state from an
Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:24 31 July 2015
astounding 1500 to a still incredibly diverse 256.
16 Gentry: ‘1.a. Rank by birth (usually, high
birth; rarely in neutral sense)’ (Oxford English
Dictionary).
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