1
Introduction

As readers of the gentrification literature will know, the British sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term 'gentrification' in 1964 in her book 'London: Aspects of Change':

One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes - upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages - two rooms up and two down - have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses, downgraded in an earlier or recent period - which were used as lodging houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation - have been upgraded once again. Nowadays, many of these houses are being subdivided into costly flats or 'houselets' (in terms of the new real estate snob jargon). The current social status and value of such dwellings are frequently in inverse relation to their status, and in any case enormously inflated by comparison with previous levels in their neighbourhoods. Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the social character of the district is changed.

(Glass 1964a: xviii-xix, italics added).

Ruth Glass's other writings, however, including those on urbanization outside of Britain are much less well known. For example, that same year she wrote about the 'Gaps in Knowledge' in studies of urbanization in non-Western contexts:

So far, our knowledge of the current processes, configurations and implications of urbanization in the developing countries has been limited, or even apparently arrested, in several interrelated respects. First, the framework of analysis and enquiry in this field (as in many others) has been heavily conditioned by Western, and particularly Anglo-Saxon, experience - or rather by categories of thought derived from the as yet inadequately documented, only sketchily compared and partially interpreted, history of nineteenth and early twentieth urbanization in the now industrialized countries, notably Britain and the United States. It is partly because the 'shock of urbanization' felt in these countries during earlier periods is still reverberating, that the notions formed under its impact, whether expressed in terms of reason or unreason, have remained so tenacious and pervasive. The influence of such notions is reflected in the choice of subjects with which students of contemporary urban growth and phenomena in the developing countries have been preoccupied. The predominance of Western thought, in general, is reflected in the treatment of such subjects, which tends to follow both the conventional lines of demarcation between matters urban and rural, and also the established boundaries between the various disciplines of the social sciences.

(Glass 1964b: 1-2)

Hers was a prescient 'comparative urbanism' that was concerned about the dominance of Western thought and experience in studies of urbanization in developing countries, what Ma and Wu (2005: 10-12) have called a Western-centric 'convergence thesis'. Other Marxists, for example Henri Lefebvre (2003: 29), had similar concerns about the hegemony of the Euro-American industrialized city in urban theory:

We focus attentively on the new field, the urban, but we see it with eyes, with concepts, that were shaped by the practices and theories of industrialization, with a fragmentary analytical tool that was designed during the industrial period and is therefore reductive of the emerging reality.

In this book, we take on board a 'new' comparative urbanism (see Robinson 2006, 2011a) to address the concern that over the past two decades the term 'gentrification' itself has been conceptually stretched to uncritically assume a similar trajectory around the globe (see Lees 2012). It is 'new' because it focuses on cities beyond the usual suspects of London, New York, etc., and beyond the constructs that have come out of, or been based on, those places. As Ley and Teo (2014: 1286) argue, this conceptual overreach 'represents another example of Anglo-American hegemony asserting the primacy of its concepts in other societies and cultures'.

This book is one of the first to unpack this hegemony and to question the notion of a 'global gentrification'. Glass (1964b: 18) goes on to ask: 'What happens to the elaborate theories and speculations on the trends and implications of urbanization on the international scale when it has to be admitted that even the most elementary raw material for their verification exists?'

In our unpacking of the notion of a 'global gentrification', we discuss gentrification beyond the usual suspects in Britain, Europe and North America, gathering in raw material on processes that have been labelled 'gentrification' in non-Western cities and on processes that have not been labelled as 'gentrification'. In so doing, we consider the extent to which Western theorizing on gentrification can be useful in non-Western cities. For, like Glass (1964b: 27) we are conscious of the 'persistence of the Western ideology of urbanism (or rather anti-urbanism)' which may not exist (or at least not in the same way) in non-Western contexts where, for example, issues of informality, state developmentalism (often intertwined with advanced neoliberalism), and even the concept of neighbourhood itself, take on radically different meanings.

Building upon recent urban studies scholarship that has revisited the concept of the urban and the process of urbanization at multiple scales (see Merrifield 2013a; Brenner and Schmid 2012, 2014; Keil 2013), we advance the view that gentrification is becoming increasingly influential and unfolds at a planetary scale. This foray into 'planetary gentrification' advances postcolonial geographies along some of the pathways that Sidaway et al. (2014) suggest, for in this book we: (i) narrate planetary gentrifications and the configurations between their paths, focusing on the ascendancy of the secondary circuit of real estate (Harvey 1978; Lefebvre 2003) (we offer a global perspective that considers colonialisms, analytical and everyday comparativisms, globalization, and also the globalized effects of financial capitalism), (ii) we acknowledge other (post)colonialisms (old and new), (iii) we demonstrate planetary indigeneity (organic gentrifications that are not copies of those in the West), and (iv) we problematize translations (West to East, North to South and vice versa).

Gentrification is argued to have 'gone global', to have spread geographically - what the late Neil Smith (2002) called 'gentrification generalized'. Atkinson and Bridge (2005: 1; italics added) have proclaimed that 'Gentrification is now global' and gone on to discuss gentrification as the new urban colonialism in a global context. In arguing that gentrification has gone global, they assume a North to South, West to East trajectory, and that gentrification has moved down the urban hierarchy from First World to Second and Third World cities. They also assume that gentrification is not indigenous to these con­texts and that it is new to them. The global is seen as originating from the West. Blaut (1993: 12) argues that such diffusionist thinking is an example of 'spatial elitism' that inscribes a geography of centre and periphery on the world. By way of contrast, others, for example Tim Butler (2007a, 2010), are concerned that lots of different changes are becoming subsumed under the 'gentrification brand' and as such the concept has become 'diluted' and we are 'losing sight of what it is that needs to be explained or at least understood'. Indeed, Sharon Zukin (2010: 9) argues that 'gentrification generalized' is really a broad process of 're-urbanization' in which city space is taken up by white collar men and women and their consumption tastes and habits, creating an economic division but also a cultural barrier between rich and poor, young and old; her research focus though is in the West - New York City - again!

By way of contrast, this book begins the process of ontological awakening to the process of gentrification in cities outside of the Euro-American heartland, in so doing we consider the claim that gentrification 'has gone' global, the idea that gentrification is a 'force' that has travelled or diffused outwards from a certain 'centre' towards global peripheries. We show that gentrification is a phenomenon that cities worldwide have experienced (it is not totally new in the twenty-first century to the global South) and are experiencing (through different types of urban restructuring).

There are material issues at the moment of co-writing a book like this. We draw on: (i) our regional and linguistic expertise (Lees on Europe and North America [languages English, and some German and French], Shin on Southeast and East Asia [languages Korean, Chinese and English], and López-Morales on Latin America [languages Spanish, English, Portuguese); (ii) the information we collected in the workshops we ran on global gentrification two...