5
A Global Gentrification Blueprint?
In the twenty-first century, some gentrification scholars declared gentrification was a blueprint being mass-produced, mass-marketed, and mass-consumed around the world. As the urban-rural dichotomy broke down, as the world became increasingly urbanized and desirous of an urban(e) lifestyle, even third World cities were gentrifying (Davidson and Lees, 2005: 1167). Other scholars were a little more cautious:
[T]here is something there in most parts of the world which we would recognise as some form of the phenomenon that we call gentrification. However, it is not like a bottle of Coca Cola with a registered trademark, which can be hauled off the shelf in any global housing market.
Smith (2002) argued that gentrification had become a ‘global urban strategy’, and that it had evolved in the 1990s into an urban strategy for city governments allied with private capital in cities around the world (p. 440). Gentrification had become bound-up in a global circuit of urban policy transfer where the promises of inner city ‘revitalization’ and ‘renaissance’ attracted national, metropolitan and local governments to promote the middle class-ization/elitization of central cities. In this chapter we investigate whether a global gentrification blueprint is evident around the globe, for as Robinson (2011b: 22) says:
Much is at stake in how we characterize the spatiality of urban policy transfer and learning. It is important to question understandings of policy exchange and innovation that are the inheritance of a deeply divided urban studies shaped by colonial and developmentalist assumptions.
By blueprint we mean a model or plan of action for something to be copied. But is ‘gentrification’ being copied/adopted in policies and plans around the world? Referring to Robinson (2002), Roy (2009: 820) paraphrases Robinson (2003: 275) stating that ‘the enduring divide between “First World” cities (read: global cities) that are seen as models, generating theory and policy, and “Third World” cities (read: mega-cities) that are seen as problems, requiring diagnosis and reform’ is a ‘regulating fiction’ that needs to be overcome in its ‘asymmetrical ignorance’.
There has long been an assumption in the gentrification literature, a diffusionist logic, that gentrification (as both a process and a blueprint) is cascading downwards and outwards from metropolises in the global North:
[gentrification] appears to have migrated centrifugally from the metropolis of North America, Western Europe and Australasia…at the same time as market reform, greater market permeability and population migration have promoted internal changes.
This diffusionist logic has continued in more recent work by, for example, Peck (2010) who talks about the mobility of a fast policy of ‘creative gentrification’ around the world. In South African literatures on gentrification, the diffusionist logic is especially apparent: Visser and Kotze (2008) argue that, in South Africa, urban policies for regeneration and renewal show ‘the imprint of global economic forces and urban redevelopment thinking’ (p. 2569), and Winkler (2009) approaches inner-city regeneration in Johannesburg as ‘nothing more than an euphemism for gentrification’ driven by a blind belief in new global policies or, as her study's title suggests, the prolongation of the global age of gentrification as it moves toward Southern cities. Her analysis presents the market-driven regeneration of Johannesburg's CBD as a fitting example of how gentrification has become a focal point for global urban policymakers.
By way of contrast, authors like Dutton (2005: 213; also Dutton 2003) have complained that this image of a downward trickle from saturated global cities implies a single mechanism for gentrification everywhere and ignores the role of local context in ‘mediating gentrification processes’. More recently, Teppo and Millstein (2015: 419), writing about Cape Town, do a good job of looking at the ‘mediating context’, arguing that ‘the public justifications of, and discussions and disputes about, these processes differ greatly from those employed in the global North’. They point to colonial and postcolonial inheritance, the social hierarchies of a settler society, ideas of ‘race,’ and massively unequal divisions of income as factors impacting how gentrification plays out differently in Cape Town.
In this chapter we show that there are gentrification blueprints, models and policies, but that their transfer is not always North to South, West to East, global city to provincial city, urban to rural or even urban to urban, etc.; and they are mediated by context. The geographies and mobilities of gentrification are complex, contingent and sometimes contradictory, and can learn from analyses of migrating neoliberal governmentalities (e.g. Ong 2006; Ferguson 2009; Park, Hill and Saito 2012).
In this chapter, we make an important point that there is no clearly bounded or explicitly labelled ‘gentrification policy’ because governments, certainly in the global North, know that to label a policy as a ‘gentrification policy’ would be foolish given the negative associations of the term with social cleansing. What governments have done is to utilize policies with other more neutral labels (e.g. urban regeneration, urban renewal, urban renaissance) or with liberal moral discourses (e.g. mixed communities policy, urban sustainability) or the economically feel good term ‘creative city’. Sometimes, new town projects under the label of ‘eco-city’ or ‘smart city’ are proposed and implemented, placing gentrification pressures on neighbouring districts too. Quite simply these ‘gentrification policies without the name’ soft peddle various ideas and programmes of gentrification. The very fact that no labelled gentrification policy exists makes resisting gentrification more complex and the process itself more ‘backdoor’ and indeed aggressive. Moreover, the unusual situation now is that ideologically quite different actors are picking and choosing bits from these models to announce their global urbaneness, but such ideas either fit uneasily with local politics and cultures or become remade to be acceptable to local politics and cultures. In looking for a gentrification blueprint, we must be clear that policies only occasionally move as fully formed things. More usually, what moves when policy is seen to replicate itself over time and across space is a far more disaggregated set of knowledges and techniques. Once these have moved then they get translated into policy, sometimes recognizable as the originating policy brand or type, sometimes not. This process is dependent upon highly contingent translations and innovations, and it is rarely linear. Sometimes, policies travel only as cosmetic make-up to enable the implementation of longer-term endogenous development projects that local elites have long envisioned.
In investigating a ‘global gentrification blueprint’, we contribute to extending understanding of what Brenner and Theodore (2002: 349) refer to as the relationship between city building and ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. In doing so we elaborate on the diverse geographies of privatization driven by the neoliberal tendencies that are occurring around the globe via the inter urban, global movement of theories, policies and techniques (Larner and Laurie 2010: 218; see also Ward 2008; McCann 2008). We show the ways in which similar neo-liberal governmentalities produce (or do not produce) gentrification around the world (also see Salomón 2009, Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2010; Peck 2002); and how processes of gentrification are (or are not) embedded in the fast-paced, self-reflexive logics of inter-city policy adoption, circulation, and learning (McCann and Ward 2010; Peck and Theodore 2010a, 2010b; McFarlane 2011). In doing so, we acknowledge that neoliberalism is not an overarching colonizing force, and that local developmental politics interact with neoliberalism in a multifaceted and spatially and temporally uneven way. For instance, East Asian scholars have been debating the extent to which regional developmental states have been transformed into neoliberal ones, and it has been acknowledged that the characteristics of developmental states have persisted in one way or another in East Asian economies despite degrees of neoliberalization (see Park, Hill and Saito 2012).
Peck (2003) argues that neoliberalism has much of its origins on the periphery, not the centre, in Chile and Mexico in the early 1980s. Although designed in the North, neoliberalism was first tried out properly in Chile under a 1973 US-backed military coup and in Mexico in 1982 under a US–led rescue package; it was then pushed in other Latin American countries as a condition of loans or renegotiations of debt by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). As Betancur (2014) states – Latin America was exposed to neoliberal shock therapy while being tightly tied to the economies of the North. The result was that much of the region's capital shifted from manufacturing to finance and commerce. Capital focused on new projects for the middle/upper classes, commoditizing cities. But the shift was limited by underdevelopment in the region, informality and limited market capacity. Later it was seen in the privatizing politics of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s. Since then, neoliberalism has become the centrepiece of urban policy seemingly regardless of the politics of national governments. As Larner (2000) shows, neoliberal techniques of governance can be deployed in very different political contexts and projects. This necessitates a relatively open reading of neoliberalism, but not a reading that says that neoliberalism is everywhere.
In his discussion of the ‘globalization of urban policy’, Cochrane (2007) argues that contemporary urban policy is focused on ‘accumulation through the built environment’, that is property development, and the management of growing inequality in society through disciplinary tactics, like Smith's (1996) revanchism. Others have gone a step further and argued that urban policy is now exported globally as part of a class-based project that remakes cities around the world for the purposes of capitalist accumulation (e.g. Peck 2003). Our critical political economy approach follows on from this.
Gentrification/Urban Regeneration Models
The Spanish Barcelona Model and the Bilbao Model have both had a significant impact on urban regeneration policy and gentrification in cities world-wide. McCann and Ward (2011) argue that they possess a kind of representational power, operating as a transformative policy imaginary across different sites. Peck and Theodore (2010a) talk about the apparent paradox that the more policies flow/mobilize the more they are tagged to places like Barcelona.
The ‘Barcelona Model’ is probably the most famous example of global urban policy transfer and it is widely recognized as a prime example of ‘best practice’ in ‘urban renaissance’. The 1992 Olympic Games provided a significant event from which to sell the supposed ‘success story’ of Barcelona's regeneration (Marshall, 2004), with its apparently successful combination of cultural strategies and urban regeneration to address social problems; a model that has now been critically rebutted (Degen and García 2012). González (2011) has shown how ‘policy tourism’, in the form of experts visiting Barcelona, contributed to the international diffusion of the ‘model’. The Barcelona model, however, was/is not really a clear construct (Blanco 2009; Monclús 2003; Marshall 2000; Garcia-Ramon and Albet 2000), nor is it a singular model. Nevertheless, it promotes urban design (top-down but small-scale interventions to upgrade neighbourhoods), governance (strong leadership in promoting a city's image) and strategic planning (again top-down, e.g. roads etc.). The result of such strategies is that former industrial spaces and working-class neighbourhoods have been appropriated by the service and knowledge economy for both residential and productive use, producing gentrification.
The irony is that the Barcelona Model was ever considered as unique in the field of international urbanism when it is far from unique. Behind this exemplar of progressive values is institutional capital with relatively conservative concerns and negative consequences relating to social polarization and social exclusion, which have been constantly sidelined. Nevertheless, the chairman of Britain's Urban Task Force in the late 1990s, the ‘starchitect’ Sir Richard Rogers, adopted Barcelona as the model of British urban renaissance policy under the then New Labour government (see Lees 2003). Indeed the introduction to the Urban Task Force's Towards an Urban Renaissance had a foreword by Barcelona's socialist mayor Pasqual Maragall. Demonstrating a policy mobilities loop, Richard Rogers subsequently became a member of the Mayor of Barcelona's Urban Strategies Advisory Council. Through its urban projects, Barcelona is now a significant player in a global urban network marked by symbolic competition and mutual imitation. The Barcelona Model promotes the kind of gentrified, sanitized city that Zukin (2010) and others have described, with the same collection of contemporary architecture, urban museums, etc. Mimetically, each city that draws on the Barcelona Model seems to aspire to the same urban regeneration menu without paying close enough attention to the inclusions and exclusions in the model.
The entrepreneurial and technical knowledge of the Barcelona Model was exported to Latin America by the Ibero-American Centre for Strategic Urban Development (CIDEU in the Spanish acronym) as the strategic partner and technical consultant for local governments (Steinberg 2001). Rojas (2004) argued that many of the strategic plans for upscale urban redevelopment in central or historical areas in Latin America in the 1990s were inspired by Barcelona's success. Parnreiter (2011) has discussed the professional and city networks behind policy mobilities, including CIDEU, ‘which was created to export the “Barcelona model” to Latin America (Salomón 2009) and has more than 100 member cities from Ibero-America, which all have applied the “Barcelona Strategic Urban Planning methodology”’. González (2011: 13f) notes, a ‘unidirectional flow is particularly true for the case of Barcelona where consultancies have effectively ‘sold’ the model to mainly Latin American cities’. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that there have been assertions more recently about a specifically Latin American gentrification (see Janoschka, Sequera and Salinas 2014). But González (2011: 4) stresses that the Catalan capital is a node, rather than a starting point, in the ‘space of policy flows’ (also see Peck and Theodore 2010a), implying that Barcelona has been a receiver (mainly from the US and Canada) as well as a sender of strategic planning ideas and practices. This is important and underlines the fallacy of ideas about the linear, diffusionist, progression of gentrification. Similarly, Monclús (2003: 417) sees Barcelona's reputation as based mainly on the city authorities' capabilities ‘to borrow, adapt and elaborate original syntheses relating to the most advanced formulae of international urban planning culture’. In fact, what is sold as the ‘Barcelona Model’ is, more often, ‘a handful of models’ (Marshall 2000: 315) whose nature depends on who the buyer is (González 2011).
Barcelona planners were behind two examples of state-led gentrification in Latin America that emerged in the 1990s – both so called ‘urban renewal’ projects – the Malecón 2000 waterfront regeneration in Guayaquil in Ecuador and the Puerto Madero redevelopment in Buenos Aires (see Figure 5.1). Both were carried out under the prevailing neoliberal planning philosophies that widely failed to keep their initial promises of social mixing and the provision of public infrastructure (see Cuenya and Corral 2011). Experts from Barcelona provided the Buenos Aires management team with ideas and strategies for the Puerto Madero rehabilitation. But when the Barcelona experts delivered their strategic plan to the mayor of Buenos Aires in 1990, protests erupted over the lack of local participation in the project forcing the Corporation to establish the National Contest of Ideas for Puerto Madero. Community action groups and others have argued that the funds generated by the sale of public land for the Puerto Madero redevelopment could have been better invested in social welfare projects elsewhere in the city. Critics also complain that although it has produced a new landscape pertinent to world-city status, the area is separate from the rest of the city socially and economically and the masses have been excluded from the project.
By way of contrast, the Malecón 2000 waterfront redevelopment in Ecuador, one of the most extensive urban renewal projects in Latin America, is seen to be a success. In 1996, an urban team from Oxford Brookes University in England was invited to make a proposal to renovate Guayaquil's deteriorated riverfront as a large public space, following the idea of similar urban projects known in Guayaquil, such as Barceloneta in Barcelona and Bay Side in Miami. The Oxford Brookes team stated that the main goal was ‘to create a large public space addressed to all the inhabitants of Guayaquil, without any distinction, which could re-establish the relationship of the city with the river, endure and serve as trigger to initiate a process of urban regeneration of the city centre’ (Carbajal, et al. 2003: 20). The preliminary proposal and the proposed management of the project were based on studies of the management models of Barcelona, Bay Side and Puerto Madero – which Mayor Febres-Cordero supported. Successive surveys of the wider public have shown high satisfaction with the project; indeed, internationally, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan-American Health Organization (OPS) declared it a ‘Healthy Public Space’. It supposedly demonstrates urban regeneration without gentrification, that is direct displacement, as existing residents were allowed to remain in their houses; but there have been indirect displacements (see the case study in architectureindevelopment. org).
The new focus in Barcelona is the 22@Barcelona Project, which has shifted the focus away from tourism and onto the new technology industry. The 22@Barcelona model is the newest model to be exported from Barcelona to cities like Rio de Janeiro, Boston, Istanbul and Cape Town (see 22barcelona. com). The project began in 2000 on industrial land in the historical Poblenou neighbourhood of Barcelona. This ‘productive renewal’ is committed to mixed use that fosters social cohesion and leads to more balanced and sustainable urban and economic development. The model being sold is the progressive urban and economic regeneration of industrial areas and a compact and diverse city. This model has also made its way to East Asia. Barcelona was highlighted as a model city for urban renewal in the 2010 Shanghai Expo whose theme was ‘Better city, better life’. The Barcelona City booth for the Shanghai World Expo was designed to show how to define and reflect Urban Best Practices from the models of the Ciutat Vella and 22@ districts in Barcelona. The entire world was able to witness the only two urban regeneration projects mentioned. Indeed, the Barcelona Model has reached iconic status, as evidenced in a World Wildlife Fund India report where the executive summary asks: ‘So, how can we ensure that India's future urban trajectory follows Barcelona rather than Atlanta?’ (Sangal, Nagrath and Singla 2010: 7). In April 2013, an Indian government delegation comprising 30 city and public administrators from 20 different cities across India visited Barcelona. During the visit, the delegation had the opportunity to exchange views on policies and urban activities with representatives from the City of Barcelona. They visited Barcelona's 22@ district!
Like the Barcelona Model, the Bilbao Model is a regeneration model, although its focus is much more on arts-led regeneration (see Rodriguez, Martinez and Guenaga 2001). Vicario and Monje (2003) argue that ‘…although the urban regeneration strategies deployed in Bilbao are touted as unique, innovative and exemplary, in fact they are a rather recent continuation of a model first devised years ago by numerous cities in the US and the UK. Indeed, the intervention model followed in Bilbao was explicitly inspired by strategies developed earlier by cities such as Pittsburgh, Birmingham and Glasgow…Bilbao is, therefore, a significant example of the well-known approach dating from the 1980s where flagship property-led redevelopment projects are central ingredients of urban regeneration…’ (p. 2384). The Guggenheim Museum was opened in Bilbao, in northern Spain, in 1997; it was commissioned by an energetic mayor who hoped to turn the city's fortunes around. It is claimed that in the first three years after the museum opened it raised over €100m in taxes for the regional government, enough to recoup the construction costs and some more. By the late 1990s, debates concentrated on what became known as the ‘Guggenheim Effect’ (Gómez and González 2001) or the ‘Bilbao Effect’. Many other cities, like Berlin, Abu Dhabi and Venice, have sought to replicate the supposed success of Bilbao, and the Guggenheim Foundation have been eager to meet that demand. Indeed, they have been accused of cashing in on their success and ‘franchising their brand name’, much like McDonald's. The new Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is to be located in the Cultural District of Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as a local offshoot of the Guggenheim and the Louvre. But there have been many issues around it, from rejection of American hegemony in Abu Dhabi to concerns over worker conditions. In a further twist, Serbia recently signed an agreement with an Abu Dhabi investor of a multi-million dollar Dubai-style riverside redevelopment – Belgrade Waterfront – marking one of the first forays of real estate tycoon Mohamed Alabbar and developer Eagle Hills and Emirates in Central/Eastern Europe. The plan is for ‘a glass forest of hotels, office buildings and apartments for 14,000 people, the largest shopping mall in the Balkans and a curvaceous 200-metre tower on two million square metres of wasteland by the River Sava’ (Sekularac 2015). Hundreds of protestors reportedly gathered as the agreement was signed concerned at the scale and cost of the project.
Gentrification Policies
We started this chapter in the global North/West (in Spain) on purpose, to demonstrate how easy it is to fall into the trap of assuming a diffusion towards the global South/East. We want to argue in this chapter that we need a much more nuanced understanding of how policies often dubbed as neoliberal were in fact existing already in many countries in the global South. Yes, there has been a rise in neoliberal urban policies over the past thirty years or so; indeed, almost all nation states have adopted neoliberal policies of some type or other (Harvey 2005), but this does not mean that states did not already have versions of these historically. In recent decades we have seen the election of right of centre governments in North America and Western Europe, stabilization policies in Latin America, the move to post-socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and marketization in previously socialist countries like China. Neoliberal policies have gradually replaced the post-war ideas of Keynesianism with liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and depoliticization. In looking at policies that promote gentrification in the global North and in some parts of the global South, we can observe a shift in policy discourse from the manager role/welfare state role towards a more entrepreneurial role of the (municipal) government (Brenner 2009: 44). A policy discourse consists of: ‘a specific ensemble of ideas, categorizations and narratives that is being produced, reproduced and/or transformed in policy practices’ (Hajer 1995 in Arnouts and Arts 2009: 206). Policy discourse determines how policy is made and indeed affects the content of policy. It is made up of ‘repeatable linguistic articulations, social-spatial material practices and power rationality configurations’ (Richardson and Jensen, 2003: 16). Importantly, policy is not merely a derivative of neoliberal discourse (see Chapter 2), but co-produces this policy within the discourse (Arts, Lagendijk and van Houtum 2009). For example, the general principles of good governance and other moral considerations within national and local government ensure that the sharp edges of neoliberal discourse are trimmed. In other places, historically brutal and coercive urban policies are not dissimilar to neoliberal policies and as such befriend them.
Twenty-first-century gentrification has been, and is being, mobilized through three particular policies as we speak – zero-tolerance policing (a form of revanchism – see Smith 1996); mixed communities policy (or gentrification by stealth – see Bridge, Butler and Lees 2011) and creative city policy (or creative gentrification – see Peck 2010), the latter includes aspirations to the former – for creative types are said to desire social and cultural diversity/mixity. In this chapter we focus on these three gentrification policies without that name!
Zero-tolerance policing policies
Neil Smith (1996) discussed zero tolerance policies in NYC as part of his ‘revanchist city thesis’ (see Lees 2000; Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008: 222–34). But what is more interesting in terms of the themes of this book is his discussion of the revanchist city in relation to Third World cities:
Third World cities have for a long time been scripted in the West as similar kinds of ‘revanchist cities’, cities where nature and humanity habitually take vicious revenge on a degenerate and profligate populace.…The organized murder of street kids in Rio de Janeiro, the Hindu massacres of Muslims in Bombay, the pre-election slaughter of South Africans in Durban…these and many other dramas present Third World cities to Western audiences not simply as places of extraordinary and often inexplicable violence but as places of inherently revengeful, perhaps lamentable, but often justifiable violence.
(Smith 1996: 208).
Smith (1996) asserted that revanchism has always been there in the Third World, and it could be argued that the way neoliberal governments in the global South deal with social inequality and class conflict is by the imposition of police force and brutality. As such, instead of arguing, rather naively, that zero-tolerance policy moved North to South or West to East, it makes more sense to argue that in the 1990s New York City's zero-tolerance model became a blueprint for a renewed, more technological and brutal policy implementation in the global South, one that even attained legitimacy through its claims to learning from elsewhere.
William Bratton's zero-tolerance anti-crime model for New York City has been copied around the world and is readily associated with supporting gentrification, often ‘cleaning up’ areas as a precursor to gentrification. In New York City, Bratton and Giuliani created a bottom-up strategy dubbed ‘broken windows’. In 1994 William Bratton was hired by NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as Commissioner of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and began to target ‘quality of life offences’: ‘[t]hese so called “beer and piss” patrols focused on drunkenness, public urination, begging, vandalism, and other anti-social behaviour’ (Fyfe 2004: 45). Their 1994 strategy ‘Reclaiming the Public Spaces of New York’ was underpinned by George Kelling and James Wilson's (1982) ‘broken windows thesis’ (see Innes 1999: 398).
The success of the crackdown in NYC led to the adoption of zero-tolerance policing in the UK soon after, when Jack Straw, then shadow home secretary, visited NYC (Fyfe, 2004). In 2003, the ex-New York City Mayor Giuliani was paid a $4.3 million consulting fee for policy advice on creating a citywide crime programme in Mexico City, recommending stiffer penalties and similar crackdowns on minor offences to those he oversaw in New York City in the 1990s. He was invited to Mexico City by multibillionaire Carlos Slim (who paid most of the tab) and then-mayor Andrés Manuel LÓpez Obrador, who requested his specific expertise in urban cleansing so as to ‘rescue’ the ‘crime infested’ historic centre of Mexico City. Giuliani travelled through the Tepito barrio (internationally known for its dominating presence of informal vendors, known as ambulantes) in Mexico City with a caravan of 300 security agents and a helicopter soaring above. Giuliani Partners LLC, the former mayor's security consulting company (formed after he left the mayor's office), wrote a 146-point plan in 2003, known as ‘Plan Giuliani’ which attracted full government backing. The Plan set out to do the same in Mexico City as had been done in New York City, but the plan was criticized for ignoring cultural differences and on-the-ground realities such as widespread corruption and poorly trained police, an ineffective judicial system and the importance of the underground economy in Mexico City. Unlike in New York City, the Plan did not deliver a sense of stability and security (see Mountz and Curran, 2009). But one cannot talk about ‘Plan Giuliani’ without also discussing Manuel LÓpez Obrador's wider plans for Mexico City, and especially his Programa de Rescate – a global urban strategy that sought to gain Mexico City global city status. The idea was that this state-led policy would attract investment into the historic city centre (the Centro Histórico) and in so doing attract upper/middle-class residents to live there and tourists to visit (see Walker, 2008). This neoliberal municipal gentrification programme, spearheaded in 2001, tallied with ‘Plan Giuliani’ in wanting to take back (gentrify) the Centro Histórico of Mexico City from ambulantes. A large-scale project, the Programa de Rescate, aimed to renovate an area three times the size of the historic area of Barcelona. The process of gentrification in this example was/is a three stage process: first, replacing the water and sewage infrastructure and building a commercial corridor; second, building hotels, a visitor centre and skyscraper; third, and most visceral, removing and relocating the 30,000 or so ambulantes who live and work in the Centro, adding public amenities and increasing security (including panic buttons at different sites linked to the police). In Mexico City we see here a form of state-led gentrification as a form of roll out neoliberalization in which the state has implemented zero-tolerance urban policies to gentrify ‘problem’ areas that were created during an earlier period.
Similarly in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro's police have enacted zero-tolerance policies, declaring a new war against the city's minor offenders and petty criminals (the war of course is historic and police violence is not new in Brazil, as the 1980s slaughter of street kids attested to). Again, they credit ex NYC Mayor Giuliani for the idea. After reading a news story about the ‘success’ of Giuliani's zero-tolerance policing in cleaning up NYC, Military Police Chief Colonel Celso Nogueira concluded that the strategy was well-suited to Rio's densely populated, heavily touristed, neighbourhood of Copacabana, and he began a pilot programme there. They increased the number of beachside surveillance cameras and radio-patrol police; cracked down on unlicensed vendors, petty thieves, and unruly motorists; and increased the arrest of those who were coercing drivers to pay for free parking. The programme was then expanded to discourage beggars’ encampments and place street children in shelters, unfairly targeting the city's poor and vulnerable. Unable to forcibly evict street people, Rio's police put pressure on them by removing their bedding materials from the streets and increasing sweeps on street vendors and other ‘marginals’. In the run up to the 2014 World Cup, police violence increased, including beatings and the use of pepper spray. Advocacy groups and public officials have said that the programme victimizes Rio's most defenseless, cleaning up streets for tourists and the well off. But unlike Mexico's ‘Plan Giuliani’, Rio's Zero Tolerance is far smaller in scale, focused on specific neighbourhoods. It lacks fully-fledged government backing and has attracted some community-based council support. In late 2009, Giuliani, however, announced that they had a security consulting contract with Rio de Janeiro regarding the 2016 Summer Olympics! (also see Chapter 7 on the Olympic-related escalation of large-scale redevelopment with hostile state actions in Seoul; see also Shin and Li (2013) for the exclusion of migrants during the Olympic Games period in Beijing).
Mixed communities policy
Encouraging socially mixed neighbourhoods and communities by bringing middle-income people into low income neighbourhoods has become, and for the moment is continuing, as a major planning and policy goal in North America and in a number of West European countries. The largest and most heavily funded programmes have been in the US, the UK and the Netherlands, but it has also been policy in Canada, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium (see Bridge, Butler and Lees 2011) and in Anglo-American territories e.g. Australia and Puerto Rico. Given that too strong a dose of neoliberalism is political suicide, neoliberal urbanism began to be soft peddled in the 1990s and 2000s through the use of ‘soft’ discourses like social mixing, social capital, social cohesion, diversity, sustainability, participation and empowerment. These soft discourses are seen as neoliberal, but moral, commonsense. These soft discourses have been rolled out in place of redistributive policies, in a retrenching welfare state, using strong neoliberalism (see Jessop 2002a; Mayer 2003; Sheppard and Leitner 2010).
But they have not been rolled out everywhere, for in some parts of the global South mixed communities policy is not new at all. In Kolkata, India, social and economic mixing has been in place since the state housing board was set up in 1972, well before ‘mixed communities’ became policy in Western cities. In 1972, the state government acquired 1,025 acres of land for the Bihar State Housing Board so that an urban housing project could be developed for lower-middle-and higher-income groups. This was a popular strategy that enabled an impoverished government to cross-subsidize between income groups. More recently, the state has a mixed-income housing strategy – a policy enacted to regulate all state built and new public-private partnership schemes that is tied to the government's new rhetoric on affordable housing (see Sengupta 2013). But like in the West, the approach often inhibits the sustainable mix of communities. More recently market liberalization has aided the state-aided construction of luxury housing estates that are densifying and gentrifying the city's fringe and also creating a gated, bourgeoisie territory of power and aesthetics that is marketed to affluent buyers as a good place that guarantees global services and lifestyles. Socio-culturally these new estates show rising incomes and decreasing family sizes and have resulted in the indirect displacement of lower-income residents due to increased rents and costs. Loopholes in means testing and the allocation of low-income homes shows signs of upper-income invasion, showing that mixed-income policy is producing gentrification. As such, lower-income households are now rapidly declining in the state provided/assisted housing in the suburbs. What is happening on Kolkata's fringes is symptomatic of wider transformations in other cities in India and indeed the global South. The centrality of neoliberal development is quite apparent in the process and is leading to an uneven and inconsistent gentrification in the suburbs, aligning with gentrification trends in the West. Bose (2014), writing on India, is quite clear that a form of global gentrification is taking place, through which people and place are being fundamentally restructured.
The concept of ‘mixed communities’ or ‘social mix’ was not new in the global North either (Lees 2008). Indeed it re-emerged in the 1990s in reaction to the large concentrations of socially homogeneous populations of poor people residing in the inner cities of Western Europe and North America. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)'s HOPE VI programme (Home ownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere) of poverty deconcentration was passed by Congress in 1992. This programme has begun to demolish large public housing projects at the centre of US cities and to disperse (displace) the project's residents. In their place, they are building new mixed income communities. The notion of mixed-income communities offered similar arguments to those made in the 1950s around ‘balanced communities’, the idea being that social diversity will enrich the lives of residents, promote tolerance of social and cultural differences, and offer educational and work role models. HOPE VI, however, is under increasing criticism for not delivering a truly mixed community nor the benefits supposed to come with this new mixed community (see Joseph 2006; Fraser and Nelson 2008). As Wilson (1987) made clear, reintegration with the middle class alone is not enough to generate social mobility. There needs to be a change in the structural economic conditions that inhibit access to employment, etc.
Evidence from the global South comes to similar conclusions. Drawing on a comparative analysis of Chicago and Santiago de Chile, two historically segregated cities, Ruiz-Tagle (2014) has assessed the relationship between neighbourhood social diversity and several dimensions of socio-spatial integration. Arguing against the consensus of mainstream policymakers in both countries, who strongly believe and defend the idea that the mere physical proximity between different social groups leads to social integration, Ruiz-Tagle finds no evidence that social-mixing housing policies defeat the barriers of class-oriented fear and exclusion. The author discovers that the physical proximity of different social groups, irrespective of the urban processes that bring them together, does not directly create the outcomes that supporters of poverty deconcentration policies believe. In other words, neighbourhood social diversity is not a sufficient condition for enhanced opportunities, better intergroup relationships or less exclusion from the housing market. In fact, Ruiz-Tagle argues it might well be the opposite, as lower status groups that live in mixed neighbourhoods and that were researched in Santiago and Chicago showed limited job opportunities, limited access to quality education, highly difficult intergroup relationships with upper status groups, and still suffered from exclusionary housing.
The HOPE VI Programme of state-led gentrification has been rolled out in Puerto Rico (Fernández Arrigiota 2010). Given its political and financial links to the US federal government, this is perhaps not surprising. Indeed, the public housing system is mainly financed with programmes from HUD. Like in the US, disinvested public housing is being demolished to make way for market rent housing, and tenant-based vouchers are being used for poverty de-concentration. One example is the high-rise public housing estate of Las Gladiolas located in the financial district of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Home to 670 families, it was built in 1973 as part of Puerto Rico's slum (barrios) clearance initiatives at that time. Like high-rise estates in other parts of the globe (see Lees 2014b on the Aylesbury Estate in London), Las Gladiolas began to be stigmatized as a failure – crime and drug ridden, delinquency etc. (see Figure 5.2). The Housing Department announced plans more than a decade ago to demolish the estate. Significantly, Las Gladiolas was located just a block away from the Golden Mile financial district, in other words on high value land. Mano Dura, the zero-tolerance approach to crime that Police Superintendent Pedro Toledo implemented under the Rosselló administration from 1992 to 2000, targeted public-housing projects as the areas where most criminal activity in Puerto Rico took place, and the redevelopment of Las Gladiolas was sold to the public as crime reduction (Fernández Arrigiota 2010). The Puerto Rico Public Housing Authority obtained a demolition permit from HUD in 2006, and that same year 200 Las Gladiolas families filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the eviction order, arguing they were notified without due process and requesting they be allowed to participate in the area's development. The plaintiffs charged that the commonwealth government failed to consult residents on plans to raze the complex – which dated back to 2000 – and had not kept the buildings in livable condition in accordance with federal law. But Las Gladiolas was demolished in 2011, and the site was redeveloped as townhouse-style subsidized housing. Here, state-led gentrification can be seen to be a postcolonial ‘project’ that has discriminated against Las Gladiolas’ residents. The policy itself could be seen as an example of US imperialism in Puerto Rico (see Briggs 2002).
Mixed-income housing development with the objective of redevelopment, integration along racial and social lines, and the alleviation of urban poverty and segregation, is also being undertaken in South Africa. In Johannesburg, mixed-income housing is being promoted to denounce the negative perception that the poor and rich cannot live side by side and that public-private partnerships in housing development work (see Onatu 2010). To deal with informal settlement formalization, the local government has embarked on a massive mixed housing development – Lufhereng in Soweto – a large-scale, mixed-income and mixed-tenure housing development which will comprise 24,000 mixed-income houses, with schools, clinics, sports fields and recreational facilities making up a complete, sustainable community. The name Lufhereng is derived from a Venda word ‘lufhera’ and a Sesotho word ‘reng’, which together refer to a place where people come together with a united commitment. Shaw (2011) argues that while gentrification may be an ‘elastic yet targeted’ process of what is ‘now global’…social mixing policies are not, but the cases here indicate otherwise.
Creative city policy
Richard Florida's (2002) creative city thesis recasts urban competitiveness between cities as cultural and economic ‘creativity’. This thesis has travelled around the world; through talks that cities have paid to hear, conferences, promotional activities, and policy blueprint documents. The mobilization of the ‘creative city’ has become big business with creative city consultancy growing. Creative city consultants sell blueprints of ‘how to create’ a new and exciting urban environment (live-work units, bike paths, historic architecture, etc.) that will attract creative types, is very similar to the type of urban environment that pioneer gentrifiers in Western cities sought in the 1960s and 1970s – sustainable, diverse, emancipatory, vibrant, on the edge, and so on. Creative city blueprints are quite simply a gentrifier's charter (Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008). More recently, however, there has been discussion of the global divergence of creative city policies (Cunningham 2009) and some scholars are pushing for a wider understanding of creative city discourse beyond its Euro-American cradle (see Pratt 2009: 19; also Luckman, Gibson and Lea 2009).
Why the creative city became so mobile is highly disputed. Some argue it is a result of the globalizing economy, part of the on-going restructuring of the economy (Prince 2010). Others like Peck (2001, 2005) argue that Richard Florida's creative city/class fits the neoliberal development agenda that is based on competition, gentrification, middle-class consumption and place marketing perfectly: ‘The banal nature of urban creativity strategy in practice’ is covered up with Florida's sales pitch ‘in which the arrival of the Creative Age takes the form of an unstoppable social revolution’ (Peck 2005: 740–1). According to Peck (2005), the field of urban policy has lacked new, innovative ideas for a longtime and therefore creativity strategies became popular very quickly because they delivered ‘both a discursively distinctive and an ostensibly deliverable development agenda’ (p. 740). It seems as if policymakers just accept the assumption that creativity is the basis for economic growth without suspicion (Peck, 2005). Within the longue durée of capitalist expansion, the diffusion of creative policy matches the shift to the consumption of images and spectacles that marks the exhaustion of the present accumulation regime as a productive force (Ross 2007 in Prince 2010: 121).
Cunningham (2009: 376) has looked at the different ways in which it is used around the world. He says that the discourse should be ‘thought of as a Rorschach plot, being invested in for varying reasons and with varying emphases and outcomes’. Critical geographers have stated that the creative industries are in fact the latest step in the commodification of culture, as already described by Adorno and Horkheimer in 1948 (O'Connor 2009; Prince 2010). The creative city and its related concepts are used by a neoliberal state apparatus, that is: ‘intent on creating markets that can govern culture through their particular incentives and constraints, while opening new territories for capitalist exploitation’ (Prince 2010: 120). This is certainly the case in East Asia where the creative city has been ‘ideologically anointed or sanctioned’ (Peck and Theodore, 2010a: 171) by states like Singapore, and China. These are fascinating case studies given that in China and Singapore creative city policy sits uncomfortably within authoritarian states in which neoliberal institutions coexist. Indeed, Singapore is now ‘selling’ its creative city model to South America, Dubai and Pakistan (see Kong 2012, on creative city policy in Singapore).
Kong and O'Connor (2009) argue that much of the thinking on cultural and creative industries in national and city policy agendas in East Asia has been derived from the European and North American policy landscape. China now has six cities listed in UNESCO's Creative Cities Network – Shenzhen, Chengdu, Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and Harbin. No other country has as many internationally acclaimed creative cities. The creative industries in China stand in the face of ‘old industrial’ China – its factories and ‘Made in China’ label. But as O'Connor (2009: 175) wonders:
The issue of creative industries is part of the question of China's future – its relationship of difference from and similarity to the West – as it is also a question of China's past – what influence will that past have on its future trajectory, is it a resource for, or burden on, this future?
The first city in China to join the then mostly Western league of creative cities was the southern city of Shenzhen in 2008. Both timing and geography were important in the development of Shenzhen as a creative city. Creative designers moved to Shenzhen in the early 1990s when the city was undergoing sweeping changes due to economic reforms and China's opening up policy. The Open and Reform Policy planted in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone 30 years ago, which led to rapid development, enabled the growth of creativity in Shenzhen. Creatives gave industrial products a brand new image and pushed them up the value chain. Shenzhen is now a leader in graphic design, fashion and architectural designs, interior, packaging and industrial designs. This shift in city governance from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’ in Shenzhen has actively shaped its urban form and developmental model. Its geographical location, away from political centres of control and near to Hong Kong with its links West, was/is important.
In 2004, OCT Real Estates Co Ltd announced its plan to renovate factory buildings abandoned in the 1990s, into a new modern art and cultural centre at a cost of more than 30 million yuan (US$3. 9 million) (News Guangdong 2007; see also O'Connor and Liu 2014). According to its CEO, the plan was to transform it into a district much like New York's Soho, while preserving its original appearance (News Guangdong 2007). They dispatched experts to visit Yaletown, the loft area of Vancouver, Canada, which allows people engaged in artistic activities to have an exclusive use of the buildings (ibid.). They copied Vancouver's Yaletown in OCT-LOFT. In 2012, URB (the Urbanus Research Bureau) organized a workshop in Shenzhen titled ‘The Making of a Creative City – International Workshop on post-industrial development of Shenzhen' (Moving Cities 2012). One of its research projects was ‘Creative City Shenzhen’. Their aim was to analyse the creative park model, advocated throughout the world. Part of this was to research the creative industries that had settled in the OCT-LOFT and also the social capital of the creative class – their social networking relationships, needs, perceptions and beliefs. The city aims to make the cultural and creative industries its fourth industry along with the high-tech, finance and logistic industries! As Prince (2010: 121) argues the rapid diffusion of creative industries policy is the result of so many policymakers, activists, council and government officers, cultural entrepreneurs, researchers, and academics from so many places being able to incorporate the concept into their political, cultural, economic and social projects.
In prioritizing attracting the creative class to Shenzhen, there has been a social restructuring in which white collar technocrats have increased and blue collar workers declined. This is not class replacement but class displacement in that Shenzhen's factory jobs have been moved elsewhere, and the City now actively excludes manual labourers, sanitation workers, and other low-end migrants from transferring their hukou to Shenzhen. Disturbingly, this process of, dare we say social eugenics, is being reinforced by the demolition of centrally located urbanized former rural villages (a vestige of earlier planning regimes) housing low-income migrants in particular, in a process of gentrification. As Booyens (2012) argues, creative city policies are gentrification policies because creative urban renewal exacerbates existing inequalities and marginalizes poor people. They uproot lower socio-economic residents and businesses and create social polarization. Cunningham (2009) has argued that in the global South policymakers tend to link creative industries with poverty alleviation, basic infrastructure development, social inclusion and the promotion of cultural heritage and diversity, but this has not been the case in Shenzhen.
Conclusions
These state-led urban projects around the globe verify Smith's (2002: 446) assertion that urban regeneration processes ‘represent the next wave of gentrification, planned and financed on an unprecedented scale’. Betancur (2014: 2) has found that gentrification in Latin America has not emerged from the local dynamics of restructuring; rather ‘it has been launched by governments with the assistance of international agencies pushing restructuring to create new markets and advance formulas of urban competitiveness in the South’. He argues that colonization and neocolonization have shaped Latin America into a single polity subject to the mandates of the Washington Consensus. In the twenty-first century, a global gentrification has been launched by governments. However, the emergence of gentrification in different places is embedded in very different stories, the Washington Consensus has less influence on China, for example; but the impact of gentrification is the same everywhere. Peck and Theodore (2010a: 173) argue that ‘[e]ven the “same” policies tend to be associated with different effects in different places, by virtue of their embeddedness in, and interactions with, local economic, social, and institutional environments’; yet, this is not the case for gentrification policy which has the same core effect everywhere – displacement of poor/low-income groups in favour of the wealthy.
As Inzulza-Contardo (2012) has said, recognizing urban regeneration as gentrification is important, for in Latin America, like elsewhere, terms such as ‘regeneracion urbana’ (urban regeneration), ‘renovacion urbana’ (urban renewal) or ‘mejoramiento de barrio’ (neighbourhood improvement) are used in official plans and policies – there is no mention of gentrification! This is a recurring situation in Asia too, where gentrification as a process exists ontologically, while seeing its epistemological absence in public discourses (see Ley and Teo 2014; Shin and Kim 2015). These plans and policies must be recognized as ‘gentrification’, and protective legislation is needed in countries around the world to mitigate what Roy (2005) calls the ‘unintended consequences’ of these blueprints – in the case of gentrification, displacement of the poor. How can gentrification be a good model or policy when it is to the detriment of the less well off in society?
McCann (2004) argues that this serial reproduction of policies, as Harvey (1989b: 10) referred to it in his entrepreneurial city thesis, or ‘policy transfer’ (see Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000), tends to foster weak competition and crowding in the market place ‘that works to the detriment of most cities by fostering a “treadmill” effect in which every city feels an external pressure to upgrade continually its policies, facilities, amenities, and so on, to stave off competition and maintain its position in the competitive urban hierarchy’ (p. 1910). It is hoped that cities and governments around the world will soon wake up and realize that models and policies that produce gentrification (Smith's 2002 gentrification generalized) are not a solution but rather a long-term problem. Urban policy needs to be made responsible at a global scale (see Massey 2004, 2007, 2011). It is high time that alternatives to gentrification were developed by policymakers and planners; this will necessitate not just some real creative thought, but also the courage to do things differently, to be leaders not followers.