7
Mega-Gentrification and Displacement
As the world witnesses deepening urbanization taking place in a highly uneven manner across and within regions and continents, the pace and scale of urban development projects has also ascended to an unprecedented scale. Contemporary cities in both the global North and South increasingly promote mega development projects. Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain, for instance, have been implementing new forms of urban development – most of which has been focused on large-scale infrastructure and real estate projects marketed at transnational capital and the global rich. Cities in mainland China have also been replacing low-rise workers' compounds and run-down industrial complexes with commercial real estate projects, each project directly affecting thousands of existing residents. Cities like Hong Kong have seen the demolition of individual residential high-rise towers in central districts to be replaced by more lucrative commercial or residential buildings, again affecting hundreds and thousands of households. To what extent can we refer to these projects as gentrification? To what extent do state-led developmental projects constitute gentrification? How do different factions of capital operate to extract exchange value at the expense of existing owners and renters' use value as well as their right to stay put?
In his afterword to the 2008 edition of Uneven Development, the late Neil Smith reiterated his earlier claim, stating that in the period of contemporary neoliberal globalization, ‘[a]t the urban scale, the gentrification which in the early 1980s was still an emergent phenomenon, has become a global urban strategy’ (Smith 2008: 263). Cities of the global South are regarded as having faced the brunt of the latest wave of ‘global’ gentrification, as mega-scale gentrification accompanied by mega-scale displacement (Lees 2012: 164). Examples from around the world testify to the severity of the mega-displacements resulting from the implementation of a particular set of urban policies and mega-projects, which aim to transform existing urban spaces within a highly compressed time scale. Mainland China, among other countries, seems to stand out in the discussion of mega-gentrification. In the case of Beijing, its official estimates indicate that the city's redevelopment projects throughout the 1990s affected about half a million residents or 160,900 households, resulting in the permanent displacement of more than two-thirds of the affected (Fang and Zhang 2003). Between 2000 and 2008, again based on official estimates, it was further reported by a Geneva-based international NGO that nearly 1.5 million residents were expected to incur the brunt of redevelopment projects in Beijing, a process accelerated in part by the city's preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games (COHRE 2007). Official figures mostly include the number of permanent residents without taking into account migrant workers and their families, and therefore, the actual impact on urbanites in Beijing would well exceed one's imagination. The situation was similar in Shanghai too, where the municipal government's ambitious redevelopment projects to transform the city affected about 746,000 households between 1995 and 2005 (see Iossifova 2009), and half a million households between 2003 and 2010 (Shanghai Statistical Bureau 2011 cited in Shin 2012). But mega-displacement experiences comparable to those of China's cities can also be found elsewhere, especially in its neighbouring country, South Korea. New waves of commercial redevelopment projects in Seoul in the 1980s, partly accelerated by municipal preparation for the 1988 Summer Olympic Games, reportedly displaced 720,000 people during the five years between 1983 and 1988 (see ACHR 1989: 91). This meant that nearly one in every ten people in Seoul at the time were subject to displacement.
Gentrification in its classic form, as first discussed by Ruth Glass (1964a), incurred a reasonably long-term process of neighbourhood change, involving dwelling-by-dwelling rehabilitation to convert working-class accommodations into those for a more affluent class. The pace of classic gentrification would often be slow enough for local residents not to notice the severity of the changes until the transformation became irreversible. However, the subsequent waves of gentrification (see Hackworth and Smith 2001) have been much more visible and vicious, involving a series of residential blocks that accommodate hundreds, if not thousands, of residents who become subject to mass displacement to give way to wholesale clearance and reconstruction of upmarket buildings and facilities that lie beyond the reach of the original residents. The massive scale of redevelopment in contemporary cities, and hence the domination of new-build gentrification, suggests a whole set of different rules and norms for the operation of the state, its apparatus, including planning authorities and law enforcement agencies, and real estate capital; that is, a different set of rules and logics of accumulation, which is qualitatively different from the gentrification Ruth Glass discussed.
In this chapter, we aim to contribute to extending understanding of contemporary gentrification that has become not only global in accordance with extended or planetary urbanization (Brenner and Schmid 2014; Merrifield 2013a; see Chapter 2) but also massive in scale to produce mega-gentrification, which elevates the effects of domicide to a whole new terrain for the displaced (Porteous and Smith 2001; Shao 2013). Our enquiry into global mega-gentrification calls for research on the changing nature of the state and capital as well as state-society relations. In doing so, the chapter pays special attention to the contextual nature of gentrification in each society, for gentrification ‘is a product of particular historical, contextual and temporal forces’ (Lees 2012: 165). Contextualizing gentrification in a society also means that we refrain from isolating gentrification in a country as being unique and incomparable with gentrification elsewhere. While mega-gentrification in the global South appears to be more prominent and brutal, we are aware of equally brutal and vicious processes of domicide as a result of gentrification in the global North.
Mega-Displacement as A Pre-requisite for Urbanization in the Global South?
We begin by enquiring into the rise of mega-gentrification in the global South. This enquiry requires us to make a further distinction between displacement-led development and gentrification, for many countries in the global South are undergoing massive restructuring of their national territories, which involve spatial restructuring to accommodate various land enclosures and clearance efforts to accommodate developmental projects such as railways, dams, power plants, factories and ports, as well as other essential urban facilities. Informal settlements often located in the path of such developmental projects are subject to clearance, resulting in mega-displacement known as ‘development-led displacement’ (DID). It is necessary to separate these processes of DID from the process of gentrification, although very often, the promotion of mixed-use projects suggests that DID and gentrification may occur simultaneously or sequentially in some instances.
In discussing spatial fix as a solution to overcoming the over-accumulation crisis in industrial production, David Harvey (1978) highlighted the ways in which capital switching took place to channel surplus capital into the built environment, especially into expanding fixed assets such as infrastructure (motorways, rail, power plants and so on) and also the real estate sector. This has become recognized as a prominent feature that highlights the several rounds of economic crises that characterized economies such as Britain and the United States from the 1970s. The experiences of the global South, in particular countries such as mainland China, have provided an opportunity to further refine theories about circuits of accumulation and capital switching. Rather than the secondary circuit of the built environment rising above the primary circuit of industrial production, the two circuits are often mutually supportive in countries that lack production bases as well as infrastructure and facilities (see Shin 2014a: 510–12).
The first dimension of the channelling of capital into investing in fixed assets produces displacement, which can be conceptualized as displacement by development or development-induced displacement (DID) that largely takes the form of forced eviction and resettlement (Mehta 2009; Satiroglu and Choi 2015). Given the large-scale nature of most development (especially infrastructure) projects, permanent displacement takes place often at the scale of hundreds of thousands of people per project. For instance, 192 dam projects around the world, which had entered into the construction phase between 1986 and 1993, reportedly produced the displacement of four million people annually (Bartolome et al. 2000: 4). In Manila, the Philippines, its metropolitan rail project accompanied large-scale land assembly, resulting in the clearance of informal settlements along the routes. In total, 35,000 households faced displacement between 2003 and 2010 (see Choi 2014). In Beijing, as part of its preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, the municipality aimed to carry out so-called environmental improvement projects, which would have affected about 370,500 people in migrant-concentrated ‘urbanized villages’ (Shin 2009c: 133–5). The list could go on indefinitely. The bottom line is that mega-displacement has become synonymous with development in the process of capitalist accumulation. DID shares a number of features with gentrification. In particular, those affected by DID may go through similar experiences of displacement as experienced in times of gentrification, given their eviction from homes and neighbourhoods. Narae Choi (2014: 9) thus notes: ‘The process and outcome of such mass displacement and relocation and, most importantly, the uprooting experience felt by displaced residents were almost identical to those of gentrification-induced displacement, particularly in terms of the issues around compensation housing and the challenges in a new site, which often result in the return of the relocated’.
DID does not always lead to gentrification. Bartolome et al. (2000: 7) point out that DID has four major characteristics: (a) displacement results from a particular model of development that does not give consideration to minimizing social and environmental costs; (b) most displacement involves involuntary displacement of people who are prevented from making meaningful participation to voice their views; (c) displacement often incurs a long period of refusal of development opportunities and traumatic forced relocation due to insufficient warning; (d) the scale of displacement is often underestimated. Obviously these characteristics echo those of displacement in the gentrification literature, but ultimately, DID differs from gentrification, given the centrality of infrastructure projects. Mega-displacement can be a daily experience of both urban and rural inhabitants in the global South, which occurs as a result of development projects that are supposedly to benefit the entire population, however dubiously public interests are defined in reality. An illustrative example would be the construction of metro systems in China's major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, which incurs the displacement of hundreds of thousands of urbanites but benefits entire populations, including low-skilled migrant, by providing heavily subsidized fares that have hardly increased for years.
Infrastructure Development and Gentrification
However, it is also necessary to discuss how DID indirectly produces gentrification under particular circumstances by means of creating rent gaps through upping potential ground rents by the installation of infrastructure and urban amenities such as parks and new water fronts. In the earlier cited example of Manila's metropolitan rail project, it was hinted that ‘[t]he removal of informal settlements [as part of land clearance for rail construction] has the secondary effect of formalizing the land use and access to infrastructures in the locality as well as of physical “beautification”, thereby opening doors to formal development/redevelopment’ (Choi 2014: 12). This creates greater vulnerability for the existing urban poor as they are placed under displacement pressure due to ensuing speculation and increased living costs. In the case of Taipei, the construction of Da-an Forest Park, dubbed as Taipei's version of Central Park in Manhattan, led to a surge in land prices and the proliferation of lucrative real estate projects in areas adjacent to the park (Huang 2015; Jou et al. 2014).
A more recent technique for boosting development potential frequently used is transit-oriented development (TOD). Hong Kong in particular has been experimenting with this to ensure that its state-owned lands are put into the more lucrative uses of development when they are assembled for expanding its metro network. By means of implementing a ‘rail + property’ development programme, the development rights in the immediate surroundings, as well as the space above each station, are sold to real estate developers for mixed-use development (see Cervero and Murakami 2009). While the revenues generated from such a sale of rights have contributed to the Hong Kong MTR Corporation's recovery of metro construction costs, upmarket residential and commercial development around each station precinct has also resulted in a price premium for the residential properties on the development site. This creates further opportunities to put land uses in adjacent areas into a higher and better use, adding more displacement pressure (also see Rerat and Lees 2011 on spatial capital around Swiss railway stations).
Creating new urban amenities through public investment may also trigger gentrification by inducing the increase in land values in surrounding areas. In this case, development projects for installing such amenities may be regarded as creating a beachhead for subsequent gentrification. This is exemplified by an urban project in Seoul, which was to restore an inner-city stream that was covered nearly half a century ago. Known as the Cheonggye Stream Restoration Project, it is a project that resulted in the provision of a 5.8-kilometre open-air stream with footpaths as a linear park that traverses the historic centre of Seoul (Lim et al. 2013). It is known for its green nature and gained world-wide attention in recent years (e.g. Revkin 2009). While the project itself was publicly announced in July 2002 and saw its completion in October 2005, Lim et al. (2013) examined the changes in land uses between 2000 and 2011 in historic central business district areas divided by a section of the restored stream. One of their key findings was confirmation that land prices and rents increased after restoration, which resulted in ‘accelerating land use change as land owners seek to maximize profits by attracting more affluent users who value the newly created urban open space’ (Lim et al. 2013: 199). Some refer to the leading role of public entrepreneurship (Seo and Chung 2012), although in reality the project has seen the advancement of urban elites’ political aspirations, as well as spatial restructuring to open up further avenues of urban capital accumulation in the historic central business district, which was redeveloped two- to-three decades ago and was awaiting another round of revalorization. The result has been the advancement of ‘commercial gentrification’, displacing small businesses and industrial uses that used to take advantage of low rents before the restoration project, giving way to more affluent users and the intensification of commercial functions for high-end users (Lim et al. 2013).
Mega-Gentrification, the State and Urban Accumulation in the Global South
We have seen in the previous section how DID occurs on a large scale, especially when infrastructure projects take place in concentrated urban areas with a high density of residential populations in the global South. Increasingly, these residential areas, both formal and informal, are subject to speculation (c. f. Desai and Loftus 2013; Goldman 2011; Shin 2014a). This relates to a dimension of capital switching into the built environment corresponding to the consumption fund in David Harvey's schema. This section discusses how mega-gentrification has been occurring, and what made such mega-gentrification possible. Gentrifying a crowded inner-city neighbourhood area in its entirety, for instance, usually goes beyond the scope of an individual developer or pioneering gentrifiers. Such a task requires the intervention of local and central states, often entrepreneurial, to make it possible. In this regard, we start by examining the intervention of the state in gentrification, which has been more strongly pronounced in recent years. In this section, we introduce several cases in order to discuss how conflictual and/or supportive interactions between the state, capital and citizens produce a particular typology of gentrification and displacement. Obviously these cases (and those sub-cases under each category of the state) are not meant to be exhaustive but suggestive of further investigation.
Mega-gentrification under East Asian developmental states
East Asia as a region has been known for the developmental orientation of its national states, which ensured their legitimacy by achieving economic security for its general population despite its undemocratic and authoritarian nature of governance in times of condensed industrialization (Woo-Cumings 1999). Having benefited from preferential access to the US market in return for their support for the US-led capitalist bloc during the Cold War period (Glassman and Choi 2014), East Asian developmental states were investing heavily in fixed assets to build up their infrastructural strength to pursue, initially labour-intensive manufacturing industries, then moving up the global value chains through technological innovation and exploiting neighboring emerging economies with cheaper labour costs (Arrighi 2009; Kim 2013; Yeung 2009). In the housing sector, socio-political relations determined the ways in which the national state intervened in housing provision for their national population. Bae-Gyoon Park's (1998) comparative study of public housing provision in Singapore and South Korea is illustrative in this regard. In Singapore, public housing was extensively supplied in part to secure social stability for the social reproduction of labour for its nascent industrial production, and in part for the state's acquisition of legitimacy by being able to provide for the immediate needs of the middle and working classes. In contrast, South Korea was seeing the domination of a growth alliance between the state and large businesses (commonly known as Chaebols), as the state redirected available resources towards helping businesses grow and secure their share in the world (the US in particular) market. While the state helped build the real estate industry and strengthen the housing sector through the activities of its national housing corporation, these were mostly to strengthen the commercial housing market based on freehold ownership so that public housing stocks were no longer part of the state's responsibility (Park 1998). Families were to cater for their own housing needs, and during the earlier period of condensed industrialization and urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s, the growth of squatter and substandard settlements was inevitable, as the urban poor were finding it difficult to gain a foothold in the formal housing market.
It is in this context that the Seoul municipal government in South Korea embarked on a city-wide programme known as the Joint Redevelopment Programme to transform its prevailing substandard settlements into commercial housing districts for the middle classes from the early 1980s. The programme provided a platform for a coalition between property owners and developers to work together to initiate commercial redevelopment. The city at the time was also in desperate need of beautifying the city-scape in preparation for the 1988 Summer Olympic Games. The municipal government resorted to a strategy of wholesale clearance of existing structures and reconstruction of upscale commercial flats to the highest density permitted by planning regulations. The Joint Redevelopment Programme (JPR) was technically a programme led by an association of property owners in substandard settlements, who would choose a developer or a consortium of developers as a redevelopment partner for the provision of finance, project management, construction and sales of completed flats in the new housing market. Legalization of land tenure was part of the programme, if property owners possessed illegal dwellings on state-owned lands, a common feature that characterized many of the surviving substandard settlements at the time. While property owners and developers were to be in the driving seat of redevelopment projects, the local state (the municipal government and other state apparatus including the police force) were acting more as a facilitator, actively intervening through its use of planning and administrative powers. While the JRP had the nominal aim of turning poor owner-occupiers in substandard settlements into homeowners of new modern commercial flats after redevelopment, in practice, upmarket new flats were often beyond the reach of poor owner-occupiers despite the preferential discounted prices of flats for the members of property-owners’ associations. Speculative interests often came into these redevelopment areas, and more affluent buyers often purchased the property rights (often referred to as ddakji in Korean or tickets) to replace existing poorer owners who attempted to acquire marginal gains (that is, a portion of potential ground rents) by selling their rights. Successive transactions often took place motivated by speculative interests.
Based on government-supplied data, Shin and Kim (2015) suggest that out of 211 project sites subject to the redevelopment programme completed between the early 1980s and 2010, the average size of dwellings per project site turned out to be 379 units. Thus, it was not uncommon to see thousands of people evicted from a neighbourhood that had been an affordable place of residence. Authoritarian states intervened to guarantee the smooth operation of profiteering activities launched by a faction of property owners and developers. Brutal evictions were common, especially during the 1980s and early 1990s, often exercised by thugs hired by developers and helped by the police who coalesced with developers. Here, the case of Sanggyedong redevelopment is an exemplary case of how the state and developers pushed forward with mega-gentrification by implementing a joined-up effort to undermine the housing rights of the urban poor.
Case study: Sanggyedong redevelopment in the 1980s
The redevelopment of Sanggyedong resulted in the displacement of 1,528 households, which included 947 squatter owner-households without land titles and 581 tenant households (Kim 1998). It was designated as a redevelopment district on 20 April 1985. The metro station opened in January of the same year. The size of the Sanggyedong project site reached 43,620 square metres, and the area was a substandard settlement located in the then northern suburban area of Seoul. According to the local district government, the substandard settlement was standing on lands mostly owned by the central state (and a small share of municipal land), hence rendering the neighbourhood as informal and illegal. As noted earlier, most original owners sold their property rights to speculators: according to a study, it turned out that ‘[o]f all the houses that had switched ownership, 18 per cent had changed owners more than five times’ (Kim 1998: 214), and eventually less than 10 per cent of the original squatter owners were rehoused in the new redeveloped estate on the site (ibid.). On the other hand, tenants were facing severe disadvantages and permanent displacement, which took place in the most violent way that one could envisage. The following excerpt from a report put together by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights vividly captures the disastrous experiences of those residents, most of whom had been tenants, when they were resisting eviction:
There were around 1,100 houses on a four hectare site. When local residents organized to resist this redevelopment (and their eviction), they were subjected to a series of violent attacks; between June 26th 1986 and April 14th, 1987, they were attacked 18 times. Around 400 people (about half of them young people and children) resisted eviction. Most of these attacks involved several hundred riot police and several hundred men hired by the construction company to intimidate and assault the residents. Many of the residents suffered serious injuries as a result of these attacks – including grandparents and babies. The cost of treating those injured totaled some US$15,000 during this period…
On April 14th, 1987, a force of 3,500 people and 77 trucks moved into the area – against 380 citizens. The belongings of the residents were loaded onto the trucks and driven away. The tent headquarters was demolished and the residents carried off the area. Wide trenches were dug at the entrances to the area and large barricades erected to prevent re-entry. Riot police and guards hired by the construction company remained to guard the site.
(ACHR 1989: 92)
The case of the Sanggyedong eviction received greater attention than other eviction cases in the 1980s, probably because of the tenant struggle's direct connection with the 1988 Summer Olympic Games, showcasing the brutality the authoritarian regime imposed upon evictees. As Davis (2011: 592) states, ‘[t]he Sanggyedong group debacle raises the question of how much eviction and development was taking place, where the human impact was practically invisible’. For us, it is also a testimony of the brutality associated with mega-gentrification carried out under a developmental authoritarian state, whose action is nevertheless supported in part by speculative property interests including members of property owners in redevelopment project sites and other speculative buyers who replaced poorer owner-occupiers therein. These evictions due to gentrification took place a whole year before the revanchist evictions in Tompkins Square Park, in Manhattan, New York City (see Smith 1996)!
Mega-gentrification in neo-authoritarian socialist states
Large-scale displacement in mainland China is not new. Having experienced accelerated urbanization since the implementation of economic reform and Open Door policies, the central and local states have guided a huge amount of investment in fixed assets to expand the country's economic growth (for a summary of China's urbanization process, see Shin 2015). This process has entailed expropriation of village lands and the conversion of farmlands under the ownership of village collectives into construction lands to be owned and managed by the state. As Carolyn Cartier points out, ‘[w]ith the state and village collectives as sole landowners, the crux of the problem is that local governments and officials appropriate and use land as a negotiating tool to attract investment and marshal authoritarian power to put down protests against land appropriation’ (Cartier 2011: 1117).
The power to expropriate land for development extends to urban governments, who are continuously seeking land resources to maximize their revenue generation on the one hand, and on the other, to transform the urban space under their jurisdiction into modernized space to realize world-city aspirations and cater for the consumption needs of the emerging middle classes. While many lands on the periphery are dedicated to further industrialization (e.g. special economic zones for export-processing and manufacturing) and technological innovation (e.g. science parks) through offering cheap lands to attract investment, lands in existing urban areas are increasingly subject to high fees upon sales of land use rights to developers (in both the state and the private sectors) who are to initiate various real estate projects. The land use premiums collected from the use right sales constitutes the major part of extra-budgetary revenues for local government finance. The growing importance of land revenues in financing urban development in Chinese cities has given rise to the conceptualization by Chinese scholars of ‘land-based accumulation’ (see Hsing 2010 in particular).
The production of mega-gentrification in mainland China on the immense scale outlined at the outset of this chapter is an accumulated outcome of numerous individual projects that have been implemented across time and space. Obviously, all these projects are not identical in terms of their institutional backgrounds, history of project sites and social consequences. Nevertheless, given the context of China's real estate investment having become a major contributor to the country's fixed asset formation and thus economic development and urbanization, it can be reasonably concluded that mega-gentrification is closely knitted with the urban development agenda by the Party State. It also involves in particular local states at the municipal scale, which have displayed increasingly entrepreneurial characteristics (Duckett 1998; Shin 2009b; Wang 2011), pursuing profiteering opportunities at the expense of local inhabitants’ rights to the city and to stay put (Iossifova 2009; Shin 2013; He 2012). Two case studies of top-down redevelopment are illustrative in this regard, exhibiting the highly interventionist, entrepreneurial and authoritarian nature of the local state. These case studies are largely taken from Cheng (2012).
Case studies: Top-down redevelopment in Xi'an and Foshan
Two case studies discussed here exhibit how the local states in mainland China have been actively promoting property-led redevelopment in order to address the accumulation agenda, as well as place promotion that meets the state elite's aspiration to build a modern city that builds upon commodification of real estate properties and breaks away from the practices of China's planned economy era. The two specific cases refer to the redevelopment of a former industrial and residential compound in Xi'an, and the redevelopment of an extensive heritage neighbourhood in Foshan.
In the case of Xi'an, a regional centre in northwestern China, the site concerned was a mixed-use compound in an inner-city area of 5. 3 square kilometres, known as Fangzhicheng that accommodated about 160,000 people. The compound was built by the central government shortly after China's Liberation, and used to provide jobs and living amenities for inhabitants whose livelihoods used to depend heavily on five state-owned textile mills and other supporting facilities and institutions. When the economic reform started, the place lost its competition with those textile industries in the coastal region, and experienced reduced operation or closure, laying off a number of workers whose livelihoods deteriorated as a result. When the local government acquired control over the compound from the central government in 2008, it subsequently embarked on the redevelopment of the area into a mixed-use area to accommodate residential, business and industrial functions. A government agency called the Fangzhicheng Integrated Development Office was formed to oversee the whole process, delegated with full powers to administer the operation and approve plans. The agency also established a tight working relationship with developers interested in the project, attracted by the locational advantage of the project site due to its proximity to a new metro station and the high demand for housing in adjacent areas.
In the case of Foshan in Guangdong province, the site of redevelopment involved a residential neighbourhood known as Dongguanli that was well-known for its architectural heritage and designated as a national historic preservation site in 2001. The neighbourhood accommodated about 30,000 residents or 9,635 households in its 0.64 million square metres in addition to a number of small businesses. Its redevelopment commenced in early 2007, directly led by the municipal government of Foshan, which learned extensively from the experience of Shanghai's Xintiandi redevelopment (Yang and Chang 2007; Wai 2006) and made sure that the same developer (Hong Kong Shui On Group) for the Xintiandi project would develop Dongguanli. Despite having heritage preservation as the key objective, the actual project, as demonstrated by the first phase completed in 2011, incurred the near complete demolition of existing structures on the site (as was the case with Xintiandi) and the reconstruction of new structures with antique styles, reminiscent of the ‘fake-over’ process in Beijing's Qianmen redevelopment (People's Daily 2009; see also Chen 2011) (see also the section on historic preservation in Chapter 4).
In both cases, the local state made heavy-handed intervention in the redevelopment process. In Xi'an, compensation offers to local residents living in decades-old self-built units were against the residents’ original expectations, and far from adequate to purchase redeveloped units even at discounted prices, as many households were financially stricken. While local residents launched a number of individual and collective actions, formal and informal, to express their discontent, the government agency in charge of the redevelopment of Fangzhicheng took various measures to make sure their discontent went unnoticed. These measures included: (a) deletion of online petitions from web sites and prohibition of media reports on the case; (b) rejection of residents’ property rights claims on their self-built units despite their recognition by a state ministry in 1956 upon their construction; (c) backroom negotiation over compensation standards; (d) explicit propaganda activities in the neighbourhood to compel residents to agree to demolition; (e) threats to cut electricity and water supply if residents refused to sign compensation agreements; (f) coopting laid-off workers through their employers by offering priority arrangement for re-employment and additional options of living in low-rent flats on site if unable to afford to purchase redevelopment flats. In Foshan, the local government was more actively involved as it carried out the demolition works itself rather than outsourcing them in order to ensure timely assembly of land for developers. Residents in Dongguanli were subject to off-site relocation as developers aimed to maximize their gains from commercial redevelopment of the site, which targeted the rich. While the residents were offered the highest compensation standards in the city, incidents of discontent still broke out due to dissatisfaction with the compensation measures that did not permit residents’ return to the site after redevelopment. Their online protests were banned, and media reports were also prohibited so that the voices of frustrated residents would go unheard. Local taxation officers often disrupted the day-to-day running of small businesses by exercising frequent checks on their accounting records, a means to coerce them to sign compensation agreements and vacate their premises. Public servants living in the redevelopment site were also subject to coercion by their employers, who urged them to sign the compensation agreements so that demolition could proceed. Between 2008 and 2011, dwellings were demolished one-by-one by the local government's exercise of forced demolition.
The actions of local governments in both Xi'an and Foshan were in close cooperation with real estate developers to make sure their redevelopment sites were to be ready for the injection of real estate capital. Local residents’ rights to their neighbourhoods and to the city were dispossessed in the process, reminiscent of David Harvey's ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2005, 2010b). In the context of speculative urbanization in mainland China where real estate investment has become a pillar of economic development, both the Fangzhicheng and Dongguanli projects could be regarded as an effective means to release state land so that the space could be converted into a commodified space for extracting exchange value (Weber 2002; see also Shin 2014a), supported by the actions of the local state acting as a de facto landlord (Shin 2009b).
Hidden Displacement in the Global South
Large-scale mega-gentrifications are often referred to by critical scholars and advocacy groups as phenomena that produce a qualitatively different experience of displacement from those in the global North. Referring to the reports by COHRE (2006) on forced evictions, Elvin Wyly and his colleagues wrote:
The only circumstances where there is not an obsessive concern with the uncertainty of numerical estimates are those places in the global South where the scale of dispossession is undeniable: an estimated 2 million people were displaced by forced evictions across Africa between 2003 and 2006, and 3. 4 million were displaced in Asia – not counting the million-plus pushed out to make way for Beijing's hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games.
However, the scale of displacement as reported above is mostly based on counting last-remaining residents who were occupying property at the time of demolition and/or forced eviction and directly affected by it. A more nuanced understanding of what displacement actually constitutes tells us that such a method grossly underestimates the actual scale of displacement.
In his thought-provoking piece on the processes of gentrification, Peter Marcuse (1985a) rejects a simple definition of displacement as equating with only ‘direct’ displacement that affects the last-remaining residents. In addition to ‘last-resident displacement’, Marcuse further adds ‘chain displacement’, ‘exclusionary displacement’, and ‘displacement pressure’ (see Marcuse 1985a: 205–8). Chain displacement occurs when households who occupied a unit previously, before last-remaining residents, have also been subject to displacement. Exclusionary displacement results when previously affordable dwellings and neighbourhoods become gentrified or become no longer available (due to various reasons e.g. law and planning regulations) for those households who could afford to live there before changes. Finally, displacement pressure is what may be felt by those households who are not immediately affected by displacement but whose experience of displacement may become a reality in time to come. Such displacement pressure may be generated due to on-going changes in the neighbourhood, loss of existing social ties due to neighbours’ displacement, and changes at the municipal scale such as overall housing price increases that generate concern for families. Here, one may link ‘displacement pressure’ to what Davidson and Lees (2010) refer to as ‘phenomenological displacement’. In this respect, those households under displacement pressure can be said to have been put in a state of on-going displacement.
The expansion of our understanding of how displacement can be multifaceted and nuanced allows us to see gentrification and the social consequences of neighbourhood changes in a profoundly different way. For example, official figures from governments or real estate developers involved in a redevelopment project mostly report the scale of last-remaining displacement by conducting head-counts of those tenants and owner-occupiers who are known to be occupying dwellings at the time of carrying out a neighbourhood census. Such an exercise involves boundary-making in terms of determining the rightful holders of legal property rights and identifying who qualifies for any kind of compensation measures for owners and tenants (see Ascensao 2015 on this in Lisbon, Portugal). For instance, in mainland China, such head-counting is usually reported by local governments and the media in terms of how many households are subject to relocation, and only includes permanently registered households confirmed by the official records kept by local neighbourhood committees. The immediate shortfall of such an approach is how the actual scale of displacement is hugely underestimated, excluding in particular private migrant tenants.
The underestimation of the scale of displacement also results from the long lead time of urban redevelopment projects, which place displacement pressures on local residents, prompting their house-moves even before actual redevelopment itself is carried out. This suggests that chain displacement is closely linked to development pressure in redevelopment projects that result in new-build gentrification. This is clearly demonstrated in a case study of Nangok's neighbourhood redevelopment in Seoul, South Korea, taken from Shin (2006, 2009a).
Case study: Nangok neighbourhood redevelopment
Nangok, located in the southwestern periphery of Seoul in South Korea, developed along a hillside, initially designated as a relocation site in 1968 for those households displaced from a number of sites in central Seoul. The majority (93 per cent) of the land on which Nangok neighbourhood sat was publicly owned, resulting in the absence of formal land tenure for most dwelling owners. During the 1970s and 1980s when South Korea was experiencing rapid urbanization and industrialization, Nangok saw an expansion of its population size, largely due to incoming migrants from rural regions and other urban poor families who found rents and housing prices in Nangok much more affordable for their household economy. By 1991, according to an official record kept at the municipal government, 2,732 illegal dwellings were present in the neighbourhood, accommodating 4,416 households or 16,734 people in total (Seoul Municipal Government 1991: 186).
When the municipal government was embarking on a city-wide redevelopment scheme known as the ‘joint redevelopment programme’ in the early 1980s (also see earlier in this chapter), local residents in Nangok also heard rumours that the neighbourhood was to be subject to such redevelopment. The rumours became a reality in May 1995 when the neighbourhood received conditional designation as a redevelopment district by the municipal government. The designation also signalled restrictions on further growth of the neighbourhood, including the prohibition of any additional investment in upgrading dwellings or building extensions. The prospect of imminent demolition and reconstruction of the neighbourhood also discouraged long-term security of tenure especially for tenant households. Nevertheless, the neighbourhood still retained a substantial number of residents whose size totalld 14,640 by 1996 (Gwan'ak District Assembly 1996).
The redevelopment of Nangok faced a number of setbacks in the following years particularly due to the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, which negatively affected the real estate markets in South Korea, discouraging the profitability of the neighbourhood redevelopment plan that depended heavily on raising profits from selling commercial flats to subsidize the construction of flats earmarked for original property owners. The original developer who was given the right to redevelop in 1996 had to withdraw from the project due to the bankruptcy of its holding company. Eventually, a public corporation intervened to salvage the project, and the displacement of the last-remaining residents started in October 2000. By this time, there were around 2,450 households (about 10,000 people). However, this meant that between 1996 and 2000, a little less than 5,000 people chose to leave the neighbourhood, most probably in part to avoid the inconveniences of demolition and in part as a result of property-owners' efforts to vacate dwellings. Official records that refer to the number of people affected by the neighbourhood redevelopment only refer to the last-remaining residents, but such records do not tell us the full picture and hide the occurrence of chain displacement that took place before the displacement of last-remaining residents. Nor do they show us the size of exclusionary displacement, that is, the exclusion of poor households who could have easily chosen those dwellings in Nangok as their most affordable housing options had the neighbourhood not been bulldozed.
Mega-Displacement: A Global South Phenomenon?
Mega-displacement is often associated with cities in the global South, but it is also becoming a dominant trend in cities in Western Europe and North America, facilitated by the intense financialization of the real estate sector and the aggressive action of neoliberalizing punitive states to implement accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2005). In particular, mega-gentrification has been associated with the process of redeveloping large-scale public housing estates in some Western European and North American countries (Bridge, Butler and Lees 2011). Public housing estates were formerly seen to be part of the decommodified means to resist gentrification (see Marcuse 1985b), but they are increasingly subject to territorial stigmatization (Wacquant et al. 2014) and the onslaught of gentrifying forces in the name of private-public sector partnerships and urban renaissance using mixed communities policy (see Chapter 5 this book).
For instance, the HOPE VI programme in the US, since the early 1990s, has initiated the redevelopment of deprived large-scale public housing estates in the US, which have become subject to redevelopment (read gentrification) (Zhang and Weismann 2006), and authors such as Lees, Slater and Wyly (2008) and Goetz (2010) have identified the deconcentration (read displacement) of the original residents as an outcome of the policy. Kingsley et al. (2003) examined 103 HOPE VI project sites that received grants up until 1998, and point out that ‘25,628 households were relocated from these sites from the time the programme began through the end of March 2000’ (p. 429). This suggests that on average, 259 households had been subject to relocation from each site. Public housing estates subject to the HOPE VI programme are experiencing stigmatization, as they are characterized as experiencing ‘severe distress’ in terms of high incidents of family poverty, crime, vacancy and/or physical dilapidation (see Goetz 2010: 139 on eligibility for the programme).
The stigmatization of public housing has also been enacted in the UK where council estates have been placed under threat by a coalition of local councils and developers under the banner of creating mixed tenure through redevelopment (Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008). In London, in particular, the redevelopment of council estates in a similar manner to the HOPE VI programme has produced significant changes in both project sites and neighbouring areas (Lees 2014c). It has, in the words of Goetz (2010: 153), ‘activated nascent land markets or swept away the last remaining obstacles to gentrification’ (see also Wyly and Hammel 1999). As observed in Paul Watt's (2009) study of housing stock transfer policy in London, schemes such as the New Deal for Communities regeneration scheme that was to enframe the idea of community or public participation often turned out to be ‘a Trojan horse for state-led gentrification in London’ (ibid. 240). In the case of the Ocean Estate in Tower Hamlets, for example, the largest council estate in the borough, the local council promoted the transfer of public housing stocks to a housing association to inject capital for much-anticipated regeneration of the estate. This involved the demolition of 543 homes, comprised of 440 rental and 103 leaseholder properties. The demolition was followed by the construction of 714 private units that were meant to provide finance for the refurbishment of the rest of the estate's properties. No units were to be provided for the displaced tenants, while the hundreds of incoming wealthier families created displacement pressures and phenomenological displacement through the transformation of the estate. Lees (2014b, 2014c) discusses the significant and disturbing displacement of thousands of residents (council rent and leaseholder) from the Aylesbury and Heygate estates in Southwark to make way for newly redeveloped housing estates (see also Municipal Dreams 2014).
There are at least fifty council estates in inner London being affected by mega-gentrification and displacement; we estimate the direct displacement of tens of thousands of council tenants (and many thousands more if we were to factor in indirect or exclusionary displacement), in what is the removal of the final bricks in the wall of total gentrification for inner London (see Figure 7.4).
Conclusions
The Parisienne's experience of Haussmannization in the nineteenth century has become a lived experience for many urbanites in the contemporary global South, and it has also re-emerged for a faction of marginalized urban inhabitants in certain cities in the global North. The rise of mega-scale gentrification testifies to the consolidation of a new gentrification economy (see Chapter 3) and builds on the increasing proliferation of slum gentrification (see Chapter 6). Mega-gentrification also denotes a powerful nexus between the state sector and businesses, which feeds upon the developmental potential (i.e. rent gap) produced in a variety of urban settings (see Chapter 2). We have seen earlier that such rent gap formation does not always depend on disinvestment in gentrifiable properties, but also on growing affluence in adjacent urban districts that outpace, for example, the growth of the developmental potential in substandard settlements.
The experiences of mega-displacement and gentrification testify to the importance of looking at the complex sets of interests that are shaped and reconstituted in conjunction with the changing geography of property-based interests. The hegemonic power of the state and businesses does not enable mega-gentrification simply through the use of violence and coercion. In Seoul, the proliferation of substandard settlements was initially subject to forced eviction and demolition by the state throughout the 1970s (see Mobrand 2008 for an historical account of this process). However, their eradication was only possible when the state devised a redevelopment programme (JRP) that enticed indigenous property owners to join property-based interests. Embedded in a speculative real estate market, these interests aimed to turn these neighbourhoods into a higher and better use, turning the land on which the substandard settlements sat into profitable commodities. The history shows that poorer factions of these property owners also lost out in the process (see Shin 2009a; Ha 2001); indeed, the separation of property owners from ‘property-less’ tenants was a classic divide-and-rule strategy to weaken opposition to the state-led redevelopment programme. A similar situation is also apparent in the process of speculative urban development in mainland China where private tenants, who are the most severely affected by mega-gentrification, get excluded from the outset. Property owners' claims on their properties in urban neighbourhoods secure legitimacy only to the extent that they are recognized by the local state that acts as a de facto landlord (Shin 2009b).
The cases of mega-gentrification discussed in this chapter show us that the experience of displacement differs across different segments of the population in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This means that it would be dangerous to identify displacees as a single, homogenous group of residents with a uniform interest. As Sapana Doshi (2013: 845) states in her discussion of slum redevelopment in Mumbai, ‘uneven displacement practices are central to the social production of land markets’. As such, ‘slum redevelopment [in Mumbai] has privileged local and transnational elites through a combination of negotiated consent to displacement and forced eviction’ (Doshi 2013: 848). The use of consent and coercion is at the core of Gramscian understandings of ruling class domination (Gramsci 1971: 57–8), and as Haugaard (2006) summarizes, the hegemony of dominant interests is secured through ‘a series of consensual alliances with other classes and groups’ (p. 5). For mega-gentrification and displacement to continue as a dominant mode of urban accumulation, it seems necessary that the manufacturing of a broader societal consensus to maximize opportunities of profiteering from real estate investment be built on a set of coercive measures to dissipate discontented voices. Such consensus building is sometimes facilitated by the dystopian imagery of criminalizing squatters (e.g. in Taipei) or welfare dependants (e.g. in the UK and the US) by increasingly neoliberal[izing] states (see Jou et al. 2014; Lees 2014b; Wacquant et al. 2014). Sometimes, as East Asia's history of speculative urbanization under developmental states attests to, the proliferation of speculative property-based interests in the state sector, populist sector, and the business sector, seems to have created a particularistic culture and discourse (cf. Ley and Teo 2014 regarding Hong Kong and Shin and Kim 2015 regarding South Korea) that have increasingly excluded the urban poor.