Planetary gentrification

There have been lots of proclamations of global gentrification based on speculation rather than investigation. In our book we use the word ‘planetary’ to signal our critique of assertions that gentrification has simply ‘gone global’. Our use of the term ‘planetary gentrification’ is not a direct copy nor endorsement of the idea of ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2012), but it does draw on some of the ideas around that (eg. Merrifield, 2013). Rather we use the word planetary to underline the new scale and scope of C21st processes of gentrification, its new found speed and its new frontiers in space, and to argue that gentrification occurs as much in endogenous ways as it emerges through global circuits of capital and policies.