The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City

I'll start with the bad news: If you're familiar with Neil Smith, you'll realize, as he mentions in the Acknowledgments, that most of these chapters aren't new. The majority are revamped mashings of a variety of articles he wrote. Nonetheless, new work still fills a lot of New Urban Frontier. His considerations for the cultural production/consumption of gentrification (i.e. frontier discourse) are rather new and important, considering previous articles where he rejects social emphases (and his following article in 1999 with James DeFilipis where he re-affirms the priority of economic analyses). The book also attempts to negotiate with gentrification on a global context, considering, for example, the intricacies of uneven dev. at the global level, and `three European cities'. Also, and I felt this was a treat, two chapters discuss other theories of gentrification and urban (re)development on local (US?) and global levels. Personally, I would recommend this book as a great example of gentrification studies - the book attempts to open up the many facets of this phenomenon (local-global economic trends, social correlations, cultural aspects, and even a little bit on future resistance). It's also quite ideal for anyone being introduced to the field, as Smith makes helpful attempts to survey the many opposing positions. Personally, I preferred the articles.

New unreleased census data bears out what the author predicted 10 years ago: cities are revanchist and want to redevelop with the wealthy in mind. Thus there is a great emphasis on downtowns with tax subsidized housing for the above average household. Indeed, the modern city is best described as the revanchist city.

The New Urban Frontier remains a cogent, essential, and hard critique of the mechanisms that shape urbanization as a process of capital, through means that impose, and expand social inequality and exclusion. Unapologetically it offers critique from the left that is supported by one of the most lucid analysis of gentrification to date. Given its depth on, it often requires careful reading and analysis, and heated questioning as it calls for a reevaluation of the built environment and the predominant discourses that often coat urban life. Written in 96, the book might benefit from an update to cover the following 10 years, something that Smith has done to some extent in his following work and teaching. However, if anything comes clear well over a decade after its publication is how current, and pointed his critique is, having been reproduced and expanded in a new cycle of gentrification, exclusion, decorated with the dogma of urban frontiers, pioneering, renewal, that hardly ever touches with any compromise social equity and environmental justice as the funding principles of its being.

I have to be careful when writing about the book that has become the backbone to my undergraduate dissertation. Smith goes where others have not dared by suggesting the real reasons behind change in New York and other western cities. His ideas are sound, but as with so many reactionary books I got the impression that he had decided on the answers before asking the questions. Research has little balance at all, and you begin to worry about its values when the book somehow manages to link revanchism to such wide ranging issues as "the organized murder of street kids in Rio de Janeiro, the Hindu massacres in Bombay, the pre-election slaughter of South Africans in Durban, the mayhem in Baghdad streets after the barbaric US bombing in 1991". However once he gets down from his socialist soapbox, the theories of revanchism can be useful for interperating change in western inner-cities. Not a book you will put down easily, but also one not to taken at face value... If you are interested in this subject check out M. Davis (1990) City of Quartz, H. Liggett & D. Perry (1995) Spatial Practices, and P. Knox (1992) The Restless Urban Landscape.

The most useful part of the book in terms of understanding cities is the chapter on the economic theory of gentrification, that economic incentives force landlords in a declining residential area to under-maintain their building, causing further deterioration of the neighborhood's housing stock until the buildings are so undercapitalized relative to the land value underneath that capital swooshes back in with rich people. (OK so this is kind of complicated for us non-economists but it's an important theory) The role of artists and the rhetoric of "urban pioneers" is very interesting too. The downside that I kept thinking about in later chapters is that it's a shame that left-wing authors' writing tends to be very academic in tone compared to those of establishment thinkers. The content in this book is interesting if you can get past that. If you just want a good left-wing view of cities, Mike Davis' City of Quartz is much a more crisply-written and compelling read.

Everyone in New Orleans needs to read this book. A tad academic, it is, but his points are valid. Preservationists need to understand that decaying buildings are not historical or the 'fabric' of the community, they are blight. If money does not exist in the community, and if there is not interest from outside within a defind period of time (three years, I propose) then razing the building is acceptable. Vacancy and blight are just as bad an evil as yuppies moving in to bring Starbucks and Walmart (only the new, urban version of their stores) to the old 'hood. It is amoral to force the indiginous inhabitants to live in a blighted area just because it "used to be" a place of substance or have some historical standing. I mean this in the sense of social history as well as with historical events. New Orleans: "bring on the chains" because the city is not getting any better with the local citizenry doing there part, or lack thereof!

En este libro da el salto de lo local a lo universal. Sigue siendo el que analiza con mayor rigor el tema de la gentrificación. Muy bueno