The Evolving State of Gentrification

Hackworth and Smith’s ‘Changing State of Gentrification’, published in 2001 and focused on New York City, is a definitive landmark. As you read these words, ‘New York City 2001’ might seem distant coordinates in the accelerating time‐space of knowledge production, but it’s not very far when understood in the time horizon of humanity’s urban evolution. Hackworth and Smith’s work helps us rethink today’s theoretical frontiers (especially postcolonial attacks on gentrification theory as a neocolonial imposition on the Global South) as well as long‐forgotten traditions. Ruth Glass’s critique of gentrification in 1964 was already a global, postcolonial challenge to the imperial epistemic violence that consolidated the West – neoliberal doctrines of human competition premised in nineteenth‐century social Darwinism and eugenics. Understanding the changing state of gentrification today requires confronting the planetary politics of urbanised human competition and hijacked theories of human evolution, and deciding what kinds of humans we wish to become.