Planning, power, and uneven development: a rent gap perspective

In cities, the rent gap arises as a difference between land rent accrued at a currently low intensity of land use, and potential land rent (the rent the same land yields under its ‘highest and best use’). The rent gap epitomizes the intersectional relation between uneven development, planning, and power. According to this model, urban decay and renovation are not antinomic but part of the same chain of value extraction. As the capitalist class extracts the highest potential rent from land, their control of the finance and the means of construction shapes urban space with forms, scales, and prices that usually become exclusionary for the many who become removed and ejected to derelict spaces. However, those marginalized areas would be suitable as reserve land for future redevelopment rounds to occur. This chapter theorizes about the intrinsically uneven urban land redevelopment process under capitalism and sees urban examples from the so-called global south. As the rent gap becomes increasingly ‘global,’ the planning of rent gaps synthesizes urban capitalism's inherent contradictions everywhere. The rent gap blurs the urban/rural divide and exerts class hegemony on space at an increasingly planetary level.