Globalizing the Sociology of Gentrification

Abstract

How can the gentrification scholarship of US urban sociologists be enhanced by expanding beyond the confines of the Global North to include empirical and theoretical analyses of Southern gentrifications? This article engages the debate around the utility of the gentrification concept outside of postindustrial Northern cities. It argues that, in contrast to geographers and other interdisciplinary urbanists, many US-based sociologists have unduly overlooked or minimized two aspects of gentrification that may be more clearly observed in the Global South: the roles of local political-economic forces and the state. This article also notes what the discipline of sociology can add to apt explorations of gentrification in the Global South. It marries the oft-disparate discourses of sociologists of gentrification primarily in North America and Western Europe with geographers and other urbanists conducting gentrification research in the Global South in order to globalize the sociology of gentrification.