Introduction: moving beyond the usual gentrification suspects

Gentrification has been a major focus of several (inter)disciplinary literatures for many years, including but not limited to geography, sociology, urban studies, urban planning, anthropology, political science and economics, but its theoretical and conceptual framing has, to date, been constrained by an Anglo-American lens. This collection responds directly and forcefully to address the limitations of this gentrification lens in ways that have not been attempted before. In so doing, it critically assesses the meaning and significance of gentrification in cities outside of the usual suspects: a large number of the book's chapters are located outside of the Global North in post-colonial and, in some cases, non-white urban contexts that are increasingly confronted by global as well as local (re)development pressures. In addition, some of the chapters focus on cities that sit awkwardly between the so-called Global North and South (eg Lisbon in Portugal) and the Global West and East (eg Istanbul in Turkey). The collection delivers on promises made by other gentrification scholars, for example, Atkinson and Bridge (2005), who outlined the need for a truly cosmopolitan, global, view of gentrification, even if we recognise that such a cosmopolitan view is not easy to obtain. A cosmopolitan view is worldly wise, well-travelled, urbane, refined and aware, but in this collection, we aspire to a ‘cosmopolitan prospect’ rather than ‘view’, for ‘prospect’ conjures up a more forward-looking cosmopolitanism, one with aspect, perspective and outlook at its heart. In this book, we seek to move the gentrification literature in the direction of a properly global urban studies, we discuss the extent to which ‘gentrification’ is a global process and, in so doing, highlight the injustices, the uneven developments and displacements that this process is yielding globally.