Introduction: the scope of the book

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest among urban policy makers, planners and urban scholars in the concept of ‘mixed communities’ or ‘social mix’ in cities, particularly at the neighbourhood scale (Forrest and Kearns, 1999; Atkinson and Kintrea, 2000; Goodchild and Cole, 2001; Tunstall, 2003). In this book we focus on the relationship between these social mix policies and plans and gentrification. We define gentrification as the movement of middle-income people into low-income neighbourhoods causing the displacement of all, or many, of the pre-existing low-income residents. Rhetorically and discursively disguised as social mixing, these policies and plans are promoting and spurring gentrification in a number of different countries (Lees, 2008). The morally persuasive and neutered terms policy makers use such as ‘mixed communities’, ‘social mix’ and ‘diversity’ politely avoid the class constitution of the processes involved (Lees, 2003). Rose (2004) has called this ‘a particularly slippery area of social mix discourse’. It is hard to be for ‘gentrification’ as it is a dirty word (see Smith, 1996; also Lees et al, 2008, pp 154-9), but who would oppose ‘social mixing’ or ‘mixed communities’?

It would be difficult to deny that there is something inherently and unquestionably positive about cities, neighbourhoods, streets, buildings and civic spaces in which we might see the broadest possible range of identities, backgrounds, wealth of experiences and personal biographies. Boosters of cities, property developers and estate agents often promote a place based on its diversity or cosmopolitan make-up, tapping into human desires for variety, difference and eclecticism. Social mix appears even more positive when scholars, politicians and journalists talk negatively about segregation – a mixed, socially diverse community is invariably pitched as the desegregating solution to lives that are lived in parallel or in isolation along income, class, ethnic and tenure fault lines. This is particularly glaring in the US, where the demolition of public housing projects to eradicate ‘concentrated poverty’ in favour of mixed-income development (under the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's HOPE VI programme [Home ownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere]) is producing a markedly different urban landscape (Wyly and Hammel, 2001; Crump, 2002; Lees et al, 2008; Hyra, 2008).