Introduction: legacies

Accepting that Ruth Glass coined the term ‘gentrification’ in an unpublished paper in 1959 (Lees et al, 2007, p 4), the field has just passed its 50th anniversary. Inevitably the contexts of gentrification have shifted over the decades. The process has successively encountered the critical social movements of the 1960s, the high water mark of the welfare state in the 1970s, the ascendancy of neoliberalism in the 1980s, and finally, globalisation, the dominant and multifaceted keyword of the past 20 years. The demographic bulge of the baby boomers, vanguard of gentrification as students and young professionals in the 1960s, is now filled by retirees and near retirees with different housing needs and aspirations. The relatively specific submarket of the young urban professional, the essential gentrifier of the 1970s, has since broadened to also include middle-class families, empty nesters and international jet-setters. On the supply side, inner-city locations redlined by financial institutions and large development corporations in the early days of gentrification – leaving renovation to be achieved through sweat equity – are now eagerly sought for redevelopment by the largest players in an international property market. Trends that were noted primarily in major Western world cities have now diffused to some smaller towns, rural villages and the mega-cities of emerging nations. The most extravagant gentrification of the past decade has been the state-driven redevelopment of the large cities of China – in Shanghai municipal statistics identify the displacement of 750,000 households between 1995 and 2005, around 10% of the entire metropolitan population (Iossifova, 2009). So gentrification has mutated, albeit the same in the perennial narrative of residential displacement and class succession, yet profoundly not the same in the permutations around that basic process shaped by geographical and political contexts across more than a generation. We can now profitably examine the historical geography of gentrification.

In this chapter I examine how the idea of social mixing of diverse groups has intersected with gentrification, and has evolved from a progressive policy in the 1960s and 1970s to a perceived regressive policy today in some scholarly and activist circles. In examining social mixing we must also consider its other, residential segregation, a condition against which mixing was compared favourably a generation ago, but much less favourably in some – but not all – quarters today.