Gentrification, neoliberalism and loss in Puebla, Mexico

Introduction In 2002, Neil Smith published a characteristically provocative article in which he claimed that gentrification, which had ‘initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets’ of cities in the advanced capitalist world, had become a ‘thoroughly generalized’ ‘urban strategy’ (Smith, 2002, p 427). The incidence of this strategy was, he argued, now ‘global’ and a ‘consummate expression of neoliberal urbanism’ (Smith, 2002, p 446). Smith acknowledged the rescaling of urban relations in a more global economy, but he took aim at writers who regarded the process as driven by finance and consumption, arguing that globalisation was based on production, albeit now in broader and more tightly connected circuits of capital and culture. Smith, however, paid little explicit attention to the relation between culture and gentrification, and he illustrated his claims of a global urban political economy from the experience of New York City. In this chapter, I want to consider Smith's broad arguments in and from the perspective of Mexico. Specifically, the chapter revisits the city of Puebla, the site of a set of articles that had their point of departure in whether the debates surrounding the ‘ideal type’ of gentrification as conceptualised in the North could ‘travel’ and offer analytical traction in the South (Jones and Varley, 1994, 1999). I outline the arguments of this research later in the chapter. However, for now, it is useful to note that we perceived gentrification in Puebla at that time to be very different from what we understood to have happened in New York City, London or Vancouver. What was unclear to us then, however, and what I want to explore in this chapter as I take the experience of Puebla forward, is whether the particular form of gentrification in the 1990s represented a ‘variation’ on a norm or a different process. In particular, this chapter considers how gentrification is affected by the changing processes of urban change in neoliberal times. Following Smith, the link between gentrification and neoliberalism requires some specificity. I am cautious about making a claim that gentrification is intrinsically linked with neoliberalism or that the latest ‘phase’ of one is coterminus with the most recent iteration of the other.

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