Bureau Savamala Belgrade

Gentrification
Research:
A Brief introduction
Philipp Klaus
The gentrification debate has to date centered around displacement—the matter of
residents being pushed out of their neighborhoods by newcomers with buying power.
It first appeared when Ruth Glass described displacement mechanisms in London’s
working-class neighborhoods and coined the term gentrification. Since its inception
in the 1960s, the gentrification discourse has expanded and many aspects of it have
changed significantly—the way the process plays out, the causes and mechanisms of
displacement, and our understanding of it. On the one hand, this expansion has to
do with the proliferation of research into gentrification; on the other hand, it has to
do with the diverse changes that have occurred in the social, economic, and political
realms. This includes motivators such as the concentration and globalization of the
property market as well as the way it has melded with the financial markets, the privatization
of state-owned properties, and the general withdrawal of local and regional
government from the social housing sphere. Gentrification is increasingly being explained
in connection with and as an expression of the globally pervasive investment
mechanisms of the real estate market, as a result of targeted publicly funded efforts at
upgrading, and finally, as specific urban development strategies. 1
Over the years, two particular topics have opened up new lines of investigation for
the field of gentrification studies: reurbanization and new build gentrification—or