ancient cities

a developing rent gap in run-down neighborhoods.
This rent-gap hypothesis, which was tested in
Malmo and Adelaide, recognizes that as housing
disinvestment sets in, land becomes undercapitalized
relative to its redevelopment potential.
By bringing together Marxian concepts such as
uneven development, capital switching, and class conflict,
Smith presents a theoretically coherent account
of gentrification as an urban output of the capitalist
mode of production. But the rent-gap hypothesis does
not properly accommodate the role of the state: As
part of urban revitalization, public development
agencies actively underwrite neighborhood improvement
to lower the risk for institutional investors and
gentrifiers. Nor does the rent-gap hypothesis admit to
how much of the emerging demand from gentrifiers
is due to noneconomic processes such as demographic
change, social restructuring, and shifts in culture and
consumption preferences.
The rudiments of the competing hypothesis
were originally outlined in a 1980 paper by David
Ley on liberal ideology and the postindustrial city.
Significantly, Ley’s narrative directs attention away
from the economic forces driving reinvestment in
gentrifying neighborhoods to concentrate on the
gentrifiers, the formation of a distinctive mode of
consumption, and the demographic, social, and
ideological influences acting on them. He begins
by sketching the implications for gentrification of
the shift from an economy dominated by the
manufacturing sector to one with rapidly growing
services. He postulated that a new middle class
was forming as a consequence of the growth of
financial, professional, administrative, and other
advanced services in postindustrial economies.
A New Middle Class
A fraction of this new middle class—most still
prefer the suburbs—gravitated to the central city,
along with the rapid growth in employment opportunities
for college-educated and therefore well-paid
workers. In turn, some city workers sought out housing
opportunities in the inner area. But note that this
demand-side explanation makes no mention of how
dependent gentrifiers ultimately are on the appraisal
of risk by institutional finance, especially mortgage
lenders. Progressively, the new middle class went
about remaking the central city and in the process
challenged the balance of power in urban politics.
Gentrification
307
In a similar vein, Saskia Sassen argues that
in genuinely global cities like New York and
Los Angeles, with their huge immigrant populations,
and London or Tokyo, the production of
gentrifiers is directly explicable in terms of the
socioeconomic polarization caused by economic
restructuring. Dual labor markets are forming in
the service economy and concentrating jobs at
both ends of occupational and pay scales. But
according to Chris Hamnett, compared with New
York or Los Angeles, the process in London has
been closer to one of professionalization because
more high-end jobs have been created in business
and government relative to the numbers jobs
available to lower-paid service workers.
As well as leading to a more critical examination
of the gentrifiers, this focus broadened out
into a consideration of the contribution to gentrification
of the feminization of work, the winning
of sexual freedom by gays and lesbians, and the
postmodern refashioning of mass consumption.
With this has come a deeper appreciation that the
new middle class doing the gentrifying is also fragmented
to varying degrees according to gender,
race, sexuality, and culture.
Gender and Sexual Identity
Feminist theorists like Damaris Rose and Liz
Bondi argue that the focus on economic class
ignores an important gender dimension of gentrification.
With the pursuit of career and more
women postponing marriage and childbearing,
many partnered and young single professionals
find that working and living in the inner city is
more supportive of their lifestyle than living in
family-oriented suburbs. In fact, after analyzing
longitudinal data on London gentrifiers,
Michal Lyons concluded that young and single
professional women probably played a greater
role in transforming inner London’s housing
market through the 1980s than households
with two high-status workers. In this way,
women are solving problems of access to work
and home, as well as the challenge of combining
paid and unpaid work, where they choose
to, with parenting.
The assertion of sexual identity by a growing
number of gays and lesbians in the second half of
the twentieth century gave rise to a number of