Wouter van Gent & Willem Boterman (2019). Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 110.1, pp. 35-46. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12331
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Artikel
Gentrification Of The Changing State
Taking Jason Hackworth and Neil Smith’s seminal paper on the ‘changing state of gentrification’ as a starting point, this paper argues for a reconceptualization of state‐led gentrification to further our understanding of urban transformation. Rather than seeing the State as an extension of capital interests, we contend that class‐state relations may produce urban spaces through representative politics and State hegemonies. To illustrate, we present a brief historical and geographical overview of the transformation of Amsterdam from 1982 to 2015, based on policy documents, media reports, archival research, interviews and secondary literature, as well as social and electoral data at the neighbourhood level. As the gentrification frontier advanced and working class voting blocs diminished, new electoral politics took hold, which permitted a new middle class hegemony to institute policy and institutional changes to further push gentrification and capital interests, leading to subsequent waves of urban change.
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Artikel
Normalizing urban inequality: cinematic imaginaries of difference in postcolonial Amsterdam
Combining insights from critical urban studies with geographies of race and racism, this article examines the role of spatial imaginaries in normalizing urban inequalities, showing how such imaginaries make the associations between places and populations appear natural. We extend analyses of the interplay between material landscapes and imaginative geographies to examine how these connections feature in processes of gentrification and displacement and emphasize the necessity of an intersectional approach in understanding the cultural underpinnings of urban change. We propose that such analyses of dominant spatial imaginaries benefit from attention to their colonial roots, given the persistence of monomythical explorer-hero narratives and the mapping of reworked colonial imaginative geographies onto contemporary postcolonial cities. Our analysis focuses on Amsterdam, the popular Dutch film Alleen Maar Nette Mensen and the spatiality of difference that its ‘monomyth’ narrative presents. It justifies an unequal urban order by contrasting Amsterdam’s city centre, which is depicted as White, middle-class and ‘civilized’, with the post-war urban periphery, which is cast as a mysterious place of racialized poverty, squalor and pathological behaviour. This culturally essentialist depiction contributes to the depoliticization of state-led gentrification and normalizes changes to the material cityscape.
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Artikel
Kwartiermaken als symbolische politiek in overheidsgestuurde gentrificatie
Deze paper bespreekt overheidsinterventies rond de vernieuwing van een arme arbeidersbuurt in Amsterdam Noord – de Van der Pekbuurt. Zulke interventies worden vaak bekeken vanuit een perspectief van overheidsgestuurde gentrificatie, waarin de (lokale) overheid fungeert als aanjager van transformatie van de stedelijke ruimte. De rol van de overheid beperkt zich hierbij niet tot de herstructurering van de woningmarkt en de fysieke en sociale vernieuwing van ‘achterstandswijken’, maar behelst ook flankerend cultuurbeleid, met name het creëren van culturele voorzieningen voor de creatieve stedelijke middenklasse. Onze analyse laat zien dat die beleidsontwikkelingen bijdragen aan een discours van ‘natuurlijke’ ontwikkeling van de Van der Pekbuurt van arbeidersbuurt tot gentrificatiebuurt, terwijl de lokale overheid volop investeert in de ontwikkeling van een middenklasse en cultureel-creatieve esthetiek die nauw aansluit bij de visie van lokale gebiedsontwikkelaars. Door de dominantie van die symboliek worden de perspectieven van niet-middenklassebewoners genegeerd en de legitimiteit van hun aanwezigheid in de buurt ondermijnd. In tegenstelling tot de creatieve middenklasse is die groep echter slecht in staat gehoor te vinden voor haar positie.
Hoekstra, M., W. van Gent & W. Boterman (2018). Kwartiermaken als symbolische politiek in overheidsgestuurde gentrificatie. Sociologos 39.9, pp. 242-262.
Bron: Researchgate
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Artikel
'Mortgaged Lives': the biopolitics of debt and homeownership in Spain
The article aims to expand the theoretical framework within which we examine mortgage debt, by focusing on the role that mortgages play not only in financialising housing, but also in promoting a biopolitics of financialising life itself. Conceptualising mortgages as a 'technology of power over life' (Foucault 2003, 246), we expose the biopolitics linked to mortgaged homeownership in order to broaden the scope of analysis on the dialectics between the production of biological futures and the production of future profits. Our analysis is grounded in a historical geographical examination of the biopolitics of mortgage debt in Spain, where, during the most recent real estate boom (1997-2007) mortgages were employed as a technique that was supposed to optimise income by enrolling livelihoods into the cycle of real estate speculation. But as 800,000 mortgages per year were issued at the same period that average wages fell by 10 per cent, mortgages also became a punitive/disciplinary technique, which made the population itself the object of financial speculation. Whilst livelihoods became closely connected to the rent extraction mechanisms of global finance, their very existence followed the fluctuation of financial markets with disastrous effects, including the eviction of over 200,000 Spanish families from their mortgaged homes between 2008-2013. This way, we argue, mortgaged homeownership became central in enrolling biological life into the process of rent extraction, in two distinct ways. First, by making hundreds of thousands of livelihoods ˜'mortgaged', that is, directly dependent on the success or failure of capital accumulation strategies rooted in the built environment. Second, by producing hundreds of thousands of indebted subjects who have to be embedded continuously in the production process in order to meet their debt obligations, and who often remain indebted even after they are evicted from the home they used to own.
Garcia-Lamarca M and Kaika M (2014) "Mortgaged Lives': the biopolitics of debt and homeownership in Spain". Pre-peer reviewed version of article submitted to Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in April 2014, currently under review.
Article can be accessed here.