Can we really ride the urban tiger of global capitalism?

摘要

Whose Urban Renaissance? An International Comparison of Urban Regeneration Strategies, Libby Porter and Kate Shaw (eds). Routledge, Abingdon, 2009, 296 pp., ISBN 9780415456821, £80 (hbk). As recent debates in City demonstrate, in the global urban age human geographers are increasingly preoccupied with one concern over all others—the right to the city. For fellow followers of David Harvey, the neoliberal hegemony of the pre-financial crash era ensured that capital's right to produce more and more profit drove the urban process and shaped the contemporary city. A ubiquitous instrument of this urban entrepreneurialism, or 'competitive cities' in policy-speak, has been the so-called 'regeneration' schemes characterised by what Neil Smith and others have called 'state-led gentrification'—the deliberate class restructuring of central urban areas from lower to higher socio-economic populations, in which the former are callously displaced, their right to the city extinguished. For both advocates and critics of this approach, the attractiveness to local elites of state-led gentrification as urban renaissance strategy is clear—it turns the problems of dereliction, deprivation and disinvestment into a profitable opportunity for the revalorisation of urban space, creating an outlet for surplus capital, a source of higher rents and tax revenues, and a new economic zone in a wider competitiveness strategy. But does 'regeneration' always