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The article aims to investigate the relations between work and urban space, focusing on the struggles of street vendors for the ‘right to the city centre’ in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. We join critical debates on Brazil’s internationally praised urban reform by focusing on informal workers. Beyond lacking the protection of labour laws, the ‘right to the city’ (RttC) of such workers has been consistently denied through restrictive legislations and policies. In the context of the ‘crisis’ of waged labour, we explore the increasing centrality of urban space for working-class political struggles. Looking at Belo Horizonte, the article traces the relation between urban participatory democracy and the development of legal-institutional frameworks that restricted street vendors’ access to urban space in the city. In the context of an urban revitalisation policy implemented in 2017, we then explore the use of legal frameworks to remove street vendors from public areas of the city and the resulting political resistance movement. The discussion focuses on the emergence of the Vicentão Occupation, a building squatted by homeless families and street vendors in conflict with the local state. Through this case, we explore the radical potential of contemporary articulations of Henri Lefebvre’s framework emerging from the confluence of diverse local urban struggles for ‘the right to the city centre’. Ultimately, we argue for an understanding of the RttC as a process and a site of continual struggle whose terrain is shaped, but cannot be replaced by, legal frameworks that need to be constantly contested and evolving to reflect the shifting socio-spatial relations.

While green urbanism has been discussed extensively in the urban studies literature, less attention has been paid to the micropolitics of its cross-border transplantation. Using the case of Forest City, a mainland Chinese developer-led mega-project in the Iskandar Malaysia, we analyze the different ways green urbanism has been deployed in speculative city-making. The state seeks to position Iskandar Malaysia as greener than its global competitors, while the developer consolidates its brand image and marketing aesthetics with selective “green and smart” techniques, yet at the cost of local residents’ habitat. In moving mountains to green the sea, the logic of speculative urbanization prevails and presides over sustainable and equitable green urbanism. Further attention to the complex local power nexus and the micropolitics of speculative green urbanism contextualizes different stakeholders’ rationales and practices, and contributes to critical reflections on the entanglement of green urbanism and speculative urbanization.

In an effort to contribute to the contemporary debates on accumulation by dispossession (ABD), we argue for a closer attention to the link between the state and ABD. We propose contextualizing ABD within the institutionalization of the process of replacing communal property rights with private property rights. In such institutionalization, the state plays a critical role as the final guarantor of property rights. As such, the sociospatial specificities of the state would strongly influence how ABD unfolds and how it is understood. In the empirical part of this article, we use this approach to focus on a specific type of capitalist state—that is, the developmental state—to examine the emergence of apartment-dominated residential landscapes in Gangnam District, Seoul, in the 1970s through the use of ABD. Key Words: accumulation by dispossession and primitive accumulation of capital, developmental state, Gangnam District, high-rise apartments, Seoul, South Korea, vertical accumulation.

One of the major contributions of the postcolonial critique of urbanism is the call for de-centring knowledge production, especially the emphasis on the need for ‘theorising’ from the Global South so that urban processes embedded therein are not rendered simply as variants of the Global North. De-centring the production of knowledge on global urbanism involves moving away from over-reliance on Western cities as sources of theoretical inspiration and treating all cities across the globe as ‘ordinary cities’ placed on the level-playing field. The rise of East and South-East Asia, to some extent, provides an opportunity to disrupt the North-South binaries, which do not capture the more complex web of spatial connectedness.

A detailed examination of the “Korean development model” from its urban dimension, evaluating its sociopolitical contexts and implications for international development cooperation. There is an increasing tendency to use the development experience of Asian countries as a reference point for other countries in the Global South. Korea’s condensed urbanization and industrialization, accompanied by the expansion of new cities and industrial complexes across the country, has become one such model, even if the fruits of such development may not have been equitably shared across geographies and generations. The chapters in this book critically reassess the Korean urban development experience from regional policy to new town development, demonstrating how these policy experiences were deeply rooted in Korea’s socioeconomic environment and discussing what can be learned from them when applying them in other developmental contexts. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in the field of urban studies and developmental studies in general and in Korea’s (urban) development experience in particular.

The chapter attempts to show the dialectical relationships between state violence and the construction of property hegemony, which have enabled the Asian states to pursue the urbanization of capital while ensuring social stability. It draws attention to the rich history of urban contestations Asian economies have witnessed so as to challenge the conventional wisdom that Asia’s economic miracle is maintained by the efficient functioning of the state in the absence of political contestations. The rise of Asian developmental states and the recreation of Party States have been possible because of their need to respond to the socio-political pressure mounted by grassroots politics, including labor struggles and democratization movements. The chapter contends that acknowledging the rich history of urban contestations would further facilitate the construction of progressive urban futures by perceiving cities as ‘commonwealth.’

The chapter discusses how important housing questions are for Asian cities and citizens in the contemporary era of neoliberalization. It highlights the importance of understanding the path-dependent nature of neoliberalization, especially in the context of Asia’s condensed development under the developmentalist states. It also shows how housing has been at the heart of urban contestations in Asian cities, especially given its significance for wealth generation and upward class mobility when the formation of middle classes would have been the state’s legitimacy project. The chapter concludes by providing a summary of each contributing chapter.

Despite significant contributions made to progressive urban politics, contemporary debates on cities and social justice are in need of adequately capturing the local historical and socio-political processes of how people have come to perceive the concept of rights in their struggles against the hegemonic establishments. These limitations act as constraints on overcoming hegemony imposed by the ruling class on subordinate classes, and restrict a contextual understanding of such concepts as ‘the right to the city’ in non-Western contexts,undermining the potential to produce locally tuned alternative strategies to build progressive and just cities. In this regard,this paper discusses the evolving nature of urban rights discourses that were produced by urban protesters fighting redevelopment and displacement, paying a particular attention to the experiences in Seoul that epitomised speculative urban accumulation under the (neoliberalising) developmental state. Method-wise, the paper makes use of archival records (protesters’ pamphlets and newsletters), photographs and field research archives. The data are supplemented by the author’s in-depth interviews with housing activists and former evictees. The paper argues that the urban poor has the capacity to challenge the state repression and hegemony of the ruling class ideology; that the urban movements such as the evictees’ struggles against redevelopment are to be placed in the broader contexts of social movements;that concepts such as the right to the city are to be understood against the rich history of place-specific evolution of urban rights discourses; that cross-class alliance is key to sustaining urban movements.

What does gentrification mean under speculative urbanisation led by a strong developmental state? This paper analyses the contemporary history of Seoul’s urban redevelopment, arguing that new-build gentrification is an endogenous process embedded in Korea’s highly speculative urban development processes from the 1980s. Property owners, construction firms and local/central governments coalesce, facilitating the extraction of exchange value by closing the rent gap. Displacement of poorer owner-occupiers and tenants was requisite for the success of speculative accumulation. Furthermore, the paper also contends that Korea’s speculative urbanisation under the strong developmental (and later (neo-)liberalising) state has rendered popular resistance to displacement ineffective despite its initial success in securing state concessions. Examining the experience of Seoul in times of condensed industrialisation and speculative urbanisation helps inform the existing literature on gentrification by resorting to non-Western empirics.

This paper explains what the production of speculative urbanisation in mainland China means for strategising emergent discontents therein. It is argued that China's urbanisation is a political and ideological project by the Party State, producing urban-oriented accumulation through the commingling of the labour-intensive industrial production with heavy investment in the built environment. Therefore, for any progressive movements to be formed, it becomes imperative to imagine and establish cross-class alliances to claim the right to the city (or the right to the urban, given the limitations of the city as an analytical unit). Because of the nature of urbanisation, the alliances would need to involve not only industrial workers and urban inhabitants but also village farmers whose lands are expropriated to accommodate investments to produce the urban as well as ethnic minorities in autonomous regions whose cities are appropriated and restructured to produce Han-dominated cities. Education emerges as an important strategy for the discontented who need to understand how the fate of urban inhabitants is knitted tightly with the fate of workers, villagers and others who are subject to the exploitation of the urban-oriented accumulation.

This paper uses Guangzhou’s experience of hosting the 2010 Asian Games to illustrate Guangzhou’s engagement with scalar politics. This includes concurrent processes of intra-regional restructuring to position Guangzhou as a central city in south China and a ‘negotiated scale-jump’ to connect with the world under conditions negotiated in part with the overarching strong central state, testing the limit of Guangzhou’s geopolitical expansion. Guangzhou’s attempts were aided further by using the Asian Games as a vehicle for addressing condensed urban spatial restructuring to enhance its own production/accumulation capacities, and for facilitating urban redevelopment projects to achieve a ‘global’ appearance and exploit the city’s real estate development potential. Guangzhou’s experience of hosting the Games provides important lessons for expanding our understanding of how regional cities may pursue their development goals under the strong central state and how event-led development contributes to this.

Gentrification requires properties to be available for investment through market transactions. In mainland China which has gone through transition from a planned to a market economy, it is necessary to unleash decommodified real estate properties and make them amenable to investment. This entails inhabitants’ dispossession to dissociate them from claiming their rights to the properties and to their neighbourhoods. This paper argues that while China’s urban accumulation may have produced new-build gentrification, redevelopment projects have been targeting dilapidated urban spaces that are yet to be fully converted into commodities. This means that dispossession is a precursor to gentrification. Dispossession occurs through both coercion and co-optation, and reflects the path-dependency of China’s socialist legacy. The findings contribute to the debates on contextualising the workings of gentrification in the global South, and highlight the importance of identifying multiple urban processes at work to produce gentrification and speculative urban accumulation.

Currently, Latin American cities are seeing simultaneous processes of reinvestment and redevelopment in their historic central areas. These are not just mega-scale interventions like Porto Maravilha in Rio or Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires or the luxury renovations seen in Santa Fe or Nueva Polanco in Mexico City, they also include state-led, piecemeal, high-rise interventions in Santiago, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Panama and Bogota, all of which are causing the displacement of original populations and thus are forms of gentrification. Until very recently, these processes have been under-conceptualized and little critiqued in Latin America, but they deserve careful scrutiny, along with new forms of neighbourhood organization, activism and resistance. In this introduction, we begin that task, drawing on the work begun in an Urban Studies Foundation-funded workshop on Global Gentrification held in Santiago, Chile in 2012. Our aim is not just to understand these urban changes and conflicts as gent...

This paper revisits China's recent experiences of hosting three international mega-events: the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games. While maintaining a critical political economic perspective, this paper builds upon the literature of viewing mega-events as societal spectacles and puts forward the proposition that these mega-events in China are promoted to facilitate capital accumulation and ensure socio-political stability for the nation's further accumulation. The rhetoric of a ‘Harmonious Society’ as well as patriotic slogans are used as key languages of spectacles in order to create a sense of unity through the consumption of spectacles, and pacify social and political discontents rising out of economic inequalities, religious and ethnic tensions, and urban–rural divide. The experiences of hosting mega-events, however, have shown that the creation of a ‘unified’, ‘harmonious’ society of spectacle is built on displacing problems rather than solving them.

Property-led urban redevelopment in contemporary Chinese cities often results in the demolition of many historical buildings and neighbourhoods, invoking criticisms from conservationists. In the case of Beijing, the municipal government produced a series of documents in the early 2000s to implement detailed plans to conserve 25 designated historic areas in the Old City of Beijing. This paper aims to examine the recent socio-economic and spatial changes that took place within government-designated conservation areas, and scrutinise the role of the local state and real estate capital that brought about these changes. Based on recent field visits and semi-structured interviews with local residents and business premises in a case study area, this paper puts forward two main arguments. First, Beijing’s urban conservation policies enabled the intervention of the local state to facilitate revalorisation of dilapidated historic quarters and to release dilapidated courtyard houses on the real estate market. The revalorisation was possible with the participation of a particular type of real estate capital that had interests in the aesthetic value that historic quarters and traditional courtyard houses provided. Second, the paper also argues that economic benefits generated by urban conservation, if any, were shared disproportionately among local residents, and that local residents’ lack of opportunities to ‘voice out’ further consolidated the property-led characteristic of urban conservation, which failed to pay attention to social lives.

Looking at contemporary Chinese cities, one is often compelled to feel aghast at the affluence and prosperity accumulated over such a short period of time. Within a time span of a little more than ...

The urban experiences of South Korea in times of its rapid urbanisation and economic growth show that wholesale redevelopment had been a dominant approach to urban renewal, leading to redevelopment-induced gentrification. This was led by a programme known as the Joint Redevelopment Programme, transforming urban space that was once dominated by informal settlements into high-rise commercial housing estates. This paper tries to explain how this approach was possible at city-wide scale in its capital city, Seoul. Through the examination of redevelopment processes in a case study neighbourhood, it puts forward three arguments. First, the development potential arising from the rent gap expansion through under-utilisation of dilapidated neighbourhoods provided material conditions for the sustained implementation of property-based redevelopment projects. Second, this paper critically examines the dynamics of socio-political relations among various property-based interests embedded in redevelopment neighbourhoods, and argues that external property-based interests have enabled the full exploitation of development opportunities at the expense of poor owner-occupiers and tenants. Third, South Korea had been noted for its strong developmental state with minimum attention to redistributive social policies. The Joint Redevelopment Programme in Seoul was effectively a market-oriented, profit-led renewal approach, in line with a national housing strategy that favoured increased housing production and home-ownership at the expense of local poor residents’ housing needs.

Beijing's selection as the host city of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games was reportedly received with joy among Beijing residents. As part of the city's preparation of this mega-event, massive reinvestment in Beijing's urban space was carried out in order to transform the city to have a global look. This accompanied large-scale demolition and redevelopment of dilapidated inner-city neighbourhoods and migrants' enclaves. In this regard, this paper seeks to discuss the drivers of the Beijing Summer Olympiad, and critically examine its social legacy. The paper argues that the benefits and costs of hosting the Beijing Olympic Games were disproportionately shared among local residents due to their differences in socio-economic status and place of residence, and that the hardest hit were poorer residents in dilapidated inner-city neighbourhoods and migrants' enclaves. The Olympic Games preparation facilitated the rebuilding of Beijing, contributing to significant loss of affordable housing stocks for urban poor families and migrants. It is therefore necessary to address the social impacts of the Beijing Olympic Games within a framework of wider urban policy contexts.

This paper examines the displacement experiences of urban poor tenants in Seoul, South Korea, and the constraints on their financing of post-displacement housing. Since the mid-1980s, urban renewal of slums and dilapidated neighbourhoods in Seoul has been geared towards clearance and wholesale redevelopment. This approach is accompanied by legalization of land tenure for dwelling owners without de jure property rights, and is based on profit-led partnerships between property owners (both on-site dwelling owners and absentee landlords) and developers. Since the end of the 1980s, tenants have been given the option, if eligible, of in-kind compensation (access to a public rental flat) or cash compensation. Neither choice, however, reflects the needs of poor tenants who still find it difficult to finance inevitably increased housing expenditures. Policy measures are necessary to increase the range of options available to tenants upon displacement.

Under contemporary capitalism the extraction of value from the built environment has escalated, working in tandem with other urban processes to lay the foundations for the exploitative processes of gentrification world-wide. Global gentrifications: Uneven development and displacement critically assesses and tests the meaning and significance of gentrification in places outside the ‘usual suspects’ of the Global North. Informed by a rich array of case studies from cities in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Southern Europe, and beyond, the book (re)discovers the important generalities and geographical specificities associated with the uneven process of gentrification globally. It highlights intensifying global struggles over urban space and underlines gentrification as a growing and important battleground in the contemporary world. The book will be of value to students and academics, policy makers, planners and community organisations.

This article on China's urbanization examines the main drivers behind China's urban transformation, its impact on the society, and how the impact is unevenly spread across populations and geography. It begins with a brief historical summary of China's urbanization focusing on the post-Liberation period, that is 1949 onward, and moves on to discuss some of the major factors that have contributed to people's migration and urban physical expansion. Three key characteristics are paid particular attention: (1) industrial production and uneven development; (2) land-based accumulation; (3) local state building and state entrepreneurialism. The article further examines some of the important sociospatial outcomes and challenges that China's urbanization poses.

Mega-events such as the Olympic Games tend to be accompanied by copious media coverage of the negative social impacts of these events, and people in the affected areas are often thought to share similar experiences. The research in this paper, which focused on the Beijing Summer Olympic Games of 2008, unpacks the heterogeneous groups in a particular sector of the housing market to gain a better understanding of how the Games affected different resident groups. The paper critically examines the experience of migrant tenants and Beijing citizens (landlords in particular) in “villages-in-the-city” (known as cheongzhongcun), drawing on their first-hand accounts of the citywide preparations for the Games and the pervasive demolition threats to their neighbourhoods. The paper argues that the Beijing Summer Olympiad produced an uneven, often exclusionary, Games experience for a certain segment of the urban population.