Is gentrification a dirty word?
39
the proposal of a “rent gap” theory, and by the location of gentrification within a broader theoretical perspective of “uneven development” (N.Smith 1979a, 1982). At the same time, the simplicity of the consumption-side argument was being superseded by efforts to see consumption too in the wider context of middle-class ideology and “post-industrial society” (Ley 1978, 1980). Doubled up on this theoretical contest was a political one. Consumption-side arguments were at times presented by quite conservative voices in the urban literature, although many conservatives also simply dismissed gentrification as a momentary and insignificant process (Berry 1985; Sternlieb and Hughes 1983). More often, the consumption-side position was adopted by political liberals who broadly celebrated the advent of a postindustrial city and the rehabilitation of slum neighborhoods while lamenting the social costs. Insofar as they focused on class it was the middle class, often a new middle class, who were vaunted as the subjects of history. By contrast, productionside explanations were more usually advanced by adherents of radical social theory, including marxism, for whom gentrification was symptomatic of a wider class geography of the city which was continually replicated and reinvented in various ways, including the patterns and rhythms of capital investment in housing. A flurry of debates ensued in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s, pitting production-side against consumption-side explanations; proposing the cultural rather than capitalist roots of gentrification; exploring the importance of the changed social position of women for an explanation of gentrification; identifying rent gaps (see Chapter 3); rejecting, reconsidering and restating the rent gap theory; explaining the “gentrifiers”; critiquing ideologies of gentrification, and so forth. This is not the place to review what became a vibrant, complicated, sometimes counterproductive set of arguments, claims and counterclaims.1 As one of the participants I have very definite opinions on