NEIL SMITH: GENTRIFICATION IN BERLIN AND THE REVANCHIST STATE

By: Neil Smith, Jens Sambale, Volker Eick

[MIETERECHO/POLICING CROWDS] From the academic debate we know the controversy about the 'right' explanation of gentrification processes. Many studies tried to explain gentrification by changing lifestyle orientation, changing demographic patterns and changing working conditions (demand side explanation)? You have and (continue to do so) strongly argued for an economic explanation (supply side explanations). How do you appraise the relationship between demand-side and supply-side explanation today? Is gentrification more a yuppie-problem or areal-estate-problem?

In the Lower East Side in the 1980s one of the anti-gentrification slogans was: 'Die Yuppie Scum'. I still have a T-shirt given me by a friend with this slogan. It was an effective slogan for scaring off yuppies, and indeed the gentrification of the area stalled until the city evicted homeless people and protestors from Tompkins Square Park. But 'Die Yuppie Scum' is not a very good analysis of gentrification. Even Yuppies have very limited choices in the housing market, albeit far more choices than the poor. By contrast, the owners of capital intent on gentrifying and developing a neighbourhood have a lot more 'consumer choice' about which neighbourhoods they want to consume, for the purposes of gentrification, and the kind of housing and other facilities they produce for the rest of us to consume. There is a huge asymmetry between the power of multi-millionaire capitalist corporations in the market and the 'power' of someone trying to rent a flat on an average city income. So while the question of consumption and the availability of consumers is by no means irrelevant, it is secondary to the far greater power of capital.