Gentrification involves the transition of inner-city neighbourhoods from a status of relative poverty and limited property investment to a state of commodification and reinvestment. This paper reconsiders the role of artists as agents, and aestheticisation as a process, in contributing to gentrification, an argument illustrated with empirical data from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Because some poverty neighbourhoods may be candidates for occupation by artists, who value their afford ability and mundane, off-centre status, the study also considers the movement of districts from a position of high cultural capital and low economic capital to a position of steadily rising economic capital. The paper makes extensive use of Bourdieu's conceptualisation of the field of cultural production, including his discussion of the uneasy relations of economic and cultural capitals, the power of the aesthetic disposition to valorise the mundane and the appropriation of cultural capital by market forces. Bourdieu's thinking is extended to the field of gentrification in an account that interprets the enhanced valuation of cultural capital since the 1960s, encouraging spatial proximity by other professionals to the inner-city habitus of the artist. This approach offers some reconciliation to theoretical debates in the gentrification literature about the roles of structure and agency and economic and cultural explanations. It also casts a more critical historical perspective on current writing lauding the rise of the cultural economy and the creative city.

Within the rapidly expanding literature on inner-city revitalization (or gentrification), there has been no attempt to assess in a comparative and systematic manner a range of explanations that have emerged from studies of single cities or even single neighborhoods. Four major explanations of gentrification are reviewed here and then made operational in a correlation and regression analysis of inner-city gentrification in the Canadian urban system between 1971 and 1981. Several of the posited explanations are not supported. Economic and urban amenity factors perform most strongly in the analysis, but demographic and housing factors have less effect. I develop an integrated model and discuss its theoretical implications, including its consistency with staple theory and the interrelatedness demonstrated between housing and labor markets.

In this article we reconsider the meaning of return migration in a period of growing transnational practices. In its conventional use, return migration conveys the same sense of closure and completion as the immigration‐assimilation narrative. But in a transnational era, movement is better described as continuous rather than completed. Focus groups held in Hong Kong with middle‐class returnees from Canada reveal that migration is undertaken strategically at different stages of the life cycle. The return trip to Hong Kong typically occurs for economic reasons at the stage of early or mid career. A second move to Canada may occur later with teenage children for educational purposes, and migration at retirement is even more likely when the quality of life in Canada becomes a renewed priority. Strategic switching between an economic pole in Hong Kong and a quality‐of‐life pole in Canada identifies each of them to be separate stations within an extended but unified social field.

This paper discusses some of the limitations of the global city hypothesis, in particular its economistic tendencies, the suppression of political and cultural domains, and the underdevelopment of human agency and everyday life. It tries to establish more fully the identities of global subjects. Examining two sets of global actors, transnational businessmen and cosmopolitan professionals, it argues that the expansive reach and mastery imputed to global subjects, their flight from the particular and the partisan, their dominance and freedom from vulnerability, are far from complete. The separation of the global and the local and the ascription of mobility and universalism to the global and stasis and parochialism to the local is an oversimplification, for an optic of transnational global spaces should not conceal the intersecting reality of circumscribed everyday lives.key words global city global-local transnationalism cosmopolitanism hybridity immigrants gentrification

A new ideology of livability in urban development changed the Vancouver landscape between 1968 and 1978. The agents of liberal ideology were a new elite of professional, technical, and administrative workers whose consolidation coincided with Vancouver's transition toward a service oriented postindustrial city. This group founded an urban reform party which assumed political power in 1972. They challenged the commitment to growth, boosterism, and the city efficient held by former civic administrations, presenting in its place a program of apparently humane, socially progressive, and aesthetic urban development. Despite some significant successes, the new ideology was also elitist and has generated new problems of social justice, giving rise to a countervailing political movement in the late 1970s. Except in special circumstances it seems the ideology of the livable city is rarely compatible with criteria of social equity or economic efficiency N 1968 a new liberalism was enunciated in