The place of gentrification in Cape Town

Expat anxieties: Risk and safety in Cape Town, South Africa and Santiago de Chile

“…A question emerges here about the ‘right to the city’ (Harvey, 2008). While it originally suggested a socially progressive urbanity that extended belonging to marginal communities, the idea of the right to the city has often manifested in privileged claims to urban space, exemplified in inner city gentrification processes (see, for example, Teppo and Millstein, 2015; Walsh, 2013). Of course, lifestyle migrants generally have more access to public amenities, decent schools and hospitals, safe transport, shopping malls, leisure opportunities and other urban features than the poor.…”

“…Cape Town and Santiago are, in Jennifer Robinson's (2006) terms, 'ordinary cities': dynamic, cosmopolitan and modern places, from which we can learn much about contemporary city forms, notwithstanding the tendency of traditional urban studies to file them in a drawer marked 'developing. ' Both cities have been dramatically impacted by processes of gentrification (Inzulza-Contardo, 2016; Teppo and Millstein, 2015), and exhibit a 'fragmented urban fabric, characterised by islands of wealth and poverty within the traditional urban structure' (Borsdorf and Hidalgo, 2013: 96). Both are diverse in terms of their residents' racial and ethnic backgrounds, the movement of international and internal migrants and some degree of language variation.…”

“…Both cities have been dramatically impacted by processes of gentrification (Inzulza-Contardo, 2016; Teppo and Millstein, 2015), and exhibit a ‘fragmented urban fabric, characterised by islands of wealth and poverty within the traditional urban structure’ (Borsdorf and Hidalgo, 2013: 96). Both are diverse in terms of their residents’ racial and ethnic backgrounds, the movement of international and internal migrants and some degree of language variation.…”

Speaking gentrification in the languages of the Global East

“…Gentrification on the outskirts of cities is inevitably path dependent in its development. This is clear, for example, when relating the rice-paddy gentrification that finds form in the gated and ‘bundled cities’ that dot the periphery of Jakarta to the sort of gentrification that occurs when injections of capital disrupt former urban-edge apartheid townships, such as that of Gugulethu as discussed by Teppo and Millstein (2015). Different again in the type of gentrification that they represent are the barrios privados , the gated complexes, that have sprung up around Buenos Aires, often in close proximity to shanty towns (Carroll, 2007; Thuillier, 2005).…”