Environment and Planning A 2003, volume 35, pages 571 ^ 574 DOI:10.1068/a3504com Commentary Policy (re)turns: gentrification research and urban policyöurban policy and gentrification research Walking through city centres across the United Kingdom it is obvious that an urban renaissance is underway. Dilapidated warehouses, office blocks, and factories are being gutted and converted into trendy loft-style homes. It is precisely this type of brownfield site regeneration that the government is hoping to encourage with its recent White Paper on urban policy ö Our Towns and Cities: The Future: Delivering the Urban Renaissance (DETR, 2000). Unfortunately it is also clear that much of this urban redevelopment caters exclusively for the well to do. Although the difficulties of squaring the rhetoric of social inclusion and diversity with the market and private sector partnerships may surprise some New Labour ministers, the spatial unevenness and social inequity produced by market-led urban redevelopment are two of the most consistent findings by gentrification researchers. Thus the direction of recent urban policy in the United Kingdom represents something of a double failure, first of the government to live up to its noble intentions and, second, of the gentrification research community to communicate conclusions from the last three decades of academic research. Those failures became clear to me recently whilst attending the ``Upward Neighbourhood Trajectories: Gentrification in a New Century Conference'' in Glasgow.(1) Despite Jan van Weesep's (1994) earlier call to put the gentrification debate into policy perspective, I was struck at the conference, yet again, by the fact that to date the impact of gentrification on urban policy and of urban policy on gentrification has not been a research priority. A North American academic at the conference expressed surprise at the conservatism that has come over many British gentrification researchers, going as far as to wonder if the theory and politics of gentrification in Britain had not themselves been gentrified! I was also surprised that, as far as I know, the Glasgow gentrification conference was not attended by any urban policymakers or practitioners. As such our dialogue on gentrification, international and useful though it was, remained routed/rooted amongst ourselves. It is now evident that this must change. Back in the 1970s the first wave of gentrification research revealed how government policy aided or even initiated gentrification (for example, Hamnett, 1973). It is only really in the last two years or so that some gentrification researchers have begun to consider the relationship between more recent (US and British) governmental policy and third-wave gentrification (for example, Amin et al, 2000; Hackworth and Smith, 2001; Lees, 2000; Smith, 2002; Wyly and Hammel, 1999). In the USA the focus has been on how the postrecession resurgence of gentrification there has been helped by state and local governments and by federal agencies through such measures as shifts in housing finance and low-income housing assistance. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, has been shown to have moved in policy terms towards a neoliberal agenda that both initiates and bolsters gentrification (Wyly and Hammel, 2001). In the United Kingdom the main focus to date has been on the report of the government's Urban Task Force (UTF)öTowards an Urban Renaissance (1) A number of the papers presented at this conference are to be published in a special issue of Urban Studies guest edited by Rowland Atkinson. Many of the papers have been posted on the following conference website: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudies/gentpaps/gentpap.html. 572 Commentary (DETR, 1999). We have had surprisingly little to say about the more important documentöthe government's response to the UTF Reportötheir White Paper on urban policy (DETR, 2000). Reading some recent work by academic critics you would be forgiven for thinking that it is the UTF Report that is the blueprint for urban policy in Britainöbut that is not so. The recent White Paper on urban policy must be the main focus of our attentions. The most excessive `gentrification manifesto' tendencies of the UTF Report are tempered in the Urban White Paper (UWP) by the import of the government's Social Exclusion Unit, amongst others (for a comparison of both see Lees, 2003). However, the UWP remains a pro-gentrification document insofar as it seeks to promote market-led gentrification as an instrument of both urban regeneration and social and economic policy. This commentary is a call for increased dialogue between academic researchers of gentrification and policymakers. It comes on the back of debates among academic geographers about a policy (re)turn (see Dorling and Shaw, 2002; Martin, 2001). But, as Danny Dorling and Mary Shaw point out, such a move is not easy, and their suggestions about why we (geographersöand here I would add gentrification researchers) are `endlessly ignored' by policymakers must be at the forefront of any attempt by gentrification researchers to put the gentrification debate into policy perspective. To make gentrification research more policy relevant gentrification researchers both have an obligation to ask questions that feed into established policy agendas (what might be called social science for policy) but also to question those agendas and their formulation. In both respectsöserving policy and studying policyögentrification researchers have got to take policy more seriously as both an audience and an object of study. The Glasgow gentrification conference has called attention to potential lines of inquiry for future research into urban policy and gentrification: 1. Is the changing nature of gentrification a symptom of the state's renewed involvement in the process? The process of gentrification seems to have mutated so much so that traditional definitions no longer seem apt. The quite disparate `gentrifications' presented at the Glasgow conference demonstrated this. As a process, gentrification has evolved well beyond the two-up two-down mews and Victorian house conversions that Ruth Glass talked about in 1964, and this evolution, I would argue, is closely tied to recent urban policy (especially its calls for urban sustainability) in Britain. Indeed, there was debate at the conference over whether we should limit the term `gentrification' to its original definition (as coined by Glass in 1964) so as to avoid conceptual chaos, or whether we need to stretch the term conceptually to be inclusive of, for example, the new-build gentrification being promoted by the government. Arguably, the types of gentrification proposed in the UWP would not displace the working classes or indigenous residents in the traditional sense of the term because there are no preexisting residential populations to displace in warehouse conversions, or newbuild apartments on brownfield sites.(2) However, this does not mean that displacement in nearby communities will not occur. There are bound to be spatial spillover effects. Nevertheless, for brownfield and new-build examples of gentrification some researchers would prefer to use the more politically neutral term of `reurbanisation' instead. Gentrification researchers need to tackle the following questions: Does the current policy of brownfield and new-build redevelopment lead to class displacement either at the neighbourhood or the city level? Can, as the UWP tries to convince us, such redevelopments stimulate social mixing? (2) I suspect that this is one of the reasons why some British gentrification researchers seem to be offering more conservative accounts of the process these days. Commentary 573 In addition to answering these policy relevant questions we also need to study policy as an object. 2. Why and how has gentrification become embedded in contemporary British urban policy? I think that this has something to do with: (a) The pro-urban left liberal sympathies of New Labour(3) which seem to be akin to those discussed in David Ley's (1996) work on the new middle class and the remaking of the Canadian central city. A piece of historically detailed research into this particular class fraction and political elite and how their ideas and experiences of urban living might have found their way into contemporary urban policy would be valuable. (b) The fact that those gentrification researchers and urban geographers who were advisors to the UTF may, as Dorling and Shaw (2002) point out, have found it difficult to be critical of those who were paying for their consultation. Without having been involved personally I am minded not to be critical here. But what would be useful to know is how those gentrification researchers involved in these reports weighed up the overwhelming academic evidence that gentrification tends to harm rather than help neighbourhoods (see Atkinson, 2002) with the government's ideas of gentrification as the saviour of British inner cities (for example, URBED et al, 1999). If nothing else this would serve as a valuable lesson to gentrification researchers on the complexities of being involved in the policy arena. To date, gentrification researchers (and I am as guilty of this as anyone) have connected little with urban policy agendas in the United Kingdom. What is the point of a substantial, critical, and vigorous academic literature on gentrification if it is not actually disseminated to those in a position to influence and make the policies we seek to inform. Equally, though, I would ask what is the point of an UTF that does not draw on the critical work of academic experts on gentrification? Can `real' evidence for Neil Smith's (2002) claim that a new revanchist urbanism has replaced the liberal urban policy of cities in the advanced capitalist world be found not just in the rhetoric of contemporary British (and indeed other countries') urban policy but also in the lived experience of that policy? How is globalisation changing gentrification? Have the experiences of gentrifying global cities like London come to dominate national thinking in ways inappropriate to other cities, especially those further down the urban hierarchy? These are all questions that need our urgent attention. Loretta Lees References Amin A, Massey D, Thrift N, 2000 Cities for the Many Not the Few (Policy Press, Bristol) Atkinson R , 2002, ``Does gentrification help or harm urban neighbourhoods? An assessment of the evidence-base in the context of the New Urban Agenda'', CNR Paper 5 www.neighbourhoodcentre.org.uk DETR, 1999 Towards an Urban Renaissance, Department of the Environment, Transport and Regions www.detr.gov.uk DETR, 2000 Our Towns and Cities: The Future: Delivering an Urban Renaissance Cm 4911, Department of the Environment, Transport and Regions (The Stationery Office, London) www.detr.gov.uk Dorling D, Shaw M, 2002, ``Geographies of the agenda: public policy, the discipline and its (re)`turns' '' Progress in Human Geography 26 629 ^ 646 Glass R, 1964, ``Aspects of change'', in London Aspects of Change Ed. Centre for Urban Studies (MacGibbon and Kee, London) pp xiii ^ xlii (3) Many are stereotypical new middle-class gentrifiersöTony Blair's home was in Barnsbury, North London, one of the first neighbourhoods in Islington to gentrify. Barnsbury's postcode N1 was immortalised in Marc Boxer's cartoon series in The Timesö``Life and Times in N1'', about the chattering (new urbane middle) classes. 574 Commentary Hackworth J, Smith N, 2001, ``The changing state of gentrification'' Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 92 464 ^ 477 Hamnett C, 1973, ``Improvement grants as an indicator of gentrification in inner London'' Area 5 252 ^ 261 Lees L, 2000, ``A reappraisal of gentrification: towards a `geography of gentrification' '' Progress in Human Geography 24 389 ^ 408 Lees L, 2003, ``Visions of `urban renaissance': the Urban Task Force report and the Urban White Paper'', in Urban Renaissance? New Labour, Community and Urban Policy Eds R Imrie, M Raco (Policy Press, Bristol) forthcoming Ley D, 1996 The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City (Oxford University Press, Oxford) Martin R, 2001, ``Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda'' Progress in Human Geography 25 189 ^ 209 Smith N, 2002, ``New globalism, new urbanism: gentrification as global urban strategy'' Antipode 34 427 ^ 450 URBED, MORI, School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, 1999 But Would You Live There? Shaping Attitudes to Urban Living Urban Task Force, London van Weesep J, 1994, ``Gentrification as a research frontier'' Progress in Human Geography 18 74 ^ 83 Wyly E, Hammel D, 1999, ``Islands of decay in seas of renewal: housing policy and the resurgence of gentrification'' Housing Policy Debate 10 711 ^ 798 Wyly E, Hammel D, 2001, ``Gentrification, housing policy, and the new context of urban redevelopment'', in Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment, Volume 6 Ed. K Fox Gotham (JAI Press, New York) pp 211 ^ 276 ß 2003 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain