Over the last years, an increasing number of scholarly contributions have become interested in the interrelation of gentrification and public policies. Thereby, the idea that public policies today have become a main driver of gentrification has become a somewhat commonly understood fact.
This talk takes issue with this view. It explores the changing interrelation of gentrification and public policy in London, Berlin and Saint Petersburg and argues that while demise in the face of market forces is clearly visible here, the scope of relations between public policies and gentrification is much wider and more complex. The reason for this is the double-character of housing as a commodity and a social right which leads to highly unstable and contradictory regeneration policies.
Against this background I call for more awareness to varying national and local policy contexts in gentrification research. I argue that what is widely coined as “gentrification” is in fact an umbrella term for fairly disparate socio-spatial formations which are marked by different policies and state structures and result in different dynamics of regeneration and population change.
Bio
Matthias Bernt was born in 1970 in Bad Salzungen and has a diploma in political science. Since 2009 he works as a research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) in ERkner, Germany.
Previous positions were at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig and, as a Visiting Scholar, at the Columbia University of New York City and the University College of London. Since 1998 Dr. Bernt has taught as an Adjunct Lecturer at the several German universities, including Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Dr. Bernt works in the broad field of interrelations between urban development and urban governance, with a strong focus on urban shrinkage and on processes of gentrification. He has extensively published on the two issues both in national and international journals.
Matthias Bernt is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, as well as of the Board of the Research Committee 21 on Sociology of Urban and Regional Development of the International Sociological Association. Since 2016 he is Deputy Speaker of the Section Urban and Regional Sociology of the German Sociological Association.