Gentrification and the Right to the Geomedia City

This article introduces the special issue “Gentrification and the right to the geomedia city.” The aim of the special issue is to make up for the lack of research on how gentrification is shaped and underpinned by the normalization of various media platforms that currently define urban life—and what these media mean to the resistance to gentrification. Building on the seven contributions that make up the special issue, this article introduces the concept of the geomedia city as a discriminatory regime of dwelling. The geomedia city refers not only to the digital infrastructures built into urban environments—circulating and embedding data—but more crucially to the social and cultural dynamics whereby certain norms, skills, and forms of capital (and thus people) are legitimized (or marginalized) in the city. As such, geomedia constitutes a territorializing force that lubricates urban displacement processes by defining who has the right to belong where.