Speaking gentrification in the languages of the Global East

This commentary sets out to make a claim for gentrification to be understood from the Global East. I argue that a regional approach to gentrification can nurture a contextually informed but theoretically connected comparative urbanism, contributing to the comparative urbanist project by providing an appropriate point of contact between local context and universalising theories. In the process, I attempt to partially destabilise the concept of gentrification and then re-centre it in the Global East. Any comparative exercise is not a straightforward process; on the contrary, it is fraught with epistemological, theoretical and methodological stumbling blocks – regions are slippery and often diverse; diversity can be hard to bottle and label along theoretical lines; methods work more smoothly in discrete settings. But it is an exercise worth undertaking; the regional is the middle stratum that allows the locally specific to speak to planetary trends, and planetary trends to find local purchase. In the pages that follow I map out a number of recognisable types of gentrification in East Asia. I then use these to transcend the region and cut across the Global North / Global South binary that bedevils so much theory-making. The aim, addressed specifically in the final section, is to use these claims for gentrification in the Global East to speak back to and, hopefully, enrich urban theory-making and contribute to discussion of what is becoming known as planetary gentrification (Lees et al., forthcoming).