Still top of our agenda?: Neil Smith and the reconciliation of capital and consumer approaches to the explanation of gentrification

Neil Smith's 1987 article, ‘Of yuppies and housing, gentrification, social restructuring, and the urban dream’, has generated widespread interest because it represents one of the earliest and in some respects most sophisticated attempts to reconcile capital and consumer approaches to the explanation of gentrification. A review of this article indicates that Smith's thesis has been met with criticism in the gentrification literature both in terms of its account of the processes involved in the production of gentrifiers, and the specific relationship between investment in the built environment and consumer choice it depicts. It is concluded that perhaps the biggest legacy of the article has been the manner in which it has (re)produced a debate that assumes the possibility of producing a universal theory of gentrification. This sits in contrast with recent thinking which points to the time and place specific ways in which consumption choice and capital investment relate.