Abstract Urban regeneration has become a central strategy in contemporary urban development, reshaping physical environments while simultaneously transforming social structures, networks, and patterns of access. Across diverse contexts, regeneration initiatives are frequently accompanied by uneven distributions of costs and benefits, often involving residential relocation and long-term changes in neighborhood composition. These dynamics have positioned gentrification as one of the most contested and closely scrutinized issues within debates on urban regeneration. Traditionally, gentrification has been approached predominantly as a negative process associated with displacement, exclusion, and socio-spatial polarization. However, as regeneration practices diversify across institutional, cultural, and governance contexts, this normative framing has increasingly been questioned. Drawing on a transnational roundtable discussion convened under the Humboldt Cities Network, this article brings together perspectives from Europe and China to re-examine gentrification as a context-dependent, multi-dimensional process rather than a uniform outcome of urban change. The roundtable contributions highlight both shared analytical foundations and substantial variation in how these mechanisms unfold across different land regimes, state capacities, and development trajectories. This article argues for a more differentiated and comparative understanding of gentrification, emphasizing its analytical value in identifying long-term transformations of urban social structure rather than serving as a universal normative label.
Wei et al. (2026) studied this question.