Whose Urban Renaissance?

The desire of city governments for a ‘renaissance’ of their inner-cities has become a defining feature of contemporary urban policy. From Berlin and Toronto to Johannesburg and Beijing, government policies are succeeding in attracting investment and middle-class populations (back) to their inner areas. Cities undergoing regeneration—or gentrification as this process can often become—produce winners and losers. There is now a substantial literature on the inequitable effects of rent increases and displacement, for example, and even more on the global and local contexts for urban regeneration and the reasons governments encourage it. But there is very little exploration of the policies used to drive regeneration.