Book review: The Creative Destruction of New York City: Engineering the City for the Elite

18th Apr 2018

Book review: The Creative Destruction of New York City: Engineering the City for the Elite

A new book review by Catalina Neculai is now available online.

The Creative Destruction of New York City: Engineering the City for the Elite by Alessandro Busà, New York, NY: Oxford University Press 2017; 360 pp.: 978-0-19-061009-8, £19.99/US$29.95 (hbk)

An important feature of neoliberal urbanisation has been the ostensibly random and natural, yet ultimately programmatic, advancements of the gentrification frontiers in cities in the Global North and the Global South. Urban studies research has responded to this accelerated and continuous socio-spatial restructuring in the form of an open call for a ‘geography of gentrification’ (Lees, 2000). The contours of this developing geography of gentrification are rich, dynamic and consensual to a degree. In its dynamism, the field has continued to engage with the theoretical, empirical and lexical dimensions of gentrification. The name has become saturated and thus has acquired new prefixes that denote the shifts in the nature and reach of gentrification in different contexts and underpinned by different ideologies of urbanisation – re/super/hyper/mega-gentrification – while the semantics of gentrification have yielded new, more fitting coinages –‘greentrification’, ‘Katrina-fication’ (p. 24). Gentrifications (in the plural) are, therefore, very much embedded in the history, politics, culture and socio-economics of the spaces in which they unfold.

You can access and read the full review here.