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Si us plau utilitzeu sempre aquest identificador per citar o enllaçar aquest document: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/103727
La Flor y Muerte de un Barrio. An Ethnography on Comprehensive Gentrification and Class Struggle in Urban Majorca
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[eng] With his seminal proposal of a rent-gap theory, Neil Smith developed a consistent materialist explanation for gentrification that efficiently contended with individual consumer preference tenets by focusing on the cycles of capital’s disinvestment and reinvestment in the built environment thanks to the necessary mediation of forms of collective social action. However, since the rent-gap theory had been devised to argue against «consumer preference», with the emphasis on the back-to-the-city movement by capital and not people, all understandings of people vanished, including those that hold them to be the bearers of particular class relations and interests. Despite later attempts to mellow such a structuralist approach by teasing out the working-class experience of resistance and displacement, it is hard to find in the original and subsequent work on rent gaps any explicit reference to the actual class relations that take place in the production of space of which gentrification is only one out of many expressions. These class relations are encouraged by the geographical expansion of capital and by the bureaucratic mediations of the State but in the last instance all of these are dependent on the labour of the working class. Such an understanding bears the possibility for thinking and implementing the limits to gentrification. Not only does gentrification have to face the contradictions of capital in its geographical expansion, and the conflictive State mediations encountered at every moment of the rent gap, but it may also encounter the opposition of a working class objectively made within the gentrification process. After theorizing on the role ethnography can play in social anthropology and by extension in all social sciences, and by drawing lessons from the extensive oeuvre of Henri Lefebvre and to some ulterior developments on the production of space, I offer an ethnographic account for Es Barri, an area subject to comprehensive gentrification in the Historic Centre of Ciutat de Mallorca (also known as Palma, Spain). Although only partially successful, I argue the gentrification encountered in the field is comprehensive in so far it has been sought from several different instances and by various means, among which the involvement of so-called civil society organizations specialized in implementing on the ground the ideas of scale (the neighbourhood) and preservation (heritage) the class relation the rent-gap hypothesis holds. Furthermore, with the aim of complementing Neil Smith’s contribution regarding the collective mediator the State is, and acknowledging that gentrification is only yet another a spatial expression of a much more comprehensive social relation, I argue each of the rent-gap moments of disinvestment and reinvestment are laboured by different groups (the so-called underclass and the middle classes) that, despite the fact they carry out a struggle that subjectively brings them together, they are apparently unaware of forming a single working class that produces surplus for others thanks to what I come to call their «urban labour». Likewise, I contend that for rent gaps to be successful and find a profitable closure there is a need to maintain as wide open as possible the class gap on which urban labour is founded upon. Against the description of the spatialisation of classes that are already formed, there is a need to explain politically how spatialisation intervenes in the urban struggle that makes them.
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MORELL I TIPPER, Marc andreu. La Flor y Muerte de un Barrio. An Ethnography on Comprehensive Gentrification and Class Struggle in Urban Majorca. [consulta: 10 de desembre de 2025]. [Disponible a: https://hdl.handle.net/2445/103727]