Abstract

State-led gentrification is a form of gentrification planned, commanded, or promoted by state agencies at national, regional, metropolitan or municipal level, as part of either a nationwide or local-level restructuring agenda, aimed at generating specific urban and land conditions for gentrification to occur. It is the result of one of several policies designed to promote the opening of economic opportunities for upper income housing production, or even the prescription or direct application of social displacement policies on originally low income residential areas or public spaces now zoned for upgrading redevelopment. The strong presence of the state in this form of gentrification is increasingly prevalent globally. State-led gentrification is a different phenomenon from the classical narratives of gentrification which were seen in the 1960s and 1970s in the Western hemisphere, where it was agent-led neighborhood-level forms of redevelopment that formed the basis of gentrification; however, its roots can be tracked in the nineteenth-century Haussmann Plan for Paris as a first well-documented case of urban gentrification proper.