Abstract

The anglicism “gentrification” is a term that the globalized urban societies of Latin America are more and more familiar with, especially those activists fighting for the right to housing. This chapter offers a brief and comparative approach to four specific cases of gentrification in Latin America; they have been deliberately chosen for their dissimilarities and are the object of analysis in an ongoing comparative research project. The cases are: the Rio de Janeiro Port Area, until recently abandoned and now renamed as “Porto Maravilha” by its promoters; the industrial neighbourhood of Parque Patricios in central-south Buenos Aires, today transformed into the city’s emerging “Technological District”; the case of Colonia Juárez in Mexico City, currently very present in the media; and the area surrounding the centre of Santiago de Chile, including ten traditionally popular communities which are currently experiencing, to different degrees, a socioeconomic substitution of the population through real estate “verticalization.”.