State-led gentrification is a generic form of gentrification planned, commanded, or promoted by state agencies at various scales, as part of a nationwide or local level restructuring agenda, aimed at generating specific urban and land conditions for gentrification to occur. In Latin America, although the national state has always played different roles as landlord, housing supplier, and redeveloper, little systematic research has been conducted about the actual involvement by the state in exclusionary redevelopment processes. The cities of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Santiago are well-known cases that host variegated forms of gentrification. López-Morales will offer insights on how public-private coalitions provide the decisive institutional arrangements that hold supra-legal powers directed at the privatization and commercialization of public spaces — especially in areas where land and housing markets are highly financialized by volatile global capitals.
Ernesto López-Morales is Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning, University of Chile and Associate Researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies. His research topics cover comparative geographies of gentrification, land and housing markets, public urban infrastructure and impacts on land value capture, anti-displacement social contestation and activism, and social self-management of housing production in Chile and Latin American cities.
Part of the Urban Planning Faculty Forum & #UnequalCities Series