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Abstract

Smith and Phillips make a powerful case both for investigating rural population change within much of the Global North from a class-foregrounded gentrification perspective and for undertaking this investigation in an internationally comparative manner. Neither aspect has been sufficiently developed within scholarship to date. While endorsing such a call, this commentary briefly presents three additional contextual framings: describing and explaining the very late coming of age of explicit ‘rural gentrification’ research; reiterating the challenge that geographical transferability of concepts and terminology presents; and insisting on the central but not exclusive role class must play within critical discourse on populations in the contemporary countryside.

Keywords

class counterurbanization language rural gentrification

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From Ambridge to the world? Class returns to rural population geographies

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