The moral rent gap: Views from an edge of an urban world

Abstract

For more than 40 years, Neil Smith's rent gap theory of gentrification has been one of the most influential concepts in critical urban research. In recent years, however, the rent gap has been challenged as an economically deterministic tool suitable only for the study of inner city land parcels in certain types of deindustrializing cities of the Global North. But what if the rent gap was never really about economics, but instead about moral outrage? And what happens when moral and ethical questions about access to urban space are extended across multiple human generations? This article develops the concept of the moral rent gap: juxtapositions, tensions, and often irreconcilable contradictions in the present use of urban land in the context of intergenerational debts and responsibilities. Parcels of urban land are not clear, Cartesian locations, but are portals into multidimensional transformations of space and time produced through diverse, competing moral claims to the benefits of urban life.