Abstract
I first met Neil Smith after my first and probably most disastrous conference presentation in the mid-1990s, in Boston (USA). In the epoch before PowerPoint, I experienced a technology-fail, and an out-of-body sensation as my examples, captured on photographic slides to be projected on a large screen, flew out of the slide-carousel and landed willy-nilly in the crowd. Neil came up to me later and offered to show me around Manhattan's lower east side to compare the racialized experiences of gentrification with my inner Sydney case study—he was not fazed by my presentation disaster. He had latched onto my take on whiteness in the revanchist city.
Several years later, Smith agreed to examine my doctoral thesis. However, a year after its dispatch, he deemed my thesis to be ‘too cultural’ to assess. To me, cultures of white privilege encroaching on an inner-city Aboriginal community were embedded within the revanchist city. He clearly did not agree.
Smith, and his work, has certainly challenged and enlightened many of us but one concept—the rent gap—has not been the cause of much consternation. To me, and many others, it is a reasonably simple observation of the underpinning mechanism of gentrification: where potential rents far exceed actual rents paid for property. This creates precarity for renters, including community welfare services, and potential capital gain for property owners if they can afford rising rates and taxes that come with increased property values. Many cannot. Yet in those heady days of neo-Marxist critique, real-world issues were often couched in densely expressed and sometimes aggressive ways of arguing, often cleverly embedded in layers of detail. This complexification was for the few to extoll. For me, particularly then, this intellectual elitism seemed off the mark—I had just come out of community-based activism, working with young homeless and ‘at risk’ people. I saw the rent gap in action, glaringly operating in the service of capital. Of far more interest to me was how revanchism operated within the process of gentrification. I could not see why ‘the cultural’ was not part of the politics of capital. I wondered why gentrification could not be conceived of as both economic and cultural. How best should we further a social justice agenda? Surely theory should be flexible and, if need be, promiscuously fluid (cf Gibson-Graham, 1996). Perhaps I am ‘intellectually lazy’ (Wyly, current volume).
The moral rent gap
The difference between rents extracted from low-income housing…. Profits from displacement and redevelopment to house wealthy new residents.
For Wyly, Smith challenged the orthodoxy of decline and renewal that rely on Social Darwinist excuses and individualist consumer choices that explain gentrification. Specifically, Wyly seeks to include challenges from non-Western postcolonial theory and Critical Indigenous ontologies that provide ‘alternate temporal views’ (p. 10), acknowledging that ‘gentrification must be contextualised in histories long before Neil Smith … even before cities’ (p. 11). This highly readable and informative essay provides a thorough over-view of Smith's ground-breaking work. It sets out examples to add the notion of morality (if that is what is meant by the ‘moral rent gap’), as a conceptual laminate. The examples are an intriguing selection, but it is one aspect of selecting these examples that falls short on one of the main aims of this paper—to draw on Indigenous ontologies, that I will tease out below.
Wyly pushes past Smith's temporal and spatial limits, which are drawn on US-based urban crises in the 1960s and claims that the rent gap was actually about MORAL outrage, as a ‘deeper essence’ of ‘the matter of unequal power and rights over a place to live’ (p.13). To explain this, Wyly then heads down a so-called ‘postmodern path’ to emphasise an epistemology and ontology of the local. He draws on Deloria, a First Nations scholar, and other (non-European/white) positionalities to argue his case for the moral rent gap. For me, however, a red flag appeared whilst reading what seemed to be an affectionate consideration of Deloria's life's work, but then focused on later, more playful, lamentations on extra-terrestrialism and aliens.
Wyly (p. 1) deploys the notion that urban spaces are portals into ‘multidimensional transformations of space and time produced through diverse, competing moral claims to the benefits of urban life’. While the notion of portals conveys a sense of a neutral opening to pasts (and futures?), Deloria's own extensive corpus of work provided early (in North American scholarship) remonstrations around colonization, and objections to the reductive ways of archaeology and the colonial notion of ‘prehistory’. Such ‘neutrality’, such as the use of portals to the past, can therefore be deeply problematic. I am not saying that Wyly has used an archaeological view of Indigeneity here but misinterpretations and repetitions of past mistakes of colonization, particularly of knowledge production, are sometimes assumed, if not actively renounced. Deloria (and many others) provide guidance on issues of sovereignty in the present and also, of pertinence here, the processes of knowledge production.
A related concern, or opaqueness, for me is the issue of representation. Wyly has provided a long overdue opportunity to revisit such oversights, which are all too easily glossed over in scholarship. So, with the explicit aim of decolonizing research and writing, I now offer thoughts on representation, portals and Wyly's discussion of the moral rent gap.
Whose (im)moral rent gap?
In the 1990s, before the non-representational turn (and perhaps a precursor to it), questions were raised about researchers representing others. Heated debate ensued. One example from Australia circled around a publication titled ‘Speaking about rape is everyone's business’ (Bell and Nelson 1989), which was written with the aim of shedding light on violence against women in Aboriginal Australia. Today, it might seem obvious why this was so contested, but at the time a group of First Nations scholars challenged this action—of writing and publishing on a topic of ‘private business’, which had been exposed to a wider, mostly non-Aboriginal and judgemental academic, and then wider world. A non-Indigenous Anthropologist led the authorship and the article was co-authored by an Aboriginal Artist from Ngapajinpi, in the Northern Territory, who was mostly referred to in second person rather than as an authoritative ‘we’. Criticism of the publication included a letter to the publishing journal by a group led by the historian Jackie Huggins. Huggins et al. (1991: 506) stated that, It is our business how we deal with rape and have done so for the last 202 years quite well. We don’t need white anthropologists reporting business which can be abused and misinterpreted by racists in the wider community … We continually find we are being jockeyed into the position of fighting and separating from our men … together [we] have suffered grave injustices by the white invaders.
This direct response led to the so-called Huggins-Bell debate, which pivoted on the overall question of who has the right to speak for whom. It clearly identified an unspoken reality about researchers and who should best represent such issues (and not be included as a secondary voice)—in short, the centre of this debate was a politics of representation. As (Larbalestier 1990: 146) noted at the time, whilst, Bell's concern for the conditions of existence of Aboriginal women in the Northern Territory is not in doubt nor at issue … [w]hat is at issue is the way in which that concern is raised … that the focus of the article is not so much on the issue of intra-racial rape, as it is on the appropriateness of the theory and practice … and [the] moral responsibility … to discuss such issues. At least twelve Aboriginal women challenged Bell's right to do so.
Such issues of representation, particularly by non-Indigenous researchers speaking about Indigenous/First Nations issues are now well considered (see Tuhiwei Smith's extensive writings), but remain fraught. Moreover, as Tuhiwei-Smith et al. (2016) argue, the production of Indigenous knowledge by Indigenous scholars is cultural production. In the case of the Bell-Huggins debate, Nelson is rendered as accomplice (as author) in this ever-fraught representation and cultural production. Opaskwayak Cree scholar, Shawn Wilson (2001: 176–177) has noted a stark difference in ontologies, One major difference between [dominant and Indigenous] paradigms … is that [the former] build on the fundamental belief that … the researcher is an individual in search of knowledge … something that is gained, and therefore … may be owned by an individual … An Indigenous paradigm comes from the fundamental belief that knowledge is relational … shared … not just with the research subjects … but with all [of this earth].
Rather than viewing this as two arguments, Wilson (2001: 177), amongst others, acknowledges that appropriation of knowledge and cultures takes place, ‘when proper relationships have not been established and honoured between researchers and their subjects [research participants]’. In the example from Australia, whether or not Nelson was colluding to ‘share’ cultural business with the wider world through a journal publication cannot be known—her personal positioning and her response to the critics—were not articulated, or perhaps sought, and now can never be as she has since died.
I have argued elsewhere that to decolonize research I am guided by a politics and epistemology of ‘Indigenism [which] must overcome the dichotomies in scientific thought’ (Rigney 2001: 7), or Euclidean logics—as Deloria (amongst others) fought for throughout his life. While gentrifying urban spaces are often imagined to consist of neighbourhoods that are poor/‘other’ (often ‘black’) and in decline, and ripe for the colonization by wealthier, often ‘white’ gentrifiers/capital, I have sought to highlight the more nuanced and inclusive politics of collaboration in research and activism. In so doing, I defer specifically to the expertise of Indigenous scholars who speak of relationality over reductive binaries. Wyly presents a similar desire. Wilson (2001: 176–177), states that Indigenous ontologies use ‘storytelling and … personal narratives [which] fit the epistemology because when you are relating a personal narrative, you are getting into a relationship with someone’. Such relationships develop in situ and can be problematic when translated to the world of academic publication, which is dominated by the written over the oral (Grossman, 2013). However, if morality is a stake (however defined), then choices of examples and how they are represented in print, must come into play.
Wyly is a storyteller. His tales are intriguing and nuanced. However, I have concerns when engagement with Indigenous stories assume Indigenous ontologies have been operationalized. In the story of Zuckerberg in Kauai, Hawaìi, the question arises: what might Carlos Andrade, and his relatives, make of this discussion no matter what it is about, if they had had the right of reply? It appears that Wyly has relied on media publications which, in such a fraught context must surely require data triangulation/verification, at the very least. Andrade is cited but not on the Zuckerberg case. I imagine Andrade not wanting to speak (to the mass media or other researchers) on this but the issue of representation in this case remains unstated. The author has not provided a background to why this particularly fraught case, which included intra-family struggles over land rights, needed to be used an example of a moral rent gap. Wyly needed to provide a rationale for this use of private business—on public record to be sure—but not necessarily ours to repeat, as researchers. A sense of reflexivity in such a fraught, contested and sensitive case could better contextualise the information provided. Again, this is not to say that Wyly should not have used this case but there is no mention of whether the subjects of research, or reliable representatives, were consulted. Consultation would have ensured research participation, whereby research participants are no longer ‘subjects’ (objects) of research. As is, it can only be assumed that there were no consultations with any community members about revisiting this case.
The Andrade-Zuckerberg story is also an odd choice given the myriad of moral rent gap examples at play in social media and data colonization (as considered in Lingel, 2021; Walters and Smith, 2022). On Zuckergerg/Facebook/Meta, who can forget Cambridge Analytica whereby ‘accumulation by dispossession … through the colonization and commodification of … everyday life [occurs] in ways previously impossible [before social media]’ (Thatcher et al., 2016: 1). Additionally, on Zuckerberg and gentrification, and perhaps an ‘immoral’ rent gap, a telling example is the renaming of San Francisco's General (hospital) to ‘The Zuckerberg’ (McElroy, 2019), after a donation which led to this renaming. Such an event occurred ‘in the context of techno-speculative gentrification [locally], and globally, in the context of … data colonialism, or utopic promises that facilitate capitalist accumulations’ (Thatcher et al. in McElroy, 2019: 2). In these examples, I do not engage Indigenous ontologies. They do, however speak to moral rent gaps.
Shades of Dr who? on portals…
To return to my disquiet about portals, if a portal in this context is simply a gate or doorway, or entrance/exit, then the use of this term is moot but as Wyly states (p. 19), ‘a parcel of land becomes a portal… that connects separate dimensions of space and time’, so the inference is that the phenomenon lies beyond—in the past (or future), and perhaps elsewhere. If a portal, a door in time, does not include the present (let alone the future), the presumption is that using Indigenous ontologies is a view to the past. As others have stated, and I think a reminder is required, this slippage has the tendency to render such ontologies as archaeological, not necessarily of the present. Indigenous ontologies are certainly not this (see my previous points citing Huggins et al.), and at the same time, reading landscapes in cities can provide so much about imperialist impulses and suppressive pasts. Think of the statue of Prince Albert atop the pillars of empire opposite the Royal Albert Hall, adjacent to the Royal Geographical Society, in London. Millions walk by without noticing the celebration of the conquer of so many parts of the world, often coloured in pink on old maps of the former British Empire. This is not a ‘portal’ to the past or space but a glaring reinforcement of empire in the everyday.
Wyly concludes with the words (p. 41) ‘the dizzying world of planetary moral rent gaps’, which is dizzying indeed. Apart from the use of such a loaded term as moral(s) (and morality), which is not unpacked or defined as used here, it is a slippery entity. I have focussed my discussion of one aspect of this slippage, which centres around the morality of the examples used, of the aim to use non-Western/Indigenous ontologies. Wyly's task, to open out the rent gap theory, is not at question. What is questionable are research methods and the data—the probably unverified secondary source materials. I am not accusing Wyly of speaking of secret business (as in the ‘Huggins-Bell’ debate), as the matters in Hawai’i were on the public record. Rather, I am asking for researchers to be more circumspect when it comes to delicate matters pertaining to colonization and neo-colonization.
On re-encountering Neil Smith
Years after the debacle about examining my doctoral thesis, Neil Smith apologised to me publicly during one of his (many) keynote presentations. He also gave a brief acknowledgement of ‘the cultural’ in gentrification, but this did not last long. We did correspond occasionally after arguments at conferences and smaller meetings, and he continued to rail against ‘the cultural’ in gentrification research. He blamed ‘the cultural turn’ and its postmodern tendencies, and therefore cultural geography for existing, and as destructive to the discipline. On revanchism, I had argued that the vengeful aspects of such processes were less deliberate—that gentrification is full of architectures of indifference and denial within the colonizing process. However, without the right of reply we can never know what Neil Smith would make of the ‘moral rent gap’, and subsequent deliberations around Wyly's assertion that the rent gap was ‘not really about urban land economics’ but was about ‘moral outrage over social and spatial injustice’ (p. 13). It might have been a very lively discussion.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.