Response to Commentaries: Contrapuntal Gentrifications

Written words should be judged not only by what they say, but also by what they do (Wilson-Raybould, 2019: 3). Regardless of what the words in the “moral rent gap” paper (Wyly, 2023) try to say, what they have actually accomplished is to have inspired five of the world's most innovative, rigorous, and insightful urbanists to help an ignorant idiot consider some of the implications of theories and processes that have been underway for many generations.

Ignore Wyly (2023). Instead, pay careful attention to Ley's (2023) astute analysis of the evolution of the “property mind” from China to the “Great Wall of Capital” that now blends with Canada's fast-advancing frontier of Indigenous city building. Devote careful study to Shaw's (2023) incisive call for researchers to be more circumspect on the entanglement of “the cultural” with the politics of capital and whiteness when approaching colonial, decolonial, and Indigenous ontologies of space-time. Meditate on Bosma's (2023) erudite analysis of the ways in which “traditional” spatial processes constituting rent gaps are now being redefined through the calculative, algorithmic reproduction of urban space. Read, and reread, López-Morales’ (2023) eloquent, heartbreaking autopsy of Chile's stillborn new Constitution amidst a reactionary “superstructure” of failed, competing “moral reclamations.” Contemplate Kallin's (2023) wise analysis of the shortening wavelengths of urban displacement machines, the fabrication of reputational gaps between a maligned past and a profitable future, and the spatial dialectics of dispossessed Scottish “frontline dispossessors” on the British Empire's frontiers across Canada and beyond (compare with Harris, 2004).

Each of these essays approaches gentrification and the rent gap in distinctive, analytically, and strategically productive ways. Individually, they are brilliant and valuable. My paper printout copies are covered with a thick mosaic of multicolored neon highlighter marks and adrenaline-rush pen scribbles of YES!, BRILLIANT!, FASCINATING! Collectively, however, the contributions of Bosma, Kallin, Ley, López-Morales, and Shaw become even more nuanced and powerful as they enter the evolving “transdisciplinary space[s]” of intergenerationally reproduced “scholarly mashup[s]” (Ley, 2023: 1) of gentrification discourses and material practices that have been circulating among theorists, activists, policy analysts, developers, investors, journalists, and cultural entrepreneurs for at least half a century.

Bosma, Kallin, Ley, López-Morales, and Shaw are far too kind and generous to the human “author function” (Foucault, 1969) responsible for Wyly (2023). Ignore that problematic noumena, which is a quintessential textual embodiment of the culture of white privilege in one of the world's most expensive regions encroaching on inner-city and near-suburban Indigenous communities embedded within a spectral revanchist Canadian urbanism of friendly, deceptive “settler theorizing” that is “designed to have us [Indigenous peoples] believe that multiculturalism is the new progressive way, which is also a way to eliminate us” (TallBear, 2022b). The reference list, however, merits strict scrutiny. The mixture of theoretical and empirical genealogies makes it what Ley (2023: 1) evocatively calls a “virtual pinball machine of citations,” but at just 106 items, this “weird conjuncture” of a “portal … to diverse literatures” (Bosma, 2023: 3) is only a tiny sample of a vast, ever-expanding global discourse on the subject (Lees et al., 2015, 2016). Even the portion focused specifically on one middling metropolis neglects important stories that need to be told about Elton John's cover of Pinball Wizard, and a Vancouver tour stop in which just a few days of Sir Elton's luxury mansion rental financed the purchase of a new Bentley for the property owner, an entrepreneur who also owns inherited lands on the knife-edge of multicultural gentrification in pursuit of UNESCO World Heritage Site designation adjacent to Indigenous poverty in Canada's poorest urban neighborhood. So do the work on intersectional antiracist decolonial citational politics to navigate the diverse cathartic geographies (Gould, 1999) of the references. Then tear Wyly (2023) apart to rewrite Smith (1979) for our present moment in space-time, with its distinctive “political force field” (Ley, 2023: 3) of theories, ideas, identities, and movements. True, Neil has no longer has the right to reply, but neither did Jane Jacobs when Neil told everyone to ignore her posthumous fights with Moses. Read the items in the bibliography while peering across the Hägerstrandian tips of stems into the past of your ancestors and allies—and into the future, especially if you have children—with all your embodied experiences, positionalities, memories, associations, collaborations, and commitments. As you read and hear your voice speak through and with authors and others—“as we read along together … talking to ourselves, and talking to each other” as authors and readers (Gould, 1985: 276)—the conversations may soon become lyrical, spiritual, and musical. Eventually, a multitude of voices will conjure a melody. Perhaps it’ll blend the plainsong chants named after Pope Gregory I 14 centuries ago with Redbone's “Chant 13th Hour” that launched Earth Day in Philadelphia in 1970, in a musical arrangement that somehow “respects the unity of time and space” created by the textual linguistic connections. This is how Hägerstrand (2006: xii) explains what he was thinking when he developed the methodology of ‘time geography.’ Edward Said, too, used musical metaphors in the “polyphony” of varied themes in Western classical music to refine and convey his conceptualization of “contrapuntal” reading (Gregory, 2009).

Said proposed the idea of contrapuntal reading in Culture and Imperialism (1994), which he regarded as a sequel to many of the arguments first put forth in the deeply influential Orientalism of 1978. Contrapuntal reading is intended to critique and challenge the modes of creativity, expression, valorization, distinction, and legitimation of European culture and Western colonialism—while also confronting the reality that generations of postcolonial elites have been enrolled, nurtured, and incorporated into ever-evolving systems of imperial thought, practice, and culture. Said's method of reading across intertwined histories and dialectical cultural construction through the creation of negations, oppositions, and Others helped to revolutionize comparative literary theory, while in the discipline of Geography Derek Gregory's complementary “imaginative geographies” transformed the study of (neo)colonialism, globalization, and the transnational proliferation of “multiple temporalities and spatialities” in collective consciousness of history and the present (Gregory, 2004: xv). There are compelling antecedents in the conception of gentrification and the rent gap, too, if we are willing to entertain the risks of a Collingwood (1946) historiography (see, especially, Lees et al., 2016: 1–5).

When Glass (1964: xviii) throws shade on the “invasion” of the pretentious middle classes—“upper and lower”—into the once-poor enclaves of Hampstead, Chelsea, Islington, Paddington, North Kensington, Notting Hill, and beyond, she's not really concerned with locally embedded causal relations. She's reading local landscapes of the 1963 present as temporal symptoms of what Said would later call the gravity of history, and as spatial manifestations of what Spivak (2003) would conceive as “planetarity” (see also Wainwright, 2013: 67–71). Glass is analytically clinical yet morally outraged at the relentless “competition for space” that pervades all of London and beyond, as constellations of local, regional, continental, and global realignments force “long established Londoners and newcomers … Europeans and Asians … the Irish, the West Indians, the Poles,” students, sex workers, and so many other Others into racialized “twilight zones” of crowding and exploitation where “the many sub-cultures … come together yet remain estranged” (Glass, 1964: xix, xxi). Glass (1964: xxvii) is fascinated by the way London “represents a nation whose status in the world has weakened.” “The city is no longer the ‘Heart of the Empire,’” Glass (1964: xxvii) remarks, “nor can she now be truly called the ‘Capital of the Commonwealth.’” And yet, Glass emphasizes, the metropole remains ignorant, trapped by the neo-Malthusian assumptions of early twentieth-century urban planning frameworks that render elites oblivious to “the postcolonial world of today” (see also Glass, 1962). A world of decolonization and competition from the United States and other neoimperial rivals makes London “largely dependent upon decisions made elsewhere,” Glass (1964: xxvii) warns; local inequalities are “linked to those of places all over the world,” as the society confronts accumulated debts in the “accounts to be settled” of virulent local racisms produced by “the legacy of imperial rule abroad, and of its attitudes” (Glass, 1964: xxvii; see also Glass, 1970).

Here one encounters profound, metaphysical dimensions of Shaw's (2023) cautions on the matter of publishing “private business.” The example Shaw cites—the rape of Indigenous women in Australia—reignites precisely those kinds of “difficult dialogues” across the “epistemological, theoretical, and political differences” (Davidson, 2023) that reproduce the essence of urban theory, practice, and politics—from the modernist industrialized carnage of George Orwell's day to the ghosts of McCarthyite purges of Harvey's early years at Johns Hopkins, to present considerations of the moral implications of Gibson-Graham's (1996) poststructuralist portrayal of capitalism as rape on a planetary scale (e.g., DasGupta et al., 2021; Puar, 2018). Said (1994: 17–18) first introduces the word “contrapuntal” only a page after juxtaposing a 1910 rationalization of the “moral superiority” of French colonizers in the “hierarchy of races and civilizations” with the way Eurocentric native nationalism is entangled with race relations as in the case of “the crisis over the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and the subsequent fatwa calling for Rushdie's death issued by Ayatollah Khomeini.” Shaw (2023: 6) is absolutely correct to question the morality of examples used to develop theory. The fact that matters are in the public record is a consideration—but not an exoneration. When rendered as a digital accelerant, “public record” is all too often translated as “lawsuit, rebellion, or death threat waiting to happen.” The decontextualized YouTube speeches and Twitter announcements that led a contrapuntal, conspiratorial consciousness blending New Jersey, Lebanon, and Iran to come to the Chautauqua Institution in western New York to try to kill Rushdie in August 2022 are part of the same comprehensive noöspheric platform capitalism that drives tech displacement in San Francisco's Mission District and creative-class gentrifying neighborhoods in Silicon Valley wannabes around the world. It is the same infrastructure that creates algorithmic combinatorics of the digitized Other, from replacement theory and incel rebellions to QAnon, Covid conspiracies, and the latest Protocol of the Elders of Zion mutations of antisemitism as Ye reminds Alex Jones of all the good things Hitler did. The same dangerous parallel hierarchies of humanity and nature that defined the nineteenth-century antecedents of Chicago School human ecology—and the “neoMalthusian” planning Glass (1964) hated—now circulate in a diverse, digitized, diasporic “state of longing for a radically altered homeland” on a planetary scale (Klein, 2019: 154).

Neil—and all of us—lost a crucial opportunity when he decided that Shaw's thesis was “too cultural.” Contemporary cultures of imperialism are cybernetic, decentered yet dynamically hierarchical reincarnations of assemblages that are at once personalized and planetary, in what Duncan (1980) famously excavated in the “superorganic” of Alfred Kroeber's anthropology. This is where one grasps the full power of Kallin's (2023) reminder of the significance and potential of science fiction. The superorganic anchored the reified, retrospective, insular conservatism of twentieth-century regional-cultural geography (Mitchell, 1995). Other paths might have been possible if only Carl Sauer had been able to pay closer attention to the nascent interstellar transgender geographical imaginations of Kroeber's daughter, Ursula K. Le Guin. In a speech upon receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters of the National Book Foundation, Le Guin described the evolving superorganic of digital capitalism in the “corporate fatwa” of Amazon's predatory royalty battles with authors and publishers. At one point, Amazon functionaries mangled a decontextualized quote to imply that George Orwell had opposed paperback books—a strangely revealing episode after Amazon itself had digitally erased Kindle readers’ copies of 1984 that the corporation belatedly discovered it had no right to sell. As Bosma's work (Bosma and Van Doorn, 2022) on the occupational professionalization of Airbnb hosting demonstrates, such matters of algorithmic corporate control now coalesce with “traditional” rent gaps in complex, contrapuntal terrains of entrepreneurial competition and struggle over commodifiable configurations of space-time. Not long ago, crowdfunded shares in a shell company organized to evade property transfer taxes on an old apartment building in Vancouver's West End neighborhood quickly sold out on WeChat, bidding up a property assessed at Cdn $15.6 million to Cdn $60 million in 2 h—a rent gap closure velocity of some Cdn $6000 per second. A few weeks later, the property was flipped for Cdn $68 million. Meanwhile, Amazon itself built a massive new distribution center on the now-sovereign lands of the very first of British Columbia's 204 first nations to negotiate and sign a formal, twenty-first-century treaty. Contrapuntal reading might be the only way to make sense of another structure nearby: Canada's second largest shopping mall. A Canadian multinational real estate firm built Tsawwassen Mills on the sovereign Tsawwassen Nation, a few 100 m north of an international border with the United States that was only finalized two and a half-human life spans ago, in 1846. With more than 200 stores and an assessed value of Cdn $412 million, the shopping mall itself was sold in October 2022 to Liu Weihong, a billionaire real estate entrepreneur who built her fortune in Shenzhen before attaining Canadian permanent residency and buying half a billion in retail properties in Victoria, BC. Neither Le Guin, Said, nor Smith are with us today to interpret such portals between local and transnational, colonial and postcolonial. But it is worth remembering how Neil's eyes glittered with star-struck reverence when he recalled that Said liked Uneven Development—Said praised it as a “brilliant formulation.” Now the latest planetary frontiers of uneven urban development and mega-event “fast-track urban regeneration” (Chalkley and Essex, 1999) produce the spectacle of Qatari officials citing Orientalism to dismiss Western journalists’ coverage of the migrant workers’ lives sacrificed for the estimated US $220 billion World Cup planetary entrepreneurial urbanism of a global viewership that FIFA President Gianni Infantino pegs at 5 billion. “It honestly sounds very arrogant and very racist” for journalists from European countries to write such critical stories, foreign minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani tells a reporter from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, responding to press coverage of the transnationally gendered and racialized workforce of South Asian construction laborers, West African security guards, and Filipina maids. From the very beginning, Said's contrapuntal reading required transcending simplistic West/rest binaries of what he called the “rhetoric of blame” to acknowledge postcolonial generations’ trans-national, trans-historical “tangled, many-sided legacy of imperialism” marked by diverse, tragic post-colonial experiences that are “polarized, radically uneven, remembered differently” (Said, 1994: 18; cf. Táíwò, 2022). Mitchell (2013) reminds us of the quote pinned to the bulletin board found in Neil's study after his death: “Although we found it easy to be brilliant, we always found it confusing to be good,” from Midnight's Children.

Maybe it's not exactly easy to be brilliant, but even a quick glance through the gentrification research produced by new generations of scholars, activists, and journalists is humbling, overwhelming, and enthralling. Yet being good is dizzying and confusing when the aspirations of plurinationality, plurilingualism, affirmative action, Indigeneity, neurodivergence, gender emancipation, and so many other intersectional dimensions of the “right to identity” are hijacked by the strategic manipulation of housing insecurity that capital continues to universalize (López-Morales, 2023)—in ways that are so different, and yet so eerily similar to the land market competition that co-opted early generations of progressive postindustrial professionals (Ley, 1980). It's confusing when an endlessly adaptive cosmopolitan capitalism refines locally contextual—yet universally hierarchical—moral orders of competition and control (Kallin, 2023). It's confusing to hear Indigenous voices speak the words of last century's neoclassical discourse of “highest and best use.”

Kallin's (2023: 3) magnificent summary—thinking about a moral rent gap is an exploration of how consistently amoral capital is—helps bring all of these essays together. It's now a decade and a half since the Global Financial Crisis, when Western neoliberal authoritarians used obscure economic orthodoxy like “moral hazard” to discipline low-income and racialized victims of predatory lending while suddenly manufacturing new doctrines—“systemic risk”—to rationalize multi-trillion-dollar bailouts for billionaires. Kallin and Ley are right to be dubious about an extrapolation of gentrification and the rent gap to planetary capitalism (and beyond). Yet, Kallin's brilliant formulation that land is older than any of us sharpens the sagacity of Shaw's insistence that the notion of a portal must not imply an Indigeneity confined to the past. Indeed, what is crucial here is the multilayered, cosmopolitan, and transnational Indigenous futurity of multidimensional moral claims over precisely the kinds of constitutional processes diagnosed by Lopez-Morales. The long, uneven pain of selective, strategically deployed austerity after the 2008 crisis co-evolved with accelerating new alignments in circuits of cosmopolitan capital and claims over debt-leveraged arbitrage of the present, past, and future. It took less than a decade after Xi Jinping proclaimed the “Chinese Dream” in November 2012 visit to the Road of Rejuvenation for analysts to describe the largest postcolonial “ultra-ownership society” (Huang et al., 2021: 1) in planetary history. Meanwhile, organizing, activism, litigation, and legislation continues after a majority of the 143 members of the General Assembly passed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in September 2007. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States opposed the Declaration, but all eventually changed course to offer support. Obama finally secured aspirational, legally non-binding US support in December 2010. In Canada, enabling legislation received Royal Assent at the federal level in June 2021. In the context of at least 204 first nations in a province where most colonization took place in the absence of formal treaties, British Columbia is undergoing a literal reconstruction of time and space in the law and morality of accumulation in property rights. BC adopted UNDRIP in November 2019, and in the Fall of 2022, the City of Vancouver adopted the very first UNDRIP implementation strategy co-developed with a local first nation. At exactly the same time, in the autumn of 2022, as construction began on North America's largest Indigenous real estate project, (1) the BC Supreme Court finally resolved a long-running lawsuit between a Singapore billionaire and a Hong Kong/Canadian billionaire over a tiny valuable leftover parcel from a trans-Pacific growth machine landscape built after a 1986 World Exposition, (2) the Tsawwassen Mills shopping center on sovereign Indigenous lands was sold to the Shenzhen billionaire, a onetime member of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and (3) a new lawsuit was filed in BC Supreme Court by a Cree nation entrepreneur and a Cree Chief, lawyer, and former United Nations Chair for the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This new lawsuit (Buffalo and Littlechild v. Roseanne Archibald, 2022) alleges defamation by a recently elected National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, as part of an anti-corruption drive and leadership struggle that culminated in a divisive, high-stakes vote at the 43rd Annual General Assembly of the Assembly of First Nations, held at the new Cdn $883 million Convention Centre on Vancouver's downtown waterfront.

From eighteenth and nineteenth-century highland clearances to dispossessions of West Bank Arab villagers, to the juxtaposition of hundreds of homeless people in tent cities not far from construction on Indigenous-led highest and best use and trans-Pacific real estate maneuvers, land is far older than any of our bodies. The notion of a moral rent gap provides no solutions, strategies, or answers. Bosma is absolutely correct to observe that the intricacies of the concept may undermine the power and simplicity of Smith's (1979) original formulation. And Bosma (2023: 4) has it precisely right that “the moral, multi-dimensional aspects of rent gaps emerging across space-time” are impossible to measure with the rigor of positivist social science or structuralist historical materialism. Yet the immorality of calculative accumulation through such gaps is happening everywhere, and it is becoming cybernetically autonomous. The euclidian distance formula has no dimensional limits in the innumerable clustering algorithms encoded in geodemographic and real estate analytics software packages, Airbnb, and all the other performative platforms that accelerate the speculative capitalization of urban space and time. Competition and code intensify the Fourier analysis temporal contradictions of the periodic functions of the urban use values of the human life spans of individuals, families, and communities versus the exchange values of capital accumulation and the pursuit of compound growth. Hence the “distressingly short timespans” (Kallin, 2023) of displacement and rent gap manipulations as urban futures become more deeply entangled with capitalist innovations of fine-grained slices of space-time and incessant market trading—from mortgage-backed securities, REITs, and credit default swaps enmeshed in Black–Scholes/Merton options pricing bids to day trading, flash trading, ETFs, NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and now even crypto derivatives and crypto ETFs. The zero-axis asymptote of present-day capitalization of recombinant slices of space-time is orthogonal to separate (yet interdependent) axes of millennial cultural time in transnational planetary urbanism. Along these axes are the extending time spans of contemporary societal discourses of racial reparations for slavery, memorialization of multiple cultural revolutions, partitions, pogroms, trails of tears and genocides, mobilizations for Indigenous sovereignty amidst competing tensions between diasporic immigrant opportunity versus reactionary nativist xenophobia, and calls for a Papal repudiation of the theological-legal foundations of settler-colonial land dispossession, the fifteenth-century Doctrine of Discovery. Again, the moral rent gap offers no answers, only questions. It forces us to acknowledge the overwhelming, disorienting complexity of planetary cultural relativity—in a social-physics evolutionary revolution poised between Heisenberg and Barad's (2007) feminist-materialist reconstruction of Niels Bohr—of the space-times of diverse memories, inheritances, and debts of ancestors and descendants in a gentrifying world. In multiple mosaics of sublime insights, Bosma, Kallin, Ley, López-Morales, and Shaw reveal varied dimensions of the space-time paradoxes of planetary gentrification—as something that can seem temporary, local, marginal, or ephemeral from certain kinds of diasporic embodied individual Hägerstrandian positionalities while simultaneously reinforcing a systemic, long-term restructuring of the production of urbanization and capital at the scale of the globe and beyond (Smith, 1982; TallBear, 2022a). Meanwhile, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses are still arguing grave to grave. So are Ruth Glass, Edward Said, and Neil Smith, along with Tsleil-Waututh Chief Dan George (1899–1981), Squamish Chief August Jack Khahtsahlano (1867–1967), and so many others. We need to listen and try to learn from them all as we imagine and enact new urban futures.