Gentrification and the housing crisis from the lens of Marxist and critical urban theory

Abstract

The issue of production, distribution, and access to housing is closely linked to society and economy developed under the current capitalist mode of production as a contemporary hegemonic system. And the housing crisis and the creative destruction strategies of the contemporary urban landscape (e.g., gentrification and its euphemisms of urban regeneration) are structural issues also determined by the cyclical and increasingly frequent crises of capitalism, especially in the current financialization of the capitalist totality. Thus, in the present chapter, we pretend to analyze the issue of housing and gentrification in the urban space, from the point of view of critical urban theory, as a process of production and realization of surplus value and as a process of reproduction of capital, but also as a means of production in the form of fixed capital, which materializes in the built environment (buildings, bridges, roads, equipment, and infrastructure in general).