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🌍 Climate Gentrification: Similar yet Different

Overview

This essay examines how climate gentrification unfolds differently across the Global North and South, using case studies from New Orleans (Hurricane Katrina) and Tacloban City (Typhoon Haiyan).

Research Question

How do the mechanisms of climate gentrification differ across regional contexts, and what roles do market forces and state-led spatial governance play?

Key Argument

Climate gentrification produces similar displacement outcomes across regions, but operates through fundamentally different mechanisms.
In the Global North, market-driven processes dominate, while in the Global South, state-led spatial governance plays a more central role.

Key Insight

Based on the case studies, this paper demonstrates that climate gentrification aligns with broader gentrification theories, while operating through regionally distinct mechanisms. In the Global North, climate-conditioned gentrification is best explained through traditional market-driven processes rooted in capitalist urban development, with the state playing a largely supportive or indirect role. In contrast, in the Global South, state-led intervention operates as the primary driver of climate gentrification, particularly within contexts characterized by tenure diversity and postcolonial aspirations to become “world-class” cities.

Across both cases, climate gentrification reflects a hybrid interaction between state and market actors that disproportionately displaces populations with the least political and economic power, albeit through different dominant pathways. While the literature on climate gentrification has thus far accumulated empirical evidence largely from Western contexts, this study highlights the need for further research in the Global South, where climate risk is more explicitly mobilized as a political and territorial tool.

This distinction fundamentally changes how displacement unfolds and how policy interventions should be designed across contexts.

Approach

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