Expanding Frontiers of Commercial Gentrification: Rent Gap and Sequential Gentrification in Taikoo Li of Chengdu, China

Abstract

AbstractGentrification has become one of the planetary processes in reorganising urban spaces. China is not immune to the process. Generations of scholarship on gentrification in China have generated considerable insights into its varying logics, morphologies and mechanism in the Chinese context. Yet, most research tends to focus on a geographically well‐demarcated area, driven either by the state or capital, while overlooking the externalities of these projects over time. Through the notion of the rent gap and the empirical case of Taikoo Li in Chengdu, we develop the new dynamic formation of the rent gap theoretical framework to explain how a commercial gentrification project changed the urban centre space and trigger new rounds of the effects of gentrification in surrounding neighbourhoods. In so doing, we underscore the hitherto overlooked roles of time and scale in theorising rent gap and gentrification in China.