Processes of Urban Regeneration: Neil Smith and Beyond Edited by Abel Albet and Núria Benach (forthcoming, Routledge) Making rent gap theory not true Eric Clark Introduction Neil Smith situated his presentation of rent gap theory (1979) in the context of a critique of consumer sovereignty: Consumer as king of naturalized markets. As cognitive lock, market fundamentalism generates ideational path dependencies in legitimating far reaching processes of commodification and privatization, opening up spaces for financialisation. Financialisation forges social relations conducive to the penetration of finance into the production, exchange and consumption of (built) environments. It enhances financial control over the governance of human niche construction by expanding spheres for financial ‘investments’, whereby unearned rentier revenues increasingly flow to a resurgent rentier class. Exchange value becomes master, use value becomes slave (Harvey 2014). Consequently, changes in built environments become increasingly determined by where rent gaps can be created and appropriated – commonly involving displacement, domicide, loss of livelihoods and human suffering – rather than as outcomes of conflict-laden democratic processes. My point of departure in this chapter is that we wish rent gap theory to become irrelevant. We therefore need to ask: How might we go about making rent gap theory not true? I start however on a personal note.1 Although we met only a dozen or so times, Neil Smith influenced my life immensely. As a student of urban planning at Stockholm University, I would seek inspiration in the library of the Department of Human Geography at Norrtullsgatan 2, a quiet place with old brown bookcases and a helpful librarian. Escaping a wintry day and a bachelor’s thesis, a special supplement on neighbourhood revitalization in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association drew me into a long read and a head-spin. Here was Chester Hartman arguing that displacement is a major problem, Peter Marcuse analysing redlining, and most notably Neil Smith’s (1979) now classic theory of gentrification. Here was a strikingly clear critique of the myth of consumer sovereignty and a powerful explanation of forces underlying urban change. I knew then that I would go on to study urban land rent, but couldn’t imagine that I would some fifteen years later be called Eric Rent Gap Clark.2 In keeping with Neil’s preference for “hard-nosed engagements with ideas” over the “uncritical and celebratory” fashions of disciplinary hagiography (Mitchell 2013, 1), I summarize here by way of introduction my hard-nosed engagements with rent gap theory before addressing the question at hand. In the 1980s it was important to show that rent gap theory is true, faced as it was by rejection from leading scholars (e.g. Ley 1986). Dusty numbers from the Malmö archives empirically verified the theory (Clark 1985, 1987, 1988), but also revealed an oversight in Smith’s original formulation: that capitalized land rents rise with speculation on future rental revenues, once finance capital and landed developer interests condemn an area to devaluation and redevelopment. A more adequate representation of rent gaps should consequently reflect this tendency for the gap to close during the years prior to redevelopment.3 A second hard-nosed engagement focused on the petrified and unhelpful bifurcation into capital-oriented, supply- and production-side explanations of gentrification, and cultureoriented, demand- and consumption-side explanations (Clark 1992, 1994). In arguing for the relevance of Bohrian complementarity to gentrification theory, I emphasized that the prevalent understanding of rent gap theory as production oriented and rent gaps as somehow unrelated with culture, demand and consumption is misguided.4 Ever forging critique into new strengths for radical theory, Neil saw the “vigorous reintegration of cultural analyses of gentrification with a less fashionable but nevertheless vital political economy” as a “much richer project than simply reconciling production-side and consumption-side arguments” (Smith 1995: 126). And indeed, Bohrian complementarity insists on resisting simplistic reconciliatory syntheses. A third engagement with rent gap theory focused on its relationship with Harvey’s elaborations on Marxian theory of interplay between differential rents (Clark 2004). Harvey saw rent gap theory as unsophisticated – “much too simple and definitely obvious” (Smith 2010: 97) – compared with his masterly treatment and development of Marx’s rent theory in The Limits to Capital (1982). Smith made much of differentials and “differentiation of ground rent levels between different places” (1982: 145) as he advanced rent gap theory, but in his analysis of “the rhythm and periodicity of … movements of capital” (1982: 149) in the uneven development of urban space, he didn’t explicitly juxtapose rent gaps to the interplay of differential rents I and II. Somewhere, I thought, these relations needed to be sketched. I attempted to do so, drawing on an empirical case I already knew well: Malmö. The interplay between differential rents “emphasizes a synchronic comparison across space of differences in capital investment, especially in terms of normal and above normal”, while the concept of rent gap “emphasizes a syntopic comparison across time, of differences in actual and potential land rent which correspond to different types and volumes of capital investment” (Clark 2004: 155). With different emphases, they reveal the relational spacetime (“the hyphen disappears”, Harvey 2009: 137) dynamics of distinct yet imbricate rhythms of capital circulation, flowing through while affixed to land.5 It may have made sense in the 1980s to show that a ‘simple and definitely obvious’ theory is true. But it definitely does not make sense now. More important is to engage in showing how we might go about making rent gap theory not true. And if we wish the “theory of the urban land market to become not true”, we need to “eliminate those mechanisms which serve to generate the theory” (Harvey 1973:137). These mechanisms are, above all (extending points made in Clark 2005): • Social relations of private property (commodification of space/nature) • High degrees of inequality • Exchange-value driven decision-making (financialisation) • Myths of market fundamentalism, frontier, consumer sovereignty and related myths. Consequently, what can make rent gap theory not true are: • New and reinvigorated traditional forms of shared ownership (de-commodification, commoning) • High degrees of equality (institutionalized floors and ceilings on income and wealth) • Use-value driven decision-making (deepening of democracy) • Egalitarian myths of interdependence, solidarity, complementarity between autonomy and community, and related myths and metaphors. (De)commodification Private property in land constitutes the very foundation of rent gaps, as it allows for extraction of capitalized land rents, speculative bidding on future rents, and the discernment of potential rents under ‘higher and better’ land uses. Private property rights “confer on the owner nearmonopoly control over land and improvements, monopoly control over the uses to which a certain space is put” (Smith 1979: 541). These rights include the right to unearned rentier incomes, a form of free-riding on the work of others (Sayer 2015). Property rights in land come in many forms, the complexity of which “is quite staggering” (Harvey 1982: 276). Making sense of this staggering complexity must, as Blomley suggests, centre on “the legal construction of both place and mobility” (1994: 225). Place becomes broken into isolated spatial commodities for which land markets are formed: “perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors” (Polanyi 2001: 187). The expansion of private property, “by restricting access, can deprive others of a place to live, even of the right to life”, thereby raising the question “whether people can be said to have a right to, literally, a place in the world” (Smith 1994: 41-42). With forced displacement among the most widespread human rights violations in the world (COHRE 2009), it seems “as if there is a systematic plan to expel low-income and unwanted populations from the face of the earth” (Harvey 2010a: 245). This mobility is forced: it has nothing to do with the right to mobility, and everything to do with violating the right to stay put, the right to place (Clark 2011). To make rent gap theory not true, the ongoing commodification of land, nature and space must be ceased and turned around: commodified lands need to be brought back into the commons. The right to place must override the right to extract rent. With a much longer history, commons are even more diverse and complex than private property rights in land. Moreover, these are far from mutually exclusive, absolute, either-or categories. Commons are continuously being co-created and “just as continuously being enclosed and appropriated”, primarily through extraction of rents (Harvey 2012: 77). There is a rich and neglected social and legal history of commons (Bollier 2014) that offers insight and encouragement in seeking ways to institutionalize new social practices of commoning and to reinvigorate traditional forms of shared ownership. But this won’t happen overnight, and in the current conditions of many cities steeped in revanchist urbanism, if “we are truly to embrace the city as the new frontier today, then the first and most patriotic act in pioneering, if historical accuracy is to be observed, will be squatting” (Smith 1996: 232). (In)equalities That the growing literature on inequality attracts so many new readers and analysts is not only because there is so much of it to study but also because it makes such a great difference in so many ways, from a broad array of social and health problems, to trust, democracy and willingness to assume social and environmental responsibility (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). The most common measure of inequality is the Gini index of income (a single number reflecting distribution across a population). This can, but seldom does, include income of capital, which is ubiquitously more skewed. Vastly more skewed still is distribution of wealth. Oxfam calculated that in 2013 the richest 85 people on the planet possessed as much wealth as the poorer half of the global population. Updated with 2014 data, the headline read, “The 67 people as wealthy as the world’s poorest 3.5 billion” (Moreno 2014). Try to imagine: 0.000000957 percent of the population possesses as much as fifty percent. This level of concentration is hard to fathom, let alone its consequences. Inequality is however “not just about the size of wallets. It is a socio-cultural order, which (for most of us) reduces our capabilities to function as human beings, our health, our selfrespect, our sense of self, as well as our resources to act and participate in this world” (Therborn 2013: 1). The costs of The Killing Fields of Inequality are immense: human suffering, unrealized flourishing, disabled democracy, impaired trust, loss of solidarity and security, and a whole raft of social, psychological and physical health problems. Relatedly, inequalities also underlie rent gaps, especially the dynamic strength of rent gaps as mechanisms driving urban change. With extreme concentrations of income and wealth comes the power at one end to make and take rent gaps, be they in inner city neighborhoods or the re-scaled rent gaps of large land grabs in the global periphery. At the other end, those weakened by inequalities are more vulnerable to displacement, as rent gaps are created and captured: their homes and livelihoods cannot compete in the spatial market with ‘higher and better’ uses geared to expand rentier revenues. To make rent gap theory not true, inequalities need to be radically diminished. As with commons, we have a long egalitarian history of keeping inequalities in check (Wilkinson 2001). There are also recent and ongoing processes of equalization that provide inspiration and reassurance that struggles for greater equality can achieve enhanced conditions of life not only for the poor, but for the better off as well (Therborn 2013). In eliminating the killing fields of inequality, rent gap theory also becomes not true. To be more concrete, policies such as universal provision of basic income, coupled with regulations on maximum income (Daly 1996) set in relation to basic income and maximum inequality (e.g. 20 to 1, see Dorling 2014), and the return of highly concentrated wealth to the commons (see above), would go far in rendering rent gap theory irrelevant. Financialisation vs democracy The “increasing tendency to treat the land as a pure financial asset” underlies “the form and the mechanics of the transition to the purely capitalistic form of property in land” (Harvey 1982: 347). The same can be said today about music, words, ideas, organisms and ourselves, as ‘intellectual property rights’, bio-prospecting and branding open up new spheres for financial ‘earnings’ through speculative ‘investment’. Once treated as pure financial asset with expectations on financial yield, these are also reduced to just another “special branch of the circulation of interest-bearing capital” (Harvey 1982: 347). Financialization involves the subordination of use values to exchange values, in sphere after sphere, thereby expanding the volumes of ‘investment opportunities’ for ever more concentrated centres of financial wealth. Establishment of private property rights in land – in its broadest sense including bodies of water and elements of land commonly called natural resources – creates a foundation for the commodification of environments by judicially and administratively rendering specific parts tradable on markets, where their exchange value can guide decisions on investment. The profit- and rent-seeking behaviour of finance capital and landed-developer interests drive the formation of market relations through the privatization and commodification of built and natural environments, extending the process wherever property relations retain the characteristics of commons that hinder the free flow of financial investment. Environments are securitized and, treated as pure financial assets, enter the orbit of finance capital as potential sites for investment, or disinvestment, depending on their expected yield to shareholders. Financialization is a process whereby privatization, commodification and securitization of the environment allow for the penetration of financial control and decision-making into the fabric of societies and (built) environments. It has involved “the phenomenal expansion of financial assets relative to real activity (by three times over the last 30 years)” and “the absolute and relative expansion of speculative as opposed to or at the expense of real investment” (Fine 2013: 6, emphasis added). Ever in search of new fields to securitize and invest in, the financial sector actively engages in the creation of conditions allowing nature “to circulate as financial capital” (Prudham 2007: 259), entailing enclosures of resource commons and the displacement of people, their livelihoods, knowledge and practices. I emphasize investment because, as Sayer convincingly argues, it is “the most dangerously ambiguous word in our economic vocabulary” (2015: 34). Masking the difference between wealth extraction and wealth creation, it camouflages the former as the latter. Sayer distinguishes object-oriented definitions that focus on what is invested in (enabling production of new use values in goods, services and skills) from ‘investor’-oriented definitions that focus on “the financial gains of the ‘investor’ from any kind of spending, lending, saving, purchase of financial assets or speculation – regardless of whether they contribute to any objective investment, or anything socially useful” (Sayer 2015: 34–35). The slippage between these usages is a source of mystification, concealing the subordination of use value to exchange value, while obscuring the moral difference “between contributing to the creation of something useful and just getting a return, no matter what” (Sayer 2015: 36). Sayer associates the rise of exchange-value-oriented ‘investment’ relative to use-value- oriented investment to “the emergence of ‘financialised’ capitalism, which prioritises making money out of money, instead of the tricky business of organising people to produce goods and services. It’s truly extraordinary that we treat these different things as one and the same without even noticing” (Sayer 2015: 36). Finance capital claims to “see the world as full of potential”, indeed, to “see potential everywhere” (HSBC billboards). Financialization reaches into everyday life as we increasingly consider our homes, our education, and even ourselves, as financial assets we ‘invest’ in for the sake of financial returns (Martin 2002). It reaches into education systems, healthcare, infrastructure of various kinds, urban planning as well as political life: wherever exchange-value-driven decision-making displaces use-value-oriented decision-making. Financialization is dialectically entwined with the previously considered aspects, exploiting while intensifying inequalities in economic and political power, and driving the privatization of commons in order to expand the sphere of property as investment opportunities open to speculation on changes in exchange values. Making rent gap theory not true requires political, economic and judicial reforms geared to foster use-value oriented decision-making processes in all spheres of investment, i.e. the deepening if democracy. This in turn requires effective constraints on exchange-value oriented decision-making ruling over investments in various systems of provision, especially housing and the built environment more widely. Neil perceptively concluded his ‘revanchist city’ book by quoting Peter Marcuse’s defence of degentrification: “The opposite of gentrification should not be decay and abandonment … but the democratization of housing” (Marcuse 1991, quoted in Smith 1996: 231). Market fundamentalism vs egalitarian ethos The myth of market fundamentalism is changing everything, from workplaces, communities, education, health care and public institutions, to our relationships with our environment and understandings of self (Michaels 2011, Verhaeghe 2014). One form of social economic integration, market exchange, is mythologized at the expense of other forms: state redistribution and community reciprocity (Polanyi 2001). Market fundamentalism “conveys the quasi-religious certainty expressed by contemporary advocates of market self-regulation”, bearing an “affinity with religious fundamentalisms that rely on revelation or a claim to truth independent of the kind of empirical verification that is expected in social sciences” (Block and Somers 2014: 3). For Neil, the struggle for ideas was central to the making of the future (Mitchell 2015). Early, he saw gentrification as “increasingly constructed through the vocabulary of the frontier myth” (Smith 1996: 13). More recently, he insisted that “we are in a moment when the future is radically open” (Smith 2015: 964), and that forging alternatives requires that we free ourselves of “the economic conveyor belt of capitalist common sense which lurches the social body from crisis to crisis” (Smith 2011: 265). Just as the roll-out of variegated neoliberalization since the 1970s was largely orchestrated and guided through ideational path dependencies (Blyth 2002, Harvey 2005) – one moment in a longer history of imposing visions to reshape the world (Smith 2005) – the creation of alternatives cannot otherwise than build to some extent upon reinvigorated traditions with very different integrative myths and metaphors. It is not only so “that without metaphors, scientific inquiry would go nowhere” (Harvey 2010b: 198). Social movements and societal change cannot either move without the power of better ideas, metaphors and foundational myths through which to perform the creation of alternatives. If the myth of market fundamentalism is co-evolutionary partner with privatization, polarization and financialization, working together to make rent gap theory true, then making rent gap theory not true must involve engaging alternative myths and metaphors. Against the rugged pioneer individual on the market frontier, the ‘self-made man’, we must emphasize our fundamental interdependence, and the interdependence of individual and collective. Bauman (1994: 43) stresses the importance of “awareness of the intimate connection (not contradiction!) between autonomous, morally self-sustained and self-governed (often therefore unwieldy and awkward) citizens and a fully-fledged, self-reflective and selfcorrecting political community. They can only come together; neither is thinkable without the other.” Indeed, “the two fundamental traits of our enduring egalitarian ethos, valuing sharing and autonomy, are connected at their roots” (Clark and Clark 2009: 316; cf. Clark and Clark 2012). Over the long stretch of human history, we have displayed “patterns of behavior that systematically prevented overreaching individuals from achieving dominance” (Shryock et al. 2011: 255). We have a rich history from which to forge more beneficial myths and metaphors conducive to making rent gap theory not true. Conclusion These are the forces that make rent gap theory true. From a dialectical co-evolutionary perspective, no one of the four spheres “prevails over the others, even as there exists within each the possibility for autonomous development”: we should not “see one of the spheres as determinant” (Harvey 2010a, 128: 132). In seeking “openings for the construction of viable political-economic alternatives” (Harvey 2016: 322), the line of analysis I have sketched suggests that in order to make rent gap theory not true, our political economies need to be reconstructed such that we: de-commodify land, and work together to cultivate and institutionalize social practices of commoning; institutionalize ceilings on inequalities by legislating floors and ceilings on incomes and wealth; move decision-making from shareholders, boardrooms and the trading floors of stock exchanges to democratic bodies, placing use-values in focus; and replace myths and metaphors of market fundamentalism with recognition of our interdependence, how we mutually constitute one another, how we are dependent on and owe solidarity to others. References Bauman, Z. (1994) Alone Again: Ethics after Certainty, London: Demos. Block, F. and Somers, M. R. 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The Gentrification Reader, London: Routledge, 97-98. Smith, N. (2011) “Uneven Development Redux”, New Political Economy, 16: 261-265. Smith, N. (2015) “The future is radically open”, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 14: 957-964. Therborn, G. (2013) The Killing Fields of Inequality, Cambridge: Polity Press. Verhaeghe, P. (2014) What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society, London: Scribe. Wilkinson, R. (2001) Mind the Gap: Hierarchies, Health and Human Evolution, New Haven: Yale University Press. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The Spirit Level, London: Allen Lane. 1 This research benefited from funding of the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 266800 FESSUD (fessud.eu). I am especially grateful to Abel Albet and Núria Benach for organizing such an intensely engaging conference. 2 Sharon Zukin kindly called me this at a workshop on urban transformation held in Stockholm in June 1995, where Anders Gullberg and I presented a study on the making and taking of rent gaps in the massive post-war renewal of Stockholm’s central business district (Clark and Gullberg 1997). 3 Neil, “tremendously warm” and keen “to nurture and encourage emerging scholars” (Slater 2012), generously acknowledged this work as a “superb, critical study” (Smith 1992: 111), a “landmark study” (Smith 1996: 72). By the way, this emerging scholar was a mere two years younger than Neil. 4 Neil appreciated this critical engagement as “pathbreaking” (Smith 1995: 125). 5 I wrongly thought bringing Harvey’s and Smith’s analytically distinct rent dynamics into dialogue would be of interest, but the paper was desk-rejected twice, and has not drawn interest among land rent scholars.