Postscript: towards a critical historiography of gentrification

This postscript to the Special Feature describes the explicit and implicit temporalities of gentrification in gentrification theory. It asks whether the papers in this collection affirm or disrupt the accepted understanding of gentrification as a phenomenon that emerged in the postwar years in the context of urban deindustrialization. It argues that a robust definition of gentrification, which identifies the historicity of the phenomenon and its temporal boundaries, is required in order to avoid the co-optation of gentrification definitions and theories and the ‘naturalization’ of gentrification. And, lastly, it suggests that critical history writing and historiography can contribute to gentrification studies’ project of denaturalizing the process by grounding it in long-term processes with a historical dimension