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By choice or by force, planners use gentrification to create the physical environments for capital to thrive. It is the process by which cities seek capital, and capital seeks land. Its endgame is a city controlled by bankers and developers, run like a corporation, designed as a luxury product and …

As cities destroyed their public housing, they chipped away at rent controls or abandoned them altogether. This helped cement the relationship between planning and gentrification. With strong rent controls in place, urban planning interventions like new parks, schools and transit do not necessarily…

Gentrification, then, was a “spatial fix” for capitalism’s urban crisis: a way to profit from previous disasters and to find new places for investors to turn money into more money. Deindustrialization created the space for real estate’s revival, and redlining and urban renewal set the spatial patte…

In several cities, these trends coincided with a severe round of fiscal crises and capital strikes—moments when a state cannot raise the capital it needs to maintain its budgets and bond investors refuse to buy shares in its future.24 New York’s late-1970s recovery from the brink of bankruptcy was …

As a result of these and other changes, during the second half of the twentieth century industry decamped from many first-world central cities in search of lower wages, looser environmental standards and wide-open spaces in northern suburbs, rural towns and international “free trade zones.” New Yor…