Introduction

My ongoing observations over the last three decades on patterns of gentrification in Israeli inner cities, suburban towns and rural communities have led me to view gentrification from a different geographical perspective to the one shared by many Western researchers writing on gentrification. Research on gentrification originated in the heart of some Western cities and, therefore, gentrification was often characterised as primarily an inner-urban phenomenon. It was first observed and defined in an academic fashion in inner London (Glass, 1964) and subsequently studied in the 1980s and early 1990s in the inner city of some North American and British cities (for references to these early studies, see Lees et al, 2008). Indeed, the settling of middle class households in lower-social class neighbourhoods of the inner city has achieved sizeable proportions in Western cities since the 1970s. Much of the debate that developed among social scientists was over whether gentrification posed a substantial challenge to the established socio-spatial structure of Western cities, postulated by the concentric model of the Chicago School (Burgess, 1925). According to this model, based solely on industrialised cities in the US, the lower classes tended to live in the inner city while the middle classes opted for outer-urban and suburban neighbourhoods. The main theoretical question raised in early gentrification debates was whether the renewed interest of the middle classes in the inner city would bring about a reshuffling of the socio-spatial structure of the North American city (eg Smith, 1986). The debate was also centred on identifying the major driving force behind inner-city gentrification: was it economically generated by a rent gap existing in the inner city or was it the result of a growing cultural shift from a suburban to an urban lifestyle? All of this debate was primarily based on the concentric model of socio-spatial structure specific to US cities.

However, the increasing accumulation of urban research on gentrification in a wide variety of cities around the world portrays a much more complex situation that does not lend itself to the sweeping generalisations based on early research on US cities.