Why have so many central and inner cities in Europe, North America and Australia been so radically revamped in the last three decades, converting urban decay into new chic? What does this mean for the people who live there? Can they do anything about it? This book challenges conventional wisdom - which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of the new middle class tastes and a demand for urban living - to reveal gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late-20th century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification...