Loretta Lees
As gentrification studies entered the C21st some authors proclaimed that gentrification had gone global and was now a generalised urban phenomenon. More recently a small number of urban geographers have become interested in investigating this claim using ideas from the supposedly ‘new’ comparative urbanism literature that has arisen in geography and beyond. Focusing on the relevance of this ‘new’ comparative urbanism for researching gentrification around the world, this chapter argues that the comparative urbanism literature is fashionable right now for a number of reasons, that it has good potential for a truly global gentrification studies, but that there is much theoretical, conceptual and especially methodological progress that needs to be made. There are also other issues to attend to, for in gentrification studies it is important to consider and resist the neglect and marginalization of those people being socially cleansed; that is, displaced from cities worldwide, not simply the neglect and marginalization of cities in the Global South in (northern) urban theory.