Cities & Society seminar series: Lecture by Matthias Bernt, November 14
Dear all,
We are pleased to invite you to the next event of the Cities & Society seminar series:
Very particular, or rather universal? Gentrification in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg
By Matthias Bernt,
Date: Monday November 14th
Time: 14:15 – 15:30
Location: Auditorium 5, Eilert Sundts Hus, University of Oslo
About the lecture:
Over the last years, an increasing number of scholarly contributions has questioned the usefulness of the concept of gentrification for cases outside of the context in which the term has originally been developed. This paper builds on this debate and explores the unfolding of gentrification in three contrasting environments. It analyzes the course of urban upgrading in London-Barnsbury, in Prenzlauer Berg in East-Berlin, as well as in the central city of St. Petersburg and argues that while the concept of gentrification provides useful conceptual tools to understand the commodification of urban space in general, its explanatory force is fairly limited with regard to the actual spatial and temporal patterns of urban change. It is concluded that what is widely coined as “gentrification” is in fact an umbrella term for fairly disparate socio-spatial formations which are marked by different policies and state structures and result in different dynamics of regeneration and population change. This calls for more reflection on the double character of housing as a commodity and as a social right, i.e. the nexus between commodification and decommodification in the housing sector. While rent-gap theories provide indispensable instruments for understanding the first, other and more contextually sensitive approaches are needed for studying the latter.
About the speaker:
Dr. Matthias Bernt has been trained as a Political Scientist and works as a Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space in Erkner (near Berlin). Previous positions were at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig and, as a Visiting Scholar, at the Columbia University of New York City and the University College of London. Since 1998 Bernt has taught as an Adjunct Lecturer at the several German universities.
Bernt works on the broad field of interrelations between urban development and urban governance, with a strong focus on urban shrinkage and on gentrification. He has extensively published on the two issues both in national and international journals. Bernt is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, as well as of the Board of the Research Committee 21 on Sociology of Urban and Regional Development of the International Sociological Association. He is Deputy Speaker of the Section Urban and Regional Sociology of the German Sociological Association.
About the seminar series Cities & Society:
As a growing majority of the planet's population live in urban landscapes, cities are increasingly identified by a wider variety of actors as the primary strategic ground for resolving some of the most pressing environmental, political, and social challenges of the 21st century. In this context, there is an urgent need to reexamine some of the basic categories and concepts used to define and decipher urban processes, and to more broadly pose the questions of what characterizes the urban today and what approaches that can help us to successfully generate new urban theory and knowledge. By inviting international expertise working at the frontiers of urban research, this seminar series seeks address these questions and support the development of a dynamic and robust research environment around contemporary urban issues at the University of Oslo.
For more information on the seminar series, please the website: http://www.sv.uio.no/iss/english/research/networks/cities-and-society
The seminar series is hosted by the Department of Sociology and Human Geography.
Best wishes,
the Cities & Society organizers