Bio-gentrification: vulnerability bio-value chains in gentrifying neighbourhoods†

Abstract

In this paper, I develop the concept of “bio-gentrification” as a way to broaden critical theoretical debates on the relationship between gentrification and “social mixing” policies. Bio-gentrification weds urban Marxist political economic insights to the neo-Foucauldian notion of biopower. The former stresses spatial tactics of removal and displacement and value generated through land and property. The latter assesses a wider terrain of spatial tactics, their relationship to knowledge produced about humans as living beings, and their alignment with capitalist urbanization. The Vancouver example illuminates how social mixing “truths” and practices to which they are tied generate value by naturalizing human insecurity in situ and transforming the biological existence of disadvantaged peoples into raw material for profit through a process that can be conceptualized as a “vulnerability bio-value chain.” Bio-gentrification refers to the tension between removal and embedding of disadvantaged peoples and points to the need for a bio-gentrification politics to confront this dynamic.

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