Introduction

Despite the fact that gentrification processes are far from a new phenomenon in the field of urban studies (see Lees et al, 2008), their importance nowadays lies in the scale of changes that cities are undergoing, as well as in the links that such transformations seem to have within the globalised economy. As Sassen (1997) pointed out, the transformation of the global economy restored the importance of large cities as sites of certain types of production, services, commercialisation and innovation. In a globalised economy, cities became centres for the growth and consolidation of capital investment and for the development of an international real estate market. Latin American cities do not appear to have bucked this trend. Indeed, a new phase of territorial capital accumulation has had a strong impact on urban processes in Latin American cities, promoting what some authors have identified as a redefinition of the sense of urbanity from ‘the notion of demographic concentration and urbanisation towards the idea of dispersal and fragmented socio-spatial structures’ (Carrión, 2010, p 7). In fact, evidence shows that Latin American cities are facing a new phase of increasingly deeper redevelopment in new centralities, which is creating new displacement-related conflicts (see Coulomb, 2010).

Within this framework, gentrification is a phenomenon that has become widespread and integrated into wider processes, both urban and global, and is differentiated from what happened during previous decades when these processes were circumscribed within specific sites (Smith, 2002). It is important to question, as Marcuse and Van Kempen (2000) did with respect to North American cities, the extent to which gentrification processes in Latin American cities are part of the establishment of a new urban order or if, on the contrary, they are historic processes of urban change in city centres that have only recently become more noticeable. It is important to note that the rehabilitation of old quarters in the privileged locations of large Latin American cities has made more visible existing divisions among different social sectors: barriers are no longer virtual, as in past decades, but are constructed in such a way as to create highly unequal conditions regarding access to urban facilities, urban aesthetics, green spaces, and so on.