This edited collection has been like a leap onto a moving train, not quite knowing where it might lead, and having only a vague sense of where it has been. It has been exciting and we have learnt a lot. What the different chapters offer is a wider and deeper view of ‘gentrification’ from around the globe than has been managed to date. However, here, the editors and contributors have done more than merely offer a large number of empirical accounts of the diverse forms of gentrification (and its interaction with other urban processes) around the world. In this conclusion, drawing on Ward (2010), we conceptualise and theorise back from the different empirical cases in this book to reveal what we have learned from looking at gentrification globally, and from comparing beyond the usual suspects.

The chapters in this edited collection show that a vast number of cities around the world, from Mumbai to Rio de Janeiro, from Santiago to Cape Town, from Buenos Aires to Taipei, are simultaneously experiencing intensive and uneven processes of capital-led restructuring with significant influxes of upper- and middle-income people and large doses of class-led displacement from deprived urban areas. The chapters show the uneven development of global gentrification connected to planetary urbanisations, and a significant number of these are in the vein of neo-Haussmannization (Merrifield, 2013a, 2013b) through processes of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003). This exploitative process of value extraction from the built environment is a phenomenon that has been in place in the Global South for some time now but has often been overlooked by urban researchers, though work is emerging (see Shin, 2009, 2014; López-Morales, 2010, 2011; Goldman, 2011; Desai and Loftus, 2013). Globally, the process of value extraction has been accelerated, unevenly, by the faster pace of financial capital mobility invested in real estate circuits of capital, by rampantly entrepreneurial urban policies, by the lack of available land for the urban expansion that many cities are experiencing and by the increasing cost of peripheral (suburban) expansion and long-distance transportation (re-emphasising the importance of the notion of ‘spatial capital’ vis-a-vis gentrification; see Rerat and Lees, 2011).