“Oh, no, we don't have any gentrification here”, said this eminent researcher of the rise of the Taiwanese middle class. On only my third visit to Taipei, I was not inclined to challenge his reply, though the ongoing and newly completed large redevelopments I saw as he drove me around Taipei some 10 years ago did stir doubt. Gentrification cannot be simply read off the urban landscape as if visible in a momentary view. So, who was I to jump to conclusions? Nevertheless, I imagined that these redevelopments – state- or market-led (or both), commercial or residential, inner-city or suburban – involved the massive accumulation of rentseeking capital, the displacement of homes and livelihoods, and the suffering of many people who pay those costs of ‘improvement’ that fail to appear on financial balance sheets or glossy plans for ‘revitalisation’. In addition, I wondered what the victims of the process in Taipei called it, if not ‘gentrification’. What particularities might a vernacular term for the process highlight?

A decade and a dozen visits later, research into urban development in Taipei in collaboration with Taiwanese colleagues tells me that this was not sheer imagination, a travelling theory about a travelling problem. Gentrification is part of Taipei's contemporary geography and history (Jou et al, 2014). However, as could be said of gentrification in Swedish cities in the early post-war period, when massive urban renewal projects were carried out with strong social-democratic legitimacy, and as Ley and Teo (2014) have observed more recently in Hong Kong, public debate and media discourse on urban transformation did not engage with the concept of gentrification. My knowledgeable Taipei guide spoke prior to ‘an ontological awakening’ spurred by growing inequality (Ley and Teo, 2014).

Ruth Glass introduced her now-classic analysis of London with: ‘London can never be taken for granted. The city is too vast, too complex, too contrary and too moody to become entirely familiar’ (Glass, 1989, p 133). The same can be said of Abu Dhabi, Athens, Beijing, Beirut, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Cape Town, Damascus and the other cities included in this volume. The rich empirical analyses presented here reflect how gentrification is characterised by particular social, economic, cultural, political and legal contexts.