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In this paper I argue that gentrification, despite the many arguments over its continuing validity as a concept, retains its key importance in understanding processes of class change. For some it is a process of colonising the city, for others a manifestation of belonging; for some the concept can be used as a radical critique of neoliberalism whilst for others this very critique is an exemplar of the hegemonising tendencies amongst (often radical) North American urban scholars. I argue that the concept has grown somewhat middle-aged and overendowed with its own history. I suggest that it needs to retain a focus on the implications of macro social change for individuals and social groups. In particular, gentrification needs to decouple itself from its original association with the deindustrialisation of metropolitan centres such as London and from its associations with working-class displacement. Recently, gentrification has occurred across the spatial scale—in second-order cities and in hitherto suburban locations as well as in the countryside. Processes such as 'greentrification', 'gated communities', and 'studentification' often coexist in quite close proximity to each other; the influence London exerts over the southern half of England is a good example of this. I argue that the concept of gentrification functions as an important way of understanding the mediations between global processes and flows, on the one hand, and the construction of identities in particular localities, on the other. With the decline of social class as providing an overall explanation of cultural, social, and spatial behaviour, this notion of gentrification as a form of 'elective belonging' has considerable potential for uniting geographical and sociological approaches to agency and structure. I illustrate this by drawing on three recent studies on the relationship between people and places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore elements of the relationship between deployments of cultural capital and neighbourhood change. Based on research in a gentrified neighbourhood of Bristol, England, I argue that for gentrifier households with children the need to reproduce (institutional) cultural capital in the education market can conflict with the desire to display (objectified) cultural capital via the gentrification aesthetic in the inner-urban neighbourhood. In the trade-off between aesthetics and education, education wins, resulting in a much more conventional suburban, exurban housing/neighbourhood career for onward-moving gentrifiers. I conclude by suggesting a more diffuse, provincial form of gentrification in which the different strands of cultural capital can conflict in urban space (rather than the smooth reproduction of cultural capital assumed by the idea of a gentritication habitus). It confirms that the intergenerational reproduction of an (urban) new middle class is likely to be confined to large metropolitan areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]