Gentrification is settler colonialism: Gabriel Schwake, Haim Yacobi, ‘Decolonisation, gentrification, and the settler-colonial city: Reappropriation and new forms of urban exclusion in Israel’, EPC: Politics and Space, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

Gentrification is settler colonialism: Gabriel Schwake, Haim Yacobi, ‘Decolonisation, gentrification, and the settler-colonial city: Reappropriation and new forms of urban exclusion in Israel’, EPC: Politics and Space, 2023

27Oct23

Abstrat: Focusing on the immigration of upper-middle-class Palestinian families to the Israeli town of
Upper-Nazareth, originally built by the state to enhance Jewish presence in the area, this paper
frames the concept of decolonising gentrification. Accordingly, it studies a unique inconsistency
between economic class and ethnonational hegemony, which enables upwardly Arab minority
families to overcome ethnic barriers and to exercise social and spatial mobility. Therefore, this
paper explains how these socio-political dynamics challenge the local settler-colonial aspects of
urban development and enable the reappropriation of colonised urban space. Focusing on the
case of Upper-Nazareth and its former ‘Officers’ Neighbourhood’, we examine a distinctive
contradiction between political power and economic abilities that triggers a unique case of
gentrification, where the colonised minority gentrifies the colonising hegemony. At the same
time, this decolonising gentrification, as we argue, takes place in restricted urban enclaves, and
relies on an ethno-class price gap as it is only the minority upper-class who is willing to pay the
increasing prices, due to their limited options. Therefore, as this paper shows, decolonising
gentrification simultaneously challenges and recreates urban settler-colonialism, enabling
limited market-oriented reappropriation while triggering ethnic-based accumulation and new
forms of neoliberal exclusion.

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