Ben Gerlofs

The University of Hong Kong | HKU · Department of Geography

This article provides a critical reassessment of the role of the state in processes of neighborhood change in Hong Kong, based on mixed‐methods research conducted in the rapidly changing Sai Ying Pun neighborhood. We argue that common narratives of ‘state‐led’ processes of neighborhood change often overstate, oversimplify or unduly assume the influ...

In this article, we outline the central tenets of an endogenous theory of neighborhood change in Mexico City known as blanqueamiento (‘whitening'). Drawing on longstanding research and intellectual exchange with local scholars and activists, we illustrate the promise this concept holds for transcending the many limitations of ‘gentrification', and...

In this author's response, I close this forum on the spatiality and political utility of humor by responding to a superb set of critical commentaries – for which I am extremely grateful – in three parts, with the sobering contemporary reality of the comedian-president facing down a brutal invasion serving as a critical, conjunctural point of entry....

This essay examines the political utility of humor using a framework developed in recent geopolitical scholarship read through Jacques Rancière's theorization of the politics of aesthetics and applied to everyday political life in contemporary Mexico City. Geopolitics here offers a unique lens through which to understand the spatiality of humor and...

A strident focus on atmospheric carbons and on climate change as its distinguishing feature has seen much debate and research surrounding the Anthropocene stray from its conceptual grounding in geology. Yet new research argues that hallmarks of the Anthropocene such as sea-level rise, melting ice sheets, and environmental engineering projects desig...

This article investigates the conceptual and political history of the right to the city in Mexico City from the late 1980s to the present, focusing especially on the Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City completed and endorsed by leading political figures in 2010. By grounding this investigation in the dialectical methods of Henri Lefebvre,...

This piece argues that urban postpolitical scholarship should pay greater attention to the everyday lives of urban residents and the everyday spaces of contemporary cities. Recent debates in urban geography have sought in part to expand narrow readings of Jacques Rancière’s politics in particular, creating space for broader and more inclusive analy...

Building on roughly ten months of ethnographic and archival research, this article examines successful resistance to a planned redevelopment project along Avenida Chapultepec, one of Mexico City's historic boulevards. Local residents and their allies objected not only to the specifics of the project but also to its planning process, in which citize...

This article examines the construction and dismantling of a regime of “aesthetic governmentality” in Oak Brook, Illinois. This regime consists not only of policy and law, but more importantly of a way of seeing and evaluating Oak Brook’s idyllic suburban landscape. Drawing on interview and archival data, the case is made that the power of this long...