Smith’s “Gentrification and the Rent Gap” sharpens the political-economic explanation of gentrification by locating it in the gap between actual ground rent and the potentially higher rent that can be extracted after reinvestment. The iconic idea is that gentrification is not primarily a cultural return to the city, but a capital movement exploiting spatially uneven depreciation and reinvestment. Its theoretical contribution is to make urban land value a temporal machine: decline, disinvestment and devaluation do not simply precede renewal, but prepare the conditions for profitable redevelopment. Methodologically, the article works as theoretical clarification, defending and refining the rent-gap thesis against consumption-led accounts. Its conceptual operation is value excavation: the deteriorated neighbourhood becomes legible as a latent field of capitalised possibility. The bridge to the wider field connects Marxist geography, housing studies, urban redevelopment, planning critique and anti-displacement politics, making gentrification readable as a structural process within capitalist urbanisation.
