Super-gentrification in a post-socialist state on the example of Poland

Abstract

The multidimensional process of gentrification is one of the most commonly occurring processes of the contemporary urban transformations. Its most advanced stage is the so-called super-gentrification, a situation in which wealthy residents of the neighbourhood are replaced by ones even richer. This process is particularly clear in the most affluent cities in Western Europe and Northern America. Gentrification there seems really advanced, and it has been observed and described for at least several decades. In contrary, in the case of the states of the former bloc of real socialism, the manifestations of gentrification started to become visible only after 1989, or even later. In their case, gentrification is less advanced in its form and affects many spaces only point-wise. However, the aim of the paper is to describe the presence of the super-gentrification process on the example of Poland, in relation to cold-war-modernist housing estates, the process of ‘wild’ property restitution, and of some rural areas. Data on the real estate market and field research are used for this purpose. The author concludes that super-gentrification is already a tangible process in the region of Central and Eastern Europe, which shows a much greater advancement and social severity of this process of transforming urban space in relations to the vast majority of research analysing the level of gentrification advancement in the CEE region. The occurrence of super-gentrification also suggests the possibility of indicating a significant caesura or even ending the socio-economic transformation of some post-socialist countries.