Submitted Paper Progress in Human Geography 2023, Vol. 0(0) 1–19 © The Author(s) 2023 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/03091325231186810 journals.sagepub.com/home/phg Elite capture and urban geography: Analyzing geographies of privilege John Lauermann  Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, USA Khouloud Mallak CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA Abstract Many cities have a two-tiered system for governing land: one set of rules for most people, and a different set for elite investors, large developers, and others who can bend, circumvent, or lobby against the rules. This reflects elite capture of urban institutions, as institutions are subverted to benefit special interests. We argue elite capture plays a systemic role in 21st century urban political economy. We review recent scholarship on four kinds of elite capture practices—rent seeking, opportunity hoarding, exploiting loopholes, and co-opting participatory planning—and illustrate them with a discussion of recent gentrification research. Keywords elite capture, urban elites, gentrification, urban governance, urban political economy I Introduction Many cities have a two-tiered system of land gov- ernance: one set of rules for most people, and a different set for elite investors, large developers, and politically connected landowners. The latter cir- cumvent de jure law with a de facto “VIP” system, cobbled together by exploiting loopholes, vetoing initiatives, lobbying for exemptions, and sometimes flouting the law altogether. Examples of such elite captures of urban institutions abound, especially in places with high degrees of social privilege like highly gentrified neighborhoods or affluent suburbs. We see elite captures, for example, in the classed and racialized politics of exclusionary zoning in five US cities (Cashin, 2021); extreme engineering for luxury property development in London (Burrows et al., 2021), Jakarta (Liong et al., 2020), or Hong Kong (Ho and Yip, 2023); subversion of planning insti- tutions by the real estate industry in Athens (Alexandri, 2018), New York (Stein, 2019), Hong Kong (Aveline-Dubac and Balndeau, 2019), and Toronto (Lippert, 2019); displacements for elite real estate development in Rio de Janeiro (Gaffney, 2016), Atlanta (Raymond et al., 2021), and Guangzhou (Kan, 2020); or the hyper-segregated enclaves of the super-rich across global cities in east and southeast Asia, the Gulf States, North America, and western Europe (Forrest et al., 2017). Corresponding author: John Lauermann, Pratt Institute, 144 W 14th St, New York, NY 10011, USA. Email: jlauerma@pratt.edu