19 Debates over the use-value of ‘gentrification’ as a concept have, in recent years, focused primarily on its applicability in contexts that do not fit the blueprint of the Western de-industrialised city. The likes of Maloutas (2011), Ghertner (2014) and Smart and Smart (2017) urge us to see beyond the word or to discard it altogether, especially in contexts where something other than an upward trajectory of rents is threatening to displace lower-income residents. The Urban Marginality workshop in Mexico City, from which this book project derived, forced us to engage with these questions upfront, bring- ing together academics from a variety of contexts. Over the course of several sessions, we kept returning to variations of a similar question, and it is this that animates our discussion here. Is the concept of gentrification helpful, and why? Is it an explanatory or mystifying concept in our research? Broadly speaking, we are all convinced that the central pillar of gentrifica- tion scholarship is intellectually sound and still (depressingly) useful in the contexts we study: the rent gap is at work in Quibdó (Colombia), Edinburgh (Scotland), and Istanbul (Turkey); the pursuit of the ‘highest and best use’ for urban land is pervasive in all three. But what is equally clear is that ‘gentri- fication’ cannot stand alone as a catch-all descriptor, still less an explanatory framework that can capture all that goes on in these cities. Smart and Smart (2017, 519) suggest that If we extend gentrification to cover all of the processes by which urban areas undergo the replacement of lower-income by higher-income residents, it is neither a new concept nor does it follow any clear common process of change. This kind of complaint serves to highlight why we feel this chapter remains necessary. It does not matter if gentrification is not ‘a new concept’—indeed, AuQ5 AuQ6 Chapter 2 An Explanatory or Mystifying Concept? The Use Value of Gentrification Theory Edwar Calderon, Neil Gray, Hamish Kallin and Ebru Soytemel 16028-0279d-1pass-r01.indd 19 7/27/2019 5:39:19 PM