Gentrification, the process of upgrading urban neighborhoods has been a controversial issue since the early 1990s. While the violence which is innate to the urban gentrification processes causing the displacement of urban poor, destruction of existing social networks and in most cases eviction from one’s habitus, has been widely studied by the academic disciplines of political geography, sociology and urban studies, it has seldom attracted the attention of political theorists, particularly researchers in the field of political violence. The lack of study on the relationship between political violence and gentrification is ever more interesting if one considers the fact that one of the most distinguished and early studies on urban transformation was written by Walter Benjamin, the famous writer of “Critique of Violence.” In his grand and untimely work, The Arcades Project, Benjamin examines the urban transformation of Paris during the nineteenth century. Contrary to the conventional association of the rise of modern cities with increasing rationalism, spread of science and technology and bureaucracy, as one could find in Weber, Benjamin’s account of Paris portrays us an enchanted spatial experience, a ‘phantasmagoria’ installed under the sign of commodity fetishism. The purpose behind retelling of such an urban story is to break the spell of this phantasmagoria by showing the innately violent character of capitalism and by negating the underlying conception of history as a perpetual progress. Hence in Benjamin’s world the phenomenon of urban transformation finds its embodiment in certain ‘lowlife’ characters such as the gambler, the flâneur or the idler. This paper argues that introducing Walter Benjamin to the studies of urban gentrification would create new tools for understanding the means of contemporary violence. In this respect this paper offers a re-reading of the existing literature on gentrification through the lenses of The Arcades Project.
