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Potential rents vs. potential lives

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  • Eric Clark
  • Annika Pissin

Abstract

The seeking of potential rents directs flows of investment into built and natural environments, suffusing volatility into urban and rural landscapes, generating gentrification and other forms of land use change, and displacing lives and livelihoods to make space for ‘improvement’, ‘highest and best use’, ‘revitalization’, or the like. In this paper we argue that potential rents are captured at the cost of potential lives, and that rent gap theory, long central (and limited) to gentrification theory, is more widely applicable to the dynamics of land use change and uneven geographical development in capitalist societies. By reading David Harvey’s analyses of rent and accumulation by dispossession as a sophisticated formulation of rent gap theory, we relate the seeking and capturing of potential rents to the power of landed developer interests and a broadened conceptualization of rentiership. We furthermore relate the seeking of potential rents to an ideology of limitless accumulation, and the striving to rein in potential rents to ideas of degrowth and the need for a culture and a politics of limits. Brief vignettes from the ‘primary sector’ (fisheries in the Baltic Sea, dairy farming in Europe, and small-scale farming in Sweden) suggestively illustrate our central argument that the seeking and capturing of potential rents stand in stark opposition to potentials for wellbeing and flourishing of human and non-human lives. We conclude that constraining potential rents – founded as they are on faith in limitless growth – requires a culture of self-limitation and politically imposed limitations commensurable with post-capitalist societies.

Suggested Citation

  • Eric Clark & Annika Pissin, 2023. "Potential rents vs. potential lives," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 55(6), pages 1485-1505, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:55:y:2023:i:6:p:1485-1505
    DOI: 10.1177/0308518X20971308
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Ernesto López-Morales & Claudia Sanhueza & Sebastián Espinoza & Felipe Ordenes & Hernán Orozco, 2019. "Rent gap formation due to public infrastructure and planning policies: An analysis of Greater Santiago, Chile, 2008–2011," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 51(7), pages 1536-1557, October.
    2. Eliza Darling, 2005. "The City in the Country: Wilderness Gentrification and the Rent Gap," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 37(6), pages 1015-1032, June.
    3. Qiyan Wu & Xiaoling Zhang & Paul Waley, 2017. "When Neil Smith met Pierre Bourdieu in Nanjing, China: bringing cultural capital into rent gap theory," Housing Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(5), pages 659-677, July.
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    1. Li, Jingyu & Stoffelen, Arie & Wijburg, Gertjan & Vanclay, Frank, 2024. "Tourism-induced land acquisition in protected areas: Land rent dynamics and state monopoly rent around the Wulingyuan world heritage site in China," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 109(C).

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