Transnational gentrification: Globalisation and neighbourhood change in Panama’s Casco Antiguo

Abstract

Drawing upon the case of Panama’s Casco Antiguo, this paper establishes the theoretical concept of ‘transnational gentrification’: a process of neighbourhood change both enabled by and formative of a spatially embedded transnational ‘gentry’ whose locational mobility creates new possibilities for profitable housing reinvestment in geographically disparate markets where such possibilities would not have otherwise existed. Globalisation does not just create a common political-economic structure driving urban change or a common ideology for a gentrifying cohort. In this case, it creates historically and geographically specific connections between places, which themselves can become pathways along which gentrification processes propagate, connecting local capital to international consumer demand. The case of the Casco Antiguo offers a provocative inversion of a standard critical narrative of globalisation, whereby capital is freed from national constraints and able to roam globally while people largely remain place-bound. In the Casco Antiguo, residents are transnational and property developers are local.