This article argues against the allegedly inter-contextual character of gentrification within the new gentrification research agenda. The main argument is that gentrification is a concept highly dependent on contextual causality and its generalized use will not remove its contextual attachment to the Anglo-American metropolis. The second argument is that looking for gentrification in increasingly varied contexts displaces emphasis from causal mechanisms to similarities in outcomes across contexts, and leads to a loss of analytical rigour. The third argument refers to the ideological and political impact of equating ‘gentrification’ with, and projecting its neoliberal frame on, the different forms of urban regeneration across various geographical and historical contexts. As gentrification becomes quasi synonymous with urban regeneration, it becomes less useful to the analysis of urban socio-spatial change and, since the use of this term seems no longer avoidable in academic and broader discourse, its implicit contextual assumptions should be constantly exposed.

This paper explores the effects of the Airbnb short-term rentals in Athens, against the background of the continuing socio-economic crisis and the substantial rise of urban tourism. The Airbnb practice emerges as a major transformative force of urban space, economy and society, which can be neither utterly condemned nor fully celebrated. The effects of the Airbnb phenomenon are found to be both positive and negative, including – on the one hand – the partial upgrading and reuse of the existing building stock or the reactivation of the local economy and – on the other hand – processes of residential segregation, gentrification and touristification.

Segregation patterns and trends are traditionally considered to be changing through residential mobility, while scant attention is paid to the social mobility of long-term residents. This paper explores first the origins of this unilateral attention and ultimately relates it to the context in which mobility, and residential mobility in particular, were conceptualized by the founders of Urban Sociology.The rest of the paper is an attempt to substantiate the context dependency of this relation through the examination of the social mobility of long-term residents and its impact on shaping local social profiles in Athens. The Athenian context, bearing important similarities to those of other large cities in Southern Europe and elsewhere, has been characterized both by comparatively reduced residential mobility and by increased social mobility in the process of rapid postwar urbanization and the massive conversion of rural masses to urban dwellers. The importance of spatially endogenous social mobility is discussed in particular with respect to social structures and institutions – such as the family or the housing system – that have been systematically impeding residential mobility. The conclusion is that the social mobility of the longterm residents has a varying, context-dependent importance for the analysis of segregation patterns and tendencies which in many cases is unwittingly neglected.

This paper draws attention to the socio-spatial diversity of immigrant groups in Athens by investigating their changing hierarchical position in both society and space. The varying demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the immigrant population generate hierarchies of immigrant groups, which are reflected in intricate ways in the residential distribution of immigrants in the metropolitan area. Diversity seems to be interconnected with hierarchically unequal social positions, and these positions are in turn interconnected with the transformation of the spatial hierarchy in the Greek capital. This hierarchical diversity is expressed by a spatial typology of immigrants’ locations in Athens. The paper ultimately explores how this typology tends to alter the urban social ecology (in terms of socio-ethnic composition of distinct spatial clusters) and the urban structural dynamics (in terms of interactions between different ethnic and social groups) in an increasingly unequal city.