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Professor Gerlofs works at the intersection of urban, cultural, political, and historical geography. His current projects are concentrated around three major foci: 1) the political economy of urbanization in historical perspective; 2) the dynamics of contemporary urban social movements; and 3) processes related to neighborhood change, including but not limited to gentrification. Much of his work has explored these issues in the dynamic hyper-metropolis that is Mexico City—the most populous urban area in the western hemisphere—whose historic neighborhoods are being demographically and aesthetically altered at an incredible rate, and whose systems of governance are on the edge of wholesale renovation as the city sheds the guise of the Federal District and is reborn as the State of Mexico City for the first time since the Mexican Revolution. His current book project, Monstrous Politics: Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City, interrogates the multivalent transformations of the Mexican capital from the last years of the Porfiriato to the present, and he is in the process of developing new comparative urban research based in Hong Kong.
Research Interests
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Urban Geography
gentrification and neighborhood change, ethnography, global and comparative urbanism
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Political Geography
urban geopolitics, urban governance, social and political movements
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Cultural Geography
urban aesthetics, dialectics, ‘structures of feeling’
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Historical Geography
cultural landscapes, urbanization, ‘social formations’
Selected Publications
2023
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Gerlofs, B. (2023). Monstrous politics: Geography, rights, and the urban revolution in Mexico City. Vanderbilt University Press.
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Gerlofs, B. (2023). Shaking Up the City: Ignorance, Inequality and the Urban Question. The AAG Review of Books, 11(1), 8-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2022.2144684
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Gerlofs, B. A., & López-Morales, E. (2023). ¿Quién es gentrificación (‘who is gentrificación’)? urban change, conceptual chimerae, and the challenge of blanqueamiento (‘whitening’) in mexico city. Dialogues in Urban Research, 27541258231204004. https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258231204004
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Lai, T. C., Gerlofs, B. A., & Wang, H. (2023). Timing is everything: Territorial stigmatization, immobility policy, and the COVID-boom in Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po. Journal of Urban Affairs, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2023.2254870
2022
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Gerlofs, B. A. (2022). Ammunition, not a ride: Humor, human geography, and the fragile absurdities of power. Dialogues in Human Geography, 20438206221102954. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221102954
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Gerlofs, B. A. (2022). Deadly serious: Humor and the politics of aesthetic transgression. Dialogues in Human Geography, 12(2), 232-251.
2021
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Ben A. Gerlofs, "Deadly Serious: Humor and the Politics of Aesthetic Transgression". Dialogues in Human Geography (DOI: 10.1177/20438206211054610).
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Ben A. Gerlofs, "Seismic Shifts: Recentering Geology and Politics in the Anthropocene". Annals of the American Association of Geographers (DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1835458).
2020
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Ben A. Gerlofs, “Dreaming Dialectically: The Death and Life of the Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City.” Urban Studies (DOI: 10.1177/0042098019868102).
2019
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Ben A. Gerlofs, “Policing Perception: Postpolitics and the Elusive Everyday.” Urban Geography (DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2018.1558633).
2018
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Ben A. Gerlofs, “Así No (Not Like This): Resisting Postpolitics on Mexico City’s Avenida Chapultepec.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.12659).
Current Projects
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"Evolving Geographies of Neighborhood Change in China's Greater Bay Area: Land Use, Planning, and Aesthetics in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong"
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"Capital Disasters: Citizenship, Gentrification, and the Politics of Geological Instability in Mexico City"
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"Understanding the Dynamics of Contemporary Urban Change in Hong Kong and Singapore"
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"Neighborhood Change in Hong Kong's Kennedy Town: An Aesthetic Survey Investigation"
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"Relevance, Revisited: Promoting Geographical Research Within and Beyond the University"