Gentrification describes the social, economic and cultural reforms of a region through introduction of private investment and personal capital, resulting in the displacement of low-income populations and replacing them with mdiddle and high urban classes. First, it is located in the urban centers of the Western world and its conception tends to be categorized into two different views, the school of supply and demand. The first examines the process through its economic and social dynamics, while the second focuses on its relationship to consumption tendencies. Additionally, a holistic approach has been developed that conceives both sides as complementary rather than competitive. The geographical expansion of gentrification from the centers to the periphery highlights the gap, the contradictions and the interrelations between the Western and the rest of the world. Some researches correlate this expansion with post-colonial theory and call it the new urban colonialism because of the geographical violence it produces. In addition, it is crucial to refer to the subject as an epistemology of the South, structured in a distance from its western-centric interpretation and related directly to the experiences of the southern populations. In an attempt to focus on an example of a city of the periphery, the examination of gentrification in central Athens is presented through the eyes of the Greek research community. In Athens, the gentrification literature was first used in the late 1980s to analyze the restructuring of Plaka neighborhood and in the early 2000s the term began to be used more frequently for various areas of the center. The research, however, points out a form of gentrification performed in spots and observed in the micro scale. Other types of urban changes  have been detected that cannot necessarily identify with the terminology of this phenomenon.