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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Cities have become the major habitat for human societies. They are also the places where the starkest social inequalities show up. Income, social, land and housing inequalities shape the built environment and living conditions of different neighborhoods of cities, and in return, unequal access to services, environmental quality and favorable health conditions in different neighborhoods and cities fuel the reproduction of interpersonal inequalities. This book examines how inequalities are produced and reproduced both within and between cities. In particular, we review land rent and social segregation theories from diverse disciplinary references and through examples taken from around the world. The attraction of urban centralities, which is further reinforced by the growing financialization of property and urban capital, is also analyzed through the lens of its influence on rent-seeking mechanisms and the ever increasing pressure of population migration.
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Seitenzahl: 466
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1 Major Models of the Spatial Organization of Urban Societies
1.1. Historical evolution of the spatiality of social status markers in the city
1.2. Slums, informal settlements and shanty towns
1.3. Institutional segregation
1.4. Separations by choice
1.5. Mobility and unequal accessibility in urban space
1.6. Corrections and remedies
1.7. Conclusion
1.8. References
2 Land Rent and the Center–Periphery model
2.1. Introduction
2.2. Space and rent: the urban field
2.3. Variations of the urban field by city
2.4. Towards a complex explanatory construction of urban rent inequalities
2.5. Financialization of urban development and conflicts over land use?
2.6. Conclusion
2.7. References
3 Inequalities in Access to Urban Services
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Urban services: definitions
3.3. Urban services and issues of socio-spatial inequality
3.4. Access to urban services: a plurality of dimensions
3.5. Conclusion
3.6. References
4 Gentrification and the Real Estate Market: What Can We Learn from the Rent Gap Theory?
4.1. Introduction
4.2. The theoretical basis for thinking about gentrification
4.3. Apparent simplicity leads to great success
4.4. Testing and quantifying the rent gap hypothesis
4.5. What place for the rent gap theory in the geography of real estate?
4.6. Conclusion
4.7. Acknowledgments
4.8. References
5 Socio-spatial Segregation in Cities
5.1. Segregation in metropolises, renewed theoretical issues
5.2. Segregation, social division of space and restratification in the contemporary city
5.3. From observations to theories: the multiple factors of segregation
5.4. Analyzing segregation, scales and temporalities
5.5. Conclusion
5.6. Acknowledgments
5.7. References
6 Migrants In and Between the Cities of the World
6.1. Introduction: migration, urbanization and inequalities
6.2. City networks and migration networks: a coincidence rather than a given
6.3. Migration flows creating urban systems
6.4. Conclusion. Migrants and cities: creators and accelerators of inequalities?
6.5. References
7 Inequalities Between Cities
7.1. Interweaving of scales and cities
7.2 Inequalities related to urban functions
7.3. Inequalities related to urban status and city powers
7.4. Size inequalities
7.6. Image inequalities
7.6. Conclusion
7.7. References
Conclusion
References
List of Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
4 Gentrification and the Real Estate Market: What Can We Learn from the Rent Gap Theory?
Table 4.1. Forty years of work on the rent gap (selected publications). NB: the ...
List of Illustrations
1 Major Models of the Spatial Organization of Urban Societies
Figure 1.1. Successive boundaries of the enclosures that have walled off the mun...
Figure 1.2. A model of the evolution of urban social segregation according to J....
Figure 1.3. Changes in the location of attractive neighborhoods in six US cities...
Figure 1.4. Configurations of economic status (left) and family status (right) f...
Figure 1.5. Dot map of the city of Detroit. Source: https://demographics.virgini...
Figure 1.6. Habitat variety and fire vulnerability scene in Guguletu Township, S...
Figure 1.7. Foreign concessions in Shanghai in 1935. Source: United States Army ...
Figure 1.8. Local signs of ongoing gentrification in Peckham Rye (London, UK), S...
2 Land Rent and the Center–Periphery model
Figure 2.1. Land prices in Sydney, Australia, by distance from the CBD. Source: ...
Figure 2.2. Exponential model of the center–periphery gradient. Source: Finance ...
Figure 2.3. Densities of resident population, jobs and flows in Dortmund. Source...
Figure 2.4. Population densities in selected cities. Source: Burdett et al. (201...
Figure 2.5. Two fractal dimensions in the built fabric of European urban areas. ...
Figure 2.6. Universality of the shape of the center–periphery gradient (with dis...
Figure 2.7. Centrality by size and diversity of flows in Singapore in 1997, 2004...
Figure 2.8. Continental inequalities in urban population densities. Source: Bert...
Figure 2.9. Urban profiles of population density in different regions of the wor...
Figure 2.10. Some exceptions to the center–periphery density gradient: profiles ...
Figure 2.11. Population density by income level in Brasilia as a function of dis...
Figure 2.12. Urban land price and the resident population density crater. Source...
Figure 2.13. Adaptation of von Thünen’s schema to the center–periphery segmentat...
Figure 2.14. Rich and poor in the arrondissements of Paris and the communes of Î...
Figure 2.15. The Chinese model of development centered on the valorization of la...
3 Inequalities in Access to Urban Services
Figure 3.1. Closed shops in downtown Meru, a small industrial town that is witne...
Figure 3.2. West Hollywood Gateway Shopping and Service Center in Los Angeles, a...
Figure 3.3. Mobility and accessibility to services. Accessibility to services ca...
Figure 3.4. Access to resources in the peripheral outskirts of Belo Horizonte. T...
4 Gentrification and the Real Estate Market: What Can We Learn from the Rent Gap Theory?
Figure 4.1. The rent gap: graphical formalization according to Smith
Figure 4.2. Evolution and location of rent gaps in Adelaide. Source: Badcock (19...
6 Migrants In and Between the Cities of the World
Figure 6.1. The Mediterranean migration and trade space. Source: © A. Doron (201...
Figure 6.2. The Accra-Lagos urban corridor: intense circulation space. Source: I...
Figure 6.3. Mobilities generated by COVID-19 lockdown. Source: © Denis et al. (2...
7 Inequalities Between Cities
Figure 7.1. Cycles of urban trajectories between positive reinforcement of innov...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
Conclusion
List of Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
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SCIENCES
Geography and Demography, Field Director – Denise Pumain
Geography of Inequality, Subject Head – Clémentine Cottineau
Cities at the Heart of Inequalities
Coordinated by
Clémentine Cottineau
Denise Pumain
First published 2022 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
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© ISTE Ltd 2022
The rights of Clémentine Cottineau and Denise Pumain to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950876
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78945-063-7
ERC code:
SH2 Institutions, Values, Environment and Space
SH2_9 Urban, regional and rural studies
SH2_10 Land use and regional planning
SH2_11 Human, economic and social geography
Preface
Denise PUMAIN1 and Clémentine COTTINEAU2
1Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
2Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, France, and Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
The social challenges for urban science in the 21st century are immense. Since the year 2000, more than half of the world’s population has been living in cities, and by the end of this century, three quarters of the human population will be urban. Cities are places of living, as well as places of production, creation and innovation. They are places where people meet and exchange, where information is made and circulated. They are also the places of powers over the world and imaginations, representations associated with what life in society is or should be, in all their common requirements and cultural particularities. And they are also places of permanent adaptation to change. They are marked for the whole duration of this century by two major tensions, sources of dialectical and dialogical contradictions. The first is the intimate association of the city with the fundamental forces of capitalism. By mastering long-distance relations, cities have made it possible to exploit information asymmetries, which have ensured their growth and the accumulation of wealth, but which have also engendered a considerable widening of all forms of social inequality, both within cities and between cities. A second tension, identified more recently, is the propensity of cities to develop their networks by taking advantage of all the planet’s resources, exhausting its reserves or polluting them without sufficient concern for the future of future generations. Water, energy, raw materials and even the atmosphere are threatened by the unbridled development of cities in the geological age of the Anthropocene, which in turn threatens the possibilities of urban expansion and the quality of life in cities. This book seeks to understand how the inequalities that result from these tensions are expressed around the world, within and between cities, what benefits they bring and what problems they pose to their development.
One of the fundamental attributes of cities, beyond their size and their dense morphology favoring contacts, is their diversity. The social, functional and economic diversity of cities is based on the possibility of complementary exchanges between economic sectors, between individuals specialized in different activities, between cultures and between generations. It is therefore a condition as well as a product of the city. The absence of diversity, by contrast, makes the qualification of a city uncertain. This is the case, for example, of the settlements established by homogeneous societies to extract a unique resource, such as the mining “cities” of Australia or the Arctic, populated mainly by young men, temporary residents employed in the extractive industry. Urban societies organize themselves spatially in part according to this diversity, through the differentiation of activities in the productive space, through the segregation of residents in different residential sectors according to their economic resources, their social and cultural identity, as well as under the influence of discriminatory strategies on the part of certain urban actors and under the action of public policies (which may aim at mixing or at separation, depending on the political context).
Although economic activities, social groups and urban facilities can be described by similar models, we wish first of all to clarify the use of certain concepts of spatial organization that apply more or less well to the different dimensions of the city. We make a meaningful distinction between the terms inequality, diversity and differentiation, as well as segregation and discrimination. The use of the term differentiation is reserved here for the description of a qualitative (i.e. non-ordered) difference between neighborhoods or parts of cities. It applies well, for example, to describe differences in economic and functional specialization in urban space, between residential areas, commercial areas and industrial areas. The notion of diversity is used here mainly to characterize the population, particularly in social and cultural terms. It initially denotes the qualitative heterogeneity of a population, its variety, but sometimes also has a positive connotation. We speak of inequality, on the other hand, to describe a situation in which the various members of society are characterized by differences (e.g. economic, social, or health outcomes) that affect their access to resources valued by the society to which they belong. The term discrimination refers to explicit strategies carried out by a dominant part of society with a view to reducing the access of certain people to these resources, on the basis of their proven or supposed membership of a social or identity group unrelated to this resource (e.g. discrimination of applicants for housing on the basis of their physical appearance). Finally, segregation is both the process and the result of the spatial separation of social groups in the urbanized area. The term segregation is generally used when the separation is caused by legal rules, or when spatial differences are highly visible. It is complemented by the notion of relegation, when certain populations are assigned to reside, often under the constraint of low income, sometimes under social pressure, in areas with poor transport links and a degraded environment.
The geographical dimension of inequalities can be expressed between individuals according to their location, their mobility and their interactions1, or between territories according to their profile and their situation2. Here, we are interested in the role of cities in the dynamics of inequalities, and in particular in their dual role in the observation and evolution of inequalities. Indeed, because of their increased density, cities make differences, competition, inequalities and solidarities more visible. They are therefore a privileged observatory of inequalities and of their deployment in human societies. Moreover, certain urban properties, such as socio-spatial segregation, also make cities amplifiers of inequalities, particularly through neighborhood effects. They thus actively participate in the geographical dynamics of inequalities. Cities are therefore not territories “like any other” with regard to inequalities. The following chapters aim to account for these two dimensions of the relationship between cities and inequalities.
The book begins with a review of the major models of spatial organization of urban societies, taking up the multidisciplinary history of this object of study, from the Chicago School of Sociology (spatialized patterns of economic, family and ethnic inequalities) to the development plans of new towns and to the patterns derived from the theories of colonial geography and from the “global South” (Chapter 1). A generic model that is closely related to historical forms of city growth is the decreasing gradient of densities as a function of distance (accessibility) to the city center (Chapter 2), which structures land prices and urban morphology. The book will discuss urban theories in their geographical context of production. In particular, American and European cities have often been opposed in terms of the spatial organization of society: in the former, the center represents a poor, criminogenic space, neglected by the White population and whose public finances are in deficit, whereas in the latter, the center concentrates wealth and symbols of prestige (architectural, cultural, financial).
Chapter 3 of the book is devoted to intra-urban inequalities in access to services. In addition to the overall organization of urban society and its varied choices of location, physical discontinuities (railroad line, cemetery, industrial site) and symbolic discontinuities (ring road, former land use) can restrict urban dwellers’ access to public and private services. The locations of services and businesses differ, however, in terms of the main criterion they consider for their location: businesses will seek to maximize the solvent population accessible at a given point and will therefore theoretically be located in the center of concentrations of (solvent) population, whereas public emergency services will seek to be located in such a way that the entire population is accessible in a limited time and will therefore promote a more regular coverage of the territory.
In Chapters 4 and 5, the authors explore the dynamics of change in urban space in relation to economic inequality. In particular, the process of gentrification and the rent gap theory (Chapter 4) describe the competition of households from different income and wealth groups in the housing and homeownership market. In particular, the size of the income and wealth gap accelerates the change of poor or mixed-use, sometimes dilapidated, inner-city neighborhoods. More systemically, polarization theory predicts that ongoing metropolization will tend to amplify income and wealth differentials among city dwellers and increase their spatial segregation (Chapter 5).
Finally, the book looks at the scale of the city system by analyzing how migration routes and flows use the urban hierarchy of origin, transit and destination regions (Chapter 6). Inequality between cities is the subject of the final chapter (Chapter 7). Its focus is on what produces and maintains economic differences between cities.
November 2021
1
See also the book by C. Cottineau and J. Vallée (2022)
Inequalities in the Geographical Area
in the same subject of Geography and Inequalities (ISTE SCIENCES), and the field of Geography and Demography.
2
See also the book by M. Talandier and J. Tallec (forecast for 2022)
Territorial Inequalities
in the same subject of Geography and Inequalities (ISTE SCIENCES), and the field of Geography and Demography.
1Major Models of the Spatial Organization of Urban Societies
Clémentine COTTINEAU1 and Denise PUMAIN2
1Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, France, and Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
2 Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France.
Numerous models for the organization of urban societies have been designed, and this chapter provides an overview of them. These models may have changed over time as a result of changes in the societies themselves (apartheid, for example, went from being a form of racial discrimination in South Africa to a crime against humanity). Section 1.1 therefore attempts to outline the historical evolution of the spatiality of markers of social status in cities. One of the most widespread and important trends in urban inequality is the concentration of poor residents in makeshift or degraded neighborhoods, sometimes built illegally or informally, under the umbrella term “slums” (Davis 2006). While the spatial concentration of wealth and affluence may be detrimental to society as a whole in the long run, the spatial concentration of deprivation has direct and immediate effects on the health of residents and the education of their children that warrant primary attention (section 1.2). The chosen separation of individuals, whether on the basis of their economic and cultural ability to isolate themselves or on the basis of an elective strategy that facilitates the expression of minority identities, is discussed in section 1.4, after a review of historical examples of institutional segregation (section 1.3). The penultimate section of the chapter aims to reintegrate the idea of dynamics into the spatial organization of societies, by taking into account spatial circulation and mobility, which can attenuate as well as reproduce inequalities in access to urban resources (section 1.5). Finally, in section 1.6, we present possible corrective measures and remedies for changing the organizational model of societies and reducing urban inequalities.
1.1. Historical evolution of the spatiality of social status markers in the city
Cities emerged independently in different parts of the world, with time lags, but always after three or four millennia of sedentarization of societies through agriculture. During this period, social institutions, the division of labor and the specialization of trades were invented. The hierarchy of statuses in the organization of societies, which characterize the functioning of urbanized social groups, gradually consolidated (Demoule 2019). The increasing size of social groups and the explicitness, notably through writing, of the rules of their functioning and relations, institute modes of “distinction” in social statuses, which are often expressed not only in social practices but also in the choices or assignments of location in the city (Veblen 1899/1970; Bourdieu 1979). For a long time, these locations had to take into account the physical constraint of proximity, during the centuries when the bulk of travel was carried out on foot or by fairly slow transport. In the course of history, social stratifications, varying according to culture and power relations, but always expressing asymmetrical and inegalitarian relations, have evolved according to various spatial forms, more or less marked by these segregations.
1.1.1. Ancient and medieval cities: center–periphery model of social status and mosaics of professions
Status differences were strongly marked in ancient urban societies, where patriarchal and patrimonial relations of inter-individual domination were established between aristocratic landowners and the popular (plebeian) categories they exploited and protected. Sometimes reinforced by religious representations, and often by unequal economic capacities, these bonds of interpersonal loyalty between members of the city were added to the legal and economic bonds uniting masters and slaves in all urban societies of the period. Historians of antiquity often note the mingling of rich and poor in the same urban districts, which can be explained by the daily functioning of the division of labor and the interweaving of roles in these highly hierarchical societies, where some were subject to the personal service of others, routinely enlisted for forced labor, while at the same time being engaged in relations of servitude well anchored in individual and social representations. But at least until modern times, “the importance of clothing and forms, their ostentatious diversity, avoided any confusion as to the respective quality of people who mingled in the city” (Donzelot 2006, p. 1). Indeed, physical proximity did not mitigate status inequalities, and living quarters were quite distinct, within houses between masters and servants or according to the different urban districts. Status inequality also operated for circulations in the public space, between those at the top and those at the bottom.
The residential groupings in the city space were organized first of all by the choice of location of the richest near the places symbolizing political and religious power, by family or by clan, for example, in the model of Roman cities or those of the Ottoman Empire. The model of a shift from the center to the periphery according to a decreasing function of caste status dominated the traditional organization of cities in India (Dumont 1966; Chatterjee 1967; Vaguet 1997). The caste system was accompanied by strong spatial segregation, which may still persist today. “The relegation of a few untouchable castes to separate neighborhoods in urbanized villages is a clear manifestation of the persistence of social ostracism” (Dupont 2004, p. 163). The author demonstrates in this recent analysis that the segregation of untouchables and scheduled castes or scheduled tribes cannot be explained, all other things being equal, by the characteristics of these populations alone in terms of income, profession or education. On the contrary, analysis of the discourses of Delhi’s urban elite shows a rejection and a claimed distancing of untouchables and the poor on the basis of their supposed impurity and violence, as well as a naturalization of poverty as a justification for urban inequalities (Paugam et al. 2017).
Another logic of social separation in ancient cities was found in the grouping of trades of the same nature in distinct districts (Roncayolo 1996; Gravier 2018). Whether this grouping was justified by reasons of convenience (functioning of markets), distance from sources of nuisance (tanners, blacksmiths, even fishermen) or by regulatory measures (granting of monopolies or franchises, establishment of product standards, collection of taxes), it was practically always institutionalized, in professional associations that were called corporations. The current names of streets and neighborhoods of some cities (rue des Orfèvres, rue des Tanneurs in France) still refer to this strict organization of the urban space. Sometimes, the grouping reflected both the economic function and the origin of people considered foreign to the city. The name “ghetto” (the foundry district), where Jews were concentrated in Venice in the Middle Ages, has become the generic term for these highly segregated places.
Another constant in the history of urban segregation is the clustering of recent immigrants in the same neighborhoods, often near the traffic routes that allow their entry into the city. It can be found in all patterns of spatial organization of ancient cities, whether territorial capitals or trading posts (Nightingale 2012). The ability of migrants to assimilate into the city involves a gradual acculturation into neighborhoods where information and prior connections facilitate it, as was again seen during the great rural exoduses to industrializing cities in the 19th century. It constitutes the main process of social evolution of American cities in the model systematized by sociologist Burgess for 1920s Chicago, or even today in the case of cities in poor, fast-growing countries, such as India (Kundu and Saraswati, 2012).
The distinction between those who have a “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1968) and those who do not have this urban status may have materialized in space through the relegation of certain activities and populations beyond city walls. The historian J. Le Goff (1967) emphasizes the importance of urban ramparts as physical and symbolic markers of the separation between the urban and the rural in European cities of the Middle Ages. Enclosures with a small number of gates were built for defensive or fiscal reasons around cities in Europe and Asia and periodically expanded to accommodate urban expansion (Benevolo 1993). For example, Figure 1.1 outlines the seven or so enclosures that have represented the successive boundaries of Paris since the 4th century, often replaced by traffic ring roads in the present-day municipality, as well as the more square-shaped ones that guided the design of the first boulevards around Beijing. Some activities were relegated beyond these walls, a situation chosen in the case of certain religious congregations, or suffered as in the case of the large caravanserais housing nomadic populations, pilgrims or merchants around the main gates of the great cities, for example, on the silk routes, in Isfahan, Samarkand or Peking. For a long time, recreational activities that played on tax differentials (such as the Paris guinguettes celebrated by the Impressionist painters) were also relegated to the intermediate fringes between the city and the countryside.
Figure 1.1.Successive boundaries of the enclosures that have walled off the municipality of Paris since the 4th century and the perimeters of Beijing that have been transformed into traffic rings. Source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceintes_de_Paris and https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beijing. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/cottineau/cities.zip
1.1.2. From “vertical” to “horizontal” segregation with industrial cities
Urban planning operations designed to consolidate the power of the urban aristocracy and bourgeoisie by embellishing and monumentalizing urban space were frequent in the 18th century and resulted in the forced exclusion of less powerful or poorer populations, who were often relegated to peripheral locations (Perrot 1968). But it was especially in the 19th century, with the Industrial Revolution and the motorization of transport, that the social division of urban space between rich and poor neighborhoods became more pronounced and generalized. Several processes more or less coincided, leading to major changes in the social composition of urban neighborhoods. The overpopulation of the countryside and the appeal of new industrial jobs led to large migratory movements towards cities from the beginning of the 19th century, causing the exceptional growth of mining and manufacturing towns, especially in Great Britain, Belgium and Germany. The increased urban densities, combined with unhealthy housing and inadequate hygiene conditions, promoted the spread of epidemics to such an extent that historians and demographers coined the expression “man-eating cities” to refer to the excess urban mortality of this period (Barles 1999). Working-class neighborhoods for employees were built around factories or railroad stations in suburbs beyond the city walls. Large-scale urban planning operations such as those undertaken in Paris by Baron Haussmann destroyed the medieval city centers and drove the poorest populations, considered in the 19th century to be the “dangerous class” (Chevalier 1958), out to the neighboring villages, which had become suburbs and long remained very underequipped, while the urban bourgeoisie occupied the quality buildings along the newly opened avenues. These changes in the distribution of social categories in urban space were observed so regularly that the German geographer Johann Georg Kohl (1841) proposed a model. He described the shift from a “vertical” social stratification according to building floors to a horizontal segregation according to urban neighborhoods. In pre-industrial cities, where housing was already very dense, craftsmen and shopkeepers occupied the first floor of buildings, aristocrats and middle-class individuals lived on the second floors, which sometimes had balconies, workers and employees crammed into the upper floors, which were more difficult to access, and servants lived in the attics or in the basements (Figure 1.2A). With the Industrial Revolution, suburbs gathering workers were built around factories, which established a more clearly differentiated distribution visible on the map of cities, the distance being overcome by the circulation of streetcars (Figure 1.2B and C). The gentrification of historical city centers was further amplified by the invention of the elevator towards the end of the 19th century (Halbwachs 1938; Chombart de Lauwe 1952).
Figure 1.2.A model of the evolution of urban social segregation according to J.G. Kohl. Source: Kohl (1841, p. 417). Figure 39 shows vertical segregation in buildings at the beginning of the 19th century, with artisans and shopkeepers on the ground floor (1), middle-class people on the second floors (2) and employees and servants (3 and 4) on the upper floors. Figure 40 shows the evolution towards a horizontal segregation of these social categories in the city with the industrial revolution and the motorization of transport. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/cottineau/cities.zip
1.1.3. Canonical spatial models for contemporary cities: factorial urban ecology
After the advent of democratic political regimes, the erosion of social categories defined in terms of order and lineage did not abolish the hierarchy of social categories but gave way to a conception of social status characterized even more than before by the level of household wealth. Social inequalities in the liberal economy city have been analyzed in detail for US cities by sociologists conducting multiple surveys and using census data since the 1920s. Those at the University of Chicago (Park et al. 1925) proposed models of the spatial organization of urban societies that have been extremely successful. Burgess’s model describes an organization in concentric zones, the center of which is occupied by the business district, surrounded by a zone of deteriorated housing inhabited by newly arrived immigrants who find in these peri-central neighborhoods the information and jobs that allow them to integrate into urban society. They tend to move successively to zones further and further from the center as their incomes rise. This evolutionary model is based on the observation of residential trajectories and the mobility of populations in urban space (in US cities at the beginning of the 20th century). In mapping land values and their evolution in many cities, however, the economist Homer Hoyt (1939) proposed a model with a different spatial form. According to Hoyt, urban space is divided into rich and poor sectors, depending on the layout of access routes to the central business district, with richer residents choosing better-serviced areas and poor people being relegated to less accessible interstitial areas. Over time, overvalued areas grow toward the periphery using the same fast traffic corridors with good accessibility to the central business district (CBD; see Figure 1.3).
Figure 1.3.Changes in the location of attractive neighborhoods in six US cities from 1930 to 1936. Source: Hoyt (1939)
It was other sociologists and then geographers who later brought these two models together and reconciled these apparently contradictory, but in fact complementary, interpretations of the location of social differences in the city. Using simple statistical methods, the sociologists Shevky and Bell (1955) demonstrated correlations between indicators characterizing the inhabitants and their living conditions and identified three major sets of criteria: social rank or economic status, family status and ethnic status. The spatial distributions of these “latent dimensions” organizing social inequalities and differences, analyzed in San Francisco in 1940 and 1950, are relatively independent of each other in terms of location patterns. Working on thousands of blocks in the Chicago metropolitan area with more than 60 variables, the geographer Brian Berry confirmed the validity of these correlations in the 1960s by means of multivariate analyses. Principal component analyses add to the demonstration by hierarchizing the three main “factors”, each of which corresponds to a different explanatory logic for the variation in social composition between urban neighborhoods. The mapping of neighborhood coordinates also allows us to compare the explanatory value of the different spatial models. Socioeconomic status (described by variables such as the share of residents’ occupations, household income and education, or rent) represents the most important divide between the city’s neighborhoods. It is divided into sectors, thus validating Hoyt’s model of a monopolization by the wealthiest of the corridors of best accessibility, from the CBD towards the periphery in the same direction during the spatial expansion of the city. The family status factor, also known as the life cycle factor (described by data such as the age and number of persons in households and the size and age of dwellings), is arranged, for both rich and poor sectors, in concentric rings following the expansion of the urban area, validating Burgess’s model for US cities. One- and two-person households, whether immigrants or students, occupy older, smaller dwellings near the city center. They then move away to newer, larger buildings as families grow and return to the center to take advantage of the proximity of urban facilities after the children have left the nest – the average age of residents is thus higher in the city center and younger on the outskirts. Smaller, older dwellings in the city center and larger dwellings in the suburbs are the rule in both the poor and rich sectors of cities. The ethnic factor, which describes populations grouped according to their declared origins, has more sporadic locations. With the sociologist John Kasarda, Brian Berry carried out systematic factorial analyses of American metropolitan areas which found everywhere the same three factors of social differentiation of urban neighborhoods as well as their logic of spatial arrangement (Berry and Kasarda 1977). These patterns have been tested in almost every country in the world and are of some relevance, for instance, to the analysis of European cities, as shown by the test carried out on a set of French cities (Figure 1.4) by Markus Schwabe (2007).
Figure 1.4.Configurations of economic status (left) and family status (right) factors in eight French cities. Source: Schwabe (2007). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/cottineau/cities.zip
The synthetic and schematic representation of the composition of urban societies through multivariate analysis has been called “urban factorial ecology” (Grafmeyer and Joseph 1979). The term ecology refers to the inspiration that Chicago School sociologists found in plant ecologists who described invasions and successions of plant species over time. The wording of this stream of research instituted by the method of analysis has been criticized for the weakness of its theoretical assumptions, which are based on a simple multivariate statistical description, and the eclecticism of its applications to a wide variety of nomenclatures and categories. However, these simple models make it possible to highlight and analyze differences that reveal opposing cultural appreciations of the desirability of urban locations, between cities of the Old World, Europe and Asia, and cities of the New World. Broadly speaking, while the affluent populations of American cities have a preference for suburban locations away from the congestion and decay close to the city center, clearly separating the prestigious places for work and business in the CBD from those coveted for family life and proximity to nature in the outer suburbs, those in European cities maintain a very strong attachment to central locations, in which they continue to invest in historic sites and buildings. The distrust of the center and its high density certainly has a European origin, but it is rather limited to Great Britain, where the aristocracy maintained their preference for rural residences away from the urban miasma and high proletarian density in very early industrialized cities (Hancock 1993). The fear of a degradation of morals associated with urban life manifested itself even more intensely among Puritan settlers in the United States, while at the same time highly egalitarian forms of the checkerboard layout of urban neighborhoods and their regular orthogonal grid of service networks were advocated and materialized in the spatial organization of cities (other consequences of this “Hippodamian” layout are discussed in Chapter 2). It is also in certain cities in the United States, such as Detroit, that gigantic social contrasts are sometimes observed between the two sides of the same street, whereas inequalities are often expressed by gradual transitions between the richest and poorest neighborhoods in European or Asian cities. The famous 8 Mile Road, immortalized in Curtis Hanson’s film of the same name (2002), separates the part of Detroit populated mostly by Black Americans from the part populated mostly by White Americans (Figure 1.5).
Figure 1.5.Dot map of the city of Detroit. Source: https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/cottineau/cities.zip
These observations should warn against the temptation to consider explanatory theories of the organization of societies in urban space as universal. Too often the “evidence” imported from the United States has been mistaken as the reference towards which other cities in the world would tend to conform (see a critical discussion of the role of these models in the construction of methods and theories of segregation in Chapter 5), which leads, for example, to inversions of the connotations associated with the suburbs that may lead to irrelevant recommendations for urban planning (Fassin 2006; Body-Gendrot 2011). Thus, even the models that seem to be most rooted in the supposed neutrality and universality of market mechanisms were mostly designed with American preferences in mind. William Alonso’s (1964) model, discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, is based on a household trade-off between rent costs and transportation expenditures. But the spatial pattern that emerges from this model, when its equations are put into a simulation model, reflects that of US cities, with poorer neighborhoods in the center and richer neighborhoods on the periphery, the opposite of the pattern observed in most European cities (Delloye et al. 2020). Urban vocabulary also deserves “translations” that are very strongly contextualized (Depaule and Topalov 1998). In a recent debate on the “dualization” of societies in the world’s largest metropolises, which opposes the very rich and the very poor, two social classes radically differentiated with respect to their integration into globalization, their degree of wealth and the degree of precariousness of their socio-professional status, according to the hypothesis of Saskia Sassen (1991), Edmond Préteceille (2006) offers a much more nuanced view. Using the example of Paris, he emphasizes the importance of neighborhoods with an “average-mixed” profile, which are home to 45% of the population, and of an evolution that results in “both [the] maintenance of a mixed central part of the socio-spatial distribution and [the] increase in the social distance between the two extremes of this distribution” (p. 60).
In fact, by suggesting the multiplicity of processes that contribute to the differentiation of urban neighborhoods, urban models invite us to examine the diversity of actors and the political and social mechanisms that are responsible for them. The processes of real estate speculation and the relegation of the poorest populations through major urban renewal operations such as Haussmannization were well analyzed by Halbwachs in 1909. It is no coincidence that the market asymmetries of city making and its locations have been analyzed, often based on Marxist theses, on the European continent. Such cities have a development constrained by the importance and value of their historical heritage and high densities. Land ownership differs from other traded goods in that it is not substitutable1 (Topalov 1973; Guigou 1982) and in these situations of relative scarcity, free market rules are much less often observed than monopoly effects. The cadastral forms of urban land appropriation are therefore a first factor of discrimination in access to the city (Lipietz 1974). Wealthy populations have greater freedom in their location strategies and prefer to cluster together in selected neighborhoods (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 2009). Actors other than property owners also often have very unequal weight, whether they are real estate developers (Topalov 1977) or the urban entrepreneurs studied by Manuel Castells and Francis Godard (1984) in Dunkirk under the revealing title of “Monopolville”. Chapter 2 offers a more detailed analysis of the inequalities that urban land and property prices reveal and give rise to in order to explain the almost universal center–periphery gradient in urban monetary values, while Chapter 5 explores in greater detail the models and theories proposed by the social sciences to explain how the tendency to separate social groups in today’s large cities is expressed.
1.2. Slums, informal settlements and shanty towns
Because it raises deep emotions, because it persists in renewed forms even in the cities of the richest countries and also because it becomes much more visible in the city than in the countryside where it is more dispersed, urban poverty is the subject of numerous analyses (Da Cunha et al. 2008).
First of all, it is important to remember that poverty is a multidimensional concept, which for the populations concerned translates into a deficit of capital, in all its forms: less income, less wealth, less cultural, relational, spatial capital, etc. than the population as a whole. The United Nations lists the consequences both at the individual level in terms of “lack of basic human capabilities: illiteracy, malnutrition, reduced longevity, poor maternal health, preventable disease” and at the collective level in terms of social discrimination and exclusion (UN 2020). Poverty is also a relative concept, resulting from a comparison of the situation of households at a given time and in a given territory. For example, 40% of poor households in the United States own a car, which is obviously not the case in many African or Asian countries. When international comparisons are made, the notion is often reduced to monetary poverty, which is supposed to summarize an array of multiple deprivations. An international extreme poverty line, designed to assess poverty in developing countries, is set at $1.90 per day per person. Globally, nearly 10% of the population, or 736 million people, lived below this line in 2015 (World Bank 2018). The proportion has declined since the 1990s, mostly due to economic development in Asia, but absolute numbers are still increasing due to population growth. Most importantly, the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed the trend of poverty rate reduction that had prevailed for at least two decades. While four-fifths of the poor resided in rural areas, the pandemic has created a category of “new poor” in urban areas, whose number the World Bank estimates at between 87 and 114 million people (World Bank 2020). Variable thresholds have been set by the World Bank to assess relative poverty in emerging countries ($3.20 per day in lower- to middle-income countries, and $5.50 per day in upper- to middle-income countries). But poverty is also measured by the lack of basic infrastructure: 2 billion people worldwide lack access to clean water and adequate sanitation (UN 2019).
1.2.1. Specificities of urban poverty
Globally, poverty rates remain higher in the countryside, but as urbanization progresses, it is in cities that poverty situations become increasingly visible (Damon 2014). It is through built infrastructure and especially housing that urban poverty is most commonly observed. While defective or degraded buildings can be found everywhere, it is in cities that 19th-century hygiene concerns led to the refinement of vocabulary designating unhealthy housing, slums, characterized by inadequate facilities and unfit housing conditions (Fijalkov and Maresca 2020). The United Nations defines a “slum household” as a group of people living in the same urban dwelling that lacks one or more of the following: permanency of its building material, sufficient living space, availability of clean water, access to sanitation and security of tenure (UN-Habitat 2003).
Historical neighborhoods, as well as working-class suburbs, concentrate these “slums”, occupied and sometimes squatted in by low-income populations, composed mainly of recent migrants to the city. It is debated to what extent these locations are temporary and could “promote” the gradual integration of these new populations into the urban world. The reappearance of visible poverty in the cities of rich countries is a recurrent phenomenon. In a country like France, for example, the shantytowns that had emerged in several large cities as a result of the post-war housing crises, or during the influx of repatriates from the colonies, housing some 100,000 people in the early 1960s, were eliminated in the 1970s. They reappeared in the 1990s for a population 10 times smaller, mainly made up of foreign migrants awaiting integration, some of whom came from countries at war (the example of Syrian migrants since 2015 is probably the most striking) or from the least wealthy countries recently integrated into the European Union, as well as from sub-Saharan Africa. These precarious camps are periodically destroyed by the authorities. Similar developments have been observed in other Western European countries. The homeless population, which is difficult to count, is nevertheless estimated by statistical services to be about 140,000 people in France (Marpsat 2008), the numbers being of the same order of magnitude in European countries. However, Maryse Marpsat considers that these people constitute “the tip of the iceberg of precarious situations”. This form of extreme social exclusion has appeared more recently in urban public space and in less visible forms in the more developed Asian countries (Kennett and Mizuuchi 2010).
1.2.2. Increased importance of informal settlements in cities of poor, rapidly developing countries.
However, the majority of the urban poor live in slums, which are home to about 1 billion people worldwide, or just under one-third of the world’s total urban population. The current increase in this number in the regions where urban growth is most rapid, such as sub-Saharan Africa, certain regions of Latin America and certain countries in South and Southeast Asia, raised the fear that it will be impossible to reduce this form of precarious housing, which could lead to the eventual creation of a “planet of slums” (Davis 2006). The term refers to vast areas of slums, built with repurposed materials, in areas poorly serviced by technical networks and transportation, often in flood-prone areas or on difficult terrain (such as the hills of Port au Prince or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro). The definition of a slum (or shantytown) used in international publications is sometimes vague, associating several types of criteria. It includes not only the fragility or poor quality of the construction materials but also overcrowding, lack of access to or difficulty in accessing drinking water, absence of connection to sanitation networks and most often a precarious occupation status, according to a variety of degrees between illegal occupation, renting at sometimes high prices and more or less uncertain ownership, hence the sometimes synonymous names of informal, irregular or self-built housing (UN-Habitat 2003). The degree of poverty of the inhabitants, their participation in the formal or informal economy, their access to water (Zerah 1999), electricity or information networks and the form of the buildings are also extremely variable in these districts (Figure 1.6).
Satellite imagery analysis allows for pinpointing the location and extent of slums, which are scattered throughout the urban fabric of most large cities in poor countries. They are most often located in the interstices of the urban fabric, on the outskirts of the city but in the immediate vicinity of wealthier neighborhoods to which their residents offer their labor for handicrafts or domestic services (Baud et al. 2009). An analysis of their morphology in large cities on different continents (Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Manila and Cape Town) reveals many similarities in the physical and spatial organization of these neighborhoods. They are very uneven in size within a single city, occupying on average just over one and a half hectares (Friesen et al. 2018). Although made up of much lower-rise buildings, slums are much denser than surrounding neighborhoods. They are often hidden from view in cul-de-sacs or vacant lots subsisting between transport or industrial structures, but they are also objects of curiosity, for a variety of reasons, from international tourists who develop a voyeuristic “taste for slums” (Dovey and King 2012).
Figure 1.6.Habitat variety and fire vulnerability scene in Guguletu Township, South Africa. Source: Photos by Denise Pumain, March 2011. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/cottineau/cities.zip
Because they represent the most extreme and blatant form of urban misery and social exclusion in the city, slums and shantytowns are the subject of many forms of intervention by governments and associations. Demolitions and evictions are frequent, such as the one that occurred several times in Otobo Gbame, on the Lagos lagoon in Nigeria, or in Jakarta, resulting in the fragmentation of smaller precarious areas scattered throughout the city. According to UN-Habitat (2003), there are still 10 or so very large slums in the world, each with more than 1 million inhabitants, such as Orangi Town in Karashi, Pakistan, Pikine in Dakar, Senegal, Ezbet-el-Haggana in Cairo, Egypt, and Neza-Chalco-Itza in Mexico City. Long stigmatized for the illegal nature of their settlements and the marginal nature of their activities, these populations have seen a clear evolution in the social representations associated with the informality of their activities, which are now considered to make a positive contribution on the one hand to the city’s economy and on the other hand to the trajectories of integration of their inhabitants into city society (Chéneau-Loquay 2008; Clerc 2008; Barthel and Jaglin 2013; Ribardière 2017). However, the popular habitat of cities in developing countries is not reduced to informal housing. A diversity of situations and occupancy statuses largely co-exist.
All over the world, the socio-economic dynamics of the 21st century, after having seen a relative reduction in the most extreme situations of poverty, have seen an increase in urban inequalities, due to the financial crisis in 2008 and then to the COVID-19 pandemic. High densities and the lack of sanitary facilities have had a very strong impact on the slum areas. Patel (2020) gives the example of the gigantic slum of Dharavi in Mumbai (India), one of the largest in Asia with 800,000 inhabitants and a population density of more than 300,000 inhabitants/km2, that is, 12 times higher than that of the already very dense central city of Mumbai nearby. According to the Census of India, 43% of Dharavi’s households have no direct access to water and 45% of homes have only one room, which makes the effectiveness of isolation measures for infected people illusory. Above all, the limitation of mobility has deprived of resources the majority of these populations which depend on urban service jobs that are often informal. Admittedly, the populations of these neighborhoods are often younger than those of the cities where they live, which may reduce the severity of the disease, but it is likely that the complex effects of the pandemic will lead to excess mortality and accentuate the precariousness of the inhabitants’ economic survival. The foreseeable crises linked to climate change could, in different ways, contribute to maintaining the exclusion of the most vulnerable populations in these urban neighborhoods, which are still stigmatized and relatively abandoned.
1.3. Institutional segregation
The distribution of social groups in urban space is not only the result of economic center–periphery logics. It can also, by becoming a normative model, result from political and administrative prescriptions, of which we shall see two aspects: colonial segregation on the one hand, which aimed to separate human groups on a racist and discriminatory basis, and “rational” zoning resulting from functionalist theories on the other.
1.3.1. Colonial segregation
From Rangoon to Cairo, Luanda to Singapore, cities were laid out by the rulers, not the ruled. Here, juxtaposed in the environment of the colonized society, were the urban forms of East and West, a unique type of social, physical and spatial organization which this study identified as colonial urban development. (King 1976, p. xii)
European colonization in America, Asia and Africa was most often inscribed in space through the process of urbanization. Whether they chose to settle in existing cities and settlements or created new ones, the colonizers established a separate and discriminatory organization of urban space, with some places reserved for the European population and others for the Indigenous population. Sometimes incorporated into state law, the expression of a segregationist ideology may also have been achieved through the imposition of European urbanistic models on the organization and functioning of the colonized city. L. Beeckmans (2013) thus notes that despite their many differences, the British colonization in Dar es Salaam, the French colonization in Dakar and the Belgian colonization in Kinshasa all had in common the establishment of a physical distance (in the form of a cordon sanitaire, a neutral zone or buffer) between the colonizer and the colonized with the aim of creating a comfortable home for the colonizer in the colony while asserting his dominance in and through the urban space. Whatever the style of urban planning (garden city, housing estate), its imposition in the colonial city was intended to accommodate the colonizer and keep the colonized at bay.
