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 COMPANION TO

Urban and
Regional
Studies
EDITED BY
ANTHONY M. ORUM
JAVIER RUIZ-TAGLE
SERENA VICARI HADDOCK
This edition first published 2021
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 Contents

Notes on Contributorsviii
Prefacexxi
Introduction: A World of Cities and Urban Problems in the
Twenty-First Century xxiv
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock

PART I   CITIES ACROSS WORLD REGIONS 1

1 Cities and Regions in South Asia 3
Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami

2 Making Cities and Regions in Globalising East Asia 21

Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He

3 Latin American Cities and Regions 43

Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa López, and
Gabriel Silvestre

4 Cities and Regions in Sub-Saharan Africa 64

Warren Smit

5 Australasian Cities: Urban Change Across Australia

and New Zealand 85
Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker

6 European Cities Between Continuity and Change 109

Yuri Kazepov, Roberta Cucca, Byeongsun Ahn,
and Christophe Verrier

7 The North American City 135

Jon Teaford
vi Contents
PART II  LEADING THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
AND APPROACHES 153
8 New Directions in Frankfurt Critical Theory for
Critical Urban Theory 155
Tino Buchholz

9 Legacies and Remnants of the Chicago School:

Lineage-Making and Interdisciplinary Urban
Research at the University of Chicago 176
Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock

10 Environmental Perspectives on Cities 196

Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza

11 Feminist Urban Research: Praxis and Possibility

Across Time and Space 218
Brenda Parker

PART III   METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES 237

12 A Critical-Empirical Approach to the Use of Demographic
Methods and Sources in Urban Studies 239
Ricardo Truffello, Fernanda Rojas Marchini, and
Monica Flores

13 GIS in Urban Studies: A Tool of Expert Analysis, Practical

Application, and Citizens’ Participation 265
Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel

14 Urban Ethnography 282

Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino

15 Cities and Networks 311

Kathryn Freeman Anderson and Zachary P. Neal

16 Policy Mobilities: How Localities Assemble, Mobilise,

and Adopt Circulated Forms of Knowledge 329
Astrid Wood

PART IV  SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY

CITIES349
17 Social Heterogeneity and Diversity 351
Ayda Eraydin

18 Inequalities and the City: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class 373

David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione
 Contents vii
19 The Role of Residential Context and Public Policies in the
Production of Urban Inequalities 398
María Mercedes Di Virgilio

20 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 420

Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman

21 Migration and Migrants in Post-reform Chinese Cities 450

Da Liu and Zhigang Li

22 Migration and Migrants in the United States:

The Case for a Fifth Immigration Phase 475
Christopher Levesque and Jack DeWaard

23 Segregation, Social Mix, and Gentrification: Nexuses 497

Sandra Annunziata, Loretta Lees, and Clara Rivas Alonso

PART V  POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS IN

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CITIES 517
24 Urban Citizenship and Governance 519
Annika Hinze

25 Policies and Policy Approaches in Cities 539

Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza

26 Financialisation and Real Estate 562

Anne Haila

27 Housing in the Global North and the Global South 579

Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala

PART VI  CLOSURE 605

28 Conclusions 607
Anthony Orum, Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena
Vicari Haddock

Index613
 Notes on Contributors

Byeongsun Ahn MSc. is a project staff member at the Department of Sociology at

the University of Vienna. He is currently involved in a four-year research project that
examines the institutional transformation of urban governance in post-industrial Vi-
enna. Additionally, his doctoral thesis examines the role of institutional contexts in
everyday encounter with urban diversity in Vienna’s multi-ethnic neighbourhoods.
He received his BA in political science from the same university in 2014 and his MA
in sociology from the University of Amsterdam in 2015.

Kathryn Freeman Anderson is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology

at the University of Houston. Her research lies at the intersection of urban sociology,
the sociology of health and illness, race/ethnicity, and organisations. Specifically, she
is focused on understanding neighbourhood disparities in health, particularly for
racial/ethnic minorities in the United States. Her recent work has been published in
Social Problems, City & Community, and the Journal of Urban Affairs.

Sandra Annunziata passed away suddenly on 4 January 2019, she had just started a
permanent position as a lecturer in critical urbanism at Roma Tre University, Rome,
Italy. She was awarded an MA in architecture and urbanism from IUAV Venice in
2004 and a PhD titled “A Neighbourhood Called Desire: Neighbourhood Transition
in Two Case Studies in Rome and Brooklyn” from Roma Tre University in 2008.
She won the Giovanni Ferraro National Award in 2010 for her PhD dissertation.
The award is a nationally recognised prize in Italy for urban and planning research
that reaches beyond the frontiers of current planning knowledge and transcends
established disciplinary boundaries. She also received the Clarence Stein Award
from Cornell University College of Art, Architecture, and Planning in 2011. She
was awarded an EU Marie Curie Fellowship 2014–2016 for “AGAPE: Exploring
Anti-gentrification Practices and Policies in Southern European Cities” at the
University of Leicester. The major outcome of this project was/is Staying Put! An
anti-gentrification toolkit for Southern Europe which will be launched in Rome in
October 2020. Sandra was a scholar and an activist par excellence, a campaigner to
anti-eviction and anti-gentrification movements in Rome and beyond. She is sadly
missed. RIP Sandra.
 Notes on contributors ix
Alonso Ayala, PhD, is an architect and spatial planner specialising in the fields of
affordable housing and human settlement planning in the Global South. He is part
of the senior academic staff at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development
Studies (IHS) and assistant professor at the Erasmus University School of Social and
Behavioural Sciences. With more than 25 years of work experience in Latin America,
Asia, Africa, and Europe, he has conducted training, research, and advisory work for
(local) governments and has provided higher education to professionals on housing
policies, slum upgrading, social housing, sustainable housing, and human settlement
planning in the Global South.

Joshua Babcock is a PhD candidate in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology

at the University of Chicago. His research examines the contemporary and histor-
ical co-construction of race, language, and identity in urban Singapore. He was a
visiting researcher at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at the Singapore
University of Technology and Design (2018–2020) and a member of the interdisci-
plinary, Chicago-based 2016–2017 Arts, Science + Culture Graduate Consortium
Fellows programme organised around the theme Contested Spaces. Together with
Pranathi Diwakar, he was also the 2016–2017 coordinator of the University of Chi-
cago Urban Workshop.

Tom Baker is a senior lecturer in human geography at the University of Auckland,

Aotearoa, New Zealand. His research centres on understanding processes and prac-
tices of policy innovation, with a particular focus on the roles of local and global
knowledges in policymaking. Empirically, his work examines social and urban policy
domains, including homelessness, social security, and urban planning. He is co-editor
of Public Policy Circulation: Arenas, Agents and Actions (Edward Elgar, 2019) and
has been published in journals such as Antipode, Progress in Human Geography,
and Urban Studies.

David Benassi is an associate professor of economic sociology at the University of

Milan-Bicocca (Italy), where he is director of the master programme in management
of social policies. His main research interests concern the study of inequality and
poverty, the welfare state and social policies, and the social foundations of health
inequalities. He favours an approach based on microdata, both qualitative and
quantitative, and constantly refers to the spatial foundations of social phenomena.
He was involved in several European and Italian research projects on those issues.
Among his last publications are Western Capitalism in Transition: Global Chal-
lenges, Local Processes (co-edited with A. Andreotti and Y. Kazepov) (Manchester
University Press, 2018); and Poverty in Italy: Features and Drivers in a European
Perspective (with C. Saraceno and E. Morlicchio) (Policy Press, 2020).

Tanvi Bhatikar is a research manager at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements
(IIHS), Bengaluru. She has previously been associated with organisations working
in areas of urban governance, anti-corruption, electoral and political reforms, and
public policy. She was part of a team that studied fiscal decentralisation at the local
government level in Kolar district in Karnataka. The focus of her research was
on understanding the fund flow at the local level and the political processes and
x Notes on contributors
institutions associated with it. She is currently part of the PEAK-Urban international
project where her research focuses on the governance arrangements of mega infra-
structure projects in and around Bengaluru.

Japonica Brown-Saracino is Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexu-

alities Studies at Boston University. She is the author of two monographs that draw
on comparative ethnographies: A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrifi-
cation, Social Preservation and the Search for Authenticity (University of Chicago
Press, 2010) and How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities
(University of Chicago Press, 2018). She is the editor of The Gentrification Debates
(Routledge, 2010) and the author of numerous articles on gentrification, qualitative
methods, place, culture, and sexualities, including recent pieces in the Annual Review
of Sociology, City & Community, Sexualities, and the American Journal of Sociol-
ogy. She directs the Urban Inequalities Workshop at Boston University.

Tino Buchholz holds a master’s degree in urban planning from the University of
Dortmund (Germany) and a PhD from the University of Groningen (The Nether-
lands). Focused on the sociology of urban conflict and urban movements, he looks
at forms of life as forms of housing: with respect to property-led urbanisation,
normative justice, community formation, and migration. His publications target
the legitimacy of legal housing standards in western and eastern Europe, squatting,
property guardianship, and critical urban theory. Expanding the scope of urban
sociology, he works as producer and director at TUNi productions, producing doc-
umentary film.

Andrea Ciarini is an associate professor at the Department of Social and Economic

Sciences of the Sapienza University of Rome where he teaches economic sociol-
ogy and sociology of welfare. He is the scientific coordinator of the Laboratory
SemPer and member of the research unit Lavoro e Organizzazioni. He was visiting
researcher at London School of Economics and Political Sciences (United King-
dom) and KU Leuven University (Belgium). He was a member of the high-level
task force for social infrastructures promoted by the European Commission and
the European Long-Term Investors Association (ELTI). As an economic sociologist,
his main research interests are in the fields of comparative welfare studies, both at
national and regional level, labour market policies, and industrial relations. He is
currently researching the relationships between welfare state and social finance in a
comparative perspective. Andrea is author of numerous publications. These include
books and articles such as: ‘Trajectories of Welfare Financialisation in Europe: A
Comparison Between France, Italy and the United Kingdom’ (2019) and ‘Policies to
Boost Services and Regular Employment in the Long-term Care Sector: More and
worse Jobs?’ (2016).

Roberta Cucca is an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Regional

Planning at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, where she leads (with Jin Xue)
the Urban Sustainability Research Group. Her main research interests are: environ-
mental policies and social vulnerability; social inequalities in contemporary cities;
and participation in local policy decision making. Among her recent publications
 Notes on contributors xi
are ‘Quality of urban environment and spatial segregation in contemporary cities’,
in S. Musterd (ed.), Handbook of Urban Segregation (Edward Elgar, 2020); with
Y. Kazepov ‘European Cities’, in A. Orum (ed.) The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia
of Urban and Regional Studies (Wiley Blackwell, 2019); and with C. Ranci (eds),
Unequal Cities: The Challenge of Post-industrial Transition in Times of Austerity
(Routledge, 2017).

Darinka Czischke, PhD, is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture and

the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. In 2014 she was awarded
the Delft Technology Fellowship to develop her research on collaborative housing.
She is the founder of the Co-Lab Research Group at the TU Delft and co-found-
er of the working group ‘Collaborative Housing’ at the European Network for
Housing Research (ENHR). Previously, she worked as the director of World Habitat
(formerly Building and Social Housing Foundation, BSHF); research director of the
European Social Housing Observatory at CECODHAS Housing Europe; and as
research associate at the LSE Cities Programme, London School of Economics and
Political Science. She has published extensively on social, affordable, and collabora-
tive housing in comparative international perspective.

Jack DeWaard is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Graduate

Faculty of Population Studies in the Minnesota Population Center at the University
of Minnesota, where he is also a faculty affiliate in the Hubert H. Humphrey School
of Public Affairs, the Institute on the Environment, and the Life Course Center. A
highly interdisciplinary and collaborative scholar, his research is broadly focused on
the causes, characteristics, and consequences of international and internal migra-
tion. He is particularly interested in the spatial patterning of migration flows among
places, and he has spent the past several years connecting his work on migration to
climate and environmental change.

María Mercedes Di Virgilio is a full associate professor in research methodology

and a CONICET (Argentinean National Research Council) researcher affiliated
at the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales,
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her research focuses on the residential mobility
processes of lower- and middle-class households, in particular, their housing strat-
egies and residential careers. She is also interested in public policies and social
policies in the city and their relations with urban mobility. The study of urban
mobilities allowed her to move forward in other directions of research such as
social mobility processes and relations between inequalities and space. She is
author/co-author/co-editor of numerous publications. This includes books such
as Disputas por el espacio urbano: Desigualdades persistentes y territorialidades
emergentes (Editorial Biblos, 2018) and Housing Policy in Latin American Cities:
A New Generation of Strategies and Approaches for 2016 UN-HABITAT III
(Routledge, 2014). Major papers include ‘Gentrification Processes in the City
of Buenos Aires: New Features and Old Tendencies’ (2020), ‘Housing Policy in
Argentina: Reflections on a Decade of Progressive Social Policy’ (2017), and ‘A
City for All? Public Policy and Resistance to Gentrification in the Southern Neigh-
borhoods of Buenos Aires’ (2016).
xii Notes on contributors
Pranathi Diwakar is a PhD candidate in sociology with a specialisation in sociol-
ogy of inequality and urban and cultural sociology. Her research investigates the
processes of caste-boundary maintenance, assertion, and resistance through musical
and spatial practices in contemporary urban India. In 2019, she was awarded SSRC’s
International Dissertation Research Fellowship and the Susanne and Lloyd Field
Research Grant from the University of Chicago’s CISSR. She held the Urban Doc-
toral Fellowship as part of the University of Chicago’s Urban Network (2017–2018)
and, together with Josh Babcock, she was also the 2016–2017 coordinator of the
University of Chicago Urban Workshop.

Ayda Eraydin is professor emeritus of urban and regional planning at the Department
of Urban and Regional Planning, Middle East Technical University at Ankara. Her
research interests are local economic development, socio-spatial dynamics of cities,
resilience thinking in urban planning, and governing urban diversity. She has been
involved and coordinated several national and international research projects and
published on various urban and regional issues, such as Politics and Conflict in Gov-
ernance and Planning (Routledge, 2019) and Resilience Thinking in Urban Planning
(Springer, 2013). Recent papers include ‘Governing Urban Diversity in Istanbul:
Pragmatic and Non-discriminatory Solutions of Governance Initiatives in Response
to Politicisation of Diversity’ (2019) and ‘Fragmentation in Urban Movements: The
Role of Urban Planning Processes’ (2017).

Monica Flores is an urban planner specialising in data analytics for public policy
and urban development. She is based in Santiago de Chile and co-leads her research
team as deputy director at Observatorio de Ciudades UC. Her research interests
focus on housing policy, urban economics, land use law, and real estate development
as factors that have historically shaped cities. Before joining the Observatorio, she
worked as a research assistant at the NYU Furman Center focusing on urban policy,
housing studies, and real estate market analysis. She previously worked as an
instructor professor in history and theory of architecture courses at the School of
Architecture of Universidad Catolica de Chile. She holds a master’s degree in urban
planning from New York University and a bachelor’s and professional degree in
architecture from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.

Maria Christina Fragkou is Associate Professor at the Geography Department at the

University of Chile. She is one of the professors in charge of the political ecology
and socio-environmental conflicts laboratory of her department, and one of the
founding members of the Latin American Conference on Political Ecology. Her
research focuses on the construction of water scarcity through a multiscale analysis
of national water policies, local and regional development dynamics, and domestic
water uses and habits. She studies cities and urban phenomena through an urban
metabolic perspective, combining quantitative and qualitative takes on urban socio-
environmental problems. She is interested in issues of urban sustainability, water
management, energy policies, and water and environmental justice.

Marisol García Cabeza is a full professor of sociology at the University of Barce-

lona and coordinator of the Research Group on Creativity, Innovation and Urban
 Notes on contributors xiii
Transformation. She was president of the Research Committee 21 (RC21) on Urban
and Regional Development of the ISA from 1998 to 2002. For many years she has
been involved in European comparative research. She has over 100 publications:
books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles in journals such as the International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, Antipode, and Citizenship
Studies. Her publications range from urban sociology to questions of social justice,
social innovation, and citizenship. She is one of the four associate editors of the
Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies (2019).

Inga Gryl is a professor at the Institute of Geography at University Duisburg-Essen,

Germany, and head of the Institute for Social and Science Education. Her research
focuses on geography/sustainability education, participation, digitalisation and space,
and innovativeness. In addition to other projects, she also runs the major project DI-
GEO on the empirical analysis of the production of Open Educational Resources for
geography education. One of her most-cited papers is ‘Re-centering Geoinformation
in Secondary Education: Toward a Spatial Citizenship Approach’ in Cartographica
(2012). Recently, she contributed ‘Educational Resources: Geographical Information,
Geomedia and Learning’ to the Encyclopedia of Education and Information Tech-
nologies () (Springer, 2019; both with T. Jekel).

Anne Haila (1953–2019) was the first professor of urban studies in Finland, ap-
pointed in 1998 at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. From 1994
to 1996 she was a senior fellow at the Faculty of Architecture and Building, National
University of Singapore. An internationally esteemed scholar and a highly respected
teacher and colleague, her work concentrated on real estate and property rights.
Her major papers include ‘The Market as the New Emperor’ (2007), ‘Real Estate
in Global Cities: Singapore and Hong Kong as Property States’ (2000), and ‘Four
Types of Investment in Land and Property’ (1991). Over multiple decades she devel-
oped a theory of urban land rent, culminating in her magnum opus ‘Urban Land
Rent: Singapore as a Property State’ (2016). In her final project, she was focusing on
non-private forms of urban land tenure in China, Finland, Hong Kong, Indonesia
and Thailand.

Shenjing He is professor of urban studies in the Department of Urban Planning and

Design, and director of the Social Infrastructure for Equity and Wellbeing (SIEW) Lab
at The University of Hong Kong. Her research interests focus on urban redevelop-
ment/gentrification, urban governance, low-income housing, rural–urban interface,
and health geography. She has published more than 110 journal articles and book
chapters in both Chinese and English and is the co-author/co-editor of five books.
Shenjing has been the editor for Urban Studies since 2012. She has been ranked by
Clarivate Analytics in the top 1% worldwide by citations from 2016 to 2019.

Annika Marlen Hinze is associate professor of political science and the director of
the Urban Studies Programme at Fordham University. Her research focuses on immi-
grant minorities in cities, citizenship policy, nationalism, immigrant and minority
identity, race and ethnicity, the politics of gender, and urban development in the
United States, Germany, Canada, and Turkey, where she has conducted extensive
xiv Notes on contributors
fieldwork in a number of her research areas. Hinze has authored various publica-
tions, among them Turkish Berlin: Integration Policy and Urban Space (University of
Minnesota Press, 2013) and the 10th edition of City Politics: The Political Economy
of Urban America (Routledge, 2018; with Dennis Judd).

Guillermo Jajamovich is an adjunct researcher at the CONICET and the Latin

American and the Caribbean Studies Institute – University of Buenos Aires. He coor-
dinates a CLACSO working group and a project of the Union Iberoamericana de
Universidades. His research focuses on urban policy circulation, large urban pro-
jects and just cities. He is the author of the book Puerto Madero en movimiento:
Un abordaje a partir de la circulación de la Corporación Antiguo Puerto Madero
(1989–2017) (IEALC, 2018) and co-authored ‘The Role of Mobile Policies in Coa-
lition Building: The Barcelona Model as Coalition Magnet in Buenos Aires and Rio
de Janeiro (1989-1996)’, published in Urban Studies.

Thomas Jekel studied geography and communication science at the University

of Salzburg specialising in GIS and social geography. He did his MSc in regional
management and regional marketing and a PhD on conceptualisations of space in
geography education. He later worked as an assistant professor of geography and
economics education at the University of Salzburg. He is currently doing teaching
and research in co-operation with the Centre for Geography and Economics Educa-
tion at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Yuri Kazepov is professor of urban sociology and comparative social policies and
the head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna. His research
examines social inequalities, social policies, and the territorial dimension of
social phenomena predominantly through a multilevel governance lens. He is
involved in several national and international (EU H2020) projects. He is author/
co-author/co-editor of numerous publications. This includes books such as Cities
of Europe (Blackwell, 2005), Rescaling Social Policies Towards Multilevel Gov-
ernance in Europe (Routledge, 2010), and more recently The Future of Western
Capitalism: Global Forces and Local Challenges (Manchester University Press,
2018; with A. Andreotti and D. Benassi) and Local Social Innovation to Combat
Poverty: A Critical Appraisal (Policy Press, 2020; with S. Oosterlynck and A.
Novy). He is currently editing The Handbook on Urban Social Policy for Ed-
ward Elgar.

Margarethe Kusenbach is associate professor and associate chair in the

Department of Sociology at the University of South Florida, Tampa. Her research
interests include cities and communities, space and place, social psychology
(identity and emotions), disasters and environment, and qualitative research
methods. She has published widely in the United States and internationally,
including Home: International Perspectives on Culture, Identity, and Belonging
(Peter Lang, 2013; co-edited with Krista Paulsen). For the past several years, her
work has focused on issues of home and belonging in marginalised communities,
while her new research comparatively investigates the intersection of street art
and urban development.
 Notes on contributors xv
Loretta Lees is professor of human geography at the University of Leicester, UK. She is
an urban geographer who is internationally known for her research on gentrification/
urban regeneration, global urbanism, urban policy, urban public space, architecture,
and urban social theory. She has been identified as the 17th most referenced author in
urban geography worldwide and the only woman in the top 20 (Urban Studies, 2017).
Since 2009 she has co-organised The Urban Salon, a London forum for architecture,
cities and international urbanism (see http://www.theurbansalon.org) and since
2016 the Leicester Urban Observatory. She is author/coauthor/co-editor of 14
books, some examples include: Handbook of Gentrification Studies (Edward Elgar,
2018); Planetary Gentrification (Polity Press, 2016); Global Gentrifications: Uneven
Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015); Sustainable London? The
Future of a Global City (Policy Press, 2014); Mixed Communities: Gentrification by
Stealth? (Policy Press, 2011); Gentrification (Routledge, 2008); and The Emancipa-
tory City: Paradoxes and Possibilities? (Sage, 2004). She is a scholar-activist who
has been involved in numerous anti-gentrification campaigns in London, where she
lives, and beyond.

Christopher Levesque is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Minneso-

ta. His research interests include US immigration court, demography, and the impact
of immigration policy on non-citizens’ well-being. He is currently an interdisciplin-
ary doctoral fellow at the UMN Law School’s Binger Center for New Americans,
and is affiliated with the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) as a graduate trainee.

Zhigang Li is a professor of urban studies and planning at the School of Urban

Design, Wuhan University, China. As an urban scholar, geographer, and planner,
Professor Li works on the urban transformation of China, with a focus on such
topics as neighbourhoods, migration, health, and related planning issues. His recent
work concentrates on the migrant communities, emotional attachment, and related
community planning.

Jia Ling is a research assistant in the Department of Building and Real Estate at The
Hong Kong Polycentric University. She obtained her MA in urban management from
City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include China’s urban politics,
political economy of space, and state–society relations. She has done research on
politics of urban aesthetics and urban village redevelopment in Shenzhen, China,
and is currently focusing on the liveability governance at Guang Dong-Hong Kong-
Macau Grater Bay Area and land politics in Qianhai Pilot Development Zone in
Shenzhen, China.

Da Liu is a PhD candidate at the School of Urban Design, Wuhan University. She
works on the urban transformation of China, with a focus on such topics as neigh-
bourhoods, migration, urbanisation, and related planning issues. She is involved
in several NFC projects, including Return Migrants in China in the Earlier 21st
Century and Socio-spatial Transformation in Chinese Cities.

Enzo Mingione is professor emeritus at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He has

also been professor of sociology until November 2017 and dean of the Faculty
xvi Notes on contributors
of Sociology (2004–2010). He has been president of the Research Committee on
Urban and Regional Development, one of the founders of the International Journal
of Urban and Regional Research and a trustee of the Foundation of Urban and
Regional Studies. Fields of interest are urban sociology, poverty, welfare, labour mar-
kets, and economic sociology. Among his books are Social Conflict and the City
(Blackwell, 1981); Beyond Employment, with Nanneke Redclift (Blackwell, 1985);
Fragmented Societies (Blackwell, 1991); and Urban Poverty and the Underclass
(Blackwell, 1996).

Zachary P. Neal is an associate professor of psychology and global urban studies at

Michigan State University. His research examines the role of networks at multiple
scales of urban processes, ranging for the formation of social relationships among
neighbours at the local scale, to the formation of economic exchanges between cities
at the global scale. He is the author of over 75 peer-reviewed articles and four books,
including The Connected City (Routledge, 2013). More details about his past and
current research is available at https://www.zacharyneal.com.

Anthony Orum is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Illinois –

Chicago from which he retired a decade ago. His early research was focused on
topics in the area of political sociology, including research on Black politics in the
United States. He published the leading textbook on political sociology which is now
in its fifth edition and has been translated into multiple Chinese versions. Much of
his writing and research in recent decades explores various topics in urban studies,
including urban history and urban sociology. He is currently completing a new book
entitled Essays on Cities: Power, Space and Ethnic Habitats.

Brenda Parker is an associate professor of urban planning and policy at the Univer-
sity of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on gender, race, class, disability and
other inequalities in cities and governance, as well as social movements and pol-
icies that address these inequalities. She is the author of Masculinities and Markets:
Gender, Race, and Urban Politics in Milwaukee (University of Georgia Press, 2017)
and research articles in journals such as Urban Geography, Antipode, and Gender
Place and Culture. She serves on boards of several academic and community organi-
sations, including Cabrini Green Legal Aid in Chicago.

Ana Parraguez Sanchez teaches and researches urban youth, social movements,
formation of critical consciousness, space/micro politics, and geography education.
Her postdoctoral research explored the socio-spatial production of the 2011 student
movement in Santiago. She also led an interdisciplinary team to develop a digital
educational platform to promote critical spatial consciousness among secondary
students in Santiago. She worked as subdirector of the Observatory of Cities-UC.
She also worked as a visiting scholar in the Department of Geography/Didactics
of General Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She currently works as
professor in the Social Work School at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

Marc Pradel-Miquel is professor of urban sociology in the department of soci-

ology of Universitat de Barcelona and founding member of the research group
 Notes on contributors xvii
Creativity, Innovation and Urban Transformation (CRIT). His research analyses
urban governance, citizenship rights, and social inequalities, focusing on the role
of citizens and civil society actors in governance. He has been involved in European
and national research projects in these fields. He has a large number of publica-
tions. The latest is Social Innovation and Urban Governance: Citizenship, Civil
Society and Social Movements (Edward Elgar, 2020) together with Ana Cano-Hila
and Marisol García.

Junxi Qian is an assistant professor at the Department of Geography at the Uni-

versity of Hong Kong. He is a social and cultural geographer who works at the
intersection of geography, urban studies, and cultural studies. His research interests
include place politics, urban public space, religion, China’s ethnic minorities and
frontiers, and China’s recent urban transformation. Most of his published works
partake in one or several of these themes. His recent projects investigate entre-
preneurial religion in urban China and technological innovation from a cultural
economy perspective.

Rebeca Raijman is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the Uni-

versity of Haifa, Israel. She has published extensively on the topic of ethnic entre-
preneurship, socioeconomic integration of Jewish immigrants to Israel, non-Jewish
and non-Palestinian labour migration in Israel, and public attitudes to migrants
and minorities in Israel and Europe. She has published a book (co-authored with
Adriana Kemp) entitled ‘Workers’ and ‘Foreigners’: The Political Economy of
Labor Migration in Israel (Van Leer Institute and Kibbutz Hamehuhad, 2008; in
Hebrew). Her book South African Jews in Israel: Assimilation in a Multigenera-
tional Perspective has been published in 2016 by the University of Nebraska Press.
Personal website: https://sites.hevra.haifa.ac.il/raijman/, https://www.linkedin.com/
in/rebeca-raijman-680b8332.

Clara Rivas Alonso is a PhD candidate in human geography at the University of

Leicester. She holds a master’s degree from Goldsmith’s College London, where she
specialised in post-colonial theory and the urban. Her PhD is an investigation into
the everyday practices and perceptions of resistance to the threat of state-led gen-
trification in Okmeydani, Istanbul, Turkey. She is interested in the invisible solidar-
ities that escape institutional attempts at rent extraction and argues that the current
global urban condition calls for more innovative forms of resistance.

Fernanda Rojas Marchini is a PhD candidate in human geography at the Univer-

sity of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her current research focuses on
the Chilean state’s turn towards market-based biodiversity conservation. Fernanda
is also a researcher in the SSHRC project Tracing Biodiversity Capital alongside
researches at UBC, Duke University, and Lancaster. She is also a teacher assistant
in the course ‘Urbanization in the Global South’, led by Dr. Priti Narayan at UBC.
Before commencing her PhD, Fernanda conducted research in projects led by the
Chilean Forestry Institute and worked as sessional lecturer in the School of Geog-
raphy of Universidad Austral de Chile, where she taught a course on the geography
of population.
xviii Notes on contributors
Javier Ruiz-Tagle is assistant professor at the Institute of Urban and Territorial
Studies (IEUT), associate researcher at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development
(CEDEUS), adjunct researcher at the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion
Studies (COES), and principal investigator at the Research Group in Urban Margin-
ality (NIMU), all at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He has specialised
in topics of residential segregation, housing policies, neighbourhood effects, urban
marginality, self-organised housing, urban sociology, and comparative studies. He
has published, presented, and won honours and awards with his work in Chile, the
United States, and in Europe. He was section editor for the Encyclopedia of Urban
and Regional Studies (Wiley Blackwell, 2019), and is currently editing Marginalidad
urbana y efectos institucionales: Sociedad, estado y territorio en Latinoamérica a
comienzos del siglo XXI (RIL, 2020).

Kristian Ruming is associate professor and discipline chair for geography and
planning in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University. His
research explores urban governance and regeneration, social and affordable housing,
strategic planning and planning system reform in Australia. He is editor of Urban
Regeneration in Australia (Routledge, 2018).

Neha Sami studies infrastructure and environmental planning and governance in

post-liberalisation urban India. She is currently on the faculty at the Indian Institute
for Human Settlements in Bangalore, India where she teaches on questions of gover-
nance and sustainability and anchors the research programme. She serves on the edi-
torial collective of Urbanization and is a corresponding editor for the International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She holds a PhD in urban planning from
the University of Michigan, a master’s degree in environmental management from
the Yale School of the Environment and a BA in economics from the University
of Mumbai.

Moshe Semyonov is professor emeritus of sociology and labor studies at Tel Aviv
University and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chi-
cago. Semyonov’s research interests lie in the areas of comparative stratification and
inequality and causes and consequences of global migration. His research was pub-
lished in the form of books, journal articles, and book chapters. Most recent publi-
cations deal with inequality in a comparative perspective, integration of immigrants
in the labour market of the host society, and attitudes towards immigrants across
space and time.

Gabriel Silvestre is an urban scholar having received his PhD in planning studies
from University College London. He is currently a lecturer based at the Department
of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, where he is the director of
the MSc Cities and Global Development. His research interests include the themes
of urban governance and policy knowledge with an empirical focus on Latin
American cities, especially in Brazil. Recent published work examined the role of
circulating global ideas in local policy making. He is a member of the working
group Circulating Knowledge and Urban Policies of the Latin American Council of
Social Sciences.
 Notes on contributors xix
Warren Smit is senior researcher and manager of research at the African Centre
for Cities at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He has a PhD in urban
planning and has been a researcher on urban issues for more than 25 years. His main
areas of research are urban governance, urban planning, housing policy, and urban
health, with a particular focus on cities in Africa. Key papers include “Decentralisa-
tion and Institutional Reconfiguration in Urban Africa” (2014), “Urban Governance
and Urban Food Systems in Africa” (2016), “Urban Governance in Africa: An Over-
view” (2018) and “The Challenge of COVID-19 in African Cities” (2020).

Oscar Sosa López is visiting faculty at The New School’s Milano School of Pol-
icy, Management and Environment. His work examines the politics of urban and
regional governance and asks how planning can contribute more sustainable and
democratic cities and regions. His research extends across sites and scales, includ-
ing climate change governance in Mexico City, immigrant social movements in
California suburbs, and regional governance and economic development in Latin
America, and the US-Mexico Border. His current book project examines how
sustainable transportation planning reforms impact existing regimes of infra-
structure inequality and democratic exclusion in Mexico City. His most recent
publication is “Bicycle Policy in Mexico City: Urban Experiments and Differ-
entiated Citizenship”, forthcoming in the International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research.

Jon C. Teaford is professor emeritus of history at Purdue University, West Lafayette,

Indiana. He is past president of the Urban History Association. His research and
teaching have focused on the history of cities in the United States with a special inter-
est in governance. He is the author of numerous books, including The Twentieth-
Century American City: Problem, Promise, and Reality (Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2016; 3rd rev. edn), The American Suburb: The Basics (Routledge, 2008), and
The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America (Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2006).

Ricardo Truffello is geographer and has an MSc in geography and geomatics from
the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile PUC, and PhD in complex systems engi-
neering from Universidad Adolfo Ibanez. He currently serves as director of the Cities
Observatory (Observatorio de Ciudades UC), researcher at CEDEUS, and professor
at the Institute of Urban and Territorial Studies at the School of Architecture, Design
and Urban Studies of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. His areas of spe-
cialisation are geographic information systems, the generation of urban indicators,
spatial analyst, geostatistics, and spatial statistics.

Anahí Urquiza is associate professor at the University of Chile, with an experience in

teaching and doing research of over fifteen years. She has an MA in anthropology and
development from the University of Chile and a PhD in sociology from the Univer-
sity of Munich, Germany (Ludwig Maximilian Universität München). Anahí teaches
methodology, research processes, theory of social systems, and socio-environmental
issues. Her field of research focuses on the environment and society relationship,
particularly in water vulnerability, poverty and energy transitions, participation,
xx Notes on contributors
governance, and resilience when facing climate change. She has extensive experience
in academic management, the coordination of working teams, as well as the design
of methodological-analytical frames to discuss complex issues.

Christophe Verrier, MSc., is a former research assistant at the University of Vienna

where he specialised in housing policies and local governance. During a brief return
to Canada he acted as a team leader at the Montreal Science Centre where he devel-
oped a newfound interest in the popularisation of science. He is currently spending
his time between Warsaw and Amsterdam, working with his life partner on gamifica-
tion systems that can foster alternative conceptions of urban heritage for locals and
tourists alike through in-situ narrative experiences.

Serena Vicari Haddock is senior associate professor of sociology at the University of

Milan-Bicocca where from 2010 to 2016 she supervised the doctoral programme in
urban studies (URBEUR). She has also taught at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, and in Leuven (Belgium) and Pavia (Italy). Research interests range from
urban regeneration in Italian cities and a comparative perspective to issues of partic-
ipation, inclusion, and social innovation. She is author of the critical study La città
contemporanea (Il Poligrafo, 2004) along with numerous papers, she has edited and
contributed to key essay collections including: Teoria ed esperienza (Il Mulino, 2006;
with Simon Parker); Rigenerare la città: Pratiche di innovazione sociale nelle città
europee (Il Mulino, 2009; with F. Moulaert); Brand-building: The Creative City: A
Critical Look at Current Concepts and Practices (Firenze University Press, 2010);
Questioni urbane: Caratteri e problemi della città contemporanea (Il Mulino, 2013);
and Sei lezioni sulla città (Feltrinelli, 2017; with Guido Martinotti).

Astrid Wood is an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Politics and Soci-
ology at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. Astrid is an urban geographer
concentrating on governance and the built environment in cities of the Global South.
Her research on critical urban studies and policy mobilities considers the range of
political engagements and exchanges occurring through the localisation of global
urban policy. Aspects of this research are published in Antipode, Environment and
Planning A, IJURR, Public Culture, and Urban Geography. Her academic work
draws on nearly two decades shaping the urban form in over 30 countries.
 Preface

I am taking this opportunity to offer a few thoughts and tributes to some of our
colleagues in urban studies as well as a few additional remarks. As a Companion
volume to the Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies the collection of essays
here highlights some key topics that we believe should be covered in much greater
depth. Javier, Serena, and I began to collaborate on this effort almost three years
ago. I invited them to join me as co-editors and each kindly accepted my invitation.
I have known Javier for several years, dating back to the time he was a graduate stu-
dent at the University of Illinois – Chicago. He took a course in social theory with
me and proved to be one of the best students that I have ever taught. I later served
on his dissertation committee along with several other people in the Urban Planning
Program at UIC. Once again, he proved to be incredibly smart and dedicated in this
project, and his dissertation eventually won a major award: the Barclay Gibbs Jones
award for best dissertation in planning in North America, given by the Association
of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP).
I have known Serena as a result of her work on the Encyclopedia. She served
as an advisory editor on that project, and always furnished important insights
and information regarding particular entries. She was strongly recommended
to me by several people for the position of co-editor of this Companion. Now
a senior associate professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca, she teaches
undergraduate and graduate courses, while her research focuses on issues of
urban regeneration. Since 2015, as delegate of the rector she is engaged in the
work of the National Center for Studies in Urban Policies. Sadly, Serena is also
facing a major health issue. This, coupled with the spread of COVID-19 in Mi-
lan, have made the last year a considerable challenge for her and her husband,
Phil Haddock. All of us wish her the very best and pray that she is able to regain
her health soon.

*******
I also want to acknowledge the efforts of two people who worked on entries in
this Companion. Both of them passed away during the course of the last year. One
is Anne Haila. She wrote the entry ‘Financialisation and Real Estate’. There are
xxii preface

extensive obituaries to Professor Haila online, including remembrances and tributes

from many colleagues and friends. I quote here only one brief passage among many
regarding her importance:

Like the great political economists of all time, she understood that research is not simply
to understand the world, scholarship must also be able to transform the world. Thus,
when Academy Professor Haila was invited to serve on the powerful Economic Policy
Council of Finland whose ‘political economy’ was in the policy sphere, she embraced
the opportunity, becoming the only woman and also the only political economist on the
Council whose task is to evaluate targets set for economic policy and how they link with
social and public policy. Asked what her initial impressions were about contributing to
the Council, she stated what had to be said, the truth, not what people wished to hear:
Finnish land policy is a mess, explaining much of the worsening political-economic and
social problems in a country which, according to UN reports, is supposed to be an El
Dorado. (Online obituary. Franklin Obeng-Odoom, on behalf of Anne Haila’s Research
Group, the ‘Helsinki School of Critical Urban Studies’, University of Helsinki, Finland)

Given the sweep and quality of her research and political influence, I very much
regret that I did not get to know her.
The second author to have passed away in 2019 is Sandra Annunziata. Dr An-
nunziata died suddenly in January 2019. She is one of the co-authors of the chapter
‘Segregation, Gentrification, and Social Mix’. Her colleague, Loretta Lees, wrote
a wonderful tribute to her that is also posted online. Besides the loss to her young
family and colleagues, Lees notes a number of Annunziata’s accomplishments. I
quote here:

In 2009 she won the Best Paper Award for the dissertation results she presented to the
International Forum of Urbanism in Delft, Holland. Sandra won the Giovanni Ferraro
National Award in 2010 for her PhD dissertation. The award is a nationally recognized
prize in Italy for urban and planning research that reaches beyond the frontiers of
current planning knowledge and transcends established disciplinary boundaries. Then
in 2011 she received the Clarence Stein Award by Cornell University College of Art,
Architecture and Planning.

Again, I regret that I never got to know her, someone who was only at the beginning
of what promised to be a very important career.

******
It has been my great pleasure to work with the authors on the entries in this
Companion. They were chosen from among many we could have selected because
of the fields of their research and their expertise. The entries that we have included,
among them the fine set of essays on the cities and regions in different parts of the
world, were selected to highlight matters that we regard as the most significant in
urban studies. As you will note later in the ‘Conclusions’, we regard these particular
entries as a vital and significant feature of this volume. Although all three of us par-
ticipated in their identification and the selection of the authors, Javier did a great
deal of this work and he deserves the credit for it. At the time I failed to realise how
 preface  xxiii
important, indeed rich and informative, these essays would be. Their authors have
gone well beyond the call of duty to make them significant contributions.
We have included many other contributions: on the legacy of the Chicago School,
on social networks, on gentrification, and on significant other elements in the field
of urban studies. Again, their authors took our invitation seriously and did an out-
standing job of putting together first-rate summaries and analyses. There are essays
on ethnographic methods, one of my favourite methods of choice, but also on the
continuing issues of social and economic inequalities. Inequalities seem to have been
written into the texts of so many different places and at so many different times that
it seems that the social sciences could simply focus on them. And parts of the social
sciences have done precisely that. I hope that the entry here plus the many associated
entries in the Encyclopedia will not only tie together loose ends but furnish the foun-
dations for new students who are only beginning their work in urban studies. Indeed,
I think there are other specialties in the social sciences whose practitioners will profit
from the insights provided by the entries here.
My colleagues and I want to extend our good wishes to all the many people who
practice urban work in one way or another – to the urban planners as well as to the
urban anthropologists, to the urban geographers as well as to the urban sociologists
and political scientists. The field of urban studies has grown enormously over the
past several decades and expanded well beyond the bounds of the field first identi-
fied and mined by that small band of sociologists, including Robert Park and Louis
Wirth, in Chicago. I happened to attend the University of Chicago in Sociology, and
only years after obtaining my degree there did I learn of the significance of this early
work. But in a sense that work has furnished the foundations, replaced by important
research in ethnographies as well as a deepened and richer school of demographic
studies. Many people contributed to this effort at Chicago, including Harvey Mo-
lotch, Nancy Denton, and Douglas Massey. They helped to move the field of urban
studies further than many people might have thought possible.
I want to note too that the field of urban studies has expanded far beyond the
boundaries of the United States and American cities. There are many urban scholars
doing work in the United States today but there are countless scholars elsewhere in
the world, like the members of RC21 at the International Sociological Association. A
number of those members are represented in the works in this volume, and I am glad
we can in one way help to bridge the differences between work in the United States
and that in Europe as well as in Asia and Latin America. It is important that we seek
to cultivate our common interests and our common goal in making urban studies a
rich and powerful way not only to explore the world but, I hope, to make it a better
place for our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters in the future.
Thanks to all of you who have worked not only on the Companion but also on
the Encyclopedia. We owe you a great debt of gratitude.
Anthony M. Orum
 Introduction
A World of Cities and Urban Problems in the
Twenty-First Century
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari
Haddock

A Crucial Year for Writing about Cities and Human

Lives in Them

Twenty years have passed since the turn of the millennium, and several key events
have transformed the world of cities. Events related to war and terrorism changed
the whole realm of migration, from international travel, to metropolitan demo-
graphic shifts, and to neighbourhood policies. Here we can name the attacks on the
twin towers in New York (2001), the beginning of the war in Afghanistan (2001),
the end of the second Congo War (2002), the invasion of Iraq (2003), the attacks in
Madrid and London (2005), the Boko Haram insurgency in Africa (2009), and the
prominence of ISIS in Iraq (2014). Events related to the environment have shaped
international regulations, urban development policies, and political movements.
Here we can mention the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami (2004), the com-
ing into force of the Kyoto Protocol (for reduction of greenhouse emissions, 2005),
the coming into force of the Paris Agreement (for limiting global warming, 2016),
and the beginning of the Youth Strike for Climate international movement (2018).
Events related to economics have changed the pace and the geographical epicentres
of the world’s development. Here we can name at least the global financial crisis
(2008–2009) and the ascendancy of China as the world’s second largest economy
(2010). Events related to politics have been either the result of long-term processes
or the marker for future developments at the global, national, metropolitan, and
neighbourhood level. And here we can mention the beginning of the post-neoliberal
experiments in Latin America (2002), the Arab Spring (including the Syrian civil
war) and the student movements in Quebec, London, Mexico City, and Santiago de
Chile (2011), the beginning of the refugee crisis in Europe (2015), the ascendancy

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Introduction xxv
of far right authorities such as Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and Jair
Bolsonaro (2016–2019), and the beginning of grassroot social outbursts in countries
such as France, Hong Kong, Chile, Algeria, Colombia, and so on (2018–2019).
To every generation of scholars the years under study appear to be the epitome of
change but it is indisputable that the events of these last two decades – diverse, unex-
pected, and of global impact as they are – give an immediate and powerful idea of
processes of change of growing intensity and complexity. A combination of political-
economic and sociocultural processes has produced explosive urbanisation, growing
inequalities, environmental degradation, and humanitarian crises all over the world. As
a result of their impact, the world of cities and today’s urban problems look a lot dif-
ferent than in the twentieth century. Beyond these common macro-processes, the world
of cities and regions have to face the different challenges they pose, through different
degrees and levels of intensity, mainly due to their widely diverse historical trajectories.
Sometimes these trajectories are firmly embedded in the local economies. In other cases,
cities and regions are swept away by global economic trends. Not less crucially, there
are also deep cultural and political assets that constrain or facilitate those trajectories.
But beyond these events, a massive crisis hit the globe in 2020: the coronavirus
worldwide pandemic. Of all the global phenomena that social science has described in
the past century, this should be the one that has reached all corners of the world faster
and deeper. As of mid-August 2020, more than 22 million cases have been reported in
188 countries and territories, with almost 800,000 deaths (Center for Systems Science
and Engineering (CSSE), 2020). The preventive and controlling measures have seri-
ously enforced social distancing, lockdowns, travel restrictions, closure of educational
systems, and cancellation of social events. Therefore, millions of people around the
world have been mandated to stay at home, away from social contacts – many of
them losing their jobs or decreasing their income – strictly patrolled by police and
military forces and, on top of that, most are affected by either healthcare problems,
socioeconomic problems, and/or mental health problems. Consequently, the social,
economic, and environmental life of cities has changed drastically in a few months.
Beyond the high rates of contagion, deaths, and the collapse of healthcare systems,
the crisis has impacted different dimensions of human life, leading to the largest
global recession since the Great Depression (Gopinath, 2020). In terms of social rela-
tions, panic buying has led to supply shortages and there are also increasing levels
of prejudice, xenophobia, and racism and a significant increase in domestic violence.
In education and culture, the closure of schools is leaving parents without caregivers
for their children, many people do not have enough computers and appropriate
internet connection at home, and most cultural venues have been forced to close. In
terms of labour, there are little or no protection for millions who are forced to stop
working. There are also little or no protection for those who cannot pay their rent or
their mortgage, homeless people are even more unprotected and displaced, and there
are millions living in dense and precarious housing (with limited access to water
and sanitation), all of this in the middle of an ongoing global housing affordability
crisis. In terms of politics, many governments have not protected their citizens: they
are not controlling the prices of essential goods, not listening to their scientists, not
defending their public services, not stopping people’s debt obligations, and so on. As
many have said, it has not been a sanitary crisis by itself, but the political, social, and
economic management of it that has generated a wide range of problems. And on
xxvi Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock
top of this, there is uncertainty: as of mid-August, there is no clarity about how and/
or when the previous context could be recovered. The near future of cities, then, is
highly insecure, damaging, and even dangerous for millions of people.
One of the most repeated phrases of social scientists, activists, and social com-
mentators, almost to the level of common sense, is that the coronavirus crisis has
exposed all pre-existing inequalities. People from middle and upper class can easily
work at home, they live in low density houses and neighbourhoods with fewer or no
children (who are vectors of contagion), they still have an income, they do not need
social contact for their daily survival, and they have better access to supply facilities
and quality healthcare. Alternatively, people from lower class and racially discrim-
inated groups live in dense and precarious dwellings, they need to work outside
among other people to put food on the table, they have large families, they are
heavily dependent on the help and contact from others for their daily survival, and
they live far from supply and healthcare facilities. Of course, there are enormous
variations from country to country (or from state to state in large countries) due
to the way in which different governments have tackled the sanitary and socioeco-
nomic crises. But a common outcome, however, has been inequality. In fact, far more
people die for other reasons every year (wars, hunger, domestic violence, terrorism,
drug cartels, etc.), but the pandemic has the potential of collapsing entire healthcare
systems, which in turn could affect the elites. During the Industrial Revolution the
cholera, tuberculosis, and other epidemics led the bourgeoisie to take measures to
protect themselves from the possibility of infection. Today, similarly, national and in-
ternational powers and elites are taking measures on behalf of the lives of the poor-
est, but in great part to protect themselves. As a lucid phrase of a poem by Damian
Barr circulating in social networks says (accompanied by an illustration by Barbara
Kelly): ‘We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm. Some are on
super-yachts. Some have just the one oar.’
Thus, the current coronavirus crisis has deeply affected life in cities, which have
lost – at least temporarily – their original sense as spaces of contact, agglomeration,
exchange, scale economies, and collective solution of needs. How can there be a city
if no one is there to occupy and use its public spaces? Does teleconferencing offer a
good substitute for social interaction and exchange in the city? And how might the
pandemic reshape the social and political character of the city in the post-pandem-
ic era? In the middle of these dystopic and uncertain times, several philosophers,
thinkers, and social commentators have quickly raised their voices, including one
initiative that translated several pieces into Spanish and edited them into a book
(Amadeo, 2020).1 The famous phrase of Marxist thinker Frederic Jameson, ‘it is
easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism’ (Fisher, 2009), has
been at the centre of those debates. Several topics have been discussed, from biopoli-
tics and totalitarianism, to solidarity and the limits of capitalism.2 But many others

1 
The book contains pieces from Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Jean Luc Nancy, Franco
‘Bifo’ Berardi, Santiago López Petit, Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, David Harvey, Byung-
Chul Han, Raúl Zibechi, María Galindo, Markus Gabriel, Gustavo Yáñez González,
Patricia Manrique, and Paul B. Preciado.
2 
Besides the ones compiled in the above-mentioned book, several others have partici-
pated, such as Markus Gabriel, Roberto Esposito, Yuval Harari, and Noam Chomsky.
 Introduction xxvii
have criticised their efforts for rushing to write something before they have anything
meaningful to say in a context where the flows of news and ideas is overwhelming
and, of course, uncertain.
This intellectual effervescence has shown that desires are somewhat confused
with reality. Sometimes philosophers have the strong aspiration of having their
theories transformed into reality, even if that reality is catastrophic. However,
what plagues and epidemics have indeed produced during human history is a
revival of fear, which could lead to religious readings of reality or to conspiracy,
emergency, prophetic, or opportunistic philosophy. Therefore, as with all these
commentators, do we want to propose a new way of thinking and intervening
in the different cities of the world? Do we really know what will follow after
this crisis? Certainly not, because we are in the eye of the hurricane and that
does not allow us to see the big picture. The only thing we could apparently pre-
dict, which may be obvious given the gravity of the situation, is that any latent
and conflicting inequality will become worse with the coronavirus crisis, espe-
cially when cold temperatures end, strict quarantines finish, and people disre-
gard restrictions and gather together and stand up for their oppressed lives. That
started to happen in July 2020 after George Floyd’s assassination in the United
States, which ignited a series of massive protests not only in that country, but in
several places in which quarantines are being lifted. Again, these are uncertain
times for cities and for human life in them.

Content and Structure of the Book

This Companion to Urban and Regional Studies began with the aim of covering
more deeply and broadly many of the issues identified in the Encyclopedia of
Urban and Regional Studies (Orum, 2019), and it does it in five sections. In the
first section, we present a state-of-the-art review of the situation of cities across all
world regions: South Asia, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Australasia (Oceania),
Latin America, North America, and Europe. In the second section, we provide a
more thorough discussion of contemporary theoretical perspectives, such as criti-
cal theory, environmental perspectives on cities, feminist theory, and the legacy
of the Chicago School. In the third section, we offer a thorough discussion and
update on the most popular methodological approaches used by urban scholars,
such as demographic methods, advanced spatial analysis, and urban ethnogra-
phies, as well as theoretical-methodological approaches like urban networks and
policy mobilities. In the fourth section, we attempt to cover the most pressing
social problems of twenty-first-century cities, such as diversity, inequalities, the
role of residential contexts, immigration (in Europe, China, and the United States),
and the nexuses between segregation, social mix, and gentrification. And in the
fifth and final section, we try to cover some other political, policy-related, and
economic problems, such as urban governance, policy approaches, financialisa-
tion, and housing.
In all the reviews and discussions of theoretical perspectives, research methods,
research themes, and policy issues, we emphasised that authors extend their geo-
graphic coverage as wide as possible. Thus, we attempted to leave the comfort zone
xxviii Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock
and the traditional focus of urban studies in European and North American cities
and set out to build a more cosmopolitan – and hopefully postcolonial – discussion.
In addition, we looked for authors all around the world in an effort to avoid the
practices of requesting authors from the Global North to write about – and on behalf
of – the Global South. We also embraced the inclusion of young scholars, sometimes
working alone and sometimes appearing as first authors (before their consolidated
bosses). And, of course, we promoted the inclusion of women, even in topics where
men use to predominate (like spatial analysis or demographic methods): of our 53
authors, 28 are women and 25 are men, and 15 women are leading authors in their
chapters, versus 12 men. The range and variety of these chapters span across all
possible dimensions of the urban studies field, in an outstanding level of quality.
These chapters are informative not only to urban scholars and practitioners but also
to people in a wide variety of fields, including political science, anthropology, eco-
nomics, and so on.

Cities Across World Regions

As we have mentioned, in the first section we cover the situation of cities across
all world regions. Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami’s chapter is on the South Asian
region,3 where cities are leading the urban transition of the Global South (along
with the African ones). Most of this new urban populations have been established
in informal settlements, generating a deep impact on socioeconomic and environ-
mental problems and increasing the pressure on all types of goods, infrastructure,
investments, and urban policies. Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He’s chapter is
on the East Asian region,4 where cities are under the challenge of being the emerging
economic engine of the world. Within a context of intense economic and cultural
globalisation, this massive wave of urbanisation has influenced wide transforma-
tions in urban governance and social relations, leading to remarkable societal and
cultural changes.
Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa, and Gabriel Silvestre’s chapter is on Latin
American5 cities, where the path of urbanisation was not equalised with industri-
alisation, creating a large sector of informality in labour and housing, with wide
inequalities between the informal poor and the super rich. Strong neoliberal reforms
took place from the 1980s, bringing a decreased role of the state in the provision of
urban services and infrastructure, transference of duties to weak local governments,

3 
This includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and
Sri Lanka. The region has a population of almost 1.9 billion, which is nearly one fourth
of the world’s population.
4 
This includes China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, South Korea, and North Ko-
rea. The region has a population of 1.6 billion, which is more than one fifth of the world’s
population.
5 
This includes South America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador,
Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela), Central America (Belize, Costa Rica, El Sal-
vador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama), and Mexico. The region has a
population of more than 600 million, which is more than 8% of the world’s population.
 Introduction xxix
reductions in public spending and social protections, and deregulating planning
tools. Warren Smit’s chapter is on sub-Saharan Africa’s6 cities, where an intense wave
of rapid urbanisation is underway, accompanied by a relatively positive prospect
of social, political, and economic development compared to past decades. This
impressive economic growth, with local real estate development and international
investment in infrastructure projects, has pushed the emergence of a new middle
class, encouraged massive intra-regional migration, and reproduced the persistence
of informal development in housing and labour.
Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker’s chapter is on Australasian7 cities, which show
very high rates of urbanisation and are markedly suburban with a population con-
centrated in a handful of former colonial outposts that attract most economic
activity and population inflows. Current problems include rapidly increasing housing
prices, lack of affordable housing, and cultural and economic inequalities affecting
indigenous and immigrant groups.
Yuri Kazepov, Roberta Cucca, Byeongsun Ahn, and Christophe Verrier’s chapter
is on European8 cities, where there are slower urbanisation processes and growing
trends of social and spatial inequalities within a context of decaying – but still
highly significant – welfare states. Austerity measures since the financial crisis in
2008 have had a deep impact at the urban level which, coupled with growing
neoliberalisation of urban economies, has led to social and occupational polari-
sations and to more residential segregation. Finally, Jon Teaford’s chapter is on
North American9 cities, where most of the population is living in metropolitan
areas and where there have been massive movements to the south and west of the
United States and Canada, which is generally explained by warmer temperatures,
high-tech employment, and the expansion of the leisure industry. In contrast to
gentrifying central cities, suburbs have grown faster and have changed a great deal
in terms of ethno-racial and land use composition, although still being highly seg-
regated places.

6 
According to the UN, this includes Western Africa (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde,
Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Ni-
ger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo), Eastern Africa (Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti,
Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, So-
malia, South Sudan, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe), Middle
Africa (Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Democratic Repub-
lic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, São Tomé and Príncipe), and Southern
Africa (Botswana, Eswatini (former Swaziland), Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa). The
region has a population of approximately 1 billion, which is about 13% of the world’s
population.
7 
This includes Australia, New Zealand, and neighbouring islands. The region has a
population of more than 30 million, which is about 0.4% of the world’s population.
8 
This includes 50 sovereign states in eastern, northern, southern, and western Europe.
The whole continent has a population of almost 750 million, which is about 9.6% of the
world’s population.
9 
For this review, this includes the United States and Canada, with a joined population of
366 million, which is about 4.7% of the world’s population.
xxx Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock
Leading Theoretical Perspectives and Approaches
In the second section of the book, we try to cover some of the leading theoretical per-
spectives and approaches of the twenty-first century’s urban studies. Tino Buchholz’s
chapter is on new directions in Frankfurt critical theory, establishing nexuses bet-
ween the Frankfurt School in general social theory, neo-Marxism and urban political
economy as a still powerful paradigm in the field, and new currents in critical urban
theory. Recognising the variety of critical approaches in today’s urban studies, Bu-
chholz discusses contemporary Frankfurt critical theory, somewhat continuing the
efforts initiated by Neil Brenner. Conversely, Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock’s
chapter is on the legacies and remnants of the Chicago School, showing the variety
of concepts that this school has been involved in throughout its history (methods,
theoretical approaches, conceptual activities, topical frameworks, and so on), and
reflecting on what the Chicago School means at present. Although many would say
that Chicago School thinking has been overshadowed for almost 50 years, it is impor-
tant to acknowledge its direct or indirect influence in current mainstream authors
such as Robert Sampson, Edward Glaeser, and Richard Florida, to name a few.
Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza’s chapter is about environmental
perspectives on cities, an approach that has expanded the scope of urban studies
from the exclusively social and economic focus of the twentieth century. The authors
describe urban environmental issues from the perspectives offered by industrial
ecology and political ecology, discuss the key concepts of risk, vulnerability, and
resilience, and highlight the social resignification of sustainability by the environ-
mental justice movement. Brenda Parker’s chapter covers feminist urban research,
highlighting how woman reflections and struggles have transformed life in cities,
even before being labelled as feminist, until they cohered into a body of academic
work in the 1960s and 1970s. The author shows how this approach has grown dra-
matically since then, diversifying in several sub-approaches and addressing a variety
of urban topics, such as housing, public space, poverty, colonialism, and so on.

Methodological Approaches
The third section of the book covers some of the main methodological approaches
used in contemporary urban studies. Ricardo Truffello, Monica Flores, and Fernan-
da Rojas’s chapter is on demographic methods in which they provide a critical per-
spective on the use of information by different types of academic and governmental
institutions. After introducing the different methods and the sources of information,
they discuss issues such as the historical role of censuses in society, the problems of
territorial representativeness in surveys, and the availability of administrative and
vital records in the Global South.
Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel’s chapter highlights the
growing use of geographic information systems and the emergence of neo-cartogra-
phy in a variety of disciplines and practical tasks. Starting from the Lefebvrian idea
of representations of space, they describe the historical development of geoinforma-
tion and geomedia, from both experts and non-experts, and how they are changing
not only urban studies and urban policies, but also our everyday life. Margarethe
Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino, in their chapter on urban ethnography,
 Introduction xxxi
offer a detailed overview of major developments and new directions in ethnograph-
ic-based urban research from the turn of the millennium. They show how the craft
of urban ethnography has crossed the boundaries of different disciplines, epistemo-
logical approaches, and regions, and how its growth from the 2000s onwards has
introduced higher levels of reflexivity and the recognition of the positionality of each
researcher.
In this section, we also considered theoretical-methodological approaches,
which focus on a particular subject matter but are also research instruments by
themselves: social networks and policy mobilities. Kathryn Anderson and Zachary
Neal’s chapter on cities and networks emphasises the challenges and opportunities
of a perspective that sees cities as places for growing social, economic, political,
and creative interactions. Besides describing methodological innovations, like the
sociogram, the authors describe the reciprocal interactions between people’s net-
works and infrastructure networks within a city, and also between cities, thus linking
neighbourhood-level research to global city discussions, both key to urban studies.
Astrid Wood’s chapter is on policy mobilities, an approach that falls within the par-
adigm shift of the so-called ‘mobility turn’ in social sciences, embracing its call for
the emergence of mobile methods, and the social-constructivist debates of critical
urban theory. As an intersection between political science and geography, the author
describes how this approach focuses on policies and practices that are assembled,
mobilised, and adopted in different political contexts, complicated by local and
regional dynamics, thus reproducing the circulation of knowledge around the world.

Social Problems in Twenty-First-Century Cities

In the fourth section of the book, we address some of the most pressing social prob-
lems of contemporary cities around the world. Ayda Eraydin’s chapter on social het-
erogeneity and diversity points not only to the growing change in the demographic
profiles of cities due to contemporary migrations, but also to the social dynamics
that these changes bring. The social, economic, and political issues that emanate
from these new local configurations are analysed in terms of social integration,
exclusion, and discrimination, including fears about separate lives and parallel soci-
eties. David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione’s chapter on inequalities
and the city presents a comprehensive analysis of both the processes that produce
inequality at global and local levels and the specific expressions of inequality in
cities. The chapter analyses the drivers of urban inequality and their evolution over
time as a background for an in-depth discussion of contemporary inequalities in cit-
ies of the Global North and the Global South.
In her chapter on the role of residential contexts in urban inequality, Mer-
cedes Di Virgilio examines the prominent role of the state and how it structures
the development of socio-territorial inequalities in the urban space, particularly in
neighbourhoods. The ‘neighbourhood effects’ thesis is discussed with particular
emphasis on the problem of the multiple scales involved in the production of urban
inequalities as well as on separate and complementary dimensions that play a role in
the struggle for the appropriation of the urban space.
Since the issue of migrations is so crucial for the social problems of inequality and
diversity, with clear impacts on neighbourhoods, we have added three chapters on
xxxii Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock
this topic from three different regions: Europe, China, and the United States. Moshe
Semyonov and Anastasia Gorodzeisky’s chapter on immigration and immigrants in
European countries highlights Europe as a major destination after World War II in a
context of decolonisation and guest-worker programmes. The authors explain how
immigrants are seen in all places as an external social group with a negative impact,
are targets of discrimination, and have partial or unsuccessful economic integration.
Da Liu and Zhigang Li consider the character of migrations and migrants in post-re-
form Chinese cities, focusing on two types of immigrants, rural migrants and interna-
tional residents. They describe, on one side, how rural migrants have been relegated
to marginalised spaces and, on the other side, how international residents can make
a decent living when established in places that are more similar (at least in economic
terms) to the Western notion of the ethnic enclave. Christopher Levesque and Jack
DeWaard’s chapter on migrations and migrants in the United States poses the idea
that the United States has entered a fifth phase of immigration after Trump’s election
in 2016, which is marked by three key developments: reactions against demographic
change in a context of deindustrialization, politics of fear and deservingness discon-
nected from reality and history, and fear of access and preservation of legal residence.
The authors describe the context of polarising interpretations on the meaning of US
citizenship, with growing racialised myths of deservingness and illegality, and resis-
tance and social organisation of many immigrant and native groups.
This fourth section of the book closes with a chapter by Sandra Annunziata, Lo-
retta Lees, and Clara Rivas Alonso on the nexuses between segregation, social mix,
and gentrification, all highly discussed and crucial for contemporary urban studies.
The authors stress how policies targeted at segregated poor areas, in the name of the
progressive ideals that are supposedly behind social mix, end up generating gentrifi-
cation: that is, displacing most (or all) poor residents and opening room for capital
reinvestment in those neighbourhoods.

Political and Economic Problems in Twenty-First-Century Cities

The fifth and final section of the book discusses political and economic problems.
Annika Hinze’s chapter covers urban citizenship and governance. Urban citizenship
is examined from legal, social, economic, identity, and practical perspectives, and
urban governance is described in terms of the variegated institutional capacities, their
vertical coherence and integration, the insertion of the private sector, ad hoc insti-
tutional arrangements established for specific development projects, and emerging
issues of democratic transparency. In their chapter on policies and policy approaches
in cities, Marc Pradel and Marisol Garcia highlight the variety of needs addressed
by urban policies and develop a highly exhaustive review of urban policy trends
in most corners of the world: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and
Africa. Despite some specific path dependencies of each context, they show several
policy innovations that are being copied and implemented in other contexts (as the
chapter on policy mobilities describes in detail), with some international institutions
providing the context for information exchange and the setting of policy agendas.
Anne Haila’s chapter on financialisation and real estate highlights how the trans-
formation of housing and properties into a financial asset has become a major
research topic for several disciplines. Centring the discussion on the reciprocal
 Introduction xxxiii
development of financial instruments and of the market for real estate, she describes
consequences, such as the increase of risk in the housing market for both home-
owners and tenants, the competition between cities to attract super-wealthy indi-
viduals for buying luxury homes, the inclusion of micro-investors within the real
estate game, the growth of short-term rentals, and more. Finally, Darinka Czischke
and Alonso Ayala’s chapter on housing in the Global North and the Global South
stresses the global affordability crisis that is suffered in most corners of the world
after the financial crisis of 2008. For the countries of the Global North and Global
South, housing issues are presented with a detailed analysis of five related themes:
land, planning, and infrastructure; tenure and management; finance; environmental
sustainability; and governance and user participation.

Updating and Extending Our Knowledge About Cities and Their

Problems Around the World

This book is a major effort of synthesising and bringing together all dimensions that
compose twenty-first-century urban studies: from a detailed overview of cities in
all corners of the world (our study subject), to leading theoretical perspectives (our
lenses to see that subject), to methodological approaches (the research instruments
to study our subject), and to social, political, and economic problems (the main con-
cerns that the urban studies literature has raised in the past two decades). Together
with the Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies, in which the three of us were
involved, we would like to say that this Companion to Urban and Regional Studies
is the most complete account of the current state of the discipline of urban studies,
although recognising the several other initiatives involved in similar ambitious
tasks.10 In any case, we wanted this book to be as exhaustive, as comprehensive, and
as diverse as possible.
Urban studies, as a subfield in social sciences that also draws from applied sci-
ences (e.g. transportation engineering) and applied arts (e.g. architecture), has been
increasingly institutionalised in the past decades. In 2010, Robert Beauregard said
that urban studies ‘exists as a parallel, and marginalized, institutional and intellec-
tual space’ (Beauregard, 2010: 931), as compared to other formalised fields in social
science within which urban studies stands, such as economics, sociology, political
science, history, geography, and anthropology. However, we think we can update
this statement. Considering the growth of disciplines that are incorporating an urban

10 
Just to name a few in the English language: Handbook of Urban Studies (Sage, 2001), A
Companion to the City (Wiley Blackwell, 2008), The Sage Companion to the City (Sage,
2008), The New Blackwell Companion to the City (Wiley Blackwell, 2011), The Oxford
Handbook of Urban Politics (Oxford University Press, 2012), The Sage Handbook of
Housing Studies (Sage, 2012), The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2012), A Companion to Urban Anthropology (Wiley, 2014), The Routledge
Handbook on Cities of the Global South (Routledge, 2014), A Companion to Urban
Anthropology (Wiley, 2014), The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City (Sage, 2018),
and The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South (Routledge, 2019).
xxxiv Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock
insight, the growth of professional and academic programmes that are increasingly
being taught, the growth of departments and research centres that are being formed,
the growth of national and international networks and research groups that are cre-
ated and join every year, the growth of academic production in regional and global
journals, and even the impact that this field has on a variety of economic, social, and
environmental international organisations and initiatives, we can at least say that
urban studies is not ‘marginal’ anymore. In fact, it does not need to be a formalised
discipline, because its strength actually comes from its multidisciplinary roots, as
long as it maintains a certain degree of expertise over its study subject (i.e. cities and
regions). And we humbly believe that this book could be a contribution in enriching
and expanding that expertise.

References

Amadeo, P. 2020. Sopa de Wuhan: Pensamiento contemporáneo en tiempos de pandemias.

Buenos Aires, Argentina: ASPO (Aislamiento Social Preventivo y Obligatorio).
Beauregard, R. 2010. Urban studies. In Ray Hutchison (ed.), Encyclopedia of Urban Stud-
ies, 930–935. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE). 2020. COVID-19 dashboard. Johns
Hopkins University. https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.
html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6.
Fisher, M. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Gopinath, G. 2020. The great lockdown: Worst economic downturn since the great depression.
https://blogs.imf.org/2020/04/14/the-great-lockdown-worst-economic-downturn-since-
the-great-depression.
Orum, A. 2019. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Hobo-
ken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
 Part I
CITIES ACROSS
WORLD REGIONS
 1
Cities and Regions in South Asia
Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami

Introduction

The ongoing global urban transition, led by cities in the Global South, particularly
in Asian and African countries, presents one of the defining development oppor-
tunities of the twenty-first century. Rapid urbanisation over the next two to three
decades will lead to an explosion in the demand for livelihoods, urban renewal,
infrastructure and real estate development, food, water, energy, housing, and digital
technology. A significant proportion of this transition will be played out in South
Asian cities: between 2001 and 2011, 130 million people were added to South Asian
cities and this number is set to rise by almost 250 million in the next 15 years.1 This
urban transition presents exceptional opportunities for sustainable development, but
also presents difficult challenges. South Asia is home to some of the fastest growing
economies in the world, but also faces critical questions around issues of inequality,
poverty, health and social welfare, and environmental degradation.
South Asia’s ‘messy’ and ‘hidden’ urbanisation (Ellis and Roberts, 2016) is evident
in the large share of the population living in settlements that possess urban charac-
teristics but do not satisfy the criteria required to be officially classified as urban
(Denis et al., 2012). Rapidly growing cities are unable to cope with the increasing
demand for urban services and are vulnerable to growing social and environmen-
tal factors that govern urban fabric. The inability of the cities to effectively address
these obstacles provides the root cause for messy and hidden urbanisation (Ellis and

1 
Data from the World Urbanization Prospects Report, 2018 Revision, United Nations
Population Division.

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
4 Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami
Roberts, 2016). It thus becomes imperative to study the current trends and processes
governing new emerging cities in this region and the role that they play in the larger
gamut of the sociopolitical discourse in South Asia.
Geographically, eight countries cover the South Asian region – Afghanistan, Ban-
gladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Collectively, these
are some of the most populated countries in the world, with the potential to trans-
form their economies to become more prosperous and liveable. It is also a region
with a fraught colonial history that continues to influence contemporary conflicts
(such as the relationship between India and Pakistan). In addition, the region fac-
es a range of other social and ecological challenges, including pervasive inequality,
chronic poverty, unemployment, growing vulnerability to natural disasters, and cli-
mate risk, all of which put its economic growth potential at considerable risk.
It is impossible to take a comprehensive look at urbanisation in South Asian cities,
and do justice to urbanisation and the range of issues that it raises, in a single book
chapter. This chapter therefore aims to provide an overview of key issues that cities
in the region grapple with. It focuses on the current social, economic, environmental,
and housing processes in South Asia. This chapter begins with a section on economic
and demographic processes where we review urbanisation in South Asia and how
urban economies are transforming the region. We also look at factors influencing
the economic geography of South Asia and the policy changes and implementations
required to propel economic growth.
In the second section on social processes, we provide an overview of critical issues
that have emerged and influenced the social fabric of South Asia. Drawing from the
Rohingya crises, Indo-Pak conflict, and the Sri Lankan civil war, we reflect on the
militarisation of conflict in the region. In addition, we also highlight the emergence
and the significance of the civil society and participation of the urban middle class
in the democratic process.
Third, we focus on environmental challenges in the subcontinent. The geographical
location of South Asia makes it susceptible to various natural disasters that have had
a powerful effect on the socioeconomic fabric of the subcontinent. We first reflect
on past natural and human-made disasters that have affected the region, specifi-
cally looking at the relationship between urbanisation, climate change, and global
warming. We then proceed to deliberate on the issues of disaster risk management
and the policy interventions that are required to build resilience.
Our final section takes a problem-based approach, focusing on the question of
affordable housing. As is the case with most urban issues, a problem-based approach
not only allows us to engage more directly with issues on the ground but also high-
lights the need for moving towards an interdisciplinary approach to thinking about
urban challenges. More than 14% of South Asians have no home, and a further
45% live in overcrowded areas. With increasing urbanisation, the pressure to
provide affordable housing has been growing, compelling government and other
stakeholders to propose different approaches to dealing with this problem that will
transcend economic, social, and environmental aspects. We illustrate this in more
detail by addressing the challenges of providing adequate and affordable housing in
South Asian cities.
A continuing thread that runs through the chapter is that of rapid urbanisation
and its ramifications on the socioeconomic and environmental fabric of South Asia.
 Cities and Regions in South Asia 5
Since economic, social, and environmental processes influence each other to a great
extent, it becomes difficult to resolve issues by approaching them from a single lens
alone. As we illustrate through the case of affordable housing, it is only through
addressing multiple aspects of the problem simultaneously that cities will be able to
realise their potential.

Economic and Demographic Processes in South Asia

According to the World Urbanization Prospects Report (2018 revision), the annual
urban population of the world is projected to reach 4.37 billion in 2020, of which
South Asia’s urban population alone will account for 0.7 billion. A surge in urbanisa-
tion has led to a rapid increase in both the urban population as well as urban density
in South Asia – cities are therefore not only getting bigger in terms of population size,
but also more crowded.2 While there are benefits that arise from economies of scale
in dense settlements, there are also concerns around resource overuse, public health,
and equity in terms of access to and distribution of the city’s resources.
A review of existing literature presents a wide array of conceptual interpreta-
tions of South Asia’s urbanisation. South Asia’s urbanisation has been referred to
as ‘messy’ and ‘hidden’, reflected in the widespread existence of slums and sprawl,
which has facilitated hidden urbanisation, particularly on the peripheries of major
cities, which is not captured by official data (Ellis and Roberts, 2016). These are
typically new settlements which have urban-like characteristics but continue to be
governed as rural bodies (Ellis and Roberts, 2016). Denis et al. (2012) describe this
process as ‘subaltern urbanization’ in the Indian context, referring to the growth of
settlement agglomerations (whether recognised by the census of India or not), that
are not a part of the larger cities and are autonomous in their interactions with other
settlements, local and global. Ellis and Roberts (2016) also emphasise the relevance
of agglomeration economies which have emerged as an outcome of the region’s
transition to a manufacturing and services-led economy (Ellis and Roberts, 2016).
This increase in attention to urban areas could also be attributed to two related
trends: the increasing population in cities and the increasing concentration of
economic activity in urban areas (Revi, Koduganti, and Anand, 2014). ‘Urbanization
is promoted by (1) economies of scale in production, particularly manufacturing; (2)
the existence of information externalities; (3) technology development, particularly
in building and transportation technology; and (4) substitution of capital for land
as made possible by technological development’ (Mohan and Dasgupta, 2005: 214).
While South Asian urbanisation fulfils some of the above criteria, its urbanisation
has largely been uneven.

Demographic Transition of Cities in South Asia

South Asia boasts of six of the world’s megacities – Bengaluru, Delhi, Dhaka, Karachi,
Kolkata, and Mumbai. Four out of these six cities belong to India. By 2020, India
will contribute to 68% of South Asia’s urban population. The 2011 Indian census

2 
The figures mentioned are from the World Atlas.
6 Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami
showed a large growth in the number of census towns, i.e. urbanisation outside the
recognised urban bodies.3 Pradhan (2013) attributes 26–29.5% of the urban growth
between 2001 and 2011 to the recognition of these new census towns, which may
not necessarily grow around existing large towns. His study of spatial distribution of
new census towns revealed that while there is high concentration in certain districts
close to metropolitan cities, the formation of census towns is also widely spread
across the country (Pradhan, 2013).
This demographic transition can be attributed to the natural increase, net rural–
urban classification and rural–urban migration in the country (Bhagat, 2011).
This process of migration is largely driven by the individual’s need to seek better
employment opportunities, often fuelled by the primary desire to lead a better
life. But the process of migration is not symmetrical in nature. While some regions
and sectors fall behind in their capacity to support populations, others flourish
and people migrate to access these emerging opportunities (Srivastava and Sasiku-
mar, 2003).
Rama et al. (2015), in their report titled ‘Addressing Inequality in South Asia’,
state that the urbanisation process in South Asian cities appears to be more organic.
‘Just as people come to cities in the form of migration, cities also “come” to people
through the densification of population and the transformation of economic activity
in rural areas. These diverse urbanization processes have led to a range of cities with
different characteristics, not just in terms of their size but also in terms of their gov-
ernance structure’ (Rama et al., 2015: 25).
South Asian nations have large demographic disparities in terms of their size,
population, and geographical dispositions. However, the demographic challenges
associated with these cities are those of developing countries grappling with major
population increases. This includes educating, housing, and employing the population
(Véron et al., 2008). The failure of South Asia’s urban areas to adequately cope with
the pressure of rising populations is also reflected in the poor performance of its
largest cities, including those with higher liveability (Ellis and Roberts, 2016).
Despite these barriers, policy response to urbanisation views cities as drivers of
economic growth, directed by their contribution to the national output growth. This
is reflected in the design and implementation of government programmes that focus
on the upliftment of cities. On the contrary, rural areas are often seen as spaces that
require developmental intervention. This preference towards the urban has fuelled
tension over resource allocation decisions not only between rural and urban areas,
but within urban areas themselves (Revi, Koduganti, and Anand, 2014).
There is a need for a more integrated response that moves away from looking at
cities as drivers of economic growth, but instead one that proposes a policy frame
that views cities as engines of inclusive development that not only transform them-
selves, but also the surrounding rural areas (Revi, Koduganti, and Anand, 2014). A
way of achieving this could be to move policy intervention in the direction of decen-
tralisation, adopt a labour-intensive workforce, and focus on employment genera-
tion, particularly with a view to increase female workforce participation to ensure
equitable outcomes in the development trajectory.

3 
The last census was undertaken in the year 2011.
 Cities and Regions in South Asia 7
Factors Shaping South Asia’s Economy
The South Asian diaspora is also marred with critical issues such as corruption,
conflict, rampant poverty, and inequalities. However, despite this, the region has
managed to uplift itself primarily due to liberal economic policy reforms that
countries such as Sri Lanka and India adopted in the 1990s (Devarajan and Nabi,
2006). While we examine the role of cities in South Asia as primary drivers of
economic growth, the economy of South Asia is undergoing a structural transfor-
mation led by the manufacturing and services-led industry (Ellis and Roberts, 2016).
Despite an increase in the workforce in the manufacturing sector since the early
1990s, employment elasticities in these sectors are low, with the exception of the
construction sector. The increase has been in informal and casual work (Revi, Kodu-
ganti, and Anand, 2014).
Despite the high economic growth, a large portion of the South Asian economy is
driven by the informal sector. The informal sector currently comprises three quarters
of all non-agricultural employment in this region, presenting a large formal work
deficit (Rothboeck and Kring, 2014). In South Asia, more than 80% of the work-
force is engaged directly in the informal sector and many more work as informal
workers in the formal sector (ibid.). India alone employs 90% of its workforce in
the informal sector (Jhabvala, 2013). This could be attributed to the capital-intensive
nature of industrialisation (Kundu, 2011) which often hinders employment genera-
tion in the urban economy. Additionally, most of the migrants are absorbed within
the informal sector (ibid.). Perhaps, given the significant contribution that the infor-
mal sector makes to our cities, it is imperative that we rethink the categorisation of
the economy into formal and informal sectors.
But this informal economy poses a tremendous challenge for trade unions
and employer organisations to not only organise and represent informal workers
and economic units in such a scenario, but also for policymakers to keep pace with and
enforce appropriate regulations (Rothboeck and Kring, 2014). In addition, the infor-
mal sector is also plagued with several disparities. According to Renana Jhabvala,
founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), to reduce the increas-
ing vulnerabilities and insecurities of this working population, social and economic
structures need to change in order to attain a just and fair system. For example, only
20% of women have paying jobs outside agriculture in South Asia, reflective of the
scale of their exclusion and nature of work (EPW, 2018). Women often tend to be at
the lower end of the inequality spectrum. Evidence also states that women in devel-
oping countries most commonly find employment in urban industries that have low
wages, require semi-skilled workers, and are casual or contracted activities (Revi,
Koduganti, and Anand, 2014). Conversely, an empirical study conducted in 2001
reports that given the cultural barriers to work participation, South Asian countries
have witnessed a slow and steady increase in the women’s work participation in the
last two decades (Unni, 2001). This therefore seems to suggest that, although slow,
there does seem to be a gradual change in women’s participation in the workforce.
Two other factors have been instrumental in shaping the economy of South Asia –
conflicts and natural disasters. The region has witnessed several conflicts and wars,
some of which are still ongoing. Some of this is an outcome of an ethnically diverse
population that is often at odds with each other, however, there are also several other
8 Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami
reasons including a colonial past, political motivations, and deeply embedded social
institutions like caste and religion. The economies of these nations have also suffered
to an extent. For example, the civil war in Sri Lanka that ran over a course of more
than 26 years, had a significant impact on investment opportunities, the tourism
industry, and led to a loss of skilled manpower (Kelegama, 2018). The Sri Lankan
economy also suffered severe losses from the tsunami that hit South and South East
Asian nations in 2004. The damage to all countries affected by the 2004 tsunami
was estimated to be around US$8.71 billion. Sri Lanka suffered damages of US$1.30
billion while the damage in India amounted to US$2.10 billion. Similarly, nearly two
years after an earthquake in 2015 flattened Nepal, the country is still struggling to
recover its losses with 71% of the affected people continuing to live in temporary
shelters (The Asia Foundation, 2016).
The population of South Asia will continue to expand and will play a significant
role in shaping urban economies. Although there is a growing body of work on
urban regions in South Asia, much more research is needed to understand these chal-
lenges and proposed sustainable development outcomes. The existing literature is
not enough to understand the ongoing urban transition. For example, more research
is required to understand the dynamics of informality and poverty, particularly on
how informalisation has impacted the poor and how the poor can become agents in
the growth process (Revi, Koduganti, and Anand, 2014). In addition, we also require
policy intervention that could enable informal enterprises to improve their produc-
tivity and generate more employment opportunities of decent quality (ibid.).

India’s Urban Transition

South Asia has regained its lead as the fastest growing region in the world,
supported by recovery in India.4 Much of India’s economic trajectory has been
shaped by two significant events – colonialism and liberalisation. The liberali-
sation of economic policies in 1991 attracted foreign direct investment (FDI)
in the country, prompting employment-generation opportunities specifically
in the manufacturing and services sector. Following this, India witnessed a
significant growth in the economy. While the liberalisation process propelled
economic growth in the nation, an emerging view point has been that the pro-
cess of urban development in India is not necessarily positive, as it is character-
ised by growing regional and interpersonal inequalities and ongoing poverty
(Kundu, 2011). This is also reflected in the prejudiced focus of policy interven-
tions in cities and not rural areas.
India’s urban transition is also taking place in the context of an economic
transition to a services-led economy, simultaneously increasing the infor-
malisation of employment and deterioration in the quality of work and life
(Revi, Koduganti, and Anand, 2014). With 90% of India’s workforce engaged

4 
The World Bank, ‘Lifted by India, South Asia Regions Growth Lead, Still Lags on
Jobs’, 15 April 2018. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/04/15/
south-asia-focus-growth-lead-jobless-growth-create-more-jobs.
 Cities and Regions in South Asia 9
in the informal sector, sectors such as the gems and jewellery industry and
block printing industries lack formal compliances and are hence marred with
inequalities. Workers in these industries often work in poor conditions and
minimum wages.
India’s urban population has been expanding rapidly. According to the
2011 census, for the first time since independence, the absolute increase in the
urban population was higher than the rural population (Bhagat, 2011). India’s
growth is projected to expand to 7.6% in 2018. This upward growth of India
is good for the entire South Asian region as the spillovers (Kelegama, 2007)
from India’s growth will influence other regions as well. However, in order to
capture the spillover, other countries in the region need to create a stable mac-
roeconomic environment with good governance and infrastructure (Kelegama,
2007). On a micro level, the country needs to focus on employment genera-
tion, especially of the female workforce, which will also facilitate the growth
of rural areas. This will ensure that the cities are viewed as engines of inclusive
development and not as drivers of economic growth (Revi, Koduganti, and
Anand, 2014).

Social Processes in South Asia

The economy of any region cannot be viewed in isolation. The social construct of
a city strongly influences the economic situation and vice versa. Despite being one
of the most dynamic regions in the world, the social fabric of South Asia is marred
with several inequalities. Persistent poverty, caste-based segregations, ethnic and
religious conflicts, gender discrimination, and human rights issues have furthered
the complexities of the South Asian subcontinent. While caste-based discrimination
and ethnic conflicts continue to exist, rights-based issues such as gender rights, les-
bian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) issues, and disability rights are
also beginning to gain wider prominence. It is imperative to understand that these
external and internal issues drive the social disposition of South Asia. However, in
the last decades, an emerging social evolution has been the political participation of
the middle class in South Asian cities. In this section we examine the key conflicts
that have influenced the social trajectory of South Asia as well as look at the new
emerging wave of the participatory development process.

Conflicts and Disparities in South Asia

The people of South Asia not only share a common geographical space, but also a
social and cultural history that influence lifestyles, belief systems, similar cultural
disposition, and social relationships (Sehgal, 2015). It is crucial to note that the
social diaspora of South Asia is ethnically diverse and, often, conflict-ridden. The
Indo-Pakistan conflict, the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, the ethnic conflicts in Sri
Lanka, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts conflict in Bangladesh are some of the major
conflicts which have afflicted the South Asia region for a few decades.
10 Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami
The impact of such internal conflicts often percolates into neighbouring coun-
tries as well – there are several instances of this. For example, the issue surround-
ing the Rohingya refugees has attracted both regional and international attention,
specifically from human rights groups. The Rohingya are an ethnic group who
have been residing in Myanmar for centuries. Viewed as illegal immigrants from
the neighbouring country of Bangladesh, they failed to gain recognition as one
of the 135 official groups in the country. The new citizenship law passed in 1982
denied this group citizenship, thereby rendering them as stateless. The atrocities
inflicted on this group has caused them to flee to neighbouring countries in search
of shelter. These conflicts have given rise not just to internal wars but also to an
increase in human rights violations such as torture, disappearances, extra judicial
killings, and detention without trial (Rupesinghe, 1988). The Human Rights Watch
group has accused Myanmar of ethnic cleansing. According to a United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) report, over 168,000 Rohingya refu-
gees have fled the country since 2012 and sought safety in neighbouring countries
such as Bangladesh and Malaysia. Further south, Sri Lanka witnessed a civil war
between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE). The war
that has been ongoing for nearly 26 years, finally saw its end with the Sri Lank-
an military defeating the Tamil Tigers in 2009. The Indian government deployed
peacekeeping forces between 1987 and 1990 under the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord
that aimed to end the Sri Lankan civil war.
In Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the militarisation of society and the militarisation of
conflicts (Rupesinghe, 1988) are among the emerging features of the subcontinent.
Another trend is the growing instances of ‘ethnic armies’ (ibid.) where recruitment is
made on the basis of ethnicity.
As nations continue to deal with external conflicts across borders, there are sev-
eral internal issues plaguing the nations. The archaic caste system is still prevalent
across certain nations in South Asia. The Dalits, a group traditionally belonging
to the lowest caste, continue to struggle for access to basic social, political, and
economic opportunities. More than 80% of Dalits live in South Asia. India leads
the list with 201 million Dalits (16.6% of the population), followed by Bangladesh
(5.5 million), Sri Lanka (5 million or 20–30% of the population), Nepal (3.6 million
or 13.6% of the population), and Pakistan (2 million).
South Asian nations show wide dissimilarities in their demographic composi-
tion. According to the data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) India’s
gender ratio is skewed across the nation. The global gender ratio for the world is
101.8 males per 100 females. India’s sex ratio stands at 107.6 males against 100
females. However, gender inequality has deeper crevasses which are visible in India’s
rising incidents of rapes and sexual assault. Data released by the National Crime
Records Bureau (NCRB) in 2016 stated that in 2016 India recorded 106 rapes and
one in every four rape cases ended in conviction.
A crucial ongoing human rights movement is that of the LGBTQ group. Nepal
has been a beacon for LGBT rights in South Asia. The country was the first among
South Asian nations to decriminalise homosexuality in 2007, while also propos-
ing the legalisation of same-sex marriage. This judgement, however, is still pending
in the court. In the past decade, India and Sri Lanka have witnessed widespread
demonstration demanding the decriminalisation of homosexuality. However,
 Cities and Regions in South Asia 11
on 6 September 2018, in a landmark judgement, the Supreme Court of India
decriminalised homosexuality making it only the second country in South Asia to
legalise homosexuality. Barring Nepal and India, all other South Asian nations out-
law homosexuality.

People’s Participatory Movements and the Rise of the Urban Middle Class
In the last decade, political developments in South Asia have led to a rise in the par-
ticipation of the urban middle class in the democratic process. India, specifically, wit-
nessed the rise in the urban middle class in the early 1990s. This rise has largely been
attributed to the economic reforms (Fernandes, 2000) that were introduced in 1991.
The liberalisation of the Indian economy led to an influx of foreign markets which
were instrumental in influencing the ‘culture of consumption’ (Fernandes, 2000: 90)
of the urban middle class. Leela Fernandes elucidates by stating, ‘advertising and
media images have contributed to the creation of an image of a “new” Indian middle
class, one that has left behind its dependence on austerity and state protection and
has embraced an open India that is at ease with broader processes of globalization’
(Fernandes, 2000: 90). The role of this urban middle class has now also extended to
the political gamut.
In India and Bangladesh, the role of civil society has not been specifically mandated
by the constitution. However, the constitution provides spaces and opportunities
for civil society to participate in the process of governance through fundamental
rights for freedom of thought and freedom to form associations (Rai, 2003). The
democratic process and popular participation in South Asia very often ends with
the electioneering process and remains in abeyance until the next time, ensuring
that the public opinion is largely discounted (Rizvi, 1994). This is attributed to the
belief in the minds of the rural elites that ‘the business of the government is consid-
ered too complex and “weighty” to involve the very people who earlier voted the
government into power’ (Rizvi, 1994: 609).
Kamat and Vijayabaskar state that a key premise of the ongoing urban gover-
nance reforms is that a combination of user participation and marketisation of ser-
vice delivery can deliver better outcomes for citizens (Kamath and Vijayabaskar,
2009). In India, a relevant example of this is the Bhagidari system initiated by the
Delhi government in their effort to promote citizen participation in the political pro-
cess.5 Bhagidari was instrumental in elevating and formalising the political status
of resident welfare associations (RWAs) and reduced the role and influence of local
electoral politics in the administration of the urban space (Ghertner, 2011). Ghert-
ner refers to this as gentrification of political participation wherein gentrification is
defined as the displacement of a lower class from a space into which a wealthier class
is entering (ibid.).
Citizens have also managed to garner attention on a national scale. In India,
another significant milestone was the rebellion of the Indian middle class on the
footsteps of Anna Baburao Hazare in his crusade against the corruption practices
of the Congress government in the centre. The ‘anti-corruption’, movement as it

5 
The word ‘Bhagidari’ refers to collaborative participation in the Hindi language.
12 Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami
was termed, not only saw the support of media and social activists, but that of the
middle-class Indians across a spectrum of ages. Anna Hazare’s demand was the
involvement of the civil society in the drafting of the Lokpal Bill, set in motion
to ensure punitive action against those accused of corruption. Similarly, the civil
society in Pakistan has also been voicing its opinion on several issues prevalent
in the country. Across South Asia, human rights groups have spoken out against
the Rohingya refugee crises. In addition, the civil society organisations have
also played a significant role in influencing the growing role of the judicial sys-
tem on issues relating to the use, sale, transfer, and development of urban land,
often driven by public interest litigations (PIL) (Weinstein et al., 2014). Gherter
argues that this urban middle-class power did not emerge from internal changes
within class itself, but was rather produced by the machinations of the local state
(Ghertner, 2011).
There has been a significant rise in the number of social movements in the past
decade in the form of demonstrations, strikes, protests, candlelight vigils, and social
media activism.
Conflicts and problems today are exposed on a larger scale due to new media and
emerging technologies. The internet has played a significant role in building aware-
ness on issues, connecting the world, mobilising people and nations, and bridging
the gap between the people and the governance officials, who were earlier seen as
inaccessible. The evolution of a networked society comprising of opinion leaders
has been instrumental in moulding public opinion on issues such as human rights,
labour issues, environmental issues, and politics. At the same time, citizen participa-
tion at the local and national government level is playing a key role in shaping the
urban areas.

Environmental Processes in South Asia

According to the data revealed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s

(IPCC) 2014 committee, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and
human systems on all continents and across oceans (IPCC, 2014). Climate change is
expected to increase the frequency and intensity of current hazards and is likely to
spur the emergence of new hazards and new vulnerabilities with differential spatial
and socioeconomic impacts (Revi, 2008). The IPCC special report on global warming
of 1.5°C (SR15), released in October 2018, states that the impact of global warming
of 2°C will be catastrophic for poor and developing nations. The report presents
evidence that if transformational and accelerated climate action is not enabled, by
2040 we can witness global warming of over 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This
could have profound local and global impact on infrastructure, food and water inse-
curities, drought, and extreme weather conditions.

Climate Change and Urbanisation – Impact on South Asia

Rapid urbanisation and rapid growth of large cities in low- and middle-income
countries have been accompanied by the rapid growth of highly vulnerable urban
communities living in informal settlements, many of which are at high risk from
 Cities and Regions in South Asia 13
extreme weather (Revi et al., 2014). Urban areas hold more than half of the world’s
population and house a high proportion of the population and economic activities
most prone to climate risks such as rising sea levels and storm surges, heat stress,
extreme precipitation, inland and coastal flooding, landslides, drought, increased
aridity, water scarcity, and air pollution (ibid.).
Disaster occurs from a combination of three key elements – natural hazards,
exposure of people and property to these hazards, and vulnerability due to physical,
social, economic, governance, and environmental factors that increase the suscep-
tibility of a community to the impact of a natural hazard (Van Bronkhorst, 2012).
Over the last few decades, there has been a paradigm shift in the conceptual under-
standing of disasters that resulted from ineffectiveness of technocentric approaches
(Jain et al., 2015). This new paradigm is increasingly ‘vulnerability centred’ as risks
are understood as phenomena linked to physical, social, economic, and institutional
vulnerability (ibid.).
South Asian cities are highly vulnerable to disasters. On a macro level, the geocli-
matic nature of South Asia is shaped and influenced by the presence of the Himala-
yan belt, the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. The Himalayan
region specifically is a seismic zone and has a prevalent history of earthquakes, land-
slides, and floods. Densely populated areas around fertile river valleys of the Ganges,
Indus, and Brahmaputra are prone to frequent and intense flooding. Likewise, settle-
ments around coastal areas are susceptible to cyclones and floods. This topography
has made the South Asian region extremely vulnerable to environmental disasters
and natural hazards.
Additionally, natural hazards frequently transcend national boundaries since sev-
eral countries in the South Asian region share common geological formations and
river basins. (Van Bronkhorst, 2012). One of the primary examples of this is the 2004
earthquake that jolted the Indian Ocean and prompted a tsunami that caused dev-
astating losses to communities surrounding the Indian Ocean. Sri Lanka and India
were worst affected by the disaster. According to data released by Oxfam, 5 million
people were affected of which 1.7 million were made homeless, half a million were
injured, and more than 230,000 were killed. Similarly, the Himalayan region which
encompasses parts of India, Nepal, and Bhutan is privy to earthquakes, flash floods,
and landslides. Most recently, in April 2015, a massive earthquake struck Nepal
killing nearly 9,000 people and injuring another 22,000.
A majority of the larger cities suffer from poor air quality due to increased
traffic congestion. Further, urban density can cause both street and water supplies
to become polluted with garbage and human waste, with serious public health
consequences (Ellis and Roberts, 2016). As per data released by the World Health
Organization (WHO), 14 Indian cities are registered in the list of 20 most polluted
cities in the world (Press Trust of India, 2018). This includes Delhi, the capital city
of India, which is characterised by high levels of smog and pollution. The report
also stated that an estimated 7 million people die prematurely every year from air
pollution-related diseases, including strokes and heart disease, respiratory illness,
and cancer.
The underlying environmental risks combined with South Asia’s large population,
inadequate infrastructure, and socioeconomic conditions result in high vulnerability
to hazard impacts (Van Bronkhorst, 2012). In India, rapid population growth, high
14 Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami
densities, poverty, and high differentials in access to housing, public services, and infra-
structure have led to an increase in vulnerability over the last few decades, especially in
the urban centres (Revi, 2008). The urban population growth in both megacities and
secondary cities has to a large extent been unplanned, resulting in the concentration of
the poor in risk-prone areas and increasing their exposure to natural risks. This risk is
aggravated by high poverty rates and a lack of readiness on behalf of the governments
for natural hazards (Ellis and Roberts, 2016).

Disaster Risk and Management

There is extensive research being undertaken on disaster risk and management in
order to understand and grapple with the effects of climate change. The IPCC report
states that risks in urban areas are amplified for those lacking essential infrastructure
and services or living in poor quality housing and exposed areas. Reducing basic ser-
vice deficits, improving housing, and building resilient infrastructure systems could
significantly reduce vulnerability and exposure in urban areas (IPCC, 2014).
While cities are ‘collectors of risk’, they also provide an immense opportunity
to reduce this risk, if managed well in time (Jain et al., 2015). Urban governments
are at the heart of successful urban climate adaptation because so much adaptation
depends on local assessments and integrating adaptation into local investments, pol-
icies, and regulatory frameworks (Revi et al., 2014). For urban development policies
to be effective and inclusive, they require a deeper understanding of the nature of
informal settlements – dimensions of differential vulnerability, particularly across
a multitude of social categories, the various actors involved, and the roles of social
networks and local associations (CARIAA, 2018). Simultaneously, it becomes imper-
ative to address local, context-specific adaptation needs and thereby build both
generic and climate specific capacities of vulnerable people and systems (ibid.).
Understanding disaster risks and ensuring that effective disaster management
policies are implemented is a crucial step towards responding to disasters. More
so because the environmental concerns for South Asia are only going to worsen.
By 2050, 246 million South Asians will reside in cities in cyclone-prone areas
(Van Bronkhorst, 2012). While South Asia’s economy has been growing at an impres-
sive pace for the last two decades, a single high-impact natural disaster can erase these
advances in an instant in certain poor and highly vulnerable localities. Disasters not
only disrupt the normal course of life of affected communities and countries in South
Asia, but halt long-term development projects. Funds originally earmarked for new
initiatives are allocated to relief, response, and rehabilitation work, often crowd-
ing out new infrastructure and capital development (ibid.). Governments at various
levels are starting to develop adaptation plans and policies and to integrate climate-
change considerations into broader development plans (IPCC, 2014). For example,
in Asia, adaptation is being facilitated in some areas through mainstreaming climate
adaptation action into subnational development planning, early warning systems,
integrated water resources management, agroforestry, and coastal reforestation of
mangroves (ibid.).
With a recent increase in awareness and a growing understanding of disaster
risk, South Asian countries are developing and strengthening their institutions to
mitigate the problems of natural hazard risk. They are investing in agencies and
 Cities and Regions in South Asia 15
equipment that boost risk identification, risk awareness, and risk management.
However, the local and national disaster risk management (DRM) institutions
that have been established across the region have not been allowed to influence
overall planning and development programmes. There is a need to strengthen
institutional capacity and technical capacities of nations which currently seem
ill-equipped to manage disasters. More risk can be mitigated by directing the
research and other resources to the most vulnerable urban centres. There has
also been an increasing focus on capacity to reduce disaster risks, to face them
(resilience), and to cope with their consequences. Jain et al. state that it is imper-
ative that we move towards a capabilities approach which involves increasing
communities and institutions’ capacities to act and react in the face of the event
(Jain et al., 2015).

Housing in South Asia

Urbanisation has had wide implications on the socioeconomic and environmental

structure of South Asia and will continue to do so in the future. Urbanisation is
seen as a cross-cutting and iterative process involving demographic, economic, and
spatial transformations (Ellis and Roberts, 2016). We illustrate this cross-cutting
process and the socioeconomic and environmental implications of urbanisation with
the case of housing in South Asia.

Economic Implications on Housing

The economic factors influencing housing in South Asia are best demonstrated using
the case of South Asia’s urbanisation. The growth spurt in South Asia has prompted
rapid migration towards the urban region, primarily in search of better employment
opportunities and living conditions. However, existing urban infrastructure and civic
amenities are insufficient to accommodate this increasing population. Conditions
are further worsened by the lack of access to affordable housing. Affordability is
demonstrated in the ability of the individual to access and afford a particular type
of housing. As a result, the migrant population is forced to reside in slums. Most of
these slums are not officially recognised and are categorised as informal settlements
that flourish along the peripheries of economic stretches. At least 26% of South
Asia’s urban population (both low-income and middle-income households), an esti-
mated 30 million households, lives in informal settlements (Ellis and Roberts, 2016).
At 12%, Sri Lanka has a lower percentage of its population living in urban slums
while 46.6% of Pakistan’s urban population are slum dwellers.6 According to the
2011 census, India is home to more than 65 million so-called slum dwellers spread
across 108,000 slums. The largest number, more than 21,000 slums, was reported in
the state of Maharashtra.

6 
UN World Urbanization Prospects: 2011 Revision; UNESCAP 2012, 126; UN-HABITAT
2013, 126–128; and Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner 2013. Data
extrapolated from the World Bank report on Leveraging Urbanization in South Asia.
16 Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami
Most of these migrant workers that enter the city find work in the informal sec-
tor. Mumbai, the capital city of Maharashtra, reports that more than half of the
city’s 12 million population are living in slums characterised by the illegal occu-
pation of land and the absence or shortage of basic civic amenities such as water,
sanitation, and electricity (Burra, 2005). Dharavi, the largest slum in Mumbai, now
houses thousands who work as potters, leather tanners, weavers, soap makers, and
in its recycling industry (Chandran, 2016). Most of the slum dwellers have optimally
utilised their houses to suit the demands of their business. ‘The squat tenements are
perfectly suited for businesses, with living and sleeping spaces sitting atop work
spaces, workers spilling into the alleys, and material stacked outside and on roof
tops’ (ibid.). Slum upgrading is seen as a key policy intervention in response to these
informal settlements and has become one of the most common and effective ways to
improve housing conditions in cities in Asia and elsewhere (Satterthwaite, 2010).7

Social Implications on Housing

In our segment on social processes in South Asia, we reflected on the ethnic conflicts
and social disparities surrounding the region while also exploring the role of civil
society and the urban middle class in the democratic process. There are several social
issues plaguing housing. While on one hand there is a movement to legitimise slums,
on the other hand there are cases of forceful evictions of illegal settlements. Delhi, the
capital city of India faces a rapidly growing slum problem (ibid.). Between 1990 and
2003, 51,461 houses were demolished in Delhi under slum clearance schemes while
45,000 homes were demolished between 2004 and 2007 (Bhan, 2009). The role of
civil society has been instrumental in addressing such issues related to housing. Sev-
eral civil society groups and not-for-profit institutions have been working towards
promoting the demands of the slum dwellers. For example, the National Slum
Dwellers Federation (NSDF) is an organisation of community groups and leaders
who live in slums and informal settlements across India. The foundation engages
with the government to undertake community-led housing and sanitation projects.
Other organisations such as the Delhi Slum Dwellers Federation and Slum Develop-
mental International (on a global scale) not only focus on the housing, but the asso-
ciated issues such as poverty, lack of education, sanitation, and health.

Environmental Implications on Housing

Lastly, the environmental process that we discussed earlier in the chapter can also be
extrapolated in the case of housing. The inability of the city to meet the rising demand
for shelter has led to the emergence of several informal settlements in the form of
slums and sprawls. These slums are characterised by small, overcrowded spaces usu-
ally lacking access to basic facilities. The residents are subjected to low-quality housing

7 
Slum upgrading is a term given to measures to improve the quality of housing and the
provision of housing-related infrastructure and services (including water and sanitation)
to settlements that are considered to be (or officially designated as) slums, including those
that developed illegally.
 Cities and Regions in South Asia 17
in often precarious areas, which adversely affects their health and quality of life (Van
Bronkhorst, 2012). On a macro scale, the inability of the cities to address this demand
has also led to human encroachment on the banks, floodplains, and river beds, often
leading to environmental degradation in the areas (Rademacher, 2009). The policy
response to housing has also addressed the environmental concerns of those living in
seismic zones. Following the 2005 earthquake, the government of Pakistan placed a
high priority on enforcing building codes for safer construction against natural disas-
ters, and housing reconstruction followed a strict earthquake resistant building tech-
nique (Van Bronkhorst, 2012).
With the rise in the urban population growth, the demands for housing are also on
the rise. Between 2010 and 2050, the South Asian region will add 203 million new
households to its cities – an average of 5.1 million households a year (Ellis and Rob-
erts, 2016). In order to effectively address the demands for housing we require effective
policy intervention and land reforms at the state and central levels. Needless to say, the
definition of housing goes beyond the tangible four walls and has much deeper impli-
cation on the social structure of the society. ‘For the urban poor in India, the right to
the city, not the right to property or the rights attained as property owners, has been
the basis of a claim to urban residency and citizenship’ (Bhan, 2009: 141).

Conclusion

According to the World Bank, South Asia is expected to maintain its position as the
fastest growing region and might even extend its lead over East Asia and the Pacific.
Despite uneven urbanisation and obstacles in the form of social and political issues,
the economy of South Asian nations is predicted to rise. By 2030, South Asia will
be better connected within itself and the rest of the world owing to several factors
shaping its economic and political geography. The rise of India as the world’s third
largest economy and the pace of growth of economies like Bangladesh, India, Nepal,
and Sri Lanka have been instrumental in steering this trend. On a peripheral scale,
emergence of China as the second largest economy in the world has lent a positive
impact on trading ties between China and South Asian economies more broadly. The
geographical location of countries like India which are surrounded by water bodies
(Bay of Bengal) have also fuelled transregional cooperation between countries in the
Far East (ibid.).
The economic processes in South Asia have certain distinctive trends. First, rapidly
growing population has led to the emergence of slums and sprawls across the region
resulting in uneven development. This growth has also led to the emergence of new
towns with their own characteristics. As cities grow in size and economy, it is imper-
ative that they are seen as factors that propel urban as well as rural development.
Second, there is a significant growth in the informal sector which employs a majority
of the migrant population that moves into urban areas – 80% of the workforce in
the region is employed in the informal sector. This is a cause of concern for not only
the trade unions and employer organisations that represent informal workers, but
also for policymakers looking to establish and enforce regulations (Rothboeck and
Kring, 2014). Lastly, the South Asian economy is also influenced by factors such as
conflicts and disasters.
18 Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami
The social processes in South Asia project severe inequalities. Internal and external
conflicts within nations, caste, religious and ethnic conflicts, gender discrimination,
and rampant poverty are some of the key issues defining the social fabric of South
Asia at present. A lateral development has been the steady rise of the urban middle
class and the increasing participation of this group in the democratic process. This
increasing participation has reduced the influence of local electoral politics in the
administration according to Ghertner (2011), who calls this phenomenon the ‘gen-
trification of political participation’. Lastly, the evolution of new media and technol-
ogies has broadened the scope of social movements due to the global disposition of
the medium.
South Asia has witnessed devastating losses from natural disasters. But rapid
urbanisation has led to the rapid growth of highly vulnerable urban communities
which are prone to climate risks such as extreme weather, water scarcity and
pollution. However, over the last few decades there has been a shift in the under-
standing of disasters to an increasingly vulnerability-centric approach that are linked
to physical, social, economic, and institutional vulnerability. Understanding disaster
risks and ensuring that effective disaster management policies are implemented is
a crucial step towards responding to disasters. Risk can be mitigated by directing
the research and other resources to the most vulnerable urban centres. Most impor-
tantly, there has been an increasing focus on moving towards a capabilities approach
that involves increasing the communities and institutions’ capacity to act and react
in the face of the event. Climate change cannot be tackled in isolation, but it calls for
a transregional, collaborative effort on behalf of the nations.
South Asian regions are socially, economically, and politically diverse with their
individual sets of issues. While, on the one hand, the region is home to some impres-
sive social protection programmes, on the other hand, widespread tax evasion
and corruption, combined with regressive subsidies for electricity and fuel imply
that the poor struggle to receive the benefits of these schemes (Rama et al., 2015).
Government interventions have been hampered by pervasive corruption and a lack
of transparency in the delivery of social schemes. Strengthening regional cooperation
to enhance cross-border relations, primarily fostering trade, finance, and cultural
ties between nations, needs to be at the forefront of policy dialogues. The respective
nations will require a combination of policy interventions and new scholarship to
understand South Asia’s role in the ongoing global urban transition.

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 2
Making Cities and Regions in
Globalising East Asia
Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He

Introduction

This chapter offers an overview of urban and regional development in East Asia,
the term referring to the geographical area comprised of Mainland China, Taiwan,
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, Macau Special Administrative
Region of China, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea. However, we acknowledge
that urban and regional issues in North Korea still represent a terra incognita to the
academia, and we have had no access to published materials on urban and regional
development in North Korea.
Over the past several decades, East Asia, as an emerging global powerhouse,
has experienced massive economic, political, and social transformations under
the interwoven forces of globalisation and urbanisation. Concurrently, East Asian
states have actively recast their relations with global markets, expanded their civil
societies, and reshaped their political governance based on the developmental state
model and, more recently, neoliberal ideologies. Japan, as the first in East Asia to
join the club of developed nations, has achieved rapid economic growth through
state-led developmentalism, following a path to success as a role model that has
been mimicked by other East Asian nations. In Japan’s footsteps, we witnessed the
rise of a second group of newly industrialised economies (NIEs) known as the ‘four
Asian tigers’ – South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. With the sole
exception of Singapore, this has been a markedly East Asian economic miracle.
By the 1980s, a third tier of newly industrialising countries once again reshaped
the global division of labour and, in the terms used by economic geographers, the
global production networks (Yeung, 2016). During this period, the most remark-
able event is the ascendancy of China to the status of the world’s second largest

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
22 Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He
economy. Amid these globalising processes, it has been recognised that foreign
direct investment (FDI) and state support played a fundamental role in shaping the
rise of East Asia, leading the countries to boost the proliferation of branch plant
economies that would usher them successfully into the late industrialisation phase.
As a natural result of the deepened integration with the global market, East Asia
spearheaded a crusade of urbanisation of a scope and velocity that was unprece-
dented in history. As a major driving force of a global urban transition, the region
is today home to 54% of the world’s total urban population, and its momentum
is expected to continue (UNHSP, 2015). In response to the massive migration to
the cities and the subsequent rapid expansion of urban areas, a shaping and re-
shaping of urban forms and urban experiences has occurred, hand-in-hand with
quantitative and qualitative urban transformations. As a consequence, people,
spaces and relationships have been rendered less fixed and have become increas-
ingly interlinked. The contemporary flows of capital, ideas, and people interact
with local urban governance in complex ways to disentangle, destabilise, and de-
territorialise society, social norms, and lifestyles that were once knotted together in
a single, territorialised mass.
Global influences, however, cannot be realised without local aspirations, adjust-
ments, and transformations. The most noteworthy factor that has fundamentally
contoured East Asian urban society is the powerful ideology of the development
state (Bae and Sellers, 2007; Cheung, 2000; Douglass, 1994; Hayashi, 2010; Waley,
2007). Distinct from the European-American contexts, the state plays an essential
role in East Asia’s economic and spatial transitions through interplays of hierar-
chical order, deference, state paternalism, and corporate interest. This provides
both central and local government with a leading and dominant role in economic
development, with government officials or the party in power occupying a number
of important posts in key industries. Such developmentalist impulses have spurred
economic development, urban transformation, and cultural change, and these
rapid transformations on the ground have raised a need to investigate just how
urban East Asia is changing, how East Asia’s states interpret and practice ‘urban’
and ‘development’, how the urban becomes a way of life for such a significant
population in the context of East Asia’s recent rise, and through what lens may the
many transformations occurring in the region make the most sense to students of
urban studies.
Over the past two decades, researchers of East Asian cities and regions have
actively engaged with these dramatic changes, thereby contributing to the rapid pro-
liferation and increased sophistication of scholarly works in the field. The number
of works pertinent to East Asian cities published as books, chapters, and journal
articles has increased significantly in different publication outlets. Research in this
field can be roughly divided into three categories: measures of the velocity and mag-
nitude of the economic development and urban transformation in East Asian cities;
examinations of the reconstruction of the state and politics in the globalisation era;
and clarifications of the multiple dimensions of sociocultural change at different
scales. However, there are few systematic reviews recording the rapid progress and
increased refinement in the field. Those that do exist are caught in the larger scales
of ‘Asia’ or ‘Pacific Asia’ (see Bunnell et al., 2012; Dahiya, 2012; Doucette and Park,
2018; Hayashi, 2010; Yeung, 2007, 2011). This chapter, therefore, aims to address
 Making Cities and Regions in Globalising East Asia 23
this dearth of systematic reviews on East Asian cities and, by navigating through vast
differences and diversities within the region, put together some theoretical sensibil-
ities that resonate across East Asian cities and regions.
Methodologically, many of the earlier publications, especially those in the first
category, are based on empirical studies and econometrical modelling, and have been
concentrated in the field of economic geography. Scholarly works of urban East Asia
were therefore dominated by a positivist approach, and generally lacked nuanced
analysis, theoretical debates, and conceptual (re)thinking. Alongside the rapidly pro-
gressing urbanisation, the deepening integration with the global economy, the recon-
stitution of the political culture, and the metamorphosis of the social and cultural
fabrics of the city, inquiries into East Asian cities have become increasingly concerned
with the unsettled interface of the state, capital, and society. Focusing on literature
published over the past two decades, this chapter first provides an overview of the
contributions to literature to date, with specific focus on journal articles on East Asia
published in English in the field of urban and regional studies. It then summarises
some of the recent developments and key themes in the field before concluding with
a sketchy and very premature reflection on the gaps in current researches and future
research directions. The confinement to anglophone literature is, foremost, because
of our lack of language competence in Korean and Japanese (the authors can read
Chinese, but for the sake of consistency, we opted to omit Sinophone publications
as well), and also because English is the lingua franca of the so-called international
scholarships. We acknowledge that linguistic barriers have alienated us from the
vast oceans of knowledge in specific native languages, but we hope that this chapter
would elicit responses from scholars who are more versed than us in Japanese and
Korean language scholarships.

A Brief Outlining of Recent Literature

Based on the search results in Web of Science (time window: 1997–2017) drawn from
two literature categories, ‘Urban Studies’ and ‘Geography’ in international social sci-
ence citation information (SSCI) journals, two separate databases – Urban China
Research and Other Urban East Asia Research – were constructed for bibliometric
analysis. The software application, Histcite, was used to unpack the basic character-
istics of these two bodies of works. Research on urban China was singled out due to
the large volume of publications in this field, which, if analysed in combination with
other publications, would have subsumed key topics specific to other East Asian
contexts. In the Urban China Research database, the number of articles published
in SSCI journals has increased more than 17 times, from 22 in 1997 to 389 in 2017.
A rough statistical overview of the keywords appearing in these journal articles sug-
gests a number of emerging hotspots in urban China research, including urbanisa-
tion, globalisation, reform, transformation, policy, market, migration, and land use.
Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, and Pearl River Delta are the most docu-
mented and researched cities and regions. Using the time zone function to separate
these keywords by year, 21 clusters are generated, which are shown in Figure 2.1. For
1997–2001, the most frequently appearing keywords include economic growth, re-
form, economic development, foreign direct investment, urbanisation, globalisation,
Figure 2.1  Clusters of key words in Urban China Research (1997–2017).
Source: Produced in Histcite using data downloaded from Web of Science.
 Making Cities and Regions in Globalising East Asia 25
and so on. In 2002–2004, keywords such as migration, rural migration, urban
population, population density, residential mobility, and others related to migra-
tion and population, became highly concentrated. After 2005, it is discernible that
research topics begin to lean slowly towards smaller scales and socio-spatial changes
within the city. In this period, community, gated community, urban village, local res-
ident, neighbourhood, etc. stand out as emergent catchwords, although these topics
still tend to be overshadowed and outsized by works on macrostructural processes
such as globalisation, urban expansion, city-region development, and neoliberalisa-
tion. In the same period, the surge of topics such as landscape, environment, cli-
mate change, and green space suggests a growing importance of sustainable urban
development. It is worthy to note that topics such as urban expansion, urban sprawl,
and redevelopment received continued research attention in the 2003–2012 period.
In the Other Urban East Asia Research database, the number of papers increased
from 9 in 1997 to 30 in 2017. This indicates that China is still the single most re-
searched East Asian context in urban studies, while academicians working on other
East Asian contexts are yet to make a full foray into the anglophone literature. Japan
and Tokyo, South Korea and Seoul, as keywords appearing in the papers, are also
the best documented and researched states and cities, while research topics include
those such as urban area, globalisation, land use, policy, and world city making.
As Figure 2.2 shows, before 2011, research on East Asian cities (excluding China)
focused mainly on the political economic aspects of urbanisation, such as the making
of metropolitan areas, agglomeration, housing, world city making, etc. Since 2011,
political-social issues, such as homelessness, migration, civil society, community,
neighbourhood, social capital, governance, and the developmental state, have been
sophisticatedly detailed in scholarly works, with concomitant attention to the issues
of gentrification, urban redevelopment, and resilience.
Instead of documenting and reviewing every aspect of urban East Asia studies –
a task that is undoubtedly impossible in a single chapter – we will focus on some
common key themes with wide resonance in and beyond China that have remained
popular as scholarly works have evolved. The four themes discussed in the following
sections are by no means exhaustive of the wide spectrum and perplexing diversity
of research topics and hardly do justice to the flourishing body of literature in the
field of urban East Asia studies. Subjected to the limited capacity and space, this
chapter serves only to bookmark the conceptual works and theoretical interventions
that have resounded not only within, but also beyond, the East Asian urban contexts.

Key Themes

Transitional Economies and World/Global City Making

This first key issue in literature relates to the political economy and the spatial out-
comes of urbanisation by tracking the multiple driving forces of urban restructur-
ing – from the local and the global, and from the internal and the external. Over
the past few decades, it has become ever more evident that East Asia and its cities
have been caught up in a dramatic economic transition, driven by inflows of FDI
and integration with the global economy, as many scholarly writings on urban East
Figure 2.2  Clusters of key words in Other Urban East Asia Research (1997–2017).
Source: Produced in Histcite using data downloaded from Web of Science.
 Making Cities and Regions in Globalising East Asia 27
Asia have recorded (e.g. Bernard and Ravenhill, 1995; Hatch and Yamamura, 1996;
­Jessop and Sum, 2000; Kojima, 2000; Korhonen, 1994; Lo, 1994; Marcotullio,
2003; Sit and Yang, 1997; Yeung and Lo, 1996; Waley, 2007). Latecomer East Asian
cities, taking advantage of its relatively cheap labour and land, huge markets in the
making, policy support from central government, and development priorities set by
local government, have become fertile sites for the circulation and spatial fix of
global capital. The rise of local transitional economies in East Asian cities is closely
tied to the global economy, as cities are proactively engaging in, and reconstruct-
ing, orders of the global division of labour. Concurrently, their dependency on fluid
financial capital, exported-oriented manufacturing industries, and, more recently,
service industries has deepened. Manufacturing activities aimed at the global market,
global financial networks, and advanced producer services have given new substance
to the spatiality of the global economy and altered the functioning of different cities
in the region and in the world.
For instance, driven by the inflows of FDI, the special economic zones in South
China, especially Shenzhen, have transformed from underdeveloped villages into
prosperous cities with the arrival of manufacturing industries mainly from Hong
Kong, to a lesser extent, Taiwan, and other overseas countries. This has led the
region to become known as the ‘world’s factory’ for such commodities as textiles,
clothing, toys, and consumer electronics (Sit and Yang, 1997). The northward shift
of labour-intensive manufacturing has contributed to Hong Kong’s transition from a
manufacturing base to a financial and service centre in East Asia, and concomitantly,
to its emergence as a global-regional gateway city in and beyond the ‘Greater China’
region (Chubarov and Brooker, 2013; Jessop and Sum, 2000). As a global city on
par with New York and London (Sassen, 1997), Tokyo has also emerged as a global
financial centre, accommodating the headquarters of many transnational corpora-
tions, and has at the same time become a main source of FDI investment in East Asia,
providing key services within the global economies.
Influenced by transitional economies and deeper integration with the global mar-
ket, cities have undergone a physical restructuring through, for example, urban mega-
projects and industry-related infrastructure construction in which the private sector is
often heavily involved (Douglass, 1994, 2000; Lo and Marcotullio, 2000; Yeung, 2011).
In line with the ideology of a developmental state, municipal states in East Asia always
make the best use of ‘zoning technologies’ to develop spaces of exception in which
policies, resources, and capital are brought together efficiently through in situ institu-
tional arrangements (Ong, 2006). In Seoul, industrial parks operated, prompted, and
endorsed by the state have come to attract high-tech investments from transnational
corporations (Kwon, 1997). Taiwan’s high-tech Hsinchu Park boasts the necessary
US-standard facilities and amenities to accommodate the needs of specialists who
originated from Taiwan, migrated to the United States, and were attracted back from
Silicon Valley. These facilities are, however, reserved for the talented workers in Hsin-
chu Park and remain unavailable for the residents of nearby communities (Douglass,
2000; Lubman, 1999). Similarly, Shanghai has seen the development of function-spe-
cific industrial estates and zones in Pudong New District, in the city’s suburban areas
and in its rural hinterlands, for example, the Caohejing Economic and Technological
Development Zone, the Minhang Industrial Development Zone, and, more recently,
the Lingang New Town (Wu, 2000, 2018; Wu and Barnes, 2008).
28 Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He
These emerging spaces are considered among scholars part and parcel of the pro-
cess of world city making (Douglass, 2000; Lo and Marcotullio, 2000; M ­ arcotullio,
2003). In the more prominent cities in the region, such as Tokyo, Seoul, Hong
Kong, and Taipei, and in the Chinese cities that have quickly caught up, such as
Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, the drive to become competitive and
to increase standing in the global urban hierarchy compels agendas of state-led
world city formation. While earlier scholarly efforts examined external forces such
as foreign investment and global market, more recent works have tended to inves-
tigate indigenous and internal dynamics in East Asian cities through the lens of city
making or city branding (Chubarov and Brooker, 2013; Kim, 2010; Shwayri, 2013;
Ye and Björner, 2018), mega events (Shin, 2014; Winter, 2015; Zhang and Zhao,
2009), urban spectacles (Wu et al., 2016), culture-led development (Karvelyte, 2020;
Nobuoka, 2010; Sasaki, 2010; Shin and Stevens, 2013), and the involvement of the
aspirational state (Fan, 2015; Ong, 2011a). In East Asia, the fever surrounding the
efforts to create world cities has had multifaceted implications. Physical facilities and
spatial restructuring have served to attract mobile capital and cosmopolitan, highly
skilled migrants. The image of the city is being (re)shaped for sale to elite urban-
ites, by constructing new collective memories of cities that underline their economic
growth, culture vitality, vibrant society, and stylish urban life (Karacas, 2010; Roy
and Ong, 2011; Yea, 2002).
The policies and practices aimed at the formation of world cities in East Asia, as
observed and summarised by Ong (2011a), are dominated by intercity comparisons
and citations of policies and rhetorics within the region, rather than simply copying
Western models as best practices. The constant referencing and citations among cit-
ies in East Asia raise a new horizon for inter-East Asia urban competition that can
be illustrated by the ‘building frenzy’ among the world city aspirants and the never-
ending competition to possess the tallest skyscraper in the world. In 2018, 10 of the
15 tallest buildings in the world were located in East Asian cities. Designed in post-
modern or futuristic architectural styles, these prestigious urban spectacles not only
serve the purpose of inflating real estate values and attracting foreign investments,
but also signifying the political aspirations for world recognition, competitive urban
futures, and forward-looking outlooks of the urban elites (Ong, 2011a; 2011b).
Above all, the horizon of intercity competition, policy mobility, and behaviours of
citing and being cited has been expanded within East Asia. The resilience, mallea-
bility, and flexibility of policy discourses and practices are the end result of similar
or shared situations and experiences in culture, economy, and state regimes, which
motivates the circulation of best practices or successful models that originated from
their neighbouring counterparts (Karvelyte, 2020; Roy and Ong, 2011; Oakes and
Wang, 2016; Ong, 2011a).

Mega-Urban Regions, Integrated Regions, and Urban Networks

In an era of globalisation, research has come up with new spatial concepts to make
sense of new spatial configurations of urban settlements, in particular the emergence
of very large urban regions. The pathbreaking work of McGee (1991) on extended
metropolitan regions, which was later termed mega-urban regions (MURs), focused
on the increasingly indefinite boundaries of cities as a territorial unit. The growth of
 Making Cities and Regions in Globalising East Asia 29
vehicular transport and trunk highway systems allowed the radius of urban activities
to extend well beyond the administrative boundaries of cities, while the traditional
core-suburb agglomeration penetrated the rural areas along the inter-metropolitan
corridors (McGee and Robison, 1995). While the core areas of these regions have
been recast into business and service centres connected by the flows of global finance
and producer service functions, in the vivid portrayal offered by Douglass (2000),
‘much of the so-called periurban areas were becoming a science-fiction landscape
of opulent gated communities complete with huge satellite dishes on each house,
farmers growing grass for golf courses instead of rice, industrial parks for foreign
enterprises and new global functions such as international airports amidst peasant
farms’ (2319).
In this sense, it is not difficult to understand the fevered construction of urban
infrastructure that is highly concentrated in mega-cities and the areas linking mega-
cities. These projects, while often located in hinterland areas outside the densely
built core of the city, assemble and uphold important urban functions. For example,
spurred by its comparative advantages and the predicted future development of the
information technology sector, Taipei spearheaded the projects to demarcate a zone
for manufacturing activities and the software sector in Nangang, in which teleports
were constructed to support the operation of the industrial software park and other
businesses (Wang, 2003). This model of boosting development through massive and
state-endorsed projects finds resonance in Hong Kong, Seoul, and Tokyo as well.
For example, a US$20 billion international hub airport, Chek Lap Kok Airport, was
built in Hong Kong on reclaimed land, along with a $1.7-billion telecommunication
‘Cyberport’, and a $2.8 billion public expenditure in the city’s successful bid for
the Disneyland project (Hilsenrath and Coleman, 1999; Orwall, 1999). Seoul, on
the other hand, revealed its intention to become an informational, networked city
and transnational control centre in East Asia with an ambitious plan that envisages
territorial integration over an extraordinarily vast area and promotes: (1) the linking
of development corridors in Korea with a railroad axis along the Yellow Sea Rim
covering the Shanghai–Beijing–Shenyang–Dandong axis in China; (2) connection to
a Pan-Yellow Sea Transport Axis via the Trans-Mongol Rail that leads all the way
to the European continent; and (3) the construction of teleports, convention centres,
and high-tech industrial parks to make Seoul a tempting locus for world events and
high-tech investments (Douglass, 2000; Kwon, 1997). To regenerate the large, well-
located but deserted areas that were previously occupied by railroad infrastructure
and industrial facilities, Tokyo has carried out large-scale redevelopment projects in
Shinjuku, the Ebisu Garden Plaza, the Tokyo International Forum, and the Tokyo
Teleport (Lo and Marcotullio, 2000). These mega-projects and infrastructures have
partly contributed to the integration of the cities and their rural hinterlands, and
the formation of a regional urban agglomeration along a borderless transnational
urban corridor.
Transcending the boundaries of cities, spatial integration, which contributes to
the making of large city clusters, city regions, mega-city regions, and megalopolises,
has become the norm in East Asia. The Hong Kong–Macau–Pearl River Delta, for
example, can be considered another variant of the borderless economy. The Pearl
River Delta (PRD) consists of 23% of the land of Guangdong Province, but contrib-
utes 80% of the provincial gross domestic product (GDP) (i.e. 10% of China’s GDP),
30 Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He
and 40% of the national exports of China (Yeung, 2011). The densely agglomerated
networks of production and services makes the region a disproportionately impor-
tant part of the country. There is an obvious economic disparity between Hong Kong
and the delta region. However, the lucrative symbiosis between the two lands is a
powerful motivator of greater integration, with Hong Kong providing key leadership
in services, market information, and management, and the cities in PRD providing
abundant cheap labour, spacious land for manufacturing facilities, a huge consumer
market, and policies targeting increased investment and growth. This trend of closer
economic integration is becoming even stronger as an advanced version of this
region initiative – the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macau Greater Bay Area Initiative
calls for a deeper regional integration and synergy in economies, cultures, politics,
and legal systems. The plan is featured in China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020),
and a guideline for its implementation has recently been published, in the form of a
master plan, jointly by the Central Committee of Chinese Community Party and the
State Council. In contrast to the earlier regionalisation efforts, the Greater Bay Area
Initiative highlights the region’s enhanced and strengthening role in the global supply
chain, which is comparable to other bay areas such as San Francisco and Tokyo. The
key role to be played by the two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and
Macau are particularly emphasised, but, besides these two cities, the city cluster also
includes nine Chinese cities in the Mainland: Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Zhaoq-
ing, Dongguan, Huizhou, Foshan, Zhongshan, and Jiangmen, each of which comes
with its own competitive advantages. The key industries in the area include high-tech
manufacturing, innovation in digital and electronic technologies, transportation (sea
and air cargo services), trade-related services (e.g. sourcing, trading, freight-forward-
ing, and finance), and increasingly financial services and advanced producer services.
Borderless urban networks and corridors can even be constructed at transna-
tional scales and, among the variety of developing urban networks within the East
Asia region, the most notable is perhaps the vast urban corridor known as the ‘BE-
SETO ecumenopolis’ that stretches between Tokyo and north-east China via the two
Koreas, extending also to Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. This corridor
consists of a series of sublevel urban corridors such as the Pan-Japan Sea Zone, the
Pan-Bohai Zone and the South China Zone, among others. Choe (1996) presents
another such case in the form of an inverted S-shaped 1500-km transnational subre-
gional urban corridor extending from Beijing to Pyongyang and Seoul and eventu-
ally to Tokyo. This vision envisages that 112 cities of over 200,000 inhabitants each
will be integrated into a mammoth urban conglomeration of over 98 million people.
Thus far, regionalisation and regionalism in East Asia have been studied exten-
sively, and some scholars have even proposed a multilaterally negotiated and
integrated East Asian community comparable to the European Union. However, the
bulk of existing literatures have been limited to smaller-scale regionalism within
nation-states, rather than genuinely transnational urban networks. The state of the
literature is borne out of the fact that connections and mobilities within the smaller
agglomerations of urban settlements are probably more relevant to economic and
social realities. That is to say, transnational urban corridors stretching over vast
territorial frameworks, such as the BESETO ecumenopolis, will most likely remain
a loose idea rather than an integrated reality. This is because cross-border regional-
ism, as it is conceived in Western European contexts, has not been widely applied in
 Making Cities and Regions in Globalising East Asia 31
policy practices by East Asian nation-states, and intergovernmental collaborations
in East Asia are fraught with political uncertainties and obstacles. This situation
shall remain so, unless cataclysmic events and progress provide the impetus for their
development and maturation (Choe, 1996; Ong, 2006).

Urban (Re)development, Gentrification, and Socio-spatial Inequality

Urban transformations across East Asian cities have given shape to a kaleidoscope
of urban spaces at microscales in the city. Stereotypical spaces that have received
sustained attention in the literatures include urban villages, gated communities, gen-
trified urban districts, new consumption spaces, communal spaces, public spaces,
etc. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to review all types of micro spaces (but see
He and Qian, 2017, for detailed discussion on variegated urban spaces in China). In
this section, we will focus on just one type of urban spatial change that is increas-
ingly recurrent across East Asian contexts, namely the massive gentrification of
urban districts, often followed by the development of tailored and gated residential
communities.
Spectacular economic growth and globalisation have brought wealth and pros-
perity to East Asian cities. Rapid urban expansion and the increasing influx of
migrant populations into the cities have led to acute shortages of urban land and
housing, epitomised by soaring real estate prices. In order to make space for urban
redevelopment, inner-city areas have been targeted by plans of systematic reshuffling
and regeneration, while outside the city there has been a boom in the construction
of new CBD centres and new towns. These urban (re)development processes are, in
most cases, bringing about massive gentrification (Shin, 2009; Shin and Kim, 2016),
incurring housing displacement (Shin, 2008; Shin and Kim, 2016), residential segre-
gation (Ha, 2007) and social polarisation (Fielding, 2004; Huang and Jiang, 2009).
The subaltern social groups – i.e. the new urban poor and migrants – and sometimes
even relatively well-off urbanites are vulnerable to the dispossession wrought by
the colonisation of lived urban space by capital priorities (Dahiya, 2012; Douglass,
2000; Hayashi, 2014; Kennett and Iwata, 2003; Li and Wu, 2008; Logan et al.,
1999; F. Wu, 2002; Yeung, 2011).
In general, the market-infused and state-led gentrifications that have turned
dilapidated low-income communities into marketable higher-end housing are
clearly discernible in East Asian cities, being dispersed throughout the inner cities,
the suburban areas, and the outskirts of the city. These processes have been analysed
through conceptual toolkits such as ‘slash-and-build gentrification’ (Waley, 2016),
or ‘new-build gentrification’ (e.g. He, 2007; Lützeler, 2008; Shin and Kim, 2016). In
Shanghai (He, 2007), Beijing (Broudehoux, 2007), Guangzhou (Yuan et al., 2011),
and Shenzhen (Hao et al., 2011), the state authorities, in coalition with market
forces, have orchestrated the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people
to be relocated to the urban peripheries. This is to allow more value-added land
use and the creation of gated communities catering to the tailored consumption
demands of the wealthier classes. Ha (2004) has identified comparable processes in
Seoul, where the South Korean state has demolished numerous shantytowns that
were home to the urban poor and low-income migrants since the mid-1980s. As
a consequence, the subaltern groups have been compelled to take up residence in
32 Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He
a new type of shantytown, known as ‘vinyl house villages’ in the more distant
margins of the city, while the urban slum clearance projects are driven by aspira-
tions to construct new, Disneyfied housing landscapes designed to have tailored
cultural tastes and are exclusively for the more affluent classes of the city (Shin and
Kim, 2016; Shin et al., 2016). While this process has been primarily orchestrated
and supervised by the state, the property-hungry corporate sector has acted as an
important accomplice.
In Japan, it seems that gentrification is seen in a more critical light and
approached with more caution in public debates. For example, Osaka, and by infer-
ence from other large Japanese cities, was characterised by Fujita and Hill (1997)
as ‘together and equal’, with no apparent social segregation. Lützeler’s (2008: 298)
treatise on the gentrification of waterfront areas referred to Tokyo as a ‘gradual and
spatially isolated form of residential displacement’ for the construction of upmarket
condominiums in areas of previous industrial uses, for example, the sites of dis-
placed factories and yards (Waley, 2016). This allegedly departs from the paradigm
of large-scale dispossession of incumbent residents, which may help justify Fujita
and Hill’s (1997) argument. However, Fielding’s (2004) detailed empirical study of
Kyoto voiced disagreement with the account of Japanese cities as relatively immune
from social segregation, arguing that Japanese cities are equally subject to the issues
of socio-spatial disparity and inequality and that they share the problems of socio-
spatial differentiations in Western cities, albeit to a lesser degree.
In addition to the residential replacement caused by new-build gentrification,
another trend of urban redevelopment has emerged in recent years, being the selective
conversion of urban districts with a characteristic vernacular community into stylish
urban spectacles with high-end consumption choices and consumer spaces. The
aestheticisation of urban spaces, feeding into culture-based urban regeneration, is
geared towards the sale of images of historical and nostalgic, but also trendy and
vibrant, cities to consumers. This is achieved by repackaging idealised, aestheticised
icons that seemingly represent public memories and place identities, so as to provide
visitors with an experience economy. Jou et al. (2016) referred to the gentrification
of the Yongkang–Qingtian–Wenzhou area of inner Taipei as the ‘commodification of
cultural and historical heritage’ (p. 570), catalysed to some extent by eco-conscious
civil society groups. Dihua Street and its surrounding area in Taipei’s historical cen-
tre appear to be undergoing a similar process (Tan and Waley, 2006). In China,
the most publicised gentrified sites, all of which are in line with the policy ideas of
placemaking and urban heritage preservation, include Xintiandi and Taikang Road
in Shanghai, and the preserved and commodified hutong compounds in Beijing
(Broudehoux, 2007; Shin, 2010).
In recent years, there have been studies taking an interest in the typologies and
dynamics of gentrification driven by the economy-centred urban (re)development,
driving deeper discussion of the contingent and contextual factors unique to a city
or a nation-state, such as institutional settings, urban political structures, migra-
tion, and the division of social classes. For instance, in China, the hukou system,
which defines a clear boundary between local citizens and rural migrants by en-
dowing them with different discriminatorily entitlements to rights and citizenship,
still works to perpetuate social disparity and spatial injustice (Huang, 2003; Li and
Wu, 2008; W. Wu, 2002, 2004). This leaves rural migrants especially vulnerable to
 Making Cities and Regions in Globalising East Asia 33
predatory urban regeneration processes, while the emergence of a new urban rich in
reform-era China and the enlarging group of urban middle class further intensifies
the socio-spatial inequality (Huang and Li, 2014).

Neoliberalism and Urban Governance

The thesis of the neoliberalisation of urban governance and the associated social and
political challenges continue to be central to urban studies as a whole. Growing out
of the major Western economies in the late 1970s, the neoliberalism ideology was
disseminated around most of the globe and came to dominate the political econ-
omies of cities. From the 1970s to the 1980s, the Anglo-American states were seen
to recast their relationships with the economic markets, to expand the scope of their
civil societies, and to devolve power from the central to local governments. In con-
trast, the ways in which neoliberalism takes hold in East Asia are slow and selective,
while neoliberalism and developmentalism were in competition, but also intersected
with each other in their influence over urban governance and urban projects (Chang,
1998; He and Wu, 2009; Pirie, 2005; Schaede and Grimes, 2003; Vogel, 2005). The
interplay between these two forces became evident in the 2008 global financial crisis.
While the financial collapse brought the long-lasting neoliberal ideology in the West
into question, the ‘four Asian tigers’ were relatively less affected by the financial
crisis. In this vein, the developmental nature of East Asian states, and how it inter-
sected with universal forms of neoliberal ideologies to make the latter more resilient
and adaptable to local contexts, have stimulated further scholarly interest. The seed
of neoliberalism, having been planted in the soil of developmental East Asia, has
grown into a mutated, localised, and contextualised East Asia-specific fruit, cata-
lysing new ways of reorganising society, space, and the population. The neoliberal
logic has been embedded in a wide variety of national and local institutions and
government programmes across East Asia (Hill et al., 2012), not in its pure forms or
as an ideal type, but in constant interaction and hybridisation with other ideologies
and policy priorities.
In general, there are three quintessential elements to neoliberal urban governance:
urban entrepreneurialism; policies encouraging the involvement of the private sec-
tor, with the fading or implicit play-out of municipal governments; and the entre-
preneurial, self-improvement, and self-regulated subjectivity of individuals (Leitner
et al., 2007; Waley, 2013). As East Asian states have become more sympathetic with
neoliberal ideologies, a fundamental rescaling and restructuring of urban governance
and politics has occurred. City governments, using the power devolved from central
governments to undertake responsibility for local development, have become stake-
holders that use policy agendas to promote growth, in contrast to their previous
roles as regulators of capitalist economy and implementors of social goals such as
equality and justice. In this sense, cities have served as strategic sites for neoliberal
restructuring, through which urban projects articulate with neoliberal outlooks and
ideologies.
Over the last two decades or so, studies of East Asian cities have examined the
processes, consequences, and impacts of the neoliberal urban restructuring. For
instance, in the case of Tokyo, urban restructuring has been occurring at a faster
pace since the early 1980s, while urban land has been used as the basis for capital
34 Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He
accumulation. This process unfolded in tandem with the discourses of, first in the
1980s, internationalisation and then in the 2000s, ‘Tokyo as global city’ (Machimura,
1992, 1998; Saito and Thornley, 2003). These are contingent attempts ‘to engi-
neer a rescaling of Tokyo, to anchor the city into a global scale of networked cities’
(Waley, 2013: 45). This rescaling of Tokyo and the shifts towards the neoliberal
logic are exemplified by the development of the Tokyo Waterfront from the 1980s
(Saito,  2003) and an urban renaissance policy (Waley, 2007). These urban (re)
development projects, in synergy with the neoliberal reformulation of housing and
social policies, have resulted in a steady increase in residential segregation, social
inequality, and uneven spatial development (Waley, 2013).
Similarly, China’s municipal governments have been delegated, by the central
state, the responsibility for overseeing local economic growth, and promotions
among municipal cadres and officials are closely tied to GDP growth. Due to the
new arrangement of revenue distribution between the central and municipal states,
autonomous local governments are now highly motivated to maximise revenues
through massive land development and speculation, and to enter into coalitions
with the private sector. In particular, land and real estate development have been
actively pursued by local governments as an expedient means of generating revenue
to finance local economic growth and urban construction (Lin and Yi, 2011; Wang,
2001; Zhu, 1999).
Taking a different methodological approach, Ong’s (2006) ethnographic study
provides us with a closer and more nuanced perspective of the neoliberal restructur-
ing in East Asia. The ascent of neoliberalism ideologies and practices does not mean
the unconditional acceptance of a general and universal norm. In the context of the
development state, the strong role played by the state means that state regimes tend
to reorganise their political apparatus and consolidate political power in an era of
global neoliberalism and flexible growth, rather than withdrawing from regulation
of economies. As a result, neoliberalism is often implemented as an experimentation
or exception, and is done so contingently and selectively. Interestingly, it is exactly
the developmental nature of the regimes, along with authoritarian tradition and
the (post-)Confucian culture, that legitimises the operation of neoliberalism without
arousing intense debate or scepticism about its social implications.
In this context, notions about personhood, individuality, and subjectivity have
also undergone a sea change, with one of the most striking examples of this being
the increasing association of citizenship elements, such as rights, entitlements, and
benefits, with neoliberal ethos. In such a situation, mobile individuals who possess
human capital or expertise are highly valued and can exercise privileged claims to
citizenship rights in their cities, while those who have no such marketable com-
petence or potential become devalued and thus vulnerable to exclusionary urban
practices and institutional arrangements. This argument is illustrated in Fan’s (2002)
research of Guangzhou and Wang and Li’s (2017) investigation of Shenzhen, where
in neoliberal urban governance previous policy priorities and axioms such as cen-
trally planned and balanced urban development have been replaced by ‘new values
emphasising global competitiveness, urban entrepreneurialism, and private financial
initiatives’ (Hill et al., 2012: 3). Consequently, these new priorities have given rise to
graduated citizenship and new mechanisms of social stratification.
 Making Cities and Regions in Globalising East Asia 35
Reflections and Prospects of Future Research

The above four themes, as a rough contouring of the recent research on East Asian
cities, are connected to each other both conceptually and theoretically. Under the
twin influences of globalisation and urbanisation, cities have undergone dramatic
economic, physical, and social changes with the evolution of the new global and
regional economies. The deepened economic integration and interdependence in
East Asia have brought about the emergence of urban agglomerations and bor-
derless urban corridors; the cities that are well integrated into the global circuits
of capital, knowledge, and people are undergoing a world city formation, spear-
headed by both state and corporate interests. Their inclusion in the globalisation
drive has not only affected their economic landscapes and morphologies, but has
also reinvented institutional, political, cultural, and social conditions, giving rise to
normative ideas about what urban forms, spaces, aspirations, and outlooks can be
considered ‘global’. Economic interactions translate directly into a growth in mega-
urban projects and massive infrastructure developments. These major infrastructure
provisions and projects are just some of the spoils of the deepening process of world
city formation in action and the transnationalisation of urban economies. Within
the city, the passion of the state and society for high skyscrapers, flagship mega-proj-
ects, cultural and creative clusters, and trendy urban districts have fundamentally
changed the material and symbolic manifestations of urbanity. These processes have
also ushered in new forms of spatial segregation and disparity. Instead of pausing
at bemoaning discrimination and shouting empty slogans of justice, as is typical of
some so-called ‘critical scholarships’ in urban studies, a more productive approach
employed by works on East Asian cities has been to determine how the state deals
with such consequences with new techniques of governance and governmentality.
Above all, as the development states of East Asia come to encounter neoliberal glob-
alism and its discourses of market supremacy, welfare retrenchment, and competi-
tiveness, the local states have recast their relations to the market and reshaped the
modalities of political governance. This transition has occasioned a hybrid political
culture based on developmentalism, Confucian authoritarianism, and experimented
neoliberalism.
Despite the wealth of extant studies, there are still spaces to fill and some notable
gaps to address. For instance, while scholars have strived to explain the integration
and interaction of East Asian cities with the global economy, with analyses at
relatively macroscopic scales, there continues to be limited engagement beyond dis-
courses of the state-capital coalition but detailing the everyday practices of ordinary
social actors. This stands in sharp contrast to scholarships on South/Southeast Asian
and Latin American urbanisms, which have an abiding tradition of analysing every-
day politics and vernacular citizenships in the context of neoliberal globalisation
and urbanisation, attesting further to the nuanced and subtle nature of neoliber-
alisms in East Asia. This inquiry into how groups and individuals experience and
engage with globalisation, and how they negotiate the consequences of globalisation,
merits nuanced exploration. The paradox of neoliberalism is that, while emphasising
individuality and downplaying collective responsibility in the public sphere, it also
empowers and activates civil society actors in some particular ways. Consequently,
36 Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He
a politically aware urban middle class has emerged and indeed evolved into a potent
force in the politics of urban governance, not only in democratised societies such as
Taiwan and South Korea, but also in the flawed democracy of Hong Kong and the
authoritarian context of China.
Relatedly, the skewed emphasis on the globalisation and worlding of East Asian
urbanisms has entailed that very limited attention has been dedicated to non-mega,
medium-, and small-sized cities. While we take note of some recent case studies
emerging from urban contexts in China (e.g. Lin and Gaubatz, 2015; Neo and
Pow, 2015; Qian and Tang, 2019), as a whole, little has been written about how
non-mega and small cities embed themselves in the relational typologies of translo-
cal, transnational, and global connections, what tactics and strategies they adopt
to broach new horizons of actions and competitiveness, and what urban politics
and citizenship regimes take root in those cities. Certainly, there is no rigid pro-
portional correlation between size and ‘globalness’ – Macau, despite its small size
(about 30  km2), is closely tied to the global gambling industry and real estate
capital (Simpson, 2014). Above all, more works are needed to account for the de-
centredness, heterogeneity, and local specificities of East Asian urbanisms, which
are at least equally central as macrostructural contexts such as globalisation and
neoliberalism.
Also, we note that subaltern social groups have remained a marginal concern in
the field and their embedded practices and everyday experiences have not received
the same attention as the middle class and the nouveau riche, whose aestheticisation
of urban spaces and their consumption and lifestyles have been well documented at
the expense of research into the urban experiences of more marginal social groups.
This is of particular significance given that very often it is precisely the lived, authen-
tic urban experiences of the less well-off groups that are dispossessed and displaced
by homogenised and simplified conceptions of culture in culture-led urban regener-
ation and gentrification. That is to say, the socio-spatial inequality experienced by
those groups and the ways in which they are governed and regulated deserve more
detailed accounting and further exploration. Given the struggles and resistances of
activist groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), it can be considered
worthwhile to investigate, on the one hand, how local government justifies and
rationalises their neoliberal governance approaches, for example, their offering of
graduated citizenship and improving the living conditions of low-income groups,
and, on the other hand, the active agency of the marginal groups and, in particular,
how they respond to social marginality, how they claim their right to the city, and
how they come up with exceptions and alternatives to the exclusionary urban pol-
icies and projects.
Increasingly and equally notably, the unprecedented diversification of social
groups and identities in East Asian cities has recently effected studies and discourses
about gender, sexuality, marriage, sex workers, gays and lesbians, ‘urban parasite
singles’ in Japan, etc. (e.g. Ding and Ho, 2013; Kong, 2006, 2017; Ronald and
Hirayama, 2009). The urban experiences of diverse social groups and their body
politics in the city offer a new horizon for studies of social inequality and shed new
light on the ways in which the market and neoliberal economy in some ways liber-
ate, but, in others, marginalise non-conformist and defiant identities in ways that are
very much comparable to experiences in the West.
 Making Cities and Regions in Globalising East Asia 37
Methodologically, empirical case studies and econometric analyses still dominate
the field of East Asian urban studies, while theoretical construction and conceptual
innovation are relatively thin. Epistemologically, the extant literature has been lop-
sided on the Marxist political economy and sometimes political-economy-informed
postcolonialism. There has been limited engagement with the latest developments
in social theories, as postmodern, post-structural, post-human, more-than-represen-
tation, more-than-human, feminist, and embodied approaches are yet to be taken
seriously by researchers of East Asian cities. As our review has shown, however,
East Asian urban development cannot be easily subsumed within the existing genres
of European-American urban theory. East Asian urbanisms have evolved from the
strong paradigm of the development state to hybrid forms of urban governance
and politics, integrating strong state interventions, neoliberal ideologies of market
supremacy and growth coalition, and new cultural aspirations and sensibilities. In
this process, ideas about how to be urban and modern are constantly refashioned.
In these radically diverse scenarios, how are urban agendas justified and advanced
via discourse, practice, and, indeed, performance, and how do diverse social groups
embed themselves in these agendas to reinvent their identities and, where possible,
develop alternative agendas and lifeworlds? These questions can be productively
interrogated only if we expand the scope of our theoretical imaginations in East
Asian urban studies.

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 3
Latin American Cities and Regions
Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa López, and
Gabriel Silvestre

This chapter discusses Latin American cities and regions as an analytical category
and a material reality. Rather than providing a definitive definition of what the
Latin American city is vis-à-vis other categories, this chapter traces the intellectual
history of the category and describes current urbanisation dynamics to highlight
long-standing tensions between specificity, exceptionalism and generalisation that
have shaped and continue to shape how scholars understand and analyse urbanisa-
tion in the region. The chapter begins by tracing the Latin American city as an idea
that has correlated with economic, political, and intellectual realities of different his-
torical moments. A second section discusses contemporary dynamics present across
the region, focusing on the last two decades of the twentieth century and onwards. A
final section serves as conclusion by reflecting on what ongoing and nascent research
avenues on Latin American cities might tell us about these cities’ position in relation
to today’s urban studies field.

The Idea of the Latin American City

Emerging as an intellectual project during the second half of the twentieth century,
the idea of the Latin American city is an offshoot of the construction of the very
idea of Latin America. ‘Latin America’ has superseded other regional identification
terms such as ‘South America’ or ‘Ibero-America’ and it is articulated through a
double opposition: ‘new world’ as opposed to Europe, and ‘Latin’ as opposed to
the Anglo-Saxon America, or the North (Altamirano, 2005). The category of Latin
American city refers to more than a mere aggregation of cities located on the sub-
continent. In fact, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, São Paulo, Caracas, Lima, and

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
44 Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa López, and Gabriel Silvestre
Mexico City, share as many similarities as differences, as their geographical location
and shared colonial past have not prevented heterogeneous processes of urbanisa-
tion over time.
Latin American metropolises began to consolidate in the post-independence and
early modern period. However, countries in this region urbanised at a different rate
given that cities played a different role in their respective economies. For example,
while Buenos Aires held 29.7% of the total population of Argentina by 1950, Bo-
gotá accounted for only 6.2% of Colombia’s total population. During the same year,
Montevideo was 17 times larger than the second largest urban area in Uruguay,
while Rio de Janeiro was 1.2 times larger than the second largest city in Brazil. Sim-
ilarly, while the whole of Latin America had an average of 41.6 % urbanisation by
the first half of the twentieth century, countries such as Uruguay reached 78%. On
the other hand, Brazil’s and Mexico’s urbanisation rates were below the average due
to the magnitude of their territories, even though they harboured some of the largest
metropolises in the world and the region’s largest economies. Nevertheless, from the
perspective of different international organisations, Latin America as a region has
occupied an intermediate rank in terms of its degree of urbanisation, and it being
situated between the most developed nations of North America and Europe and the
least developed nations of Asia and Africa (Hauser, 1961).
While Latin American cities and regions are diverse, they all share one characteristic:
their urbanisation followed a path different from North American and European cit-
ies. Certainly, some of their shared experiences respond to their colonial past, but
these cities also share another set of characteristics that are more difficult to explain.
For instance, although other cities in the continent were colonial at some point,
why don’t they exhibit several imbalances associated with Latin America, such as
urbanisation without industrialisation, accelerated population growth, high volume
migration from the countryside, and generalised and persistent informal urbanisa-
tion? For the last several decades scholars in the social sciences have tried to answer
these questions with different focuses, biases, and theoretical frameworks and gen-
erated an intellectual and political construction of the Latin American city (Gorelik,
2005). Not surprisingly, their answers, as the following paragraphs illustrate, have
also changed over time.

Latin American Cities, Regions, and Developmentalism

After the end of World War II, a series of ideas promoted across Latin America by
international organisations, such as the Economic Commission for Latin America
(ELAC), fuelled a political will to leverage the advantages of underdevelopment and
make the final leap towards progress (Almandoz, 2008). Thus, countries sought to
promote ‘ingrowth’ through a policy of import substitution industrialisation (ISI),
which was set to enable the modernising of the production of the continent and
helped to overcome the disadvantageous terms of trade that left Latin America on
the capitalist periphery. In this Latin American project, cities were understood to
play an important, though contradictory, role. On the one hand, they were valued as
indispensable tools to advance on the path towards modernisation and were viewed
in opposition to rural areas associated with backwardness. On the other hand, they
embodied central failures of the ISI project and were seen as impeding the process
 Latin American Cities and Regions 45
of surmounting the most persistent features of traditional (non-modern) societies:
urbanisation without industrialisation, high mortality rates paired with high birth
rates, and increased migration from the countryside to the city with a corresponding
inability of local and national governments to deal with the resulting pressure on
their housing, infrastructure, and services supplies (Germani, 1980).
In this context, a framework that became known as the theory of marginality
rose as the first systematic effort to understand urban social issues in Latin America.
According to this view, marginalisation was a fundamental urban problem and the
most characteristic feature of the Latin American city. Marginalisation was defined
as the lack of participation and membership in society of a particular sector of the
population that is excluded from modern urban life as a result of its persistence in
rural and traditional cultural behaviour (Vekemans and Silva, 1969). Marginality,
thus, was seen as the main obstruction to development, as it evidenced the inability
of the region’s economic systems to incorporate low-skilled and low-productivity
citizens into the processes of production. Scholars and politicians also linked mar-
ginality to a political threat posed by the massive population inflow to cities through
different forms of precarious housing (known as slums in Lima, shanty in Santiago
de Chile, favelas in Rio de Janeiro, shantytowns in Buenos Aires, etc.) (Rosenblüth,
1968). The arrival of this theory initiated a pessimistic period in the region’s social
thought, however, the assumption that marginality was temporary also reinforced
confidence in urban reform policies.
Urban problems in the region were addressed through different modalities of
economic integration using regional planning strategies that ultimately reinforced
the problems of excessive concentration of population and economic activity in a
handful of cities. Countries responded to this situation by implementing various
territorial approaches to development that sought to accelerate the industrialisa-
tion processes through the promotion of growth poles that could mitigate territorial
administrative and economic imbalances (Almandoz, 2016). Such strategies also
sought to offset, at least in part, migratory flows to central cities and to have an
impact on areas considered marginal within cities as well as on those located in the
peripheral regions of the countries.

Developmentalism and Its Critics

During the late 1960s a new framework, dependency theory, united strains of intel-
lectual pessimism in order to re-evaluate underdevelopment and marginalisation.
According to this viewpoint, underdevelopment and marginality would no longer
be merely susceptible conditions to overcome, but constitutive elements of capitalist
dynamics, for development requires an international division of labour in which
Latin America is in a subordinate position (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979). This shifting
viewpoint would have two consequences: first, the consolidation of a regional the-
ory that identifies the subcontinent as part of the capitalist periphery; and, second,
the understanding of marginalisation as a result of the structural tendencies of soci-
eties in the ‘dependent periphery’. Concurrently, this theory sought to articulate the
history of the urban and regional phenomenon and its corresponding imbalances
in successive forms of Latin America’s dependency condition (Quijano, 1967). In
this view, the urbanisation of Latin American cities was a dependent process, i.e. the
46 Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa López, and Gabriel Silvestre
processes of urban regional development in the region were shaped by the larger
relationships of dependence of which these societies are a part.
Under this lens, the areas directly connected to the system of dependency, for
example, the port cities that export raw materials, tend to concentrate urban
development, attracting people from other less developed cities and towns. The main
consequence of this migration is the consolidation of the phenomenon of ‘internal
colonialism,’ a relationship of domination and exploitation of a population (with its
different social classes) over another (of indigenous or African descent, for example).
This amounted to a process of internalisation of the conditions of dependency. Fur-
thermore, the displacement of the extractivist, agricultural basis of the traditional
structure of production towards an industrial base had ecological and demographic
consequences, subordinating the rural to the urban and intensifying the imbalances
that characterise the Latin American city.
Dependency theory questioned the aforementioned theoretical specifications of
marginality as well as the intervention strategies derived from them. Such criticisms
produced an interpretive turn in the study of slums, which were no longer seen
as a problem and instead were conceived as a common solution to the inability
of the state and the market to provide low-income housing. Anthropologists such
as Anthony Leeds and William Mangin and architects such as John Turner – who
developed proposals for and reflections about the Lima slums between 1957 and
1965 – were essential in producing this conceptual shift, synthesised by Turner as an
alternative between ‘housing for people’ versus ‘housing by people’ (Ballent, 2004).
While acknowledging previous initiatives in the region, this reconceptualisation
influenced some urban policies, identifying autoconstruction as a realistic solution
to the crisis of housing in Latin America (Jaramillo, 2012). Paradoxically, the afore-
mentioned interpretative turn would also be embraced by the World Bank.
Cultural explanations of marginality also gave way to more radical viewpoints.
According to these views, marginality is explained by the unstable, fragmentary,
and indirect inclusion of ever-growing segments of the population to the capitalist
mode of dependent production and, therefore, it is a phenomenon that is external
to the individuals who experience it. From this materialistic version, or neo-Marxist
conception of marginality, arose a change in how scholars referred to this sector of
the population: the marginalised, rather than those on the margins. The recognition
of the existence of marginal masses, not useful for capitalist accumulation and not
identifiable with the Marxist ‘reserve army of labour’ concept, would become the
centrepiece of a theory of ‘dependent urbanisation’ (Jajamovich and Cortés, 2019).

Latin America After Developmentalism

Starting in the 1970s and throughout the 1990s the region faced profound structural
(economic and political) transformations that accompanied economic crises and
that put an end to the ‘expansive’ and ‘developmental’ cycle. Urban manifestations
corresponding to the end of the developmentalist project include the abandonment
of industry-led development, the end of demographic growth by migration, the pro-
liferation of insular spaces, and the emergence of new forms of urban interventions
(Menazzi, 2013) as well as a profound re-understanding of the role of the state and
new forms of articulating the public and private spheres (Portes and Roberts, 2005).
 Latin American Cities and Regions 47
This phase coincides with, and is linked to, the rise of globalisation, which has pro-
duced important transformations, including the intensification of flows of economic
and cultural exchange across borders and the re-emergence of the city as the locus
of sovereignty (Holston and Appadurai, 1996). These dynamics have brought about
a renewed interest in the city and in cross-country exchanges and introduced new
concerns in intellectual and practitioners’ debates that had particular manifestations
in Latin America.
One of these is an interest in generating alternatives to the classification of the
‘Latin American city’. For instance, the emergence of Spain as a cultural and economic
power with growing influence in the region led to the increased relevance of the
‘Ibero-American’ category. In turn, this renewed focus on cross-Atlantic links re-
sulted in multiple initiatives, such as the Union of Ibero-American Capital Cities
network or the Ibero-American Center for Strategic Urban Development (CIDEU);
the growth of  Ibero-American international cooperation, with organisations such
as the Institute of Ibero-American Cooperation; and the increasing inflow of urban
policies promoted by experts from Catalonia, Madrid, and Andalusia. These initia-
tives also introduced and strengthened policy-reform agendas focused on democracy,
decentralisation, and local governance, among others. In academic circles, geopolit-
ical transformations like the end of the Cold War led to the embracement of other
categories, such as ‘cities of the third world’, that highlight similarities with cities in
Africa and Asia. And, more recently, the rise of postcolonial scholarship sparked pro-
ductive debates on how to analyse cities of the ‘third world’, that inform new debates
around the idea of the ‘Global South’ (Parnell and Robinson, 2012; Roy, 2009) and
the need to generate theories and epistemologies alternative to those generated in,
and based on, European and North American cities.
A second area of concern has grappled with the question of the ‘global city’
as concept and analytical framework. This issue has been tackled from a variety
of angles: from economist analyses of the new economy (Graizbord et al., 2003;
Parnreiter, 2002), to political economy analyses that expose the new forms of
exploitation that global capitalism brings about (Pradilla Cobos, 2009), to staunch
critiques of the ‘global city’ as a concept that slipped from the descriptive to the
normative (Cuervo González, 2003; Ferreira, 2007). All of these approaches and
concerns have generated a wealth of scholarship on the region that contribute to
long-standing questions about the specificity and universality of Latin American
urban experience.
The following section provides an overview of some of the urban dynamics asso-
ciated with the transition of the region into the global economy. The subsequent sec-
tions discuss the forms of urban governance that have accompanied these dynamics
and elaborate on some of their most representative strategies.

Globalisation and Latin American Cities and Regions

Since the 1980s Latin American cities experienced a process of spatial restructur-
ing corresponding to the adoption of post-Fordist and global-bound economic
models that followed the demise of developmentalist projects. One of the most
salient dynamics of this period is the emergence of the city region – that houses
48 Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa López, and Gabriel Silvestre
a high concentration of producer services: financial, legal, marketing, information
technologies – as the basic unit of the global economy (De Mattos, 1999; Sassen,
1991). Researchers who classify city regions in terms of how they are integrated into
the global economy, or how that serve as links between regional and global econ-
omies, include several Latin American cities in their lists. For example, the Globaliza-
tion and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) lists Mexico City and São Paulo
as ‘Alpha’ cities, a category that comes after a handful of ‘Alpha +’ and ‘Alpha ++’
such as New York, Tokyo, and London. Meanwhile, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and San-
tiago are listed as ‘Alpha−’ cities. Similarly, a group of smaller cities, including Lima,
Monterrey, Santo Domingo, Managua, and Guayaquil, are considered ‘Beta−’ and
‘Gamma’ cities (Taylor and Derudder, 2015).
This small sample of cities shows that national capitals and old industrial centres
remain competitive in this new economy. This has also brought about a reconfigu-
ration of urban centres into regional networks of cities. For instance, in São Paulo
and Mexico City, old city centres have stopped growing, while networks of urban
agglomerations around them have consolidated, creating continuous urbanisation
areas articulated by strong economic links. This re-organisation of economic activity
also shows a clear pattern: old industrial centres now host tertiary economy and
producer services, while industrial activity has relocated to the peri-urban areas of
those regions. It is important to note that while economic activities seem more mo-
bile, and metropolitan regions more linked, this process has not been accompanied
by an improvement of transportation systems nor a reduction of social disparities.
Therefore, the landscapes of these city regions are rather heterogeneous and frag-
mented, following the patterns described as ‘splintering urbanism’ (Graham and
Marvin, 2001).
Another important phenomenon is the increased flexibilisation of labour. Along
with the opening of economies to global capital, national governments have also pro-
moted reforms to deregulate labour markets, decreasing layoff costs, and reducing
employer obligations. These policies have had the effect of increasing informality and
precarity (Buechler, 2006), increasing pressures on labour markets. Since the 1980s
economic crises, large sectors of urban residents have joined the informal economy,
including individuals who previously held formal jobs. Increased precarity has also
been linked to the increase of crime and violence (Portes and Roberts, 2005).
A third relevant dynamic is the reduction of the state’s role in the provision
of services and infrastructure. This has been described as a turn towards mana-
gerialism that responds to fiscal conditions as much as ideological and political
agendas (Harvey, 1989; Peck, 2010). In Latin American cities, fiscal austerity and
the reduction of spending has translated into two interrelated phenomena. The first
is the reduction of welfare and safety-net services (Portes and Roberts, 2005). In
many cases, this has created an opening for third sector organisations to take on
some of the responsibilities, while in other cases it has led to the rise of self-help
groups that take up the role of provision of services in what has been described as
the ‘NGOization’ of social demands. The second phenomenon is the reinforcement
of disparities in life outcomes for urban residents that result from the reduction of
public spending on social programs and services. Indeed, there is ample evidence
that Latin American cities today are more unequal than three decades ago (Mon-
tero and García, 2017).
 Latin American Cities and Regions 49
A fourth dynamic is the increased participation of the private sector in the pro-
vision of urban services. This includes the expansion of privately constructed and
managed infrastructures, such as roads and urban highways, that operate as con-
cessions. These public contracts are often awarded to multinational corporations
in contracting processes hidden from public view and lack accountability and/or
citizen participation mechanisms (Sosa López, 2017). Public utilities, including wa-
ter, electricity, and telecommunications, previously supplied by public companies, are
now commonly offered by private companies with mixed effects. In some cases, this
has increased coverage and improved quality of services for the poor but in other
cases it has brought increased costs to users (Post, 2008).
A final phenomenon is the embracement of pro-market urban development strat-
egies, which manifests in the targeted investment by public and private entities
with the purpose of putting cities in a better position to participate in the global
economy. These strategies include the redevelopment of historic areas, often accom-
panied by displacement and an increase in policing (Crossa, 2009; Müller, 2016);
the construction of new commercial and office zones including large scale develop-
ments or megaprojects; and the construction of tourism-oriented and city branding
amenities, such as museums, stadiums, and other areas. Several of these issues are
discussed at detail in the following sections.

The Rise of Urban Governance

In Latin America the consolidation of city-level democracy coincided with two

important national-level structural reforms: an administrative one – often described
as reforma de estado – based on decentralisation of institutions, and a second set
of transformations that include economic liberalisation and reduction of public
spending. While historically, in many Latin American countries, the municipality
has been one of the most important administrative scales (inherited from colonial
times, mostly for Spanish colonies), in practice, municipalities functioned merely as
administrative structures of a highly centralised government. In contrast, the current
strengthening of local governments is understood to be not just a means through
which a central government manages local territories, but a process that responds
to local demands for autonomy and self-determination on economic, environmental,
cultural, and political issues.

Decentralisation
The push for administrative decentralisation in the region responded to a variety of
political reasons that include citizen demands as well as pressure from international
organisations and multilateral institutions. The assumption has been that decentrali-
sation brings decision-making and governance closer to constituents and thus, at
least in theory, is closely intertwined to processes of democratisation. Decentrali-
sation efforts in the region have been welcomed by all ideologies. From the left,
the devolvement of government functions has been seen as a process that brings
government closer to people. Thus, decentralisation can be a factor in the consol-
idation of bottom up governance mechanisms such as participatory budgeting at
50 Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa López, and Gabriel Silvestre
a municipal level that would not have been possible under centralised structures.
But from the right decentralisation is also appealing, as ideas of local autonomy
are considered compatible with nimble governments, reduction of spending, and
increased efficiency and competitiveness.
Good local governance requires effective electoral processes, an adequate
administrative structure, and fiscal autonomy (Gilbert, 2006). However, in practice,
processes of decentralisation have generated different effects and outcomes and have
not always led to good governance (Grindle, 2007). In many cases, the results have
been the opposite where new responsibilities for local governments have not been
met with adequate knowhow. While in others the lack of regional or metropolitan
governance structures have made it difficult to deal with issues that are not bounded
within a particular territory.

The Paradox of Democracy and Neoliberalism

If the period of rapid urbanisation of most of the twentieth century was character-
ised by centralisation, authoritarianism, and narrow spaces for citizen participation,
contemporary urban governance is marked by decentralisation and the opening of
the institutions and decision-making processes to non-state actors. While historically
it was through social mobilisation and contentious politics that citizens were able to
put forward demands to expand rights, today Latin American urban governments
are characterised by new forms of governance in which the state collaborates with
civil society in the co-production of policies and plans (Jessop, 2002). The following
discussion of these transition takes the paradox of institutional democratisation and
increased social exclusion as a central characteristic of Latin American urban gov-
ernance experiences.
On the one hand, the rise of urban governance, and especially the creation
of institutions and mechanisms for civil society participation, has been consid-
ered by some as a case of demobilisation and co-optation (Portes and Roberts,
2005). On the other hand, some identify urban democratisation as an opportunity
for empowerment, expansion of substantive rights, and more democratic urban
life (Baiocchi, 2005; Goldfrank, 2007; Irazábal, 2008; Miraftab, 2009). In prac-
tice, however, urban governance in Latin America has brought about a series of
dynamics that point to the fact that both of these views are actually true and not
exclusive of each other (Angotti, 2017). As such, Latin American urban gover-
nance reforms combine mechanisms for accountability and transparency, the plu-
ralisation of actors in decision-making and planning, the adoption of technocratic
planning mechanisms, the implementation of participatory mechanisms, the rise
of third sector organisations as an interface between low-income citizens and the
state, as well as the consolidation of the private sector as the main actor driving
urban development.
Given the increased autonomy of cities, scholars have noted that Latin American
cities are following different governance models to those of their respective countries
(Goldfrank and Schrank, 2009). For example, in Mexico City left-leaning candidates
have won all elections since the city’s democratisation in the late twentieth century,
meanwhile, the national office had a long run of right-leaning presidents up until
2018. This has led to a variety of local political transformations disjointed from
 Latin American Cities and Regions 51
national policies. For instance, in Mexico City, local governments have expanded
reproductive rights, LGTB marriage, and have implemented policies that embrace
ethnic multiculturalism, making the city distinctly progressive compared to the rest
of the country.
Urban governance models are often classified in terms of their pro-market or
pro-citizen approach. The former is linked to pro-business strategies, in which
urban policies tend to embrace free market ideas, and in which demands of
business leaders and private entities tend to be privileged over those of the gen-
eral citizenry. The latter is the leftist or populist city, in which governments try
to reinstitute the state as a provider of services and seek wide participation of
citizens in governance and decision-making with a variety of mechanisms, such
as participatory budgeting. In practice, most cities exhibit traits of both forms of
models and make use of strategies from both approaches, often with contradic-
tory results. Thus, Latin American cities are simultaneously invested in program-
matic efforts to expand citizen rights and strengthen local governance capacities
that paradoxically coexist with the reinforcement of dynamics of urban revanch-
ism, social fragmentation and exclusion that accompany pro-market policies.
Some of the strategies utilised that reflect these paradoxes include megaproj-
ects, strategic district revitalisation, targeted slum upgrading interventions, city
branding projects, participatory budgeting, and public transportation (sustain-
able mobility) projects.

Contemporary Urbanisation Processes

Revanchist Urbanism: Violence, Fortification, and Social Displacement

A shared feature across Latin American cities has been the deepening of inequalities
materialised in the production of urban space. Informality – practised both by the
poor and wealthy segments of society – together with the flexibilisation of planning
control has sustained the growth of informal settlements and gated communities in
peri-urban areas.
Fear and insecurity have pervasive effects in the urban fabric of Latin American
cities: they generate social and spatial fragmentation and the fortification of pub-
lic, residential, and commercial spaces which are usually justified by increasing
levels of criminality. Studies regularly rank Latin American cities among the most
violent in the world. For instance, a recent study based on the rate of homicides per
population placed 43 cities of the region in the world’s top 50 (Seguridad, Justicia
y Paz, 2018). The link between urbanisation and crime has long been a relevant
theme for social scientists as evidenced in the work of the Chicago School of Sociol-
ogy in the 1920s and 1930s. In Latin America, this link has been the focus of work
that examines the relationship between increasing levels of poverty, inequality, and
the sharp increase in crime rates since the 1980s. Deterministic explanations based
on natural and behavioural causes take the attention away from the social rela-
tions governing Latin American societies and how historical and social processes
perpetuate violence (Angotti, 2013; Carrión Mena and Velasco, 2017). In contrast,
for scholars such as Angotti (2013), urban violence should be seen through an
52 Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa López, and Gabriel Silvestre
analytical lens in which current urban dynamics are examined as part of longer
historical trajectories of land grabs, the expulsion of rural populations, and the
control of the elites over the production of the urban space with minimal provision
for the needs of the urban poor.
With the ascendance of neoliberalism, public safety has become a fertile space for
a number of urban practices in which privatised solutions aim to replace and correct
for the ‘failed’ efforts of the state to guarantee security of urban dwellers. Political
and economic elites have capitalised on discourses of violence (Caldeira,  2000)
to legitimise revanchist policies that criminalise the poor and their livelihoods
(Crossa, 2009) and enable capital investment in central districts (Müller, 2016).
The exclusion of the ‘other’, as Angotti (2013) argues, is most radically expressed
though ‘enclave urbanism’: the proliferation of gated communities, shopping malls,
and business districts with their associated use of private security, CCTV, and
defensive technology.
Concurrently to patterns of social retreat of the middle and upper classes, there
has been an increase in revanchist policies targeting barriadas, favelas, and villas
miserias, including police harassment, forced removal, and military occupation. The
military occupation is perhaps most evidenced by the Pacifying Police Units (UPPs)
programme in Rio de Janeiro, where a combined operation between police and mil-
itary forces seek to ‘take control’ of favelas by displacing drug-trafficking groups.
The selection of the favelas for this intervention, however, was not supported by
criminal statistics but oriented toward securing the areas around the sites for the
2016 Olympic Games, which generated real estate value increases in the adjacent
middle-class neighbourhoods (Silvestre, 2017).

Large Urban Projects and Policy Models

Critiques of the legacy of modernist planning gained traction in Latin America
during the 1980s and 1990s following intense debates in the northern hemisphere
(Holston, 1989; Scott, 1998). This was a fertile period in Latin America in which
new concepts and ideas for planning practice led to innovations in the field and
opened the discipline to the influence of experiences from elsewhere. In fact, the
transnational flow of ideas and practices is a long-standing hallmark in the discipline
of urban and regional planning. As Hardoy (1992) and Almandoz (2002) have dem-
onstrated, Latin American cities have incorporated influences from European and
North American ideas throughout their history.
The circulation of planning and policy models requires institutional channels
of policy diffusion and informational infrastructures where knowledge circulates,
as well as the peripatetic work of travelling experts and the practices of lesson-
drawing and ‘policy tourism’ on the part of local policy actors (González, 2011).
For instance, in the 1990s Barcelona became a relevant point of reference in these
debates and an ‘obligatory passage point’ for different areas of planning exper-
tise. The historical connections between experts from Barcelona and the region
were made possible through their participation in institutional channels such as
the Regional and Urban Planning Commission of the Latin American Council of
Social Sciences (CLACSO), the use of existing political ties, and the development of
commissioned projects (Jajamovich, 2016a). Thanks to these connections, advisers
 Latin American Cities and Regions 53
were able to influence urban designs, the write up of municipal charters, and the
decentralisation of local governments. Individual efforts were supplemented in the
early 1990s by concerted efforts for the promotion of urban policies ‘made in Bar-
celona’ that capitalised in the international prominence of this city. Institutions such
as the World Bank and UN-Habitat also aimed to disseminate Barcelona’s lessons in
the region (Borja, 1996; Borja and Castells, 1997), in particular the strategies used
to transform the city from a declining industrial economy to a global destination for
investment and tourists.
The rationalisation of the ‘Barcelona Model’ in Latin America was epitomised in
the promotion of strategic (urban/spatial) planning. A dedicated channel of diffu-
sion was created with the creation of the Ibero-American Centre of Strategic Urban
Development (CIDEU), through which Barcelona experts assisted in the formulation
of strategic plans across the region (Steinberg, 2005). Set within a wider context of
globalising economic and informational processes, this initiative championed the
articulation of public and private sectors to formulate plans that identified key pro-
jects for the future of the city (Vainer, 2000).
Large urban projects (LUP), or megaprojects, were promoted as strategic policies
facilitating spatial restructuring, attracting foreign direct investment, and assisting
to reposition cities globally. They generally included office complexes, high-end real
estate, five-star hotels, shopping malls, and cultural and leisure facilities (Cuenya
et  al., 2012). Several of these projects were created on unused or abandoned
industrial infrastructure sites, such as ports and railway areas. Waterfront renewal
programmes such as Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires and Porto Maravilha in Rio de
Janeiro contained direct references to the experience of Barcelona and paradigmatic
urban interventions, such as Malecón 2000 in Guayaquil and the creation of new
CBDs in Mexico City’s Santa Fé and São Paulo’s Água Espraiada, illustrate how the
global city discourse became pervasive.
Political and technical debates about LUP span from fervent support to fierce crit-
icisms. On one end, they are considered an effective tool to deal with post-industrial
and globalised dynamics of contemporary urban regions (Borja and Castells, 1997).
At the other end, they are criticised as an example of entrepreneurial and neoliberal
urban visions. The first position emphasises new articulations between public and
private actors that are common in the planning and management of megaprojects.
In contrast, the second position questions the weakened position of the public realm
in what is understood as a process of privatisation of urban planning (Jajamovich
and Kozak, 2019).

The Hosting of Mega-events

The analysis of mega-events offers an entry point to examine the politics and
development policies enacted by hosts at a particular time. Mega-events are usually
sought when ruling regimes are confident of recent material progress and aim to
showcase an image of achievement to external audiences as an instrument of ‘soft
power’, as well as to mobilise support and suppress opposition internally. The expe-
riences of Mexico City (1968) and Rio de Janeiro (2016) with the staging of the
Olympic Games are helpful to illustrate the interplay between externally oriented
discourses and the uneven impacts on the host populations.
54 Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa López, and Gabriel Silvestre
The 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City were embedded in the developmen-
talist politics of the post-war period. In the more stable political landscape that
followed the Mexican Revolution the country exhibited high rates of GDP growth,
particularly during the ‘Mexican miracle’ years between the 1940s and 1950s. The
staging of the Olympics in 1968 – and of the World Cup two years later – was
instrumental for the political and economic elites to challenge negative stereo-
types and showcase an image of a modern(ist), prosperous, and orderly country
(Castañeda, 2014; Zolov, 2004). As the city grew exponentially in population and
size, the period was marked by wide-scale investments in infrastructure, com-
munications, road and mobility network, and more specifically in sports venues
(Barke, 2017). The construction of the Azteca Stadium in 1966 directed urban
development towards an urban–rural transition zone in the south of the city,
whereas new venues demonstrated the importance of sports in the political agenda
(Castañeda, 2014). However, for all the expectations to present an image of a
peaceful and efficient country at times of hostile global relations, the event ended
up being associated with the violent repression of a student demonstration ten
days prior to the beginning of the Games. The episode known as the ‘Tlatelolco
Massacre’, which led to hundreds of deaths, arrests, and injuries, stands as harsh
evidence of the extreme measures that political powers can take to avoid contes-
tations to a political project ‘before the eyes of the world’ (Brewster and Brewster,
2010; Witherspoon, 2008).
In recent decades, urban agendas associated with mega-events have taken an
explicit outward justification as tools for inter-city global competition for capital
investment. For instance, the presentation for Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016
Olympic Games argued that the event would enable the city to ‘become a greater
global city and an even better place to live, do business and visit’ (Rio 2016 Bid
Committee, in Silvestre, 2019). In the 2000s, Brazil was recognised as an emerging
geopolitical power constituent of the BRICS (Brasil, Russia, India, China, and South
Africa) bloc. The Olympic bid – as well as the candidature to the 2014 football
World Cup – gained strong and personal backing from the federal government in
alliance with subnational governments and private groups.
The organisation of this mega-event entailed a wider intervention in the urban
structure that included the construction of new sports venues, the ‘Porto Maravilha’
regeneration programme, the implementation of Bus Rapid Transit corridors, new
roads, sanitation infrastructure, and the cleaning of the polluted waters of the Gua-
nabara Bay. This project also led indirectly to the expansion of the security UPP
programme (see above) and further contributed to booming real estate activity, espe-
cially in the affluent Western area of Barra da Tijuca, where a large part of the public
investment was concentrated. However, the political, social, and economic turmoil
in the country since 2013 compromised the ability of delivering the Olympic project
promises and many programmes were reviewed and cut back. The material legacy
of the 2016 Olympic Games – as well as much of the infrastructure elsewhere in
the Brazilian cities that host the 2014 World Cup – have quickly turned derelict or
remain incomplete, with doubts regarding their future viability. Despite the enduring
references to Barcelona as a model to follow, the harsh reality of Rio de Janeiro in
the post-Olympic period is one of tarnished image and an uncertain future of urban
interventions and the local economy.
 Latin American Cities and Regions 55
These experiences of Latin American nations and cities with the hosting of mega-
events demonstrate how elite visioning and the concern with international recogni-
tion clashed with the stubborn realities of social inequality, state–society relations
and police violence. The preparations to ‘dress up’ both cities to the internation-
al gaze also justified the removal of illegal settlements, the repression of informal
commerce, and the invisibilisation of poverty (Castañeda, 2014; Silvestre, 2017;
Zolov, 2004). Despite the exceptional character surrounding the preparations for
the staging of mega-events, their impacts magnified and rendered more visible the
social polarisation and spatial segregation that has marked the development of Latin
American cities.

Latin American Cities and the Environment

Given the current and future challenges posed by global warming, environmental
governance in Latin American cities is a critical area of practice and research. Envi-
ronmental challenges bring to the forefront the complexity of daily urban governance
and show how, paradoxically, decentralisation and municipalisation has increased
challenges for environmental policy. For instance, Romero Lankao (2007) argues
that fragmented governments make it difficult to coordinate regulatory frameworks
across scales. Indeed, the fact that environmental issues are not contained within an
administrative boundary brings to the forefront the need to develop metropolitan
governance mechanisms that respond to changing patterns of urbanisation. Despite
this, some of the actions promoted by local governments show that Latin American
cities are in fact global innovators in environmental policy.
The historical patterns of urbanisation in the region, and in specific the persistence
of unplanned development, have linked Latin American cities and regions to a series
of environmental problems. Latin American cities have been aware of their environ-
mental problems for a long time, but these were treated as public health problems
and it is only recently that they have been ‘environmentalized’ (Timmons,  2013).
The most critical of these problems are air quality, water supply, and food security,
but in light of growing concerns about climate change, the question of environmen-
tal vulnerability, especially in the case of informal settlements, has received more
attention.
Water problems are classified in three categories: provision of water, quality of
water, and disposal of wastewater. Most urban residents will be affected by one of
these problems at some point, however, the urban poor will be affected to a higher
degree. For instance, peripheral areas often lack piped water and must receive water
by trucks or other means; and its residents pay several times more for water than
those that have access to water via pipes. Water quality is related to the capacity
to treat wastewater and to the exposure of water sources to waste coming from
industries and/or households, often informal, located near water sources. The latter
case evidencing that the housing needs of the urban poor are often at odds with the
agendas of conservationists and the need for clean water sources, forests, and farm-
land (Hochstetler and Keck, 2007).
The main sources of urban air pollution are industrial activity and automobile
traffic, but other important sources include dust, the use of solid fuels for home
56 Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa López, and Gabriel Silvestre
cooking, and the large scale burning of solid waste. Again, the last two mostly affect-
ing poor households that lack access to cleaner sources of energy or live near waste
depositories. Cities such as Mexico City and Santiago have regulated industrial pol-
lutants and eliminated lead from gasolines but continue to face several days a year
of unhealthy air conditions. This is due to the parallel growth of car ownership and
the limited success of traffic reduction initiatives, such as ‘Hoy no Circula’ in Mexico
City or ‘Placa y Pico’ in Bogotá.
While Latin American cities are generally dense, the processes of dispersion,
patterns of segregation, and fragmentation make connectivity difficult and pose
particular challenges for air quality improvement measures. But challenges to
improve air quality also have social and cultural dimensions. For instance, while
mass transport is used much more than in cities of North America, the distribution
of riders is marked by social class, with the poor representing the majority of users.
Meanwhile, the automobile is seen as a safer mode of transportation than buses and
trains and is a central element of an aspirational middle-class lifestyle.
In recent years urban sustainability has become an important area of policymak-
ing for mayors in the region and, while the majority of the problems discussed above
persist, Latin American cities are also becoming known for their successful implemen-
tation of innovative projects. For example, in the 1990s Curitiba mayor Jaime Lerner
developed a novel model of transportation now known as Bus Rapid Transit and en-
forced a strict land use plan to create the conditions for transit-oriented development,
although overlooking the larger peripheral areas (Sánchez and Moura,  2005).
Lerner’s approach has been influential and has been adopted across the globe –
a situation that is also true for Metrocable gondolas in Medellín or bike lanes in
peripheral areas in Bogotá.
More recently, large cities such as Mexico City and Santiago have implemented
large-scale urban sustainability plans that address environmental problems from
multiple angles and are examples of urban innovation. These plans are evidence that
urban agendas are being transformed to respond to climate change and that gov-
ernance areas previously disconnected are now being brought together under one
umbrella. The rise of these agendas signals the arrival of new policy actors, especially
international development institutions, that in the last decade have increased their
influence in local governance by financing climate change-related projects (Sosa
López and Montero, 2018).

Conclusions: From ‘Planet of Slums’ to ‘Spaces of Hope’?

From Vasconcelos’s praise of a ‘Raza de Bronze’(1997 [1925]), to Borges’s view of

Latin America as ‘Europe in exile’, to more contemporary reflections on consumer-
ism and citizenship (García Canclini, 2001) or the provocative proposal of Miami as
the only truly Latin American city (Gorelik, 2005), the region has had no shortage
of thinkers grappling with its complex cultural, economic, and political origins and
realities.
Long-standing tensions between specificity, exceptionalism, and generalisation
have shaped and continue to shape how scholars understand and analyse urbanisa-
tion in the region as a category and as a reality. Nevertheless, the Latin American city
 Latin American Cities and Regions 57
prevails as a cultural and political construction (re)produced by politicians, experts,
social movements, private sectors, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
from the region and the Global North. Given the profound transformations that
Latin American societies have been experiencing for the last three decades, it comes
as no surprise that their cities continue to be rich sites for research and experimenta-
tion. By way of conclusion, we point out three interesting trends.
First, that Latin America, previously seen by many scholars as a ‘planet of slums’
(Davis, 2006), has recently emerged as ‘space of hope’. For instance, Novy and Mayer
(2009: 114), argue that progressive planners from Europe and the United States
should learn from Latin America ‘where some of the most interesting sources of
inspiration for current struggles towards different and more just processes of urban-
isation have emerged’. Meyer underlines the emergence of a ‘New’ Left in the form
of progressive urban movements as well as local, regional, and national governments
and highlights ‘city-level experiments’ in places such as Lima, Porto Alegre, Mon-
tevideo, Caracas, and Mexico City, which have shared a ‘commitment to changes
directed toward greater social and spatial justice within a redistributive framework
of opposition to neoliberalism’.
Similarly, McGuirk (2015), searching for radical cities, progressive alternatives,
and new architectures, lists a series of Latin American experiences including Quinta
Monroy in Chile, designed by Pritzker Prize Alejandro Aravena – who has also been
labelled neoliberal – PREVI, a Peruvian housing programme from the 1960s that
continues to gather global attention, the occupation of Torres David in Venezuela,
Morar-Carioca and Favela-Bairro programmes in Brazil, Atanas Mockus’s policies in
Bogotá, Teddy Cruz architectural projects in Mexico, and Tupac Amaru’s community
initiatives and projects in Argentina. In short, as in Mayer’s narrative or in recent
accounts on Latin American left local governments (Carrión Mena, 2015), Latin
America is often seen as the region where progressive urban changes and spaces for
‘insurgent citizenship’ (Holston, 2007) can be found.
Some of these initiatives foregrounded the ‘pink tide’ of leftist national govern-
ments voted to power across the region during much of the 2000s to unsettle or
reform the status quo of neoliberal policies, including the governments of Hugo
Chávez in Venezuela, the Kirchners in Argentina, Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Evo
Morales in Bolivia. Local governments run by the Workers Party in Brazil, for in-
stance, experimented with distributive policies, such as innovative educational and
cultural centres in São Paulo and direct democracy mechanisms in Porto Alegre’s
participatory budgeting. The latter, for instance, became the ‘spiritual home’ of
alternative politics through the hosting of gatherings for the World Social Forum
(Baiocchi, 2005). Nevertheless, the failure of successive national governments in rec-
onciling broad interests and the end of the ‘commodity boom’ that in large measure
sustained economic growth in the 2000s abruptly ended this period and led to the
return of governments committed to neoliberal policies.
Second, the region has become a fertile space for regional collaboration and inno-
vation. For example, regional initiatives, such as the Southern Common Market
(Mercosur), have urban-level counterparts like the Mercociudades networks. In
recent years, Latin American urban innovations have become global best practices,
effectively challenging the prior prevalence of the diffusion of urban policies from
north to south. Among these, the most well-known are Porto Alegre’s participatory
58 Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa López, and Gabriel Silvestre
budgeting and Medellín and Curitiba’s interventions in urban transport and public
space design (Peck and Theodore, 2015; Sánchez and Moura, 2005), but neolib-
eral policies have also been mobilised, such as the Chilean housing policy (Amarilla
and Ruiz-Tagle, 2018) and the Puerto Madero redevelopment project (Jajamovich,
2016b). South-south urban policy diffusion and learning is an increasingly impor-
tant field of intervention for international development banks, global philanthropy,
and global think tanks (Montero, 2017; Sosa López and Montero, 2018). Similarly,
various social movements associated with academic sectors have been (re)creating
a distinct Latin American imaginary of geopolitical regional resistance linked to
urbanisation experiences of the region, for example, with the (re)appropriation and
regional circulation of ideas such as the ‘right to the city’.
And third, transformations in Latin American societies and academic circles are
informing new research avenues. Institutions and networks are engaging in regional
dialogues, such as the Network of Researchers on Globalization and Territory and
working groups of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences. Several initiatives
are also investigating the specificity of urbanisation in Latin America and the need
to produce knowledge in and about the region, such as the Latin American Research
Network on Urban Theory. All in all, scholars from the region and elsewhere are pro-
ducing novel and important work that incorporates diverse theoretical frameworks
and epistemologies. These include feminist and gender studies (Gamble, 2017),
ethnic studies (Rousseau, 2011), race and urban segregation (Linares and Ramírez
Avilés, 2014; Margarit Segura and Bijit Abde, 2014; Villamizar Santamaría, 2015),
policy mobilities (Jajamovich, 2016a; Montero, 2017), old age studies (Klein, 2018),
actor network theory (Ureta, 2015), urban political ecology (Cohen, 2016), and
gentrification (Janoschka and Sequera, 2016; López-Morales et al., 2016), among
others. This renewed interest informs academic debates at a global scale, evidenced
in the recent publication of special issues on Latin American cities in journals such
as the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Studies in Compar-
ative Development, and Latin American Perspectives, which recently devoted three
issues to cities.

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 4
Cities and Regions in
Sub-Saharan Africa
Warren Smit

Introduction

The past two decades have been a time of great change and great promise for sub-
Saharan Africa. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) notes that
‘sub-Saharan Africa has put its lost decades behind and made significant strides on the
social, political and economic fronts since the turn of the 21st century’ (UNDP, 2020).
This chapter discusses major trends and processes with regards to cities and regions in
sub-Saharan Africa. The most notable trends are sub-Saharan Africa’s rapid urbanisa-
tion (together with complex processes of migration) and impressive economic growth,
combined with the rise of the ‘middle class’, on one hand, but also with persistent
informality, on the other hand. Rapid urbanisation has resulted in increases in the
number of people living in informal settlements and other types of slums, along with
an increase in the number of ‘new town’ developments. Also linked to urbanisation
processes are renewed international investment in addressing infrastructure deficits
and the increasing importance of local real estate development. The net result of
these processes of urbanisation and economic growth is high levels of urban poverty
and growing inequality. Cutting across these trends are ongoing weak governance
processes, continuing rich forms of associational life and cultural expression, and
increasing fragility linked to climate change and resource depletion.
It should be noted that Africa is a vast and diverse continent (as per the United
Nations Development Programme definition, there are 46 countries in sub-Saharan
Africa) and there are enormous international and intra-national differences in urban-
isation dynamics and governance conditions. This chapter identifies broad trends for
sub-Saharan Africa, but it should be noted that these trends do not apply everywhere
equally (or at all – a notable example is that in the midst of rapid urbanisation in

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Cities and Regions in Sub-Saharan Africa  65
Africa there were some areas, such as the Copper Belt in Zambia, that were actu-
ally de-urbanising). It should also be noted that the data available is often uneven in
availability and reliability (Borel-Saladin, 2017), so estimates of population growth
and infrastructure deficits should be regarded with caution.
This chapter starts off with a discussion of the concept of ‘sub-Saharan Africa’
and its subregions. This is then followed by an overview of urbanisation processes in
sub-Saharan Africa and a discussion of economic growth and change. Trends with
regard to infrastructure and housing are then discussed, followed by discussions of
poverty and inequality, governance, sociocultural change, and environmental change.

Sub-Saharan Africa and Its Subregions

The concept of sub-Saharan Africa, first coined in the 1950s, is a contested one
that has been much criticised (e.g. De Haldevang, 2019; Ekwe-Ekwe, 2012; The
Economist, 2019). Although sub-Saharan Africa by definition excludes North Af-
rica, the terms ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ and ‘Africa’ are often used almost interchange-
ably, as in one United States Congressional report which says: ‘sub-Saharan Africa
(henceforth, “Africa” unless otherwise noted)’ (Congressional Research Service,
2019). From a biogeographical perspective the concept makes sense, as sub-Saharan
Africa is essentially a separate biogeographical region, known as the Afrotropical or
Ethiopian region (Linder et al., 2012), but from a political geography perspective it is
problematic. Ever since the formation of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963
(succeeded by the African Union in 2002), the entire continent of Africa (i.e. includ-
ing North Africa) has increasingly been seen as a single region, and this concept of
Africa as a region is increasingly replacing the idea of sub-Saharan Africa. None-
theless, the concept of sub-Saharan Africa is still widely used by researchers and by
international organisations, and many statistics are only readily available at the scale
of sub-Saharan Africa, not Africa. The United Nations uses both Africa and sub-Sa-
haran Africa as regions for different purposes – the former is defined as a ‘geographic
region’ and the latter as a ‘SDG region’ (UNDESA [United Nations Department of
Economic and Social Affairs], 2019: 3). Different agencies have different definitions
of sub-Saharan Africa. The United Nations definition of sub-Saharan Africa is the
most important, as this definition is used for the statistics of UN agencies, such
as UNDESA’s World Population Prospects and World Urbanization Prospects. Sub-
Saharan Africa is defined by UNDESA (2019: ix) as consisting of 48 countries and
3 territories (see Table 4.1). The African countries excluded from their definition of
sub-Saharan Africa are Morocco, Western Sahara, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt,
and Sudan (UNDESA, 2019: ix). By comparison, the World Bank definition of sub-
Saharan Africa includes Sudan but excludes Djibouti (World Bank, 2020).
Different agencies divide sub-Saharan Africa into different subregions – the United
Nations division is shown in Table 4.1: Western Africa (16 countries and 1 territory),
Eastern Africa (18 countries and 2 territories), Middle Africa (9 countries) and
Southern ­Africa (5 countries) (UNDESA, 2019). All of these subregions can also be
defined in various other ways, for example, the United Nations includes Zimbabwe,
Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, the Seychelles, the Comoros, and Mau-
ritius in their definition of Eastern Africa, but all of these countries are part of the
66 Warren Smit
Southern African Development Community (SADC, 2020). The fluidity of these sub-
regions is indicated by the fact that Tanzania is both a member of the Southern African
Development Community and the East African Community (EAC, 2020).

Urbanisation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Rapid urbanisation has been one of the defining features of sub-Saharan Africa in
recent decades. Sub-Saharan Africa has been the most rapidly urbanising region
of the world, with an average annual urban population growth rate of 4.14% per
year between 2005 and 2015 and an average growth rate of 3.98% between 2015
and 2020 (UNDESA, 2020). By comparison, the annual average urban population
growth rate in Europe between 2015 and 2020 was 0.35% (UNDESA, 2020). The
urban population of sub-Saharan Africa has grown from an estimated 203 million
people in 2000 to an estimated 459 million in 2020 (UNDESA, 2020). It is projected
that the urban population of sub-Saharan Africa will increase to 1.258 billion by
2050, which is about 800 million people more than at present (UNDESA, 2020). The
estimated proportion of the population of sub-Saharan Africa living in urban areas
increased from 31.4% in 2000 to 41.4% in 2020 and is projected to reach 58.1%
by 2050 (UNDESA, 2020).
Currently, only two of the world’s 33 megacities (cities with more than 10 mil-
lion inhabitants) are in sub-Saharan Africa: Lagos in Nigeria and Kinshasa in the
Democratic Republic of Congo (UNDESA, 2019). Two more are expected to emerge
by 2030, as Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Luanda (Angola) are each projected to
grow beyond 10 million inhabitants, so that 4 of the world’s 43 megacities in 2030

Table 4.1  The United Nations definition of sub-Saharan African subregions (based on
UNDESA, 2019).

Subregion Countries Territories

Western Africa Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côte Saint Helena
d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea- (­United Kingdom)
Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger,
Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo
Eastern Africa Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Mayotte (France),
Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, ­Réunion (France)
Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles,
Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, United
Republic of Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe
Middle Africa Angola, Cameroon, Central African N/A
Republic, Chad, Congo, Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Equatorial
Guinea, Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe
Southern Africa Botswana, Eswatini (formerly known N/A
as Swaziland), Lesotho, Namibia,
South Africa
 Cities and Regions in Sub-Saharan Africa  67
will be in sub-Saharan Africa (UNDESA, 2019). The number of large cities with
populations between 5 and 10 million in Africa is also expected to increase, from
five in 2018 to thirteen in 2030 (UNDESA, 2019). By 2025, it is projected that there
will be 100 African cities with more than one million inhabitants, twice as many as
in Latin America (Muggah and Hill, 2018). Although the large cities in sub-Saharan
Africa dominate the literature on African cities, in fact, the fastest-growing urban
centres are the smaller cities with less than one million inhabitants, which accounted
for 62% of the urban population in Africa in 2015 (UN-Habitat [United Nations
Human Settlements Programme], 2016). From 1990 to 2018, cities with 500,000
to 1 million inhabitants were the fastest-growing category of urban settlement in
Africa (UNDESA, 2019). Most of the projected urban growth in sub-Saharan Africa
will take place in intermediate and small cities and not in megacities. It is projected
that on average the ‘million plus’ cities will absorb only some 25% of countries’
urban growth, while smaller urban centres will attract the balance of about 75%
(­UN-Habitat, 2014).
Sub-Saharan Africa is largely characterised by primate cities which dominate their
respective countries (such as Nairobi in Kenya and Accra in Ghana). As noted above,
however, secondary cities are actually growing faster than the big primate cities.
Secondary cities in Africa face particularly severe challenges, as they generally have
weaker urban economies than primate cities, and therefore have weaker institutional
and financial bases (UN-Habitat, 2016). The net result is that secondary cities are
typically characterised by ‘chronic inequality of opportunities, widespread poverty,
inadequate capital investments in public goods, and lack of pro-poor social pro-
grammes’ (UN-Habitat, 2016: 173). The smaller revenue base means a smaller and
less capacitated local government.
The rapidity of urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa is unprecedented in world his-
tory. Previously the most rapid urbanisation process in history was in the developing
regions (i.e. Europe and North America), where the proportion of residents living in
urban areas increased from 11% to 34% in the 65 year period between 1850 and
1915; by comparison, in the 65 year period between 1950 and 2015, the proportion
of residents in sub-Saharan Africa living in urban areas increased from 11% to 39%
(UNDESA, 2018).
It is important to note that there are considerable differences between cities, coun-
tries and, subregions within these overall figures, for example, Southern Africa was
estimated to be 61.6% urban in 2015, while Eastern Africa was estimated to be
only 25.6% urban (UN-Habitat, 2016). Rates of urban population growth also vary
significantly, for example, the urban population of Eastern Africa was estimated to
have grown at 4.39% per year during 2010–2015, while the urban population of
Southern Africa was estimated to have grown at only 1.93% per year in this period
(UN-Habitat, 2016).
Unlike urbanisation in other parts of the world or in other eras, urban population
growth in most of Africa has generally not been linked to a commensurate increase
in economic growth (Bryceson and Potts, 2006; Fox, 2012). Fox argues that urban-
isation should be understood as a process driven by population dynamics associ-
ated with technological and institutional change (Fox, 2012). In this analysis, in
the years after World War II, access to surplus food supplies in sub-Saharan Africa
occurred more rapidly than economic development, and improved healthcare led
68 Warren Smit
to a mortality decline, resulting in high levels of population growth and thus in
rapid urbanisation without economic growth (Fox, 2012). As discussed in the next
section, though, parts of Africa have experienced significant economic growth in
recent decades.
Despite rapid urbanisation, rural links generally remain strong and important,
and many urban dwellers maintain links with rural areas (or vice versa), through
oscillating migration and circular migration (Potts, 2010; UN-Habitat, 2014). As
a result, rates of permanent rural-to-urban migration are often fairly low, and in
many African countries urban populations are growing mainly as a result of natural
growth rather than in-migration (Potts, 2009).
It is important to note that although migration to other regions (such as Eu-
rope) is significant, migration in Africa is primarily intra-continental – an esti-
mated 53% of Africa’s international migrants in 2017 remained on the continent
(UNCTAD, 2018). Changes in migration and urbanisation patterns have been
linked to c­ limate in past decades (Barrios et al., 2006; Marchiori et al., 2012), and,
although it will not necessarily be the dominant factor, climate change is likely
to increase migration and urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa (Black et al., 2011;
Parnell and Walawege, 2011).
In most cases, the capacity of governments in sub-Saharan Africa to manage
urbanisation has been poor (UN-Habitat, 2008). The net result of rapid urbanisa-
tion and the inability of the state to design, build, or manage cities adequately is the
growth of ‘slums’. In 2010, 61.7% of the urban population of sub-Saharan Africa
lived in slums, which are areas where residents lack adequate water supply, adequate
sanitation, durable housing, and/or sufficient living area (UN-Habitat, 2010b).
In recent decades, the nature of urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa has continued
to evolve, with the rapid transformation of rural and peri-urban areas and a growing
number of new towns and cities. An indicator of the rapid transformation of rural
areas is that the number of urban settlements in West Africa grew from 157 in 1950
to 1,947 in 2010, an increase of 1,790 (Fox, 2017). For example, in Ghana the town
of Akatsi in the Volta Region, far from any metropolitan area, grew from an esti-
mated population of 1,600 in 1960 to over 25,000 in 2010 (Fox, 2017). The number
of new towns and new cities is also growing (Van Noorloos and Kloosterboer, 2018).
The plans for large-scale new urban developments in Africa are often driven by
international investors and are increasingly globalised, reflecting ‘images of Dubai,
Singapore or Shanghai’ (Watson, 2014: 215).

Economic Growth and Change in Sub-Saharan Africa

In most sub-Saharan African countries, the 1980s and 1990s were characterised by
‘structural adjustment, economic decline, government debt crises, political instability
and deteriorating public infrastructure’ (Turok, 2013: 142). Economic growth was
particularly slow between 1975 and 2000 – in most African countries, the average
per capita income in 2000 was less than that of 1975 and only slightly more than that
of 1960 (Noman and Stiglitz, 2012). At the start of the twenty-first century, how-
ever, there was a rapid change in the economies of many African countries. Between
2001 and 2010, six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were in sub-Saharan
 Cities and Regions in Sub-Saharan Africa  69
Africa, and in eight of those years the economic growth rate of sub-Saharan Africa
was faster than that of East Asia (Turok, 2013). Turok (2013: 143) notes that ‘boom-
ing exports of primary commodities and major construction projects are among the
most visible signs of growing economic dynamism’. The economy of Africa grew
3.4% in 2017 and 3.2% in 2018, as compared to global economic growth rates of
3.1% and 3.2% respectively (UNECA [United Nations Economic Commission for
Africa], 2019). This economic growth has been driven by ‘increasing demand for
Africa’s exports and by rising commodity prices, higher investment in infrastruc-
ture, strong private consumption and favourable weather’ (UNECA, 2019: 2). Sub-
Saharan Africa mainly exports primary commodities and raw materials (fuels, ores
and metals, and agricultural raw materials); Nigeria and Angola are the two largest
exporters of fuels, while South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, and Cameroon are the leading
exporters of agricultural products (UNECA, 2019).
Eastern Africa has been the fastest-growing subregion economically, with its
economic growth rate increasing from 6.1% in 2017 to 6.2% in 2018, while Southern
Africa has grown the slowest in economic terms, with the economic growth rate
decreasing from 1.5% in 2017 to 1.2% in 2018 (UNECA, 2019). These trends are
very similar to the urbanisation trends, with Eastern Africa having the highest urban
population growth rate and Southern Africa having the lowest urban population
growth rate.
Along with this economic growth there has been an increase in the middle class
in sub-Saharan Africa (McKinsey and Company, 2012; Ncube and Lufumpa, 2015;
Shimeles and Ncube, 2015). There has been much debate about what is ‘middle
class’ in Africa, but using a broad definition of an income of between US$2 and
US$20 per day, 323 million Africans could be classified as middle class (Ncube,
2015). However, of these, 63% are in the $2–$4 per day range, regarded as being in
a vulnerable condition and at risk of dropping back into the low-income category
in the event of any unexpected shocks (Ncube, 2015). This growing middle class has
the potential to increase domestic consumption in sub-Saharan Africa and contrib-
ute to economic growth (Ncube, 2015).
A key characteristic of sub-Saharan African economies is their high levels of
informality. The majority of people in sub-Saharan Africa work outside of the for-
mal economy, live in informal housing and conduct financial transactions outside
of the formal banking sector (Grant, 2015). There has been much debate about
the utility of the concepts of ‘formality’ and ‘informality’, given that they are often
intertwined and are more of a continuum than a dichotomy, but they are still use-
ful concepts that reflect to what extent activities fall within the realm of state reg-
ulations (e.g. see Hansen and Vaa, 2004). Sub-Saharan Africa has higher levels of
informal economic activity than other regions of the world, with informal economic
activities forming, on average, 40% of the economies of low-income countries in
sub-­Saharan Africa and 35% of the economies of middle-income countries in sub-
Saharan ­Africa (Medina et al., 2017). Oil exporting states and fragile states in sub-
Saharan Africa seem to have particularly high levels of informality, well above 40% of
their economies (Medina et al., 2017). One of the most tangible manifestations of the
high levels of informal economic activity is large numbers of ‘informal’ traders in mar-
kets and streets (although many of them actually pay fees to the state for the right to
trade) (Mitullah, 2003; Rogerson, 2016; Skinner, 2008).
70 Warren Smit
As mentioned in the previous section, there are high levels of migration in sub-
Saharan Africa, and remittances from migrants are an important part of economies.
Remittance inflows to Africa account for half of all private capital flows into the
continent and have risen from an average of $38.4 billion per year in 2005–2007 to
$64.9 billion per year in 2014–2016 (UNCTAD, 2018).

Infrastructure and Housing

By most quantitative measures, sub-Saharan Africa lags behind most other regions
in the world in terms of infrastructure. Financing sub-Saharan Africa’s infrastruc-
ture deficit and the requirements of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are
estimated in the billions and trillions of US Dollars, depending on the metrics and
assumptions used (Goodfellow, 2020; Kharas and McArthur, 2019; UNCTAD, 2014).
Nonetheless, there has been a recent surge in infrastructure provision in Africa. This
is particularly noticeable in terms of telephone coverage. The median number of fixed
and mobile phone lines per 1,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa has risen dramati-
cally, from about three in 1990 to 736 in 2014 (Calderón et al., 2018). Similarly, the
median number of internet users per 1,000 people increased from 1.3 in 2005 to 16.7
in 2015 (Calderón et al., 2018).
Other sectors have grown less. For example, the per capita electricity-generating
capacity of the region increased only slightly between 1990 and 2012, increasing from
about 0.03 megawatts (MW) per 1,000 people to 0.4 MW per 1,000 people (Calde-
rón et al, 2018). The current power generating capacity per 1,000 people in sub-
Saharan Africa is still inadequate, being three times less than that of South Asia and
ten times less than that of Latin America and the Caribbean, and there are ‘low rates
of electrification, high cost of electricity generation, and insufficient supply resulting
from power system failures and unreliable equipment’ (Calderón et al, 2018: 20).
However, a positive trend has been the growth of renewable sources of energy, such as
solar, wind, and biomass (Suberu et al., 2013).
In general, urban transport infrastructure in African cities is currently inadequate –
a study of 14 cities in Africa found that in all of the cities, ‘the networks of paved roads
and associated traffic control facilities are deficient’ (Kumar and Barrett, 2008: 37).
The proportion of roads that are paved actually decreased between 1990 and 2010,
from 17% of roads to 16% (Calderón et al, 2018).
It is important, however, not to see infrastructure in Africa solely in terms of
deficits and backlogs. There have been many innovative attempts at expanding
infrastructure coverage. As Hildyard (2016) notes, there are substantial infrastruc-
tures in sub-Saharan Africa, however, much of it is not conventional formal net-
worked infrastructure, but is decentralised and incremental infrastructure which
has evolved in the absence of centralised networked infrastructure (Silver, 2014;
Simone, 2004b). For example, in Kisumu, Kenya, the Kisumu Water and Sewer-
age Company (KIWASCO), a privatised utility company, has been successful in
rolling out water provision to peri-urban areas. KIWASCO has relied on a net-
work of subcontractors who in turn sell water to connected customers and to
water kiosk operators, the latter selling on to unconnected customers (Schwartz
and Sanga, 2010).
 Cities and Regions in Sub-Saharan Africa  71
In the past decade there has been renewed attention by global finance on investing in
infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa. After the global financial crisis of 2008, major
finance industry actors, such as McKinsey, pushed the idea of an ‘infrastructure gap’
and championed large-scale private sector investment in infrastructure in sub-Saha-
ran Africa (Goodfellow, 2020: 262). This was driven by the fact that, although risks
were higher than elsewhere, the returns were potentially higher in sub-Saharan Af-
rica – typically with expected rates of return of 30%, compared to 19.3% for other
developing markets and 12% for developed markets (Hildyard, 2016). In the same
period, many development aid agencies again started prioritising aid for infrastruc-
ture in sub-Saharan Africa after many years of decline (Goodfellow, 2020). One of
the other major changes in infrastructure investment in Africa has been the rise of
China, which now accounts for about 30% of the total value of infrastructure pro-
jects in Africa (Alves, 2013; Gharib, 2013; Goodfellow, 2020).
Unlike infrastructure in Africa, housing backlogs are more difficult to quantify
and housing provision has generally attracted much less international investment,
other than in the form of a number of ‘new towns’. As Goodfellow (2020: 260) notes,
the provision of housing on a large scale both by the state or the private sector is
‘severely limited’ in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The only two countries in
sub-Saharan Africa with large-scale state housing programmes are South Africa and
Ethiopia; in most African countries, the total housing supply by formal housing pro-
viders and government agencies meets less than a quarter of housing demand (World
Bank, 2010). This means that in most other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, infor-
mal housing development, such as through the growth of informal settlements on
the urban periphery, continues to be the way that most low-income households get
access to housing. As a result, as discussed in the section on urbanisation, more than
60% of urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa live in informal settlements and other
types of slums, and the upgrading of informal settlements has largely been restricted
to a few scattered projects (for example, the Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme in
Kibera in Nairobi). Increasingly, however, the housing needs of upper- and middle-
income people in Africa are being met by the rise of local real estate development in
sub-Saharan Africa, largely driven by local elites who invest in land and buildings.
Much local real estate development takes the form of speculation driven by pro-
posed infrastructure investment, prompting investment in property either to benefit
from expected increases in values or from compensation when it is demolished to
make way for infrastructure (Goodfellow, 2020; Owusu, 2008). In some cases, real
estate development has had very negative effects, as ‘land grabs’, privatisation of
public property, and evictions of informal residents have all resulted in the displace-
ment and marginalisation of the urban poor.
As mentioned in the section on urbanisation, there has also been an increase
in ‘new towns’ in Africa, largely aimed at upper- and middle-income people, and
some of these have involved international finance. Notable new town develop-
ments include Diamniadio Lake City (Dakar, Senegal), Apollonia City and Hope
City (Accra, Ghana), Eko Atlantic (Lagos, Nigeria), Centenary City (Abuja, Nigeria),
and Tatu City and Konza Techno City (Nairobi). These new towns are generally
located close to existing cities and are intended to provide desirable living environ-
ments for middle-income and high-income people and for growing economic sectors
(such as information technology). These developments are mainly driven by private
72 Warren Smit
i­nternational developers, such as Rendeavour, and are mainly financed from private
sources, but with significant state involvement in the form of infrastructure provi-
sion, tax concessions, and relaxing of planning regulations (Smit, 2019). They are
often designed to be sustainable/smart settlements, using new technologies, and can
result in higher standard of living for residents who can afford to live there. How-
ever, through being aimed at the high-income market, these new towns can exac-
erbate spatial exclusion and social inequality, and contribute to urban sprawl and
decreased urban sustainability (Watson, 2014).

Poverty and Inequality

The impressive recent economic growth in Africa has resulted in a substantial

reduction in the poverty rate, from 54.3% in 1990 to 36% in 2016 (UNECA, 2017,
2019). However, the actual number of people living in poverty in Africa has stayed
more or less the same at about 390 million people (UNECA, 2017). Poverty there-
fore continues to be a major problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Linked to the nature of
economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa, there have also been growing inequalities,
which are most noticeable in urban areas. The 2010/2011 State of the World’s Cities
Report (UN-Habitat, 2010b) highlighted that African cities are the most unequal in
the world, with an average Gini coefficient for urban consumption of 0.58 (where 1
is complete inequality and 0 is complete equality), followed by Latin American cities
with an average Gini coefficient of 0.52. By comparison, the average Gini coeffi-
cient for Asian cities was 0.384 (UN-Habitat, 2010b). In many cases in sub-Saharan
Africa, these levels of inequality are growing. In five of the 13 countries looked at in
Africa, income inequality grew in the first decade of the twenty-first century (UN-
Habitat, 2010a). For example, the urban consumption Gini coefficients of Ethiopia,
Zambia, and Burkina Faso increased by 11.8%, 8.2%, and 7.8% respectively from
2002 to 2008 (UN-Habitat, 2010a). In many cases, increases in inequality were
linked to economic growth, but the example of Uganda shows that this does not
always have to be the case – in Uganda, there was average economic growth of 6%
per year from 2003 to 2006, but the urban consumption Gini coefficient actually fell
from 0.48 to 0.43 during this period.
A particularly important dimension of poverty and inequality is growing urban
food insecurity in African cities (Battersby and Watson, 2018, 2019; Smit, 2016).
Nairobi, Kenya, is typical of the urban food security situation in Africa: 47% of the
population is classified as being ‘food insecure’ and only about a third of households
are able to afford a nutritionally adequate diet, despite low-income and middle-
income households typically spending about three-quarters of their income on food
(Dixon et al., 2007: 122). The net result is undernutrition. For example, surveys
in Accra and Kitwe found that 20–30% of households in low-income areas spent
almost their entire household income on food, and that there were ‘disturbingly high
levels of stunting (chronic malnutrition) and wasting (acute malnutrition) among
children in both the lowest income and the poor-middle income populations’ (De
Zeeuw and Prain, 2011: 37). Food security is particularly a problem in slum areas,
which are characterised ‘by high food insecurity and low dietary diversity, with mul-
tiple market and non-market food sources but variable household access to food’
 Cities and Regions in Sub-Saharan Africa  73
(Battersby and Crush, 2014: 143). For example, a survey of 3,000 households in
slums in Nairobi found that 85% of households were food insecure (Kimani-Mu-
rage et al., 2014).
Simultaneously with these high levels of food insecurity, the nature of food retail
in African cities has been changing dramatically with increasing growth of ‘formal’
retail outlets. In the past two decades, there has been rapid growth in supermar-
kets in Africa (Crush and Frayne, 2011; Weatherspoon and Reardon, 2003). This
is changing urban food systems in ways that are still not fully understood, but a
comparison of Blantyre, Malawi, and Gaberone, Botswana, suggests that the shift
from local production of food and a largely informal retail sector to formal super-
markets with international supply chains may result in decreased levels of food secu-
rity (Riley and Legwegoh, 2014). This is partially because of higher and less flexible
prices: a study of food prices in Madagascar found that, while the quality of food in
supermarkets was higher than that from informal traders, prices in supermarkets were
40%–90% higher than those of informal traders (Minten, 2008).

Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa

Governance is an important and useful concept that reflects that decision-making is

seldom just the preserve of the formal processes of government, but almost always
involves a variety of stakeholders in both formal and informal processes. A good
working definition is that of the United Nations Development Programme, which
defines governance as ‘the mechanisms, processes and institutions through which
citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their
obligations and mediate their differences’ (UNDP, 1997: 2–3). There is a wide range
of actors involved in governance, with very different interests and agendas, and with
few processes for reaching consensus or resolving competing interests. Key actors in
governing can include all levels of government (and the political parties that attempt
to control them), traditional leaders, the private sector (across the entire formal/
informal continuum), international agencies, and civil society (community groups,
religious organisations, NGOs) (Smit, 2018).
Governance conditions have improved greatly in sub-Saharan Africa over the past
few decades, with a strong shift towards peace and democracy in most of the region,
especially in West Africa and Southern Africa (Temin, 2018). This improvement in
governance, peace, and democracy is reflected by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s
Index of African Governance (Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2020). The index for Over-
all Governance in Africa increased from 48.9 (out of 100) in 2008 to 49.9 in 2017
(Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2020). In all, ‘34 countries, home to approximately three
out of four Africans (71.6% of Africa’s citizens), have improved their governance
performance over the last ten-year period’ (Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2018: 17). The
improvement in the Participation and Human Rights index was particularly nota-
ble – that increased from 46.3 in 2008 to 49.2 in 2017 (Mo Ibrahim Foundation,
2020). In terms of the Overall Governance index, the countries which improved the
most from 2008 to 2017 are Côte d’Ivoire (+12.7 points), Zimbabwe (+10.8), Kenya
(+6.1), Guinea (+6.1), Somalia (+6.0), Senegal (+5.9), and Rwanda (+5.9) (Mo Ibra-
him Foundation, 2018). The countries where there has been a decrease in the Overall
74 Warren Smit
Governance index from 2008 to 2017 include Burundi (–5.0), Madagascar (–4.4),
Mali (–4.0), and Mozambique (–3.0) (Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2018).
Challenges still remain, though, and ‘autocratic regimes, civil strife, corruption,
weak institutions, and unresponsive political systems continue to undermine reform
efforts in a handful of countries’ (NDI, 2020). Sub-Saharan Africa had a number of
conflicts over the past decades, which resulted in great destruction and loss of life
in some countries (for example, Rwanda 1990–1994), but conflict in the region has
decreased. The most notable ongoing conflict is the insurgency by Boko Haram in
Nigeria and neighbouring countries, which displaced more than 1.5 million people
(Bello-Schünemann and Aucoin, 2016). There are also ongoing conflicts in a few
other countries, such as the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, and Mozambique (ACLED [Armed Conflict Location and Event Data
Project], 2020). From 1 January 2019 to 13 June 2020 there were 27,922 events of
public violence (such as armed clashes and violent demonstrations) documented in
sub-Saharan Africa, resulting in 41,136 deaths (ACLED, 2020).
In terms of governance at the urban scale, much of sub-Saharan Africa did not
have a tradition of strong local government in the colonial or early post-indepen-
dence eras. However, from the 1980s onwards there was a shift towards decen-
tralisation as governments and international agencies decided that improved urban
management, decentralisation, and local democracy were interlinked. By 2000, it
could be claimed that there was not a single country in Africa in which some form
of local government was not in operation (Oyugi, 2000). The implementation of
decentralisation in sub-Saharan Africa has, however, been very uneven and partial
(Andrews and Schroeder, 2003; Smit and Pieterse, 2014; UN-Habitat, 2008). It has
been argued by some scholars that the rushed and partial decentralisation of public
authority has often resulted in local governments that are ‘weak, disorganized, inad-
equately trained and staffed, and often underresourced relative to the new range of
responsibilities they are expected to take on’ (Meagher, 2011: 51).
Simultaneously with increased decentralisation,there has been a shift in recent decades
in the way local governments in sub-Saharan Africa operate, towards privatisation and
partnerships (Myers, 2011; Nunan and Satterthwaite, 2001; Olivier de Sardan, 2011).
The implementation of structural adjustment programmes in many countries helped
introduce these shifts. In Nigeria, for example since the 1990s, public services that
were previously administered by local governments (such as health centres, water
supply, road repairs, and the management of public facilities and parks) were to a
large extent privatised (UN-Habitat, 2008). Privatisation of service delivery often
disadvantages the urban poor, who are unable to pay for adequate levels of ser-
vice provision. This is exacerbated by local governments usually having inherited
colonial-era by-laws, and planning and building standards, which are unsuited to
the current realities (Devas, 2001: 404). The reasons why the actual implementa-
tion of decentralisation often lags behind decentralisation laws and policies include
inter-governmental and intra-governmental politics, as well as a lack of capacity
in local governments (Andrews and Schroeder, 2003). Even where decentralisation
was implemented, in some cases the aim of decentralisation reforms was merely to
reinforce vested interests through patron–client relationships (Crook, 2003: 78). In
addition, sometimes the motivations behind decentralisation were driven by self-­
interest, for example, to shift the responsibility for unpopular structural adjustment
 Cities and Regions in Sub-Saharan Africa  75
programmes  away from central government to urban local governments, which
in many cases were controlled by opposition parties (Shah and Thompson, 2004).
Tension between national g­ overnments and urban local governments controlled by
opposition parties has continued to be a common characteristic of governance in
sub-Saharan Africa (Resnick, 2014).
The net result of these stalled decentralisation processes, partial privatisation and
corporatisation, and low levels of funding is that the capacity of government bodies
in Africa to manage economic growth, urbanisation, and environmental changes
remains generally weak (Myers, 2011). For example, urban planning, one of the
core functions of local government, is generally weak, resulting in much new urban
growth being unplanned and unserviced (Ayotamuno et al., 2010; Watson, 2011).
It should be noted that a unique feature of urban governance in sub-Saharan
Africa is that traditional leaders, such as ‘chiefs’, often play an important role in
governance in peri-urban areas (Devas, 2004; Olivier de Sardan, 2011). Traditional
leaders were often marginalised during the first few decades after independence,
with their role restricted to cultural and spiritual activities, but since the 1990s there
has been a resurgence and expansion of the role of traditional leaders in governance
processes in sub-Saharan Africa. In some cases, traditional leaders have been incor-
porated into state hierarchies (and are paid by the state), while in other cases they
perform governance functions in parallel with or in competition to the state (Kyed
and Buur, 2006). The typical roles of traditional leaders include dispensing justice,
ensuring safety and security, collecting rent/tax, and the allocation of land.
Informal business organisations, such as traders associations and urban farmers
associations, can also play a role in urban governance (Brown et al., 2010), but they
usually have less influence than big private sector companies. For example, a study
of informal business organisations in Nigeria highlights their limitations in affecting
formal decision-making, noting that small entrepreneurs pay local government taxes
and some state-level taxes but they continue to receive little or no basic services in
return (Meagher, 2011).

Sociocultural Change

With some notable exceptions, most of the academic and policy literature on sub-Sa-
haran Africa has focused on poverty and on infrastructure deficits and has neglected
sociocultural issues. In the words of Pieterse (2011: 9–10), ‘The policy‐fix genre of
scholarship on African cities is premised on a moral outrage about the suffering
of the poor, and in that normative positioning becomes blind to the very people
it aims to help because it erases their innately complex and diverse “lifeworlds”’.
However, there is a growing body of work that recognises that the rapid urbanisa-
tion of sub-Saharan Africa and increasing global linkages have had a wide range of
impacts on society and culture, resulting in innovative new forms of cultural and
artistic expression and new forms of associational life (Freund, 2010; Ojaide, 2018;
Simone, 2001). Simone (2004a) notes that we do not know much about how the
behaviours, imaginations, and ways of life of African urban residents are changing,
but we do know that new practices and social forms are rapidly evolving to meet
the changing dynamics of African cities. Some studies in particular cities have shown
76 Warren Smit
how ­globalisation and changing communication technologies are impacting on the
lifestyles of different subgroups in specific cities in a range of different ways, for
example, among the middle class in Nairobi, resulting in increasingly individual-
ised lifestyles and reduced importance of kinship links for some subgroups, such as
young professionals (Neubert and Stoll, 2015).
New urban identities are emerging in sub-Saharan African cities, as ‘territori-
alized productions of identity and diversity combine on various scales to conten-
tiously shape experiences and meanings of urban citizenship’ (Gervais-Lambony,
2014: 357). Cultural expression is a way that urban residents can activate their
citizenship, both symbolically and practically (Mbaye, 2014). New forms of cultural
expression are developing, such as hip-hop music, which serve as sites ‘for identity
formation and negotiation, building a cultural economy that allows for endoge-
nous local capacity building as a potential source of individual, as well as collective,
growth and development’ (Mbaye, 2014: 409).
Cities in sub-Saharan Africa are exciting and dynamic places, and there is a growing
number of writers, artists, poets, musicians, and movie makers that reflect this and
are giving rise to new and innovative forms of artistic expression. In terms of motion
pictures, since 2009 the Nigerian film industry (‘Nollywood’) has been the second
largest film industry in the world after India’s Bollywood in terms of number of
films produced, with 1,844 movies produced in 2013 alone (Bright, 2015). Africa has
always had a rich array of writers and numerous new writers have emerged within
the past two decades, for example, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria, whose
novels include Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah
(2013). African authors have been inspired by the region, particularly its urban life.
For example, Nigerian writer Ben Okri (2002 [1996]: 190) captured the essence of
Lagos in his 1996 novel, Dangerous Love:

Metal. Hot road. Copper sun. Sweating drivers. Busy hawkers. Policemen accepting
bribes. Lights on painted metal. Yellow and black taxis. Glittering windscreens. Weath-
er-beaten faces. Struggling faces. A million colours of sun and city. The faces of my
people. Hallucinatory sunlight on the green lagoon. Gasoline fumes. Beggars. Soldiers
everywhere. Traffic jams everywhere. Noise. Chaos. Everything jammed. Motion. Con-
fusion. Houses jammed. No birds in the air.

There has been a recent boom in speculative fiction, cinema, and artwork that imag-
ines the future of Africa, including music videos by Kwesta and Petit Noir, artwork
by Jelilu Atiku, Athi Patra Ruga, and Kiluanji Kia, and novels by Nnedi Okorafor
(Pereira et al., in press)
Sub-Saharan Africa has always had a rich array of communal associations that
play an active role in the social and economic life of communities, such as ethnicity-
based networks, home-town associations, youth associations, savings groups, and
funeral groups (Devas, 2001; Olivier de Sardan, 2011; Tostensen et al., 2001). In
addition, many new ‘Western-style’ community associations have been set up by
international development agencies (Olivier de Sardan, 2011). Various types of reli-
gious associations (for example, charismatic movements and Islamic brotherhoods)
also play an important role, particularly with regards to humanitarian interventions
 Cities and Regions in Sub-Saharan Africa  77
such as providing food (Olivier de Sardan, 2011). NGOs can also be important in
helping build and support community organisations (Devas, 2001). Associations of
informal traders, transport operators, and small-scale farmers often also play an
important role in governance and in engaging with the state (Lindell, 2008; Meagher,
2011; Schmidt et al., 2015).

Environmental Change

Climate change is impacting on Africa in many ways, decreasing the agricultural

viability of many rural areas and increasing risks of flooding, sea-level rise, and
high temperatures (Muller, 2007; Parnell et al., 2007; Simon, 2010). These chal-
lenges are all exacerbated by rapid urban spatial growth in floodplains, coastal
areas, and other environmentally sensitive areas. Despite the fact that African cit-
ies have fairly small ecological footprints compared to cities in the Global North,
inadequate infrastructure systems and weak planning and management mean they
still have a significant negative impact on ecosystems that exacerbate risks from cli-
mate change. As a result, levels of risk have been increasing in much of sub-Saharan
­Africa, and these impacts are particularly borne by the urban poor, for example, the
risk of flooding (Clancy, 2008; Douglas et al., 2008). The potential impacts on the
health of urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa is of particular concern (Smit and
Parnell, 2012).
Although the linkages are complex, it is believed that climate change will result
in increased frequency and intensity of drought across much of Africa (McCann
et al., 2011a, 2011b). Some African cities, such as Harare, have already experienced
a noticeable increase in the frequency and length of droughts in recent decades
(Blake et al., 2011). Drought is characterised by lower than average precipitation in
a specific area over an extended period, leading to an inadequate supply of water,
both within cities in drought-stricken areas and in their rural hinterlands. Drought
can result in decreased access to clean water and to decreased food production,
eventually leading to famine and malnutrition, and in some cases to death. Drought
can also result in reduced air quality, leading to respiratory diseases (McCann
et al., 2011a).
In addition to increased dry spells, climate change is projected to also result in
more frequent and more intense heavy rainfall events and sea-level rise, which will
together increase the risk of flooding. Flooding risk in African cities is exacerbated
by the nature of urban growth, which is characterised by growing occupation of
floodplains and low-lying coastal areas, increased expanses of hard surfaces which
result in increased run-off, and the inadequate provision and maintenance of infra-
structure (Douglas et al., 2008).
Another problem linked to climate change is heat stress. Prolonged exposure to
high temperatures (above 35°C), particularly with high humidity and little wind
or ventilation, can result in heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and, ultimately, death
(Kjellstrom, 2009). Global climate change and increased urbanisation (the ‘urban
heat island’ effect) is likely to result in increased problems of heat stress (Frum-
kin, 2002).
78 Warren Smit
Conclusion

Sub-Saharan Africa has changed enormously over the past two decades, with gen-
erally impressive economic growth and rapid urbanisation, but severe challenges
remain, such as high levels of poverty and weak governance capacity. What does
the future hold for sub-Saharan Africa? While many prominent popular publica-
tions have run features predicting that Africa is on the brink of even more spectacu-
lar economic growth (e.g. The Economist, Time, Forbes, and The Financial Times),
others have been more sceptical about whether the preconditions for this are fully
in place. For example, Karuri-Sebina et al. (2012: 494) are of the view that ‘Africa
needs a more grounded perspective on her future prospects, one that could be bright
depending on improved education and leadership’.
There has been much thought over the future of sub-Saharan Africa. Other than
current trends continuing unchanged, foresight studies have identified three broad
options for the future of the region (Karuri-Sebina, 2019: 103):

• A ‘things get worse’ scenario, linked to major crises such as climate change
impacts, conflict, and changed global economic conditions.
• An ‘Africa rising’ scenario, where Africa grows rapidly, based on her natural
resources, growing middle class, and improved government capacities.
• An ‘evasive path-disruptive scenario’, where Africa pursues ‘an alternative
conceptualisation and model of growth and development, which avoids
simply producing and reproducing poverty and inequality’.

One key initiative that is attempting to shape the future path of Africa is the African
Union’s Agenda 2063. The first ten-year implementation plan covers seven aspira-
tions, 20 goals, 13 fast-track projects, 39 priority areas, 255 targets, and focuses on
democracy, cultural identity, and continental integration (Mo Ibrahim Foundation,
2019). As Karuri-Sebina et al. (2012) suggest, achieving continued economic growth
in sub-Saharan Africa together with a decrease in poverty and inequality will require
wise leadership and increased levels of national education.

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 5
Australasian Cities
Urban Change Across Australia and
New Zealand
Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker

Introduction

This chapter discusses major cities in Australasia, a region of Oceania, located in the
southern Pacific Ocean. Australasia includes Australia, New Zealand (Aotearoa),
and neighbouring islands. With its focus on major cities in the region, the chapter
is weighted towards Australian cities – in particular Sydney and Melbourne – which
accommodate a substantial amount of the urban population in Australasia. New Zea-
land cities are also discussed, with a focus on Auckland (T maki Makaurau) and,
to a lesser degree, Wellington (Te Whanganui-a-Tara) and Christchurch ( tautahi).
Australia and New Zealand are developed nations which have, from the 1980s, expe-
rienced periods of prolonged economic restructuring and are now well connected to
global economic and population flows. The restructuring of cities across Australia and
New Zealand has come in response to a growing neoliberal form of urban governance,
which emphasised economic productivity, global links, reduced government expendi-
ture and a growing reliance on the private sector for the provision of infrastructure,
services, and employment (Geddes, 2005; Gleeson and Low, 2000).
The urban structure of Australia and New Zealand differs from many other
developed nations. Australia and New Zealand are primarily urban countries. In
2016, the capital cities of Australia’s eight states/territories1 were home to 66.7% of
the total population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018a), with 75% of Austra-
lians living in the nation’s 20 largest cities (although some of these cities are quite

1
Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, Darwin, and Canberra.

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
86 Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker
small on a global scale) (Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development,
2015). In New Zealand, 86% of the total population live in large and small cities,
with approximately 50% living in the three largest cities (New Zealand Productivity
Commission, 2017). Thus, Australasia’s urban population is highly concentrated.
A clear urban hierarchy is observed, with a number of ‘primate’ cities dominat-
ing economic activity and population growth (Dowling and McGuirk, 2012). In
Australia, the state capitals – dotted around the coastline and sites of colonial out-
posts – contain much of the population and economic activity for each state. Two
cities – Sydney and Melbourne – emerge as the largest Australian urban centres by
quite some way. In New Zealand, Auckland is approximately four times larger than
the next most populous city and is responsible for over a third of the gross domestic
product (GDP). The chapter focuses on topics related to population, economy and
employment, housing and spatial inequality, and in so doing discusses key attrib-
utes of Australasian cities, including high rates of immigration and culturally diver-
sity, concentrated economic performance and governance, low density built form,
housing (rental and purchase) unaffordability, and social and economic divisions.

Population

Growth and Distribution

One of the defining features of Australian urbanism is a clear urban hierarchy (see
Table 5.1). Atop the Australia urban hierarchy in terms of population are Sydney and
Melbourne with 4.8 and 4.5 million residents respectively in 2016 (Australian Bureau
of Statistics, 2018a). Since their establishment as British colonies in 1788 (Sydney)
and 1835 (Melbourne), these cities have been home to a significant proportion of
the total. All of Australia’s largest cities are the product of a colonial past, as each
was the capital of an independent British colony prior to the Federation in 1901. The
colonial administrative and economic role of these cities, and the historical compe-
tition between the cities/colonies, worked to bolster urban primacy (Dowling and
McGuirk, 2012). The status as Australia’s most populous city has fluctuated between
Sydney and Melbourne. As the first city established by Europeans, Sydney was Aus-
tralia’s largest city until the mid-1850s, when, driven by an influx of international
migrants as part of the gold rush, Melbourne took the mantle. Sydney regained the
crown of the most populous city in 1901 and retains that status today. However,
current population projections suggest that Melbourne will again overtake Sydney
in terms of population by the mid-2030s (Salt, 2017). Between 2006 and 2016, Mel-
bourne’s population grew by almost 840,000 people (an increase of 23%), compared
to 700,000 new residents in Sydney (an increase of 17%). Compared to Sydney,
the (slightly) more affordable housing market and the availability of more fringe
development options are some of the drivers of this faster growth rate in Melbourne.
Population growth in both Sydney and Melbourne is primarily driven by interna-
tional migration (historically from the United Kingdom and Europe, more recently from
China and India) and it is expected that net overseas migration will remain the dom-
inant driver of population change in Australian cities, for decades to come (­McGuirk
and Argent, 2011; Productivity Commission, 2016). For example, in 2016–2017,
 Australasian Cities 87
Sydney’s population grew by 101,600, of which 84,700 were international migrants
(83% of total growth). A similar picture is observed for Melbourne when, in the same
year, 80,000 international migrants arrived in the city, accounting for 64% of the total
population growth for that year (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018b). Population
growth in Melbourne is also driven by inward domestic migration, with just over 9,000
new residents moving to the city from elsewhere in Australia. In contrast, Sydney is
characterised by a significant amount of outward internal migration. In 2016–2017,
just over 18,000 more people left Sydney to live in other parts of Australia (mainly
Melbourne and regional centres in New South Wales) than arrived from elsewhere in
the country (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018b).
In terms of population, Brisbane and Perth form the second tier of capital ­cities
with approximately 2.3 million and 1.9 million residents respectively in 2016
(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018a). In the 10 years to 2016, both cities grew
by just over 400,000 people. Of Australia’s large cities, Perth had the fastest growth
rate, growing by 29% between 2006 and 2016. This population growth rate was
fuelled by a prolonged period of economic growth in Perth, and Western Australia
more broadly, due to the so-called mining boom which commenced around 2003.
The ‘mining boom’ came in response to a peak in global demand and related prices
in raw materials and resulted in significant growth in the national economy (Tulip,
2014). This drove increased demand for employment across Western Australia,
which saw both domestic internal and international migrants (often on short-term
working visas; Daley et al., 2017) move to Perth as the city became home to both
populations working in corporate governance roles and as the base of a new breed
of ‘fly-in/fly-out’ workers who would live in Perth but fly to mines across the state to
complete their shifts (Perry and Rowe, 2014). Of Australia’s largest cities (population
over 1 million people), Brisbane and Perth recorded the highest rate of ageing in the
decade to 2016. In Brisbane the number of persons aged over 64 years of grew by
45%, while in Perth this age category grew by 44% (the other large cities ranged
from 28% in Adelaide to 35% in Melbourne). For Brisbane, this was largely driven
by retirees moving to the city from southern states (primarily New South Wales)
(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017a). In Perth, this was due to the ageing in situ
of a comparatively young population (Committee for Perth, 2017).
New Zealand also has a distinct urban hierarchy, dominated by its primate city,
Auckland. This was not always the case, however. From colonisation to the onset of
World War I, Auckland was one of four cities – the others being Christchurch, Wel-
lington, and Dunedin – with broadly similar population sizes (Te Ara, 2018b). Today,
Auckland is the largest city in New Zealand by population, with approximately
1.5 million people in 2016, comprising almost one-third of the national population
(4,693,200 in 2016) (Stats NZ, 2016). Briefly, the nation’s capital city (1841–1865),
Auckland is approximately four times larger than the next two most populous cit-
ies, Wellington (the national capital since 1865) and Christchurch (405,000 and
389,600 in 2016, respectively). Only four more cities have populations over 100,000
(Hamilton, Tauranga, Napier-Hastings, and Dunedin, in descending order). Com-
pared to Wellington (7.8%) and Christchurch (4.0%), Auckland has experienced
strong population growth (17.5% in the 10  years to 2016), contributing approx-
imately half of national population growth. Auckland has experienced a net loss
of internal migrants in the last decade, but its relatively young population (19.7%
Table 5.1  Population characteristics for major cities in Australia and New Zealand (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018a; Stats NZ, 2013, 2016).

Proportion of Proportion of Proportion of

Population the population Proportion of population population
growth since 2006 identifying as population born aged under aged over
Major city Total population (% increase) indigenousa domesticallyb 15 years of age 65 years of age

Australia

Sydney 4,823,991 17.1% 1.5% 57.1% 18.7% 13.9%

Melbourne 4,485,211 23.0% 0.5% 59.8% 18.3% 14.0%
Brisbane 2,270,800 22.6% 2.4% 67.8% 19.6% 13.4%
Perth 1,943,858 28.6% 1.6% 57.3% 19.0% 13.8%
Adelaide 1,295,714 12.0% 1.4% 68.2% 17.4% 17.3%
Hobart 222,356 10.3% 3.8% 79.8% 18.0% 17.8%
Darwin 136,828 29.1% 9.7% 62.7% 22.6% 5.3%

New Zealandc

Auckland 1,495,200 17.5% 10.7% 60.9% 19.7% 11.4%

Wellington 405,000 7.8% 14.9% 75.0% 18.8% 11.8%
Christchurch 389,600 4.0% 8.5% 77.8% 17.2% 14.8%
a
For the purposes of this table, ‘indigenous’ is equivalent to Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander in the Australian context, and M ori in the New Zealand context. New
Zealand statistics are drawn from the 2013 Census.
b
‘Born domestically’ means born in Australia for Australian cities, and born in New Zealand for New Zealand cities. New Zealand statistics are drawn from the
2013 Census.
c
2016 statistics are estimates made by Statistics NZ based on the 2013 Census. Where no estimates were available, census figures from 2013 have been used and footnoted.
Figures relate to urban regions, not inner-city municipalities.
 Australasian Cities 89
under 15 years, in 2016) and attractiveness to international migrants (39.1% born
overseas, in 2016) has supported strong population growth. About two-fifths of
Auckland’s growth since 1996 is due to international migration (primarily from
China, India, the United Kingdom, and Australia), compared with 15% for the rest
of New Zealand over a similar period, with net international immigration peaking
during 2002–2006 and 2014–2015 (New Zealand Productivity Commission, 2017).
While Auckland’s position of dominance remains unchallengeable for the foresee-
able future, comparatively strong growth in third-tier cities such as Hamilton (20%)
and Tauranga (11%) will likely lead to a reorganisation of lower tiers on the urban
hierarchy in years to come.

Indigenous Peoples
Australian and New Zealand cities are the product of settler-colonialism and are sites
of historical and ongoing connections and contestation for indigenous peoples. The
location, form, and function of Australian cities are the outcome of European inva-
sion and dispossession based on the erroneous principle of terra nullius (nobody’s
land). Urban scholars point to a ‘cult of denial’ regarding the origins of Australian
cities, implicating historical and contemporary urban planning practices as well as
academic research (Jackson et al., 2017; Porter, 2018), which serves to deny indige-
nous histories embedded in Australian cities and the ongoing and ever present indig-
enous relationships to Country (a term that denotes thick relations between people,
land, culture, and nature) (Porter, 2018). New Zealand cities have similar origins.
Before the arrival of Europeans, the sites that would later become cities were places
of cultural meaning, p (fortified villages) and k inga (settlements) for the indige-
nous M ori, who claimed tribal authority (Schrader, 2016). Prior to the declaration
of British sovereignty with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, the M ori
had granted permission for a then relatively small numbers of European settlers to
use land for different purposes. After the treaty, M ori endured large-scale alienation
and confiscation of their lands in the service of the colonial project, continuing well
into the 1900s (Te Ara, 2018a). Dispossession and alienation of indigenous peoples
from their lands are, thus, foundational features of cities in Australasia.
While Australian cities remain indigenous Country (Porter, 2018), indigenous
Australians account for a comparatively small proportion of national and urban
populations. In 2016, 2.8% of the Australian population identified as indigenous
(Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, or both). This population is comparatively dis-
advantaged to the rest of the Australian population, characterised by poorer health
and lower life expectancy, lower rates of formal education and employment, and
lower levels of household income and higher rates of poverty (Australian Insti-
tute of Health and Welfare, 2018). Despite policy efforts to address this disadvan-
tage – such as the Close the Gap campaign – improvements have been slow, with
many of the indicators stalling or going backwards (Department of Prime Minister
and Cabinet, 2018). While the indigenous population is distributed across Austra-
lia, with an over-representation of indigenous people in rural and regional centres
(Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2018), a significant proportion of this
population resides in Australia’s urban areas. Together the eight capital cities were
home to over 226,000 indigenous Australians, equating to more than one in three
90 Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker
indigenous people living in these cities (34.9%). However, indigenous Australians
are not evenly distributed across these cities. Sydney has the largest indigenous
population in Australia, with over 70,000 indigenous residents. While this only rep-
resents 1.5% of Sydney’s population, it amounts to 10.8% of the total Australian
indigenous population. As with other cultural groups, the indigenous population has
a unique geography across the city. In Sydney, concentrations of indigenous popula-
tions are located around the inner-city suburb of Redfern and outer city locations
such as Blacktown, Penrith, and Campbelltown. Redfern, in particular, emerges as
an important culture centre for indigenous communities. Redfern is home to ‘The
Block’ – a block of social housing historically managed by the Aboriginal Housing
Company. The concentration of indigenous populations in certain outer city loca-
tions is also, in part, driven by the location of social housing across the city. In con-
trast to Sydney, Melbourne is home to a relatively small indigenous population – just
over 24,000 people – which equates to only 0.5% of the total city population or
3.7% of the indigenous population.
Prior to the start of World War II in 1939, New Zealand’s M ori population was
highly rural, with less than 20% living in cities (Te Ara, 2018c). What followed has
become known as the M ori urban migration, or the Second Great Migration (with
the First Great Migration referring to the passage of M ori ancestors from the Pacific
Islands to settle in New Zealand) (Haami, 2018; Hill, 2012; New Zealand History,
2017). An act of parliament (the Manpower Act) was used to direct young M ori
men and women to work in essential industries, frequently located in cities, during
the war effort. So began a profound urbanisation of the M ori population: by 1986,
almost 80% of M ori lived in cities (Te Ara, 2018c). Estrangement of many urban
M ori from their ancestral lands, cultural practices, and kin through the process of
urbanisation has posed significant challenges, compounding other sources of socio-
economic marginalisation. This, among other factors, has given rise to new forms
of indigenous organisation and self-determination, such as urban M ori authorities
(Keiha and Moon, 2008), and ongoing efforts to embed M ori values, worldviews,
and input into urban planning, design, and policy (Matunga, 2017; Thompson-Faw-
cett and Riddle, 2017). In 2013, 14.9% of the national population was M ori. Auck-
land is home to the most M ori of any district in New Zealand, with 142,767 or
23.9% of the national M ori population. However, M ori comprise a smaller share
of Auckland’s population (10.7%) than the national average (14.9%). Wellington is
at parity (14.9%) and Christchurch lower (8.5%).

Ethnic Diversity
Australia is a multicultural country with a third of the population born overseas
(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017b). Australia’s largest cities of Sydney and
Melbourne are the most culturally diverse, where, in 2016, 43% and 40% of res-
idents were born overseas, respectively. Australian cities have long been home
to a significant number of migrants (Department of Infrastructure and Regional
Development, 2015; McGuirk and Argent, 2011). Much of the early history of migra-
tion to Australia (and in particular its cities) was framed by national immigration
policy. The first legislative act of the Australian Parliament, following Federation in
1901, was the Federal Immigration Restriction Act of 1902 – commonly known as
 Australasian Cities 91
the ‘White Australia Policy’. The policy (which was not fully dismantled until the
1970s) worked to restrict migration to populations moving from western European
nations. The largest influx of migrants came in the post-World War II period, which
saw significant populations move to Australia from countries such as the United
Kingdom (‘Ten Pound Poms’2), Ireland, Greece, Poland, and Italy (Forrest and Dunn,
2010). These populations were important in shaping Australian cities, as cultural
and ethnic enclaves emerged across Sydney and Melbourne. For example, in both
Sydney and Melbourne, large Greek and Italian communities became established in
inner-city suburbs (such as Haberfield in Sydney and Carlton in Melbourne) (John-
ston et al., 2017). Indeed, Melbourne is often referred to as the city with the largest
Greek population outside Greece. The profile of immigrants arriving began to change
from the 1970s as these traditional countries of origin became less important. The
first wave of significant Asian migration began in the mid-1970s with the arrival
of Vietnamese refugees following the Vietnam War. It is estimated that 90,000 ref-
ugees relocated to Australia in this period, the majority of which located in Sydney
and Melbourne. Vietnamese migrants coalesced, primarily due to government refu-
gee housing policies (Dunn, 1998), in a number of suburbs. In Sydney, the middle-
ring suburb of Cabramatta (and surrounding suburbs) to the southwest of the CBD
became the hub of the Vietnamese community. Likewise, in Melbourne, the suburbs
of Richmond, Footscray (both inner-city suburbs), and Sunshine (middle-ring suburb
to the west of the CBD) became home to the Vietnamese community. In 2016, Viet-
nam was the fifth most common place of birth in both Sydney and Melbourne (1.7%
of population in Sydney and 1.8% of population in Melbourne). In the decade to
2016, the number of Vietnamese-born residents grew by 20% in Sydney and 36%
in Melbourne. While the first wave of Asian migrants originated in Vietnam, the
largest flows of migrants coming into Sydney and Melbourne are now coming from
south and central Asia, with China and India particularly prominent. According to
the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016 was the first census year where the number
of Chinese-born people in Sydney was larger than the number of people born in the
United Kingdom. China is now the second most common birthplace for Sydney res-
idents (4.7% of Sydney residents were born in China). In Melbourne, Chinese-born
residents are the fourth most common, just behind UK- and Indian-born residents
(3.5% of Melbourne residents were born in China). In Sydney, between 2006 and
2016, the number of Chinese-born residents increased by over 115,000 (an increase
of 106% on the 2006 figure). A similar growth rate is observed in Melbourne, were
over 101,000 new Chinese-born residents were recorded in this period (an increase
of 185% on the 2006 figure). The growth in the number of Indian-born residents in
Sydney and Melbourne has been equally significant. In Sydney, between 2006 and
2016 the number of Indian-born residents grew by over 77,000 people (an increase
of 146% on the 2006 figure) and now represents the fourth most common place of
birth. In Melbourne there are over 110,000 new Indian-born residents (an increase
of 217% on the 2006 figure) and India is the third most common place of birth.

2
A colloquial term used to describe British citizens who migrated to Commonwealth
countries following the end of World War II. Migrants were required to pay a £10
processing fee, while passage was arranged by the Australian Government.
92 Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker
Compared to Australia, where significant numbers of continental European
migrants settled in cities in the mid-1900s, the impact of continental European migra-
tion on New Zealand cities has been muted. Continental European migrants have
been key figures in rural industrial development, such as wine making, rather than
being prominent features of urban ethnic landscapes. Throughout the nineteenth and
much of the twentieth century, national migration policies actively supported British
migration to New Zealand (often through government ‘assisted passage’ provisions)
and actively restricted migrants outside the British Commonwealth (New Zealand
Parliament, 2008). In 1840, 1,000 English migrants arrived in the first wave of British
settlers, enabled by a private enterprise, the New Zealand Settlement Company
of Wellington. By 1852, it is estimated that approximately 28,000 British settlers
had arrived, the majority via private companies (New Zealand Parliament, 2008).
Outside of Auckland – a city founded by government – many New Zealand cities
were founded through the activities of private migration enterprises (for example,
the Otago Association, an entity of the Free Church of Scotland, founded Dunedin).
By the mid-1900s, New Zealand was overwhelmingly British in its ethnic make-
up, with 94% European (primarily of British origin) and 6% M ori (Ishizawa and
Arunachalam, 2014). In the 1970s, ‘new’ Polynesian migration began, under skilled
migration provisions that attracted substantial numbers of migrants from the Pacific
Islands, such as the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, Samoa, and Tonga. The sheer num-
ber of Pacific Islands migrants to Auckland has led many to refer to it as the Pacific
Islands’ de facto capital city (Bedford et al., 2000: 3). In 1987, the Immigration Act
was reformed and ‘country of origin’ provisions removed in favour of a points-based
system, weighted towards higher skilled migrants and migrant-investors. Coupled
with efforts to attract international tertiary education students, this ushered a new
wave of migration stemming from China, India, and other Asian countries (Friesen,
2012). As New Zealand’s gateway city, Auckland is the most ethnically diverse, with
the lowest proportion of residents from European backgrounds (59.3% in 2013,
compared to 73.9% in Wellington, 83.9% in Christchurch, and 74% nationally)
and highest proportions of residents from the Pacific Islands (14.6% in 2013, com-
pared to 11.75% in Wellington, 3.1% in Christchurch, and 7.4% nationally) and
Asia (23.1% in 2013, compared to 9.95% in Wellington, 9.4% in Christchurch, and
11.8% nationally) (compiled from 2013 Census).
In both Australia and New Zealand, the significant number and rate of growth
of migrants coming to Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland, particularly from China
and India, has raised a number of challenges for these cities. In Australia, public
discourse has tended to coalesce around debates about whether the country – and
by extension the major cities – is ‘full’ (Millar and Schneiders, 2018; Ting, 2017).
In particular, population growth due to high rates of immigration (for example, in
2016–2017 there was a net overseas migration of 262,500 people – over 190,000
of which went to New South Wales and Victoria – primarily to the capital cities of
Sydney and Melbourne [Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018c]) has been blamed for
issues surrounding housing affordability and lack of housing supply, infrastructure
overcrowding, traffic congestion, and cultural tensions. In their most extreme, these
debates have mobilised discourses of Australia’s ‘way of life’ being under threat from
migration driven urban population growth, although contemporary research dis-
rupts and challenges such claims (Forrest et al., 2017). In New Zealand, Auckland’s
 Australasian Cities 93
role as the primary destination and ‘gateway’ for migrants has installed the city at
the forefront of issues surrounding international migrants. While Auckland’s self-im-
age as a ‘super-diverse’ city tends to position international migration as an enriching
force for civic life, migrants (and, in particular, migrants who are visibly different
from the European-descended majority) are often positioned within public discourse
as key contributors to housing unaffordability and infrastructure inadequacy (Dann,
2017; Fyers, 2017), despite international migration accounting for only two-fifths of
Auckland’s population growth in the last two decades.

Economy and Employment

The size and structure of the economy differs considerably between Australian
capital cities. Despite an underlying desire for many capital cities to achieve ‘global
city’ status, as outlined in their metropolitan strategic plans, where this is a central
policy ambition (Ruming, 2018a), Sydney is often positioned as Australia’s only
truly global city, due to its level of economic integration, level of international
migration, concentration of corporate headquartering, prolonged industrial re-
structuring and sociocultural diversity (Baker and Ruming, 2015). However, this
position is challenged, with state and local governments claiming that Melbourne,
Brisbane, and even Perth are global cities. According to the 2016 Globalisation and
World Cities (GaWC) Research Network,3 Sydney was defined as an Alpha city
(the third highest tier) and Melbourne was defined as an Alpha – (the fourth high-
est tier). Other Australian cities to appear on the list were Brisbane, Perth (both
Beta cities, the sixth tier) and Adelaide (a Gamma + city, the eighth tier). Perhaps
more than cities elsewhere, Australian cities have pursued the goal of becoming
‘global’. Global status is routinely mobilised by Australian cities as a tool to facil-
itate economic growth and encourage business confidence (PricewaterhouseCoo-
pers, 2010). Further, with rapidly growing populations and wealth across Asia,
Australia (and, in particular, its cities) has sought to benefit from the so-called
Asian Century (Australian Government, 2012) through expanding trade relation-
ships, economic activity, and corporate governance functions through Asia and the
Pacific region. This has seen simultaneously a restructure and significant growth
in the economies of Australia cities. According to the State of Australian Cities
2014–2015 report, Australian cities are ‘important parts of the national economy
and gateways for much of Australia’s interaction with the global economy’
(Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, 2015: 51). While New
Zealand’s economy is highly interconnected and dependent on global markets –
the result of a dramatic restructuring of what once was a comparatively protected
national economy (Larner et al., 2007) – the political projects surrounding the
designation of global city status are much more subdued than Australian cities.
Auckland, for example, has tended to emphasise sustainability and liveability as
an overarching policy ambition, rather than global city status (Lewis and Murphy,
2015). It is reasonable to surmise that the relatively small size of New Zealand’s
cities, and their distance from major population centres, make global city projects

3
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2016t.html.
94 Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker
unviable. On the 2016 GaWC rankings, Auckland is defined as a Beta + city and
Wellington a Gamma –.
The economies of Sydney and Melbourne have grown rapidly and have benefited
from a significant shift in the structure of the Australian economy. From the early
1900s the Australian economy has evolved from one dominated by agricultural-
related industries, which accounted for between 20% and 30% of GDP up to the
1950s. The importance of manufacturing grew steadily from the 1900s, peaking
in the early 1960s, where it accounted for almost 30% of the Australian GDP.
Since this period the importance of manufacturing to the national economy has
declined significantly, with it now accounting for around 6% of the GDP. The
role of business services as a proportion of the GDP grew from the early 1980s,
overtaking manufacturing as the main contributor to GDP in the early 1990s
(Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, 2015). The growth of
business services to the national economy comes in response to a series of finan-
cial and monetary policies implemented by the commonwealth government which
sought to promote Australia’s integration into the global economy. Policy initia-
tives included floating the Australian dollar and removing tariffs and trade bar-
riers, opening up international trade (Centre for International Economics, 2017).
Business services now account for around 20% of Australian GDP. Importantly,
much of these services are performed in Australia’s largest cities. Mining represents
another major industry sector which contributes to Australian GDP, with peaks of
around 10% of the GDP in the late 2000s and early 2010s (Department of Infra-
structure and Regional Development, 2015).
Economic activity is concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne. For the financial
year 2016–2017, Sydney accounted for 24.7% of the national GDP, while Mel-
bourne contributed 19.2%. The next highest urban centre was Brisbane, with
9.3% (SGS Economics and Planning, 2017). While almost 44% of GDP occurred
in Sydney and Melbourne, two-thirds of all economic growth (in terms of GDP) in
the same period occurred in these two cities, with the rest of Australia making up
the remaining third (SGS Economics and Planning, 2017). This level of economic
concentration in such a small number of cities is rare globally. Typically, contribu-
tion to economic performance and growth is distributed between a greater num-
ber of large cities. According to the World Bank (2016, cited in Greater Sydney
Commission, 2018) Sydney’s 2015–2016 GDP (AU$401 billion) was higher than
the GDP for New Zealand (AU$248 billion) and Singapore (AU$399 billion) and
just below Hong Kong (AU$431 billion). Melbourne’s GDP (AU$304 billion) was
also higher than the New Zealand GDP. Much of this economic productivity is con-
centrated in the CBDs of Australia’s capital cities and specialised high-tech business
parks. For Sydney, the CBD contributes 23% of the total economic activity of the
city. If other major commercial centres and high-tech business parks located in the
‘Global Arc’ – an urban planning region which includes major centres stretching
across the east and north of the city – are combined with the CBD, this area con-
tributes over a third (approximately 35%) of the total economic activity of Sydney
(Kelly and Donegan, 2014). A similar situation is observed in Melbourne where
the CBD and surrounding inner-city centres (such as Docklands and Southbank)
account for 30% of the total economic activity of the city. In Brisbane and Perth,
while the total value of economic activity is well below Sydney and Melbourne, the
 Australasian Cities 95
CBD dominant economic activity accounting for 19% and 30% of total economic
activity respectively (Kelly and Donegan, 2014).
Sydney and Melbourne have emerged as important locations for national and
regional (Asia-Pacific) corporate headquarters. According to the IBISWorld’s 2018
Top 500 Private Companies list, 183 companies have their headquarters in Syd-
ney/New South Wales (36.6%), while 161 have their headquarters in Melbourne/
Victoria (32.2%) (Australian Financial Review, 2018). Recent years have seen an
increase in the number of private companies in Melbourne/Victoria. For example,
in 2015, 139 of the Top 500 companies had headquarters in Melbourne/Victoria
(27.8%), while 206 had headquarters in Sydney/New South Wales (41.2%). While
there has been some movement between Sydney and Melbourne, the dominance
of these two cities remains unchallenged, with 68.8% of the top 500 companies in
one of these cities in 2018. The concentration in Sydney is more pronounced for the
international banking and finance sector, where 93.6% of international financial
institutions and 74% of authorised deposit-taking banks are based in Sydney, with
5% of the Sydney workforce employed in the finance and insurance industry (New
South Wales Trade and Investment, 2014). The Global Financial Centres Index 22
(Z/Yen and China Development Institute, 2017) identified Sydney as the eighth and
Melbourne as the thirteenth most important global financial centres.
Like Australia, New Zealand’s economy has undergone major structural transfor-
mations that position its cities as central to national economic performance. Until the
mid-1900s, New Zealand was commonly referred to as ‘Britain’s farm’, reflecting both
the dominance of agricultural products (e.g. wool, dairy products, meat) within the
national economy and its dependence on the British market. In the mid-1990s, Britain
bought approximately 90% of New Zealand’s production (Reserve Bank of New
Zealand, 2007). A series of factors – not least the Great Depression, Britain’s entry
into the European Economic Community, and ideological preferences for market allo-
cation – led to a radical and, by international standards, rapid restructuring of the
economy during the 1980s via rounds of privatisation, corporatisation, deregulation,
and trade liberalisation (Larner et al., 2007; Reserve Bank of New Zealand, 2007). By
the late 1990s, Britain bought approximately 6% of New Zealand’s production, and
tourism and knowledge-based industries, many of which were located in cities, were
far more prominent (Reserve Bank of New Zealand, 2007). Between 2000 and 2015,
employment in knowledge-intensive services increased by over 40%, much more than
other service jobs (under 30%) and primary industry (under 20%), and currently
about one-third of service sector jobs are knowledge-intensive (New Zealand Produc-
tivity Commission, 2017). New Zealand’s economy is now significantly urbanised. In
2013, the three largest cities (Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch) produced up
to 56% of national GDP on less than 1% of the nation’s land area (Nunns, 2014).
Auckland contributes a disproportionately high amount of national economic output,
38% in the year ended March 2018, up from 36.8% in 2013 (Auckland Tourism,
Events and Economic Development, 2018). So too did Wellington, which contributed
13.2% of national GDP in 2015, while comprising 10.9% of the national population
(Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 2015). New Zealand’s major cit-
ies differ somewhat in their economic make-up, with Auckland being a centre of
business services, Wellington a centre for scientific and administrative services, and
Christchurch a centre for agricultural services and manufacturing.
96 Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker
Housing

In response to population growth pressures facing many Australian and New Zea-
land cities, recent decades have seen governments seek to reconfigure the urban built
form. This reconfiguration comes in response to the historical form of urban growth
and development which, particularly in the post-World War II period, was char-
acterised by rapid outward expansion of the urban fringe (Ruming et al., 2018;
Johnson et al., 2019). This low density urban sprawl was driven by owner builders,
state housing corporations, and speculative developers (Davison, 2013; Murphy,
2003). Mirroring the process of outward urban expansion characteristic of North
American cities, urban sprawl was facilitated by growing car dependency and related
transport infrastructure, such as freeway developments, which allowed populations
to progressively live away from the central business district and inner-city manu-
facturing (Dodson, 2016). Accompanying this outward expansion of the city was
the emergence of the ‘Great Australian Dream’ and, in New Zealand, the ‘quarter
acre paradise’, both referring to a detached/separate home on a quarter acre block
(although blocks were rarely this large) in private ownership (May, 2009; Murphy
and Rehm, 2016) and the associated notion of the heterosexual nuclear family. As a
result, Australian and New Zealand cities have some of the lowest urban densities
in the world. Depending how you define the city (i.e. where urban boundaries are
drawn) many have densities lower than cities such as Los Angeles (the architype for
sprawling cities) (Ruming, 2014). Comparing within Australasia, Sydney has the
highest population-weighted density among major cities, with approximately 7,500
people per square kilometre, followed by Auckland (approx. 4,000), Melbourne (ap-
prox. 4,000), Wellington (approx. 4,000), Perth (approx. 3,800), Brisbane (approx.
3,500), Christchurch (approx. 3,000), and Adelaide (approx. 2,200) (New Zealand
Productivity Commission, 2017). Recent decades have seen cities in Australia and
New Zealand attempt to temper the dominance – in imaginative and numerical
terms – of low density housing by enabling and promoting a more varied range of
medium- and high-density housing, often in the central city and inner-urban neigh-
bourhoods, through new forms of urban consolidation and regeneration (Ruming,
2018b; Johnson et al., 2019).
Accompanying planning, development, and building regulations in the post-
World War II period, which allowed and promoted outward urban expansion,
were housing-related policies that emphasised home ownership over other forms of
housing tenure. From the 1950s, the Australian commonwealth government intro-
duced taxation, funding, and regulatory frameworks that supported private home
purchase (Badcock and Beer, 2000). As a result, Australia has one of the highest rates
of private homeownership, with historically around 70% of dwellings being owned
(either with or without a mortgage), although recent decades have seen a decline in
the proportion of dwellings owned outright and an increase in the proportion with
a mortgage (Burke et al., 2014). In 2016, across all of Australia 65.5% of dwellings
were in private ownership (31% owned outright, 34.5% with a mortgage). For the
majority of Australian cities, the proportion of households owning their home is
lower than this national figure, with regional locations having higher rates of own-
ership. Only Perth, with 66.4% of dwellings in ownership is above the national
figure, although Hobart (65.2%) and Adelaide (64.7%) come close. In the largest
 Australasian Cities 97
cities of Sydney and Melbourne the rate of ownership is lower, with 59.2% and
63.3%, respectively. Brisbane has a rate identical to Sydney (59.2%), while Dar-
win has the lowest rate of ownership with just 46.9%. Similarly, New Zealand has
historically had high rates of homeownership, resulting from strong cultural pref-
erences for ownership, unfavourable conditions for renters, and various financial
incentives (Murphy and Rehm, 2016). However, rates of home ownership have
begun to decline. In 1986, homeownership rates were 74% in New Zealand and in
Auckland; in 2013, they were 65% in New Zealand and 62% in Auckland (Good-
year and Fabian, 2015). Falling home ownership rates have prompted widespread
debates about intergenerational disparities and the impossibility of the ‘dream’ of
home ownership for large segments of the population, particularly in larger cities.
It is estimated that across all Australia’s capital cities, property prices increased by
82% between 2006 and 2016 (Compass Housing, 2018), with Sydney and Melbourne
having the highest house prices. In 2017 the median price for a detached dwelling
in Sydney was AU$900,000, up from AU$472,000 in 2007 (an increase of 90.7%).
For apartments, the median price rose from AU$380,000 in 2007 to AU$720,000
in 2017 (an increase of 89.5%). The fastest rates of growth were observed in the
inner and middle-ring suburbs. For example, the price of detached houses in mid-
dle-ring suburbs grew by 148.8% (from AU$580,000 to AU$1,443,000) and the
price of apartments in inner-ring suburbs grew by 102.6% (from AU$459,000 to
AU$930,000) between 2007 and 2017 (Department of Family and Community Ser-
vices, 2017). Similar trends are observed in Melbourne, where the median price of
a detached dwelling grew from AU$372,000 in 2007 to AU$720,000 in 2017 (a
growth of 93.5%). However, the rate of price growth for apartments in Melbourne
for this period was below that recorded in Sydney – the median apartment price
went from $AU340,000 to AU$530,000 (a growth of 55.9%) (Department of Envi-
ronment, Land, Water and Planning, 2017). According to CoreLogic (2016), in 2016
Sydney had a house price to income ratio of 8.3,4 while Melbourne had a ratio of
7.1 – the least affordable housing markets in Australia.
In New Zealand’s major cities, house prices have risen considerably over the last
two decades, leading to much concern about an ‘affordability crisis’, particularly in
Auckland. In Auckland, the median house price was NZ$852,000 (at August 2018),
compared to NZ$590,000 in Wellington and NZ$440,000 in Christchurch. Nation-
ally, the house price to income ratio rose from 3.2 in January 2002 to 6.3 in June
2018. Auckland’s median multiple rose from 4.0 to 9.1 over the same period, while
Wellington (3.1–6.0) and Christchurch (3.0–4.9) also experienced sizeable increases
(Interest.co.nz, 2018).
In addition to state support for private home ownership, the 1950s also saw
a significant shift in Australian commonwealth government policy around rental
housing support. Following World War II, commonwealth funds were allocated to
the construction of large-scale public housing estates, many of which contributed
to the outward sprawl of Australian cities (Pawson and Pinnegar, 2018). Public
housing was seen in this early period as a form of housing capable of accommodat-
ing middle-income working families and lower socioeconomic households which

4
Meaning the median house price was 8.3 times the median household income.
98 Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker
required some state assistance. Despite this early period of policy support, public
housing in Australia never reached the levels observed in other Western countries,
such as the United Kingdom or across Europe, never accounting for more than 6%
of total housing stock (Groenhart and Burke, 2014). From the 1950s, the com-
monwealth housing policy began to shift funding from the public housing sector
towards the private sector, a process that accelerated rapidly in the mid-1980s, align-
ing with an underlying neoliberal political philosophy that positioned the private
sector as best equipped to provide rental housing. Accompanying a decrease in the
funds for new social housing provision, funds were directly allocated to individ-
uals and households (in the form of commonwealth rental assistance) looking to
secure rental accommodation in the private market. Rather than providing afford-
able housing through direct state provision (public housing), funds were allocated to
households to reduce the amount they spent on rent in the private market. Accom-
panying the establishment of rental subsidy payments, a number of policy conditions
have progressively been established to support the provision of rental housing, pri-
marily in the area of taxation policy, such as negative gearing (Wood et al., 2010).
New Zealand has followed a similar trajectory, with central government decreasing
demand-side interventions in the housing market (such as through the development
of social housing) from the 1990s and switching to supply-side interventions, such
as tax incentives for investors and rent assistance payments (Murphy, 2003). Thus,
owning a rental property has emerged as an important form of investment for many
Australian and New Zealand households. For example, it is estimated that approx-
imately 11% of adult Australians own an investment property.5 Often discursively
framed as ‘mum-and-dad’ investors, any efforts to reconfigure the taxation condi-
tions which support investment in private rental accommodation has been met with
stiff opposition and political parties have historically been reluctant to change these
conditions (Eccleston et al., 2018).
Over the past 5  years, public and policy discourse has positioned foreign
investment – where non-citizens purchase properties – as a major driver of increased
dwelling prices and associated affordability pressures across Australasian cities
(Rogers et al., 2015). In 2015–2016, AU$72 billion of foreign investment in res-
idential real estate in Australia (over 40,000 dwellings purchased) was approved
by the Foreign Investment Review Board (2018) (29% of all foreign investment
coming into Australia). This fell to $25 billion in 2016–2017 (13% of total foreign
investment) following a series of taxation reforms from commonwealth and state
governments which sought to limit foreign investment in residential real estate and
cool the housing markets in the capital cities (Foreign Investment Review Board,
2018). Despite a fall in the number of foreign investors, the bulk of residential pur-
chases were in New South Wales (32%) and Victoria (41%), almost all of these in
Sydney and Melbourne (Foreign Investment Review Board, 2018). In New Zealand,
a ban on foreign residential investment was introduced in 2018 as a response to pub-
lic perceptions of the adverse impacts of foreign investment on housing affordability,

5
Number of persons who declared a rental income as part of their 2015–2016 tax return
(2,116,755 people, ATO data) as a proportion of the 2018 population aged 15 years and
over (19,037,271 people, ABS Census data).
 Australasian Cities 99
particularly in Auckland and Queenstown (a popular skiing destination for domestic
and international tourists) (Reuters, 2018). While foreign investment in residential
property is routinely identified as a significant driver of house price inflation and
related affordability issues in Australian and New Zealand cities, particularly for
first-time home owners, Rogers et al. (2018) outline how foreign investment is sup-
ported by domestic investors who seek to gain from the capital gains associated with
increased demand.
Within the context of significant population growth and policy settings promot-
ing rental property construction, the number and proportion of Australian house-
holds living in rental properties has increased over the past decade. Nationally, the
proportion of Australians renting their home grew from 27% in 2006 to 31% in
2016. Across all capital cities, between 2006 and 2016, the number of households
in rented properties grew by at least 20% and in all cities this rate of growth was
well above the growth rate for households who own their homes. Accompanying
growth in the number of households living in private rental accommodation has
been a significant increase in the costs of rents being paid. In Australia’s largest
cities, median rent grew by around 75% (growing from AU$250/week to AU$440/
week in Sydney and AU$200 to AU$350/week in Melbourne). According to anal-
ysis by Compass Housing (2018), in the period 2006 to 2016, the median rent
across all capital cities grew by 76% compared to just a 40% growth in household
incomes, resulting in a growing rate of rental stress. Unsurprisingly, inner-city
suburbs across all Australian capital cities were the least affordable in terms of
rent, with an almost complete absence of affordable private rental properties (i.e.
properties where low income households pay less than 30% of their income on
rent) (Daley and Coates, 2018). In Auckland, the proportion of renting house-
holds increased from 32.4% in 2006 to 35.4% in 2013, slightly higher than the
national average of 33% in 2013. In 2013, renting households in Auckland spent
an average of 25% of their income on rent (compared to just over 20% in Wel-
lington and Christchurch). This was substantially more than home owners, who
spent an average of 15.2% of their income in Auckland, and 12% and 10.6% in
the Wellington and greater Christchurch regions.
While the support for private rental has led to long-term affordable housing chal-
lenges, it has also contributed towards reducing the importance of social housing,
effectively residualising tenants and locations of social housing across Australasian
cities (Morris, 2015; Murphy, 2003). Shifts in policy support for private rental (and
ownership) resulted in a decline in the level of funding, in real terms, flowing to the
social housing sector (Jacobs et al., 2013). As a result, the number of new social
dwellings constructed has been well below demand, with significant waiting times
in many major Australasian cities of over 10 years (Groenhart and Burke, 2014). In
Australia and New Zealand, efforts have been made to shift public housing stock
to the community housing sector (Norman and Teahan, 2015; Pawson et al., 2013).
While, in Australia, this has seen the number of social housing properties managed
by community housing providers increase, the overall proportion of the housing
stock as social housing has fallen in all capital cities. For example, in Sydney,
according to the 2016 Census, there are 30,057 households in social housing (com-
pared to 245,371 households in private rental), accounting for just 3.6% of the total
housing stock. In the decade from 2006 to 2016, the number of households in social
100 Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker
housing grew by 5.8% (1,638 additional households) compared to 38.8% growth
in households in private rental (67,243 additional households). A similar story is
observed for Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth where the number of households in
social housing grew by between 1,060 (Perth) and 1,638 (Brisbane) (accounting for
between 2.6% in Melbourne and 3.6% in Brisbane of the housing stock), at growth
rates well below private rental, households with a mortgage and even the number
of outright owners. In New Zealand, social housing has been similarly residualised,
now functioning as a ‘tenure of last resort’ (Murphy, 2014) for those unable to
access the private housing market. As a proxy for this residualisation, the number of
dwellings managed by the state housing authority (Housing New Zealand) declined
from 69,171 units in 2011 to 62,917 in 2017. On a per capita basis, this reduction
is made more severe through strong population growth over that period (Johnson
et al., 2018). Social housing has fallen from 4.0% of national housing stock in 2008
to 3.4% in 2017.
As a product of growing demand and lack of investment in new stock, an
increasingly focused allocation for social housing has been implemented across
Australasian cities. Only the most socially and economically disadvantaged are
now eligible for social housing. As a result, residents and locations are increasingly
stigmatised (Jacobs and Flanagan, 2013). The concentration of social housing in
large estates across Australian cities has worked to concentrate social disadvan-
tage. Across Australian cities the most social and economically disadvantaged sub-
urbs tend to be Radburn-designed6 fringe public housing estates or high-density
apartment estates located in inner-city areas. The social disadvantage, often char-
acterised by low rates of education and employment and high crime rates, cou-
pled with poorly maintained dwellings (as a result of reduced funding and state
government investment in maintenance), has, from the 1990s, seen many of these
locations emerge as sites of community renewal and urban regeneration (Pawson
and Pinnegar, 2018). While early efforts sought to address issues of social dis-
advantage in situ, through community development and education/employment
initiatives, more recent efforts have seen the widespread physical regeneration of
these estates. This regeneration of social housing estates is now one of the key
features of urban change across Australasian cities (Gordon et al., 2017; Rum-
ing, 2018b).

Spatial Inequality

The benefits of economic restructuring and globalisation have not been equitably
distributed across urban populations, with costs and benefits accruing unevenly
for different social groups. While it has been suggested that the social divides of
Australian cities have not historically been as pronounced as those in cities in

6
The planning and development of social housing estates copied the Garden City design
principles of the Radburn development in New Jersey, USA. Key design principles include
large open public spaces, a road layout dominated by cul-de-sacs, and terrace dwellings
where the front of the dwelling faced the public park, rather than the street.
 Australasian Cities 101
the United States (Dowling and McGuirk, 2012), changes in the structure of the
economy, education and employment opportunities, together with population
changes (particularly immigration) and housing market pressures have left Aus-
tralasian cities divided (Randolph and Tice, 2017). While all Australian and New
Zealand cities are characterised by spatial inequalities (Table 5.2), with pockets of
both extreme wealth and deprivation, Sydney and Auckland present stark cases of
this division.
In both public and academic discourse Sydney is seen to be divided by a so-called
latte line (Gladstone, 2018) – an imaginary boundary which cuts the city in half
along socioeconomic lines, running from the northwest to the southeast. To the
north and east of the line live those residents who have benefited from spatial and
economic restructuring of Sydney – they are the most advantaged populations,
characterised by high household incomes, high rates of formal education, high
rates of home ownership, high rates of professional and managerial employment,
and an older age profile. These populations are healthier and have longer life
expectancies. They have benefited from rapid increases in house price and tax-
ation policies supporting investment in rental properties. To the south and west
of the line the inverse is generally true. These populations are more disadvan-
taged, they have borne the brunt of a decline in manufacturing and comparative
decrease in ‘blue collar’ jobs, they have lower rates of formal education and are
less likely to work in professional or managerial jobs, they have lower incomes,
they are more likely to be a recent immigrant, they have lower rates of home own-
ership and have benefited less from increases in house price growth, and there is
a high concentration of extreme disadvantage in social housing estates scattered
throughout the region. They are structurally disadvantaged by the lack of appro-

Table 5.2  Socio-spatial divides in Australasian cities.

Areas of low Areas of high

socioeconomic status
Sydney Outer western suburbs
Inner and outer south-west-
ern suburbs
Melbourne Outer northern suburbs
Western suburbs
Outer south-eastern suburbs
Brisbane Outer south-western suburbs
Outer southern suburbs
Perth North-east inland suburbs
South-east inland suburbs
South-west coastal suburbs
Adelaide Northern suburbs
Hobart North-west suburbs
Auckland Southern and western suburbs
Wellington Northern (outer) and some
southern suburbs
Christchurch Eastern suburbs (central
and outer)
socioeconomic status
Eastern and northern suburbs
Eastern and north-eastern suburbs
Inner southern suburbs
Inner northern suburbs
Inner western suburbs
South-eastern suburbs
North-west and western
coastal suburbs
Eastern and south-eastern suburbs
Central and southern suburbs
Central, eastern, and
northern suburbs
Central and some
southern suburbs
Northern and north-
western suburbs
102 Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker
priate (public) transport infrastructure and are often forced to endure long and
expensive commutes to work (Randolph and Holloway, 2005; Randolph and Tice,
2014, 2017).
Despite ingrained public narratives of New Zealand being an egalitarian society,
inequality in wealth and income is a continuing issue (Perry, 2018; Rashbrooke,
2013) that manifests in urban spatial organisation. ‘Hidden classes’, as Caldwell and
Brown (2007) call them, are spatially as much as socioeconomically inscribed. They
go as far as to identify several of New Zealand’s archetypical hidden classes – or
‘tribes’ – with neighbourhoods of its major cities: the ‘North Shore Tribe’ (Auck-
land, upwardly mobile working class to middle class), the ‘Grey Lynn Tribe’ (Auck-
land, inner suburb, ‘trendy’, White), the ‘Remuera Tribe’ (Auckland, inner suburb,
old wealth), the ‘Otara Tribe’ (Auckland, outer suburb, M ori/Pacifica prominent),
the ‘Cuba Street Tribe’ (Wellington, central city, bohemian) and the ‘Papatoetoe
Tribe’ (Auckland, outer suburb, working class). Various measures of socioeco-
nomic inequality affirm the unevenness of New Zealand’s cities. Newly developed
indices of multiple deprivation (Exeter et al., 2017) – which comprise measures of
employment, income, crime, health, and others – evidence marked differences on
socioeconomic status in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch, among other cities
(Indices of Multiple Derivation, n.d.; summarised in broad terms in Table 5.2), pro-
duced and compounded, in part, by waves of economic and social restructuring over
the last forty years, in particular.
In conclusion, Australasian cities (as with cities in other regions of the world) are
diverse, with each city the product of a unique, but often similar, histories and expe-
riencing different pressures in terms of economic and population growth. However,
across Australia and New Zealand, a defining characteristic is that a clear urban
hierarchy has emerged, with the largest cities in the region – Sydney, Melbourne,
and Auckland – playing a major role in housing the population and in generating
economic activity. These are the sites of corporate governance, which are linked into
the global economy and are responsible for generating much of the national GDP.
They continue to be the home to new migrants and are experiencing rapid rates of
population growth. With this growth comes a series of challenges related to con-
cerns around increased housing affordability, the need for new housing supply and
the built form it takes (fringe development compared to a more dense urban form),
access to employment for some groups, and a lack of appropriate infrastructure.
These changes have worked to exacerbate the social and economic divisions across
cities in Australia and New Zealand – there are winners and losers of these processes
and the gaps between these groups appear to be getting wider.

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 6
European Cities Between Continuity
and Change
Yuri Kazepov, Roberta Cucca, Byeongsun Ahn, and
Christophe Verrier

Introduction

European cities have attracted considerable theoretical and empirical attention since
Max Weber (1978 [1921]) identified the requisite conditions for the development of
capitalism in medieval occidental cities. Scholars from different disciplines have at-
tempted to highlight their distinctive characteristics and trace their development and
changing nature. From this perspective, the study of the European city becomes a
peculiar way of looking into the broader role of cities in the development of specific
social, political, and economic outcomes. In fact, the complex layering of social,
economic, political, and cultural history does not allow for identifying one European
city model (Pinol et al., 2003), rather it led scholars to identify a common heritage,
paralleled by differentiating factors. Much of the distinctiveness of European cities,
therefore, depends on how much we need to zoom out from particular historical cit-
ies to find some common denominators. In this exercise, the role of nation-states in
influencing European cities’ models becomes evident. This is especially evident given
their ability to define specific jurisdictions – since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) –
and their capacity for allocating resources through the welfare state, particularly
since the second half of the nineteenth century.
In order to describe the commonalities and distinctive characteristics of European
cities, this chapter is divided into five sections. The first section provides a brief his-
tory of European cities, showing the importance of disentangling the complex his-
torical layering of urban Europe and the way it has contributed to the structure of
contemporary European cities.
Building on this historical account, the second section highlights the ways in
which scholars used specific analytical dimensions as unifying factors to portray a

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
110 KAZEPOV, CUCCA, AHN AND VERRIER
more systematic ‘European city model’. Specifically, it shows the underlying broader
criticism of structuralist accounts of global convergence found in urban studies, the
different theoretical approaches developed to define its contours, and the different
articulations of the model emerging as soon as we zoom in analytically.
The third section addresses the relationship between cities and the state as a key
constituent analytical element of the model and, at the same time, a fundamental
empirical factor that structures the degrees of freedom that cities have, both in terms
of resources, regulatory capacity, and political power.
The fourth section analyses the challenges that European cities are currently fac-
ing, highlighting the ways in which they are addressed by the different European
urban governance regimes.
The fifth and final section provides a brief outlook on the future of European
cities, identifying common and diverging trends and highlighting possible pathways
for research.
The argument put forward assumes that differentiating factors are not only
important in producing contexts that influence European cities’ resilience, they are
also important because they influence their ability to innovate and cope with the
challenges of globalisation.

The History of European Cities

The history of European cities, and its accompanying historiographies, are com-
plex and multifaceted. The endeavour of looking into the historical trajectories of
European cities is far from novel. Its modern origins trace back to the seminal contri-
butions of Fustel de Coulanges (1877) and Max Weber (1966). Both authors main-
tained that rather than analysing urban settlements primarily through morphology,
cities have to be understood principally as a social and political association. Each, in
his own way, understood the perceived particularism of the sociopolitical institutions
of occidental cities as the result of historical evolution that originated in the Greek
polis and the Roman urbs. This topic has remained relevant ever since, with scholars
having engaged recently in the history of the cities of Europe. The historiography on
the subject has evolved a great deal since Weber, however, the general historical pe-
riodisation has remained vastly unchanged. In their voluminous contribution on the
subject, Pinol et al. (2003) identified four main historical periods bearing their own
specific trends and developments. Each subsequent era participated in a layering that
would lead to the contemporary European city, namely: (a) the ancient city (tenth
century BCE to seventh century CE); (b) the medieval city (seventh to fifteenth cen-
turies); (c) the modern city (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries); (d) the contemporary
city (from the nineteenth century to the present day). The last category requires –
from a social science perspective – a further differentiation into: (d) the industrial
city (from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries); (e) the contemporary city (from
the twentieth century to the present day).

(a) The ancient city. The European continent saw its first phase of urbanisation
during the first millennia BCE, which culminated with the Greco-Roman civ-
ilisations (Pinol et al., 2003). As the ancient Greek city-states developed, so
did the novel idea of the city as an autonomous political and social entity, as
 European Cities Between Continuity and Change 111
discussed in Plato’s Republic (1991) and Aristotle’s Politics (2013). Ultimately,
the sovereignty of the Greek, and later Roman, city was instrumental to these
civilisations’ advances in philosophy and science, as well as in their expansion
around the Mediterranean basin. At their apogee, the Romans had established
a vast empire organised around self-governing cities, with Rome as its political
and social node. The rise of these ancient cities represents a significant turning
point in European urban history, with their expansion representing far more
than the continent’s first true instance of urbanisation. Indeed, the central
role taken by citizenship as a mode of social organisation would become an
important distinctive feature of the Greco-Roman period. It is on this basis
that scholars – from Fustel de Coulanges (1877), to Weber (1966) or, more
recently, Finley (1981) – have characterised the particular trajectory leading
to contemporary European cities. Later, the gradual collapse of the Roman
Empire brought the slow regression of urbanisation, as settlements faced war
and economic decline. By the fifth century, these tight political and economic
linkages that previously connected large swathes of southern and western Eu-
rope had either disappeared or contracted (Pinol et al., 2003).
(b) The medieval city. Starting in the seventh century, the European continent
saw important regional variations in the degrees and forms of urbanisation.
Although primary sources are rather scarce until the late Middle Ages, these
different pathways are still strikingly visible when looking at contemporary
urban morphologies around Europe. Benevolo (1993) demonstrates this
point, describing the old towns of southern France and Italy, where Roman
infrastructure continued to frame urbanisation for centuries after their down-
fall. Indeed, for Bologna and Florence, as in many other cities, the Roman
remains provided ‘a neutral geometric base’ (Benevolo, 1993: 44) for the later
cities’ fortifications and thoroughfares within which medieval urbanity could
flourish. Contrary to this trajectory, urbanisation in northern and eastern Eu-
rope would take hold much later in the trading ports of the Baltic by the turn
of the eleventh century (Clark, 2009). Indeed, one would have to wait for the
eleventh century to see the next period of continuous urbanisation, which
would ultimately establish the foundation for modern states and market econ-
omies, as well as a significant part of the urban networks still visible today.
Over four centuries, market cities flourished regionally – in stark contrast to
the resource-consuming settlements of the nobility and clergy – and acted as
hubs for different merchants wishing to trade goods away from the taxation
power of local lords. In these towns, economic relations took a prominent
place as the organising force binding inhabitants together (Christensen and
Mikkelsen, 2006). As such, these types of trading cities were distinct from the
consumer towns of the nobility, which used their hinterland for subsistence.
In these trading cities, the mutually beneficial nature of these economic rela-
tions ultimately encouraged local inhabitants to cooperate in order to ensure
the stability and protection of their city (Eibach, 2007). It is on this basis that
Weber (Weber, 1966: 55) argued for the peculiarity of the medieval European
city, where the Bürger’s membership was based on their individual involve-
ment in the regulation of social matters as a citizen and bearer of rights and
duties, subject to a common legislation (Häussermann and Haila, 2005;
112 KAZEPOV, CUCCA, AHN AND VERRIER
Pirenne, 1925). For Weber, this novelty would act as the early foundation of
modern society. On the one hand, this led to the development of the market as
an exchange system and, on the other hand, citizenship emerged as a mode of
social organisation distanced from feudal bonds, which in turn offered fertile
ground for economic and social innovation (Davids and De Munck, 2014).1
(c) The modern city and the rise of national states. By the sixteenth century,
the internal divisions within trading cities between powerful factions seek-
ing more wealth created instability, making them easy targets for rising
nation-states (Tarrow, 2004). At variegated rates across Europe, the imperial
and monarchic powers prompted state apparatus capable of ensuring both
coercive power on larger realms of territory and control on their economic
systems. Through their mercantilist economic policies, these ‘Westpha-
lian’ nation-states would prove much more capable of levying the wealth
necessary for military projection as atomised free cities (Tilly, 1990). The
city then became ancillary to a nationally organised power, though retaining
its symbolic charge as rulers was immortalised through the presence of his-
torical monuments (Therborn, 2017).
(d) The industrial city. Beginning in the eighteenth century Britain, industrial-
isation marks a next turning point in the history of European cities. With
its rapidly expanding production, the Industrial Revolution hinged, in large
part, on the exploitation of a readily available, low-wage, labour force, which
needed housing close to their work (Stearns, 2013). As industrialisation
spread around Europe, so did the growth of its dense working-class quarters
of overcrowded dwellings lacking basic amenities. This dramatic rise of urban
poverty in industrial cities is probably best exemplified by critical voices rang-
ing from Chartist reformism to the revolutionary thought of Marx and En-
gels (Lipset, 1983). These social issues would agitate the European nineteenth
century with unrest and conflict, which would ultimately lead to major reform
(Crouch, 1994). In this sense, the industrial city was not only remarkable in
size, but also played a critical role in the development of ways to conceive and
manage new social risks, giving way to nascent welfare systems (Flora and
Heidenheimer, 1981). However, the increasing power of the national state
during the same period made the city somewhat peripheral in the implemen-
tation of key measures in tackling, for instance, unemployment and illness.

1 
As much as the medieval free city may appear as an important turning point in European
urban history, associating this development to the rise of an ‘occidental city’ in the way
Weber did, poses some problems. For instance, it is important to understand that the
trading cities of northern Europe were a relative exception in Europe, that was still main-
taining a low degree of urbanisation. At the same time as urbanisation takes hold around
the Baltic, a harsh feudal system of powerful nobility dominated the nearby Polish king-
dom, where cities were marginalized (Wyrobisz, 1994). Moreover, it appears difficult to
justify the exceptionalism of the occidental city as a community liberated from tribal and
religious bonds. As Isin (2003) argues, the merchant cities of medieval Europe were not
only communal bodies of free citizen but also associations of powerful trading families
not as drastically different from some of its counterparts outside Europe.
 European Cities Between Continuity and Change 113
In this sense, as much as these issues were urban in their nature, it is the fear
of working-class unrest among national rulers that led to nationally organ-
ised welfare measures (Alber, 1982). This would set the scene for the later
growth of the nation-state during the twentieth century and the development
of citizenship on national grounds.
(e) The contemporary city. Under Fordism, cities were primary places of both
mass production and mass consumption. On the one hand, economic growth
was fuelled by a strong demand for consumption, largely concentrated in cit-
ies. On the other hand, efficient and economic functions in cities required the
organisation of social reproduction through stable industrial relations and
generous welfare systems (Amin, 1995). As a result of an entanglement of
factors – both exogenous and endogenous – this balance dramatically changed
over the last decades of the twentieth century. The industrial crisis during the
1970s paved the way for a long-lasting restructuring process of local produc-
tion systems. Sudden changes in the political system following the fall of the
Berlin Wall and later with the enlargement of the European Union, opened
new markets and new geopolitical scenarios characterised by increasing glo-
balisation. These changes undermined the financial basis of national welfare
systems, tightening their budgets and limiting their redistributive role also
from the territorial point of view. The economic crisis in 2008 reinforced this
tendency and many cities in Europe have reoriented their urban agendas to
achieve the goal of being competitive actors in the global arena, by attracting
talents and foreign investments. Within this framework, flexibility and the
search for greater competitiveness become more important than a high level
of social integration, as it used to be under Fordism. Despite this tendency,
many European cities still show a specific ability to govern social changes, and
still represent worldwide a key reference for developing urban policies and
strategies oriented towards social and spatial justice (Fainstein, 2010).

The European City Model – Similarities, but Also Differences

Weber’s notion of the ‘occidental city’ has regained momentum in more recent
attempts to define the peculiarities of a ‘European city model’. In particular, the
consideration of a ‘European city’ as a social and political actor with a higher degree
of autonomy, compared to the big metropolises in other parts of the world, has been
used in contrast to the overall pessimistic views of the declining significance of cit-
ies as actors in a globalising world (Bagnasco and Le Galès, 2000). Since the 1970s,
neo-Marxist geographers, such as Harvey (1973), started to envision the production
of urban patterns requiring a broader analysis of overall socioeconomic structures
of individual actions (Wells, 2014). In particular, his work on ‘urban entrepreneur-
ialism’ paved the way to the analysis of the processes of ‘urban neoliberalisation’ as
an overall converging trend (e.g. Swyngedouw et al., 2002). Against the ecological
tradition in urban studies, this historical-materialistic approach saw cities as spatial
units within a world system of which development trajectories were structured by
the capitalist mode of production and reproduction (Castells, 1977; Harvey, 1973,
1989). However, critical positions to the continuing tendency to identify inexorable
114 KAZEPOV, CUCCA, AHN AND VERRIER
trends of convergence driven by neoliberalism have emerged (Le Galès, 2016; Storper,
2016). Brenner et al. (2010) have partly rejected a homogeneous convergence thesis.
Without denying the existence of trends that entail a convergence towards models
influenced by the different facets of neoliberalism, they rather refined their argument
identifying the existence of differences and variations characterising urban changes.
In contrast to the neo-Marxist assumption on the neoliberal configuration of
cities in global capitalism, the renewed interest in the Weberian perspective on
modern cities saw cities as differing in terms of their distinctive national and local
institutional arrangements, dependent on their own governance regimes (Isin,
2003). From this institutionalist perspective, these scholars (e.g. Häussermann,
2005; Kazepov, 2005; Le Galès, 2002; Pahl, 1975; Rex and Moore, 1967) priori-
tised the institutional and opportunity structures of cities in different regions of the
world, whose particular modes of regulation were to mediate the repercussions of
globalisation differently to varying degrees at the urban level. In a reconsideration
of the orientalist Weberian city model (Weber, 1978 [1921]), this institutionalist
approach saw governance regimes as the main determinant for the different tra-
jectories of change and the different outcomes of urban transformation in times of
globalisation – be they neoliberal and private-market-oriented American cities or
welfare-driven and less-market dependent European cities (Fainstein, 2010; Lehto,
2000; Smith, 2002).
It is at this particular point that scholars in the neo-Weberian debate saw
European cities once again as ‘cultural and political laboratories for participation
and government’ (Kazepov, 2005: 13) and called for a context-specific intervention
into the conceptualisation of neoliberalism in critical urban studies (Clarke, 2008;
Le Galès, 2018; Pinson and Journel, 2016; Storper, 2016; Venugopal, 2015). The
neo-Weberian lens aims, from this point of view, at shedding light on other structural
and contextual factors that filter and challenge neoliberalism, bringing about diver-
sified urban outcomes (Storper and Scott, 2016). This perspective mitigates the over-
stretched generalisations of cities lost in the global networks of power, calling for
a renewed engagement with structural and institutional differences between cities.
In particular, attention should be paid to policy instruments – and their multilevel
characteristic – that structure the relations between social and economic interests
mediating global capitalism at the city level (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2004).
Specifically, scholars highlight the strong role of public administration in European
cities, which together with other characteristics like their small and medium size and
the persisting presence of a middle and lower-middle class, have continued to miti-
gate inequalities and segregation (Bagnasco and Le Galès, 2000; Kazepov, 2005; Le
Galès, 2002). Rather than claiming universal convergence within global capitalism,
in which neoliberal economic restructuring erodes the regulatory mechanisms of
cities and regions, the new European city model underlined the redistributive role
of the welfare state and the activism of local authorities (McEwen and Moreno,
2005; Musterd and Ostendorf, 1998). It is their policy frameworks that actively
promote socioeconomic and socio-spatial stability within European social market
liberalism (Kazepov and Cucca, 2018; Le Galès, 2018). This has been possible due
to the morphological, political, economic, and social developments of European cit-
ies that played an important role in the nation-state building process itself. This
continued to provide innovative mechanisms for participation and governance, as
 European Cities Between Continuity and Change 115
well as administrative tools and techniques for regulation and planning at the urban
level (Kazepov, 2005).
That said, the neo-Weberian lens on the distinctive urban governance forms of –
mainly western – European cities praised the public services and infrastructure at
the urban level in conjunction with the welfare state intervention at the national
level as a driving force behind the revival of the European city model. In fact, dur-
ing the Fordist period it was the state that successfully balanced between economic
competition and social integration, being able to compromise between public and
private interests (Cassiers and Kesteloot, 2012; Cucca and Ranci, 2017). The strong
presence of state intervention and that of an active civil society are said to contin-
uously define European cities (Le Galès, 2018). However, there is evidence of new
challenges that arise from the long-standing economic restructuring in their post-
industrial transition and, more recently, the 2008 economic crisis. A growing trend
towards flexibilisation in post-industrial European cities meant, for instance, a shift
in urban policy priorities and an increased need to mediate between the traditional
model of social cohesion and higher economic competitiveness. Together with the
recalibration processes of welfare policies at the national level, these contributed to
increasing the social inequalities in urban labour and housing markets in some cities
and countries (Kazepov and Cucca, 2018).
An emerging body of literature has identified a number of contextual factors that
shape different contours and outcomes of these processes of change in European
cities. Scholars aimed at understanding intra-European differences based on a more
nuanced analysis of the diversity of institutional arrangements. The redistribu-
tive outcomes at both the national and local level are the result of different policy
responses as to how local and state actors react to both exogenous and endogenous
pressures in times of crisis (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Ferrera, 1996; Kazepov, 2005;
Le Galès, 2002; Lehto, 2000). Some have emphasised size and income as the defin-
ing element of the differentiation process that currently unfolds in European urban
regions (Le Galès, 2018; Storper, 2016). As such, high-income metropolises with
larger local labour markets, e.g. London and Paris, are able to utilise a large labour
pool with a diverse range of skills in corresponding sectors and industries. Con-
versely, smaller, low-income cities with less-specialised urban economies, e.g. cities
in southern Italy or northern England, are prone to lower productivity and lower
employment rates (European Union, 2016). Such differentiation, however, does not
only derive from the structural differences between European cities at the horizontal
level, but also from vertically structured differences across territorial levels. The dif-
ferent degrees of autonomy allocated to local authorities, for instance, are both path
dependent and the result of a territorial reorganisation of social policies through
ad hoc reforms, which took place in the last thirty years and differed from country
to country (Barberis et al., 2010; Kazepov, 2010; Sellers and Lidström, 2007). The
evidence from the rescaling processes of social policies in post-war European cities
call for a context-specific assessment into the close intertwinement between the state
and cities, in which interscalar struggles for regulative power and the management
of resources unfold (Béal et al., 2018). This complex relationship between the state
and cities is a key analytical element of the new European city model, which deci-
phers the roles that actors beyond the state and non-state boundaries play, and their
respective influences that bring change in the degree of their regulatory capacities.
116 KAZEPOV, CUCCA, AHN AND VERRIER
The coexistence of different policy levels continues to shape the urban landscape of
contemporary European cities, on the one hand, while their structural and contex-
tual differences suggest the diverse urban processes and outcomes that differ from
city to city, on the other hand.

The European City, the State, and the Relevance of Multilevel

Governance in Europe
As it clearly emerges from the previous paragraphs, the European city and its history
have been deeply intertwined with the parallel process of state formation. The city
and the modern state mutually influenced one another and this relationship deserves
some closer attention. For this purpose, three aspects bear specific importance: (i)
the historical relationship between the state and the European city as a critical driver
of modernity, (ii) the role of nation-states and welfare systems for the contemporary
European city, and (iii) the role of recent transformations in changing the relations
between the city and the nation-state.
For Tilly, cities of the late Middle Ages would offer ‘the coincidence of a dense,
uneven urban network with a division into well-defined and more or less independent
states [that] eventually set apart Europe from the rest of the world’ (1990: 5). For
him, the economic efficiencies of the city as a place for exchange and the state as a
coercive force seeking power provided the specific conjuncture for the development
of the national state. Considered as such, only a close look at the relation between
the city, the state, and capital can underline the specificity of the European urban tra-
jectory. Similarly, this relationship becomes an enlightening way to look at contem-
porary European cities. With industrialisation, the European continent underwent
an unprecedented urbanisation, which slowly transformed its cities into production
centres employing an important labour force. The low wages and poor living con-
ditions of the time offered fertile ground for subsequent waves of popular unrest,
which needed rapid quelling for the sake of political and economic stability (Flora
and Heidenheimer, 1981). Simultaneously, consolidating its coercive power, national
states quite naturally took a central role in controlling the effects of these popular
claims, meanwhile still ensuring the stability of the capitalist accumulation process.
It is in this context that one can observe the development of the first social insurance
schemes on the European continent, exactly geared towards the quelling of claims
from labour movements (Alber, 1982; Flora and Heidenheimer, 1981). For Polanyi
(2001: 170), the states’ balancing of tensions between the social and economic
spheres became a critical factor shaping the different national trajectories in Europe
(Andreotti et al., 2018). Using this perspective allows us to better understand con-
temporary European cities, especially when it comes to the effects of post-war wel-
fare states and how they changed over time.
During the post-war decades, most European countries experienced an unprece-
dented period of economic growth and an increase in quality of life. Simultaneously,
most western European states expanded the scope of social protection measures
as to cover numerous risks stemming from old age, unemployment, housing, and
illness. Investigating these policies, Esping-Andersen (1990) proposed that the dif-
ferent welfare regimes across western Europe were mainly the result of specific tra-
jectories of working class struggle. For him, the answers of national states and elites
 European Cities Between Continuity and Change 117
to these claims would ultimately explain the forms of decommodification and social
stratification found in different countries.
Although national, this development would have an important impact on
European cities. In fact, as Fourastié (1979) would underline in his analysis of the
French trente glorieuses that urbanisation was central to the post-war period. Sim-
ilarly, the protection offered by social policies deeply affected the European city,
as the improvements in living conditions, employment conditions, education, and
health ultimately aggregated at the urban level, allowing the middle classes to grow
substantially (Baldwin, 1990). In this sense, much of the previously mentioned char-
acteristics attached to the European city model are closely linked to nationally or-
ganised welfare policies and their redistributive role. If it is possible to generalise the
importance of the national state on the development of post-war European cities, it
is also important to acknowledge variation across different countries and welfare
regimes. Indeed, local authorities play different roles in different countries. In the
Nordic countries, for instance, they have an important role not only in policy imple-
mentation but also in management and regulation. In others, for instance in France,
they play a minor – albeit increasing – role (Hooghe and Marks, 2000; Sellers and
Lidström, 2007). The primacy of the national state logic for post-war urbanisation
also apply to central and eastern Europe (CEE) countries, in particular, cities in the
planned and centrally managed economies (see, for instance, Zarecor, 2018). This
situation has led numerous scholars to consider national welfare states as an impor-
tant variable to take into account when investigating European cities.2
Focusing on the national state to understand contemporary urban Europe poses
a number of issues. Primarily, doing so would forgo the critical importance of the
city, its inhabitants, and urbanisation as a driver for change and reform throughout
the modern era; something Soja defined as the ‘generative power of cities’ (2011:
218). In this sense, one should remember that the class struggles that led to the
development of the welfare state were intimately linked to an urbanised working
class. The same applies to recent protests against austerity, populism, and neoliber-
alism. Similarly, it would be misleading to depict cities as historically passive actors
in the development of welfare states. For this purpose, one must simply look at the
blossoming of local social policies in some cities of interwar Europe which rivalled
those of their national governments. A good example is Red Vienna (Blau, 1999;
Lewis, 1983). This point becomes particularly relevant when considering the rising
importance of cities and local dynamics over the last three decades (Kazepov and
Barberis, 2017).
The strong post-war national states have experienced significant pressures and
change over the last three decades. Nationally, sociodemographic change and dein-
dustrialisation have created important financial and political pressures on states
to reduce or recalibrate spending and to reform their welfare systems (Hemerijck,
2013). However, popular preferences for social benefits and the rise of new social
risks brought about by the new economy strongly framed the range of possibil-
ities for reform (Pierson, 2001). Simultaneously, globalisation made national econ-
omies ever more dependent on the logic of transnational capital flows. Globalisation

2 
For instance, Le Galès (2005), Kazepov (2005), and McEwen and Moreno (2005).
118 KAZEPOV, CUCCA, AHN AND VERRIER
therefore appears as a rescaling of ‘socioeconomic and political-institutional spaces’,
within which state action has to be understood through dynamics occurring at dif-
ferent scales (Brenner, 1999: 431). In this sense, in a globalised world – according
to Brenner – the primacy of national dynamics has to be reconsidered to include the
influence of forces coming from above and below, resulting in dynamic multilevel
governance arrangements (Kazepov, 2010).
The development of the European Union’s political and legislative capacities in the
last three decades appears critical in this regard. It has not only resulted in a trans-
national economic space, but it has also affected the policy autonomy of its states in
key areas. This can be viewed through the slow building of ‘European citizenship’,
a system of rights and responsibilities that is no longer strictly national but shared
across member states (Jenson, 2007). For lower scales, the enshrining of subsidiar-
ity in Article 5 of the ‘Treaty on European Union’ (1992) introduced an incentive to
move policy responsibilities downwards to the lowest level capable of carrying out
the task. At the intersection of all these changes it appears more important than ever
to reconsider the relation between the European city and the state through territo-
rially more articulated lenses. On the one hand, this should be done at the regional
level, and on the other, at the supranational level. Indeed, as much as the post-war
European city could be understood through the lens of nationally centred policies, the
current situation points towards a multiplicity of levels (vertically) actually involved
in policy design, implementation, funding, and management. Subsidiarisation, as a
result of the shifting of policy responsibilities away from the national government,
has been an important trend for cities across the European Union (Kazepov, 2010;
Kazepov and Barberis, 2017). This has meant that local and regional governments
have received an ever more important role in policymaking and implementation.
Despite these commonalities, these processes have occurred in different ways across
the continent, with various formats of devolution of responsibilities and financial
resources; often closely linked to regime specificities. Unpacking the issues related
to the multilevel governance arrangements today implies, therefore, analysing shifts
and reproduction mechanisms that are crucial to understand how the concept of
European cities evolved nowadays (Andreotti et al., 2018; Cucca and Ranci, 2017).
It is especially crucial to gain insight into how European cities reacted to the current
transformations and the related challenges.

The Challenges of European Cities Facing Structural and

Contextual Changes
Despite a growing trend towards social and spatial inequalities in most post-in-
dustrial European cities, the varying outcomes of urban transformations in each
city are the result of distinctive demographic trends, social structures, and institu-
tional arrangements that contribute to largely different trajectories and outcomes of
deindustrialisation (Body-Gendrot et al., 2012; Musterd et al., 2016; Storper and
Scott, 2016). In contrast to the assumptions on the consequences of globalisation in
previous scholarship, such as the polarisation (Sassen, 1991) and professionalisation
hypotheses (Hamnett, 2003), European cities are increasingly analysed through a
neo-institutional approach in order to grasp the heterogeneity of social and spatial
inequalities that manifests itself in different shapes in urban labour and housing
 European Cities Between Continuity and Change 119
markets. This neo-institutionalist perspective aims to decipher post-Fordist urban
transformations as a historical and geographical reflection of a complex interac-
tion between the local economic and residential environment and the management
capacities of institutional actors within different scales of power relations. Since the
shift towards flexibilisation and specialisation of urban economies, the post-Fordist
economic restructuring has exacerbated the repercussions of globalisation and dete-
riorated the traditional equilibrium between economic competitiveness and social
cohesion in European cities (Ache et al., 2008; Buck et al., 2005). In line with the
growing depth of austerity measures at the national level, with repercussions at the
urban level, a trend towards the neoliberalisation of urban economies meant an
acceleration of new forms of social and spatial inequalities that have facilitated a
dualism in the occupational hierarchy (Gallie, 2007) and a residential segregation
in housing markets (Arbaci, 2019). In this vein, the growing diversification of cities
along socioeconomic and sociopolitical indicators challenges the analytical homoge-
neity that a welfare regime theory might produce (Musterd et al., 2016; Ranci, 2011;
Tammaru et al., 2016). A growing number of studies have shown there to be a lack
of empirical evidence for a statistical correlation between deindustrialisation and
social cohesion (Ranci, 2011). They have instead argued for other social forces in
action that bring out different levels of social and spatial inequalities in different
national and urban contexts.
For example, Amsterdam and Vienna – both characterised by corporatist wel-
fare policies and unitary housing systems – exhibit different forms of occupational
and residential segregation, due to their distinctive urban regimes, spatial organisa-
tions, and migration trajectories (Hatz et al., 2016; Musterd and Van Gent, 2016;
Musterd et al., 2016). On the same note, Manchester and Milan – despite a similar
trend towards financialisation and specialisation – experienced largely variegated
labour market outcomes. These are the result of different occupational and
industrial relations, which led to a growing polarisation towards the two extreme
ends of the occupational structure in Manchester, and an aggravation of income
inequalities among workers in the low-paid construction and traditional service
sector in Milan (Benassi, 2019; Cucca and Maestripieri, 2017). The differentiation
process is also taking place in cities of post-socialist eastern Europe, of which
changing patterns of socioeconomic and socio-spatial segregation show variegated
outcomes, despite their ‘fast-track’ transition to neoliberal capitalism (Musterd et
al., 2016). This differentiation, owing to largely different demographic, economic,
and spatial compositions of post-socialist urban environments, is most visible in
the segregation trends in cities in the Baltic countries. Here the pace of neolib-
eral-inspired reforms of the welfare state was particularly dramatic (Marcińczak
et al., 2015). Indeed, the ‘paradox of post-socialist segregation’ – i.e. the survival
of socialist regulatory mechanisms and slower privatisation – have engendered a
rather smooth shift towards market-oriented regulation in some cities of central and
eastern Europe, e.g. Budapest (Kovács and Szabó, 2016) and Prague (Ouředníček
et al., 2016). A different dynamic took place in cities of the Baltic region, e.g. Riga
(Krišjāne et al., 2016), Vilnius (Valatka et al., 2016), and Tallinn (Tammaru et al.,
2016), where weak welfare regimes and ethnic discrimination characterise the
­dissimilar patterns of socioeconomic and socio-spatial inequalities that unfolded
differently in each context.
120 KAZEPOV, CUCCA, AHN AND VERRIER
The rise of social and spatial inequalities in European cities has been reinforced
by recent population changes, led by low-birth rates, changing household types, and
international migration. Also, these trends followed different dynamics according to
specific historical, geographical, and institutional configurations. Despite a slower
urbanisation process across virtually all European cities, we can recognise two lines
of differentiation. On the one hand, the urban–rural divide and, on the other hand,
the western–eastern European cities divide. Today in most countries, the rural is
the territorial context more affected by social exclusions dynamics, and this is par-
ticularly evident in eastern Europe. In countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, and
Lithuania, households affected by risk of poverty, very low work intensity, and
housing deprivation are clearly concentrated in the rural areas (Figure 6.1, Figure
6.2, Figure 6.3)
A similar divide characterises population dynamics (Table 6.1). Capital metropol-
itan regions grow relatively fast, while other metropolitan areas rise at a slower rate,
and rural regions are in standstill or are declining (capital: 7%; non-capital: 4%;
rural: 1%). These rates differ substantially between the cities in western European
member states and the cities in central and eastern European member states, both
in terms of birth and net migration (European Union, 2016). Urban shrinkage, for
instance, despite becoming a global phenomenon, followed specific diversified pat-
terns across Europe (Mallach et al., 2017; Martinez-Fernandez et al., 2016). While
the slowdown of urban growth occurred much earlier in west European cities that
never declined on average, the magnitude of shrinkage in their eastern counterparts
is worse, where general demographic decline is far greater (Mykhnenko and Turok,
2008). In eastern European cities, such shrinkage is the joint outcome of the rapid
collapse of state socialism in the early 1990s, combined with deindustrialisation
and suburbanisation. These trends mutually reinforced one another, exacerbating
processes of urban decline (Haase et al., 2017; Steinführer and Haase, 2007).
The intra-European differentiation occurring in capital regions has also intensi-
fied in the last decade. More specifically, capital regions in the wealthier countries
show an uneven increase in the overall population growth rates almost up to 10%
in this period – except Paris. Meanwhile, the pace is rather moderate in southern
and eastern European cities and even negative in some cases, e.g. Athens, Bratislava,
Riga, and Vilnius (see Table 6.1). However, whether this trend can facilitate positive
economic outcomes – also in terms of productivity – largely depends on the social
and institutional capacities of cities, as well as the occupational and industrial struc-
tures of their respective urban labour market. For example, a de-growth of the over-
all population of cities in central and eastern European countries is an indicator of
the fact that these regions appeal less to both youth and migrants due to a lack of
diverse employment opportunities in less-specialised urban economies (Mykhnenko
and Turok, 2008; Ranci, 2011; Tammaru et al., 2016). This is especially true for the
growing number of non-EU migrants, whose accessibility to and mobility within
urban labour and housing markets are markedly more difficult than for natives and
EU migrants with ‘freedom of movement’. Despite the long history of migration
 10
20
30
40
50

Denmark
Finland
Hungary
Latvia
Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Source: European Union (2016) and updates.

Cyprus
Czech Republic
Germany
Estonia
Greece
Cities
Spain
France
Croatia
Ireland
Italy

Towns and suburbs

Lithuania
Luxembourg

Figure 6.1  Share of population at risk of poverty or social exclusion, by degree of urbanisation.
North Macedonia

Rural areas
Malta
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Serbia
Sweden
Slovenia
Slovakia
United Kingdom
 5
10
15
20

Denmark
Finland
Hungary
Latvia
Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Source: European Union (2016) and updates.

Cyprus
Czech Republic
Germany
Estonia
Greece
Cities
Spain
France
Croatia
Ireland
Italy

Towns and suburbs

Lithuania
Luxembourg

Rural areas
North Macedonia
Malta
Netherlands
Norway
Poland

Figure 6.2  Share of population, aged 0–59, living in households with low work intensity, by degree of urbanisation.
Portugal
Romania
Serbia
Sweden
Slovenia
Slovakia
United Kingdom
 0
10
20
30

Denmark
Finland
Hungary
Latvia
Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Source: European Union (2016) and updates.

Cyprus
Czech Republic
Germany
Estonia
Greece
Cities
Spain
Figure 6.3  Severe housing deprivation rate, by degree of urbanisation.
France
Croatia
Ireland
Italy

Towns and suburbs

Lithuania
Luxembourg
North Macedonia

Rural areas
Malta
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Serbia
Sweden
Slovenia
Slovakia
United Kingdom
Table 6.1  Demographic and economic profile of European capital regions, 2016.
GaWC Unemployment Population Population change in last 10 years EU Foreign (%) Non-EU
Ranking, 2018 (%) (in 000s) Foreign (%)
absolute (in 000s) %

Greater London Alpha ++ 5.6 8,731 +1,184 +15.7% 11.2a 10.4a

Greater Paris Alpha + 13.3c 6,754c +246 +3.8%a 4.1c 11.7c

Madrid Alpha 14.9 3,166 +36 +1.2% 3.4 8.8

Brussels Alpha 18.6 1,184 +182 +17.9% 22.8 12.6

f c a
Warsaw Alpha 1.9 1,735 +43 +2.5% 0.2 0.4a
Greater Amsterdam Alpha – 7.3d 811 +71 +9.7% 6.0c 6.8c
Stockholm Alpha – 6.5a 936e +140 +16.7% 4.4a 5.9e

Greater Dublin Alpha – 14.9a 1,326 +142 +12% 9.9a 9.0a

Vienna Alpha – 12.3c 1,767c +168 +10.5% 10.2c 14.0c

Greater Lisbon Alpha – 12.8a 1,836 +34 +1.9% 1.8 6.1

Prague Alpha – 6.8a 1,259c +55 +4.7%a 3.6a 9.6a

Rome Alpha – 9.5a 2,865 +317 +12.4% 4.3 8.4

a
Budapest Alpha – 2.2 1,759 +61 +3.6% 1.6 1.7a

Greater Athens Beta + 17.6a 2,642a –262 –9.1%b 2.1a 9.0a

Copenhagen Beta + 5.1b 540 +58 +11.6% 5.6b 8.8b

Bucharest Beta + 1.1e 2,112e +169 +8.7% — —

Oslo Beta 2.7e 613b +101 +19.4%a 8.2b 6.1a

Berlin Beta 7.9 3,520 +125 +3.7% 6.2 9.3

Sofia Beta 4.9 1,232 +78 +6.8% 0.3 1.5

a
Zagreb Beta 9.5 801 +28 +3.6% 0.2 0.5

Greater Helsinki Beta – 11.4 1,122 +124 +12.5% 3.9 5.5

Bratislava Beta – 8.5a 423 –3 –0.7% — —

Riga Gamma + 7.6 639 –88 –12.1% 0.5 22.5

a
Vilnius Gamma 3.7 543 –10 –1.8% 0.2 1.2a

Ljubljana Gamma 12.7 288 +21 +8% 1.2 7.8

Tallinn Gamma 6.1 423 +25 +6.2% 2.0 19.5

a
From 2011, last eight years; b from 2012, last seven years; c from 2014; d from 2015; e from 2017; f from 2018.
Source: Own calculations on Eurostat (Urban Audit), EURES, and GaWC (2018)
126 KAZEPOV, CUCCA, AHN AND VERRIER
from all regions of the world (Häussermann, 2005), the rapid growth of interna-
tional migration in urban labour and housing markets has become one of the major
issues that concerns the social cohesion of European cities. In most countries, severe
housing deprivation is predominant in cities (Figure 6.3), and especially in the urban
contexts mostly affected by international migration. Although earlier scholars in
world cities literature had envisaged an emergence of a new migrant underclass in
the low-paid service sector in maintenance of a strategic infrastructure of global cit-
ies (Sassen, 1991), the issue is far more complex. There is growing evidence that insti-
tutional configurations at both local and national level, as well as different migration
histories, occupational structures, and spatial organisations facilitate largely different
labour and housing markets outcomes across European cities (Fraisse and Escobedo,
2014; Hamnett, 2003; Kakpo and Cucca, 2017). The rise of hyper-diversity3 in terms
of ethnicity, culture, lifestyle, and attitudes is relevant for urban transformations in
European cities (Tasan-Kok et al., 2013). However, the degree to which the growth
of migrants can have a positive or negative impact on the urban environment largely
depends on the interplay between socioeconomic characteristics and social inclusion
policies that incorporate – or do not – the migrant newcomers into urban labour
and housing markets (Costa and Ewert, 2014; Cucca and Ranci, 2017; Kazepov,
2005; Ranci, 2011; Ranci et al., 2014; Turok and Mykhnenko, 2007). New forms of
fragmentation and segregation also become evident in multicultural European cities
and threaten the ethos of social inclusion that characterised them up to the post-
war period. This has increasingly problematised the notion of political citizenship
based on national contracts and has urged the need for a broader sense of social
citizenship based on universally valid human rights (Dukes and Musterd, 2012;
Eizaguirre et al., 2012; Miciukiewicz et al., 2012; Novy et al., 2012).
The new challenges that European cities face are also a consequence of the recal-
ibration or retrenchment of welfare policies that worsened since the financial crisis
in the late 2000s. In line with financialisation and flexibilisation in global capitalism,
the introduction of neoliberal policy instruments under a growing pressure for
economic competitiveness both at the national and local level has continued to
deteriorate the regulative and retributive dimension of the welfare state. This has
exacerbated new patterns of inequality in urban labour and housing markets in
European cities (Cucca and Ranci, 2017; Emmenegger et al., 2013; Kazepov and
Cucca, 2018; Musterd et al., 2016; Wills et al., 2010). Indeed, in times of austerity,
a cost-minimising reorganisation of the policy dimension has driven national and
local actors to prioritise economic flexibility and competitiveness over the tradi-
tional regulative and retributive role of the state. However, this did not take place
to the same magnitude everywhere. At the same time, the growing financial pressure
from national governments brought about the need for innovative strategies by local
actors to facilitate both the financial competitiveness and social integration of the
disadvantaged social groups. Such a trend made European cities once again ‘labora-

3 
Tasan-Kok et al. (2013) have argued that the concept of diversity is too simplistic. They
define hyper-diversity as a way of scrutinising how cities are not only diverse in ethnic,
demographic and socio-economic terms, but in terms of attitudes, lifestyles, behaviours,
and materialities.
 European Cities Between Continuity and Change 127
tories for innovative social policies’ (Kazepov and Cucca, 2018). Although the state
and national economy still provide the framework within which local governments
can manage social innovation in their labour and housing markets, local public
actors cooperate increasingly with new actors in the private sector to design, man-
age, finance, and implement innovative measures. These are aimed at fostering new
solutions to upcoming social risks, unmet needs, and more attractive and sustain-
able jobs and residential environments for their growing population (Oosterlynck et
al., 2018). The emergence of new actors in a multiscale reorganisation of the policy
dimension poses a number of new challenges, such as the multilevel coordination,
the accountability of decision-making processes, and the civic and political engage-
ments of grassroots organisations. However, such economic and political transfor-
mations also provide European cities with new opportunities and capacities for local
actors to compensate the weakening role of the welfare state and to minimise the
growing gap between economic competitiveness and social cohesion (Béal et al.,
2018; Bisong, 2019; Careja, 2019; Eizaguirre et al., 2012; Kazepov and Barberis,
2017; Miciukiewicz et al., 2012; Novy et al., 2012).

Outlook
The way in which European cities developed over the long term influences the way
in which they are facing major challenges today. This influence, through welfare pol-
icies and urban planning, has led to local contexts characterised by lower levels of
social inequalities in comparison to other counterparts in the world. The ability to
govern social changes showed by many European local institutions have largely been
recognised internationally, and still nowadays represents a key reference for plan-
ners and scholars keen in developing urban policies and strategies oriented towards
social and spatial justice (Fainstein, 2010). However, European cities are today
under strong pressure due to long-term transformations and their fate is increasingly
uncertain. According to The State of European Cities 2016, ‘European cities har-
bour a number of paradoxes: they are relatively safe but many people feel insecure.
Housing in cities is smaller but more expensive. Cities have many job opportunities
but unemployment and low work intensity rates are high in many cities. Cities are
more productive but poverty rates are higher in cities in some of the most productive
countries’ (European Union and UN-Habitat, 2016: 110). The report provides evi-
dence of an increasing complex urban landscape in Europe. The trade-off between
the generally strong economic performance of a large number of European cities, on
the one hand, and the very high level of labour market exclusion, overcrowding, and
housing affordability problems in those same cities, on the other hand (European
Union, 2016), gets more nuanced once we zoom in and investigate the interplay
of the many dimensions influencing the outcome. The paradoxes testify that under
current circumstances there are no direct and simple links between economic glo-
balisation and local outcomes in Europe. Differences are remarkable between cit-
ies within different welfare regimes and different political-institutional and cultural
contexts, despite the fact that most cities are embedded in the capitalist system and
influenced by the dynamics of changing capitalism (Andreotti et al., 2018).
The new risks emerging in Europe especially affect young people who face increas-
ing difficulties in entering the labour market and are among the most exposed to
128 KAZEPOV, CUCCA, AHN AND VERRIER
precariousness, but are also dealing with care responsibilities in their early stages of
family creation. These problems are even stronger among minorities, who can rely
less on support from the family and the state (Taylor-Gooby, 2004: 8). To this we
must add that social risks are unevenly distributed across Europe and specific social
risk configurations characterise each regional and urban context (Ranci et al., 2014).
The differentiating factors – ranging from socioeconomic, socio-demographic, and
political factors – highlight the emergence of different and fragmented developments
of the European city model(s) that require multilevel governance settings, on the one
side, and the ability of the local institutions to deal with new social needs and prob-
lems, on the other.
Squeezed between changing state financial support and increasing social
needs, some cities are learning to innovate their policies in order to reduce the
gap between emerging problems and financial constraints, eventually involving
civil society actors, such as the case of Barcelona or Berlin recently (Blanco and
León, 2017). In these cities, spontaneous initiatives that emerged to counteract
the effects of the crisis at the community level are simultaneously serving as
platforms for reciprocity and political contestation, especially on issues related
to housing affordability. Other cities, instead, face huge problems in mitigating
the social impacts of the economic crisis that started in 2008 and the austerity
policies that have followed. According to the report on The State of European
Cities, between 2009 and 2014 the average share of local public investments
by EU-25 local authorities dropped by 19%, from 1.6% to 1.3% of the total
GDP, ‘with the subsequent austerity measures, large cities have been particularly
hit’ (European Union and UN-Habitat, 2016: 192). Despite this scenario, most
European cities are still showing a great ability to govern social change. It is the
capacity to close/reduce these gaps that may be interpreted as a measure of the
resilience and orientation towards social justice historically characterizing the
European city (Fainstein, 2015).

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 7
The North American City
Jon Teaford

Both the United States and Canada are metropolitan nations – cities dominate their
national life. Unlike much of Asia and Africa, North America experienced its most
rapid urbanisation in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. In con-
trast to the Global South, and like Europe, the United States and Canada are mature
post-industrial metropolitan societies. The following pages review recent develop-
ments in the metropolises that define the two nations, discussing significant patterns
of continuity and change. Many long-standing trends of the second half of the twen-
tieth century have persisted and continue to determine the course of metropolitan
life. Yet the cities of the United States and Canada are dynamic agglomerations,
adapting to new cultural preferences and changing human predilections. The North
American city is, then, a malleable creature. Its basic shape would be recognisable
to an observer transported from the late 1970s, but a few additions and corrections
would surprise, and perhaps please, the visitor from the recent past.

Metropolitan Population Trends

One notable trend was the continuing flow of population to North American met-
ropolitan areas. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the prevailing
population trajectory was from rural to urban, and over the past three decades this
pattern has persisted. In 1980, 75% of the population of the United States lived in
metropolitan areas. By 2010 this figure had risen to 84% with almost two-thirds of
Americans inhabiting large metropolitan areas of over 500,000 people (data on met-
ropolitan America are from Frey, 2012). Similarly, the metropolitan share of Can-
ada’s population rose from 55% in the census year of 1981 to 69% 30 years later.

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
136 Jon Teaford
Over the half century from 1961 to 2011 the Canadian metropolitan population
soared 183%; the number living in non-metropolitan Canada inched up a mere 3%
(Fischer and Siddiq, 2013: 33). Whereas in sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia
floods of poor rural migrants have inundated burgeoning urban centres during the
past three decades, in the United States and Canada the population trend has been a
persistent but relatively gentle flow. In fact, in these mature post-industrial nations
some metropolitan areas have lost population. Overall, however, the population
movement has been towards metropolitan centres.
Both the United States and Canada are vast nations with sprawling expanses of
sparsely inhabited territory. Yet the trend has been towards the concentration of much
of the population in relatively small tracts. By the second decade of the twenty-first
century Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancou-
ver accounted for more than a third of the nation’s population. America’s population
was more widely dispersed among the nation’s many metropolitan regions, but these
urban areas comprised only a small portion of American territory. According to
urban economist Edward Glaeser, ‘Two hundred forty-three million Americans crowd
together in 3 percent of the country that is urban’ (Glaeser, 2011: 1). Americans sang
proudly of purple mountains majesties and amber waves of grain but the alabaster
cities were the true heart of the nation.
Not only did the flow from rural to metropolitan areas continue, so did America’s
decades-long movement to the metropolises of the south and west. This resulted
in booming metropolitan areas south of the Mason-Dixon Line and west of the
Rockies and northeastern and midwestern metropolises of diminishing demographic
importance. Of the one hundred largest American metropolitan areas the ten with
the highest rates of population growth in each decade from 1980 to 2010 were all
located in the south and west. The well-known attraction of warmer temperatures
at least partially explained sunbelt metropolitan growth. Sunny Florida, Texas, and
California were well represented among the growth leaders of the 1980s, 1990s,
and 2000s. Yet the presence of Boise, Idaho, and Provo, Utah, on the list of fastest
growing metropolises in both the 1990s and 2000s proved that mild winters were
not the only factor drawing people to the turn-of-the-century boomtowns.
Various factors fuelled the rise of the southern and western metropolises. Austin
was a perennial leader in population growth, owing in large part to local high-tech
companies that drew well-educated millennials to the Texas capital. Between
2000 and 2017 the population of the Austin metropolitan area soared 69% from
1,250,000 to 2,116,000. By the latter date the once backwater college town was
the 31st largest metropolitan area in the United States, having surpassed the for-
merly mighty Cleveland region. Dubbed by its boosters as the Silicon Hills, it was
challenging California’s Silicon Valley for high-tech jobs and drawing young college
graduates with the skills and entrepreneurship to grow the booming local economy.
Forty-three percent of the metropolitan area residents 25 years or older had a bach-
elor’s degree or higher as compared to the national average of 31% (Austin Cham-
ber of Commerce, 2018). In an age that valued educational attainment, Austin was
poised for success. It had mild sunbelt winters, but it also had brains. The result was
a median household income well above the national average.
Heading the list of fastest growing metropolitan areas in both the 1990s and
2000s was Las Vegas. A city that virtually did not exist prior to World War II,
 The North American City 137
metropolitan Las Vegas was home to 2.2 million people by the middle of the second
decade of the twenty-first century, and it attracted another 42 million visitors annu-
ally. Its economy suffered a sharp setback from the housing bust of the Great Reces-
sion, but it bounced back and rose from the 31st largest metropolitan area in 2010
to 28th in 2017. The leisure and hospitality industry was its economic mainstay
and, in sharp contrast to Austin, it fell far below the national average for residents
with a bachelor’s degree or higher (Society of Human Resource Management, 2017).
Its prosperity was not built on brains but on the gullibility of millions of human
beings who believed they could beat the odds and win at keno, roulette, black-
jack, and slot machines. In addition, the Nevada metropolis was a mecca for trade
shows and conventions; it was the nation’s place to meet. Las Vegas proved that
educational attainment was not the only road to metropolitan success. A metropolis
could also grow based on a low-skilled tourist industry and by exploiting the desire
of millions of people to break loose and momentarily enjoy a lifestyle not found in
Akron or Omaha.
The population trends of the northeast and midwest offered a sharp contrast to
the fast-paced growth of Las Vegas and Austin. Dreary winters and deindustrialisa-
tion repelled residents and job seekers. The sobriquet Rustbelt denoted not only
the corrosion of manufacturing facilities but also the erosion of population. Each
decade between 1980 and 2010 the Pittsburgh, Youngstown, and Buffalo metropoli-
tan areas lost population, and in two of the three decades the Cleveland, Detroit, and
Toledo regions recorded losses. Moreover, metropolitan Pittsburgh and Youngstown
were on the road to four consecutive decades of shrinkage, losing an estimated 1.0%
and 4.2% of their residents respectively between 2010 and 2017. The closing of steel
mills doomed these metropolitan areas to a future of fewer residents and diminishing
significance. Pittsburgh partisans advertised their hometown as the most liveable
city in America and boasted of a body of educated, high-tech personnel that should
have aroused the envy of Austin boasters. But migrating Americans did not heed
the message.
A number of northeastern and midwestern metropolises recorded gains. Those
were modest, however, compared to the increases in the boomtowns of the south and
west. Between 2010 and 2017 the population of metropolitan Chicago inched up an
estimated 0.8%, the Philadelphia area gained 2.2%, and the New York City region
registered an increase of 3.9%. Metropolitan Boston proved the star of the northeast
with a 6.2% rise in population. None of these cold-weather, deindustrialising me-
tropolises approached the 23.3% figure for Austin or the 16.4% boost for Houston
(US Census Bureau, 2017a).
As a result of the continuing flow of population to the south and west the hier-
archy of American cities was shifting. In the early twentieth century the urban
population of the United States largely clustered in the northeast and midwest.
There were metropolitan outliers on the West Coast, but the great bulk of city
dwellers inhabited a swath stretching from Boston to Kansas City. By the early
twenty-first century this had changed markedly. Of the ten largest metropolitan
areas in 2017 five were in the northeast and midwest and an equal number were
in the south and west. Dallas and Houston had displaced Philadelphia, occupying
the fourth and fifth places, and the former industrial dynamo of Detroit had fallen
from the top ten.
138 Jon Teaford
The shift in the metropolitan hierarchy was less dramatic in Canada, but Toron-
to’s ongoing eclipse of Montreal was noteworthy. In the mid-twentieth century Mon-
treal was the largest city in Canada and the nation’s business capital. Toronto was
an emerging also-ran. Over the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, however, this was to change. Financial institutions and corporate head-
quarters migrated to metropolitan Toronto, robbing Montreal of its former pre-emi-
nence. According to the census of 2016, the Toronto metropolitan area was home to
almost 6 million residents whereas the population of metropolitan Montreal barely
topped 4 million (Statistics Canada, 2017a). Between 2006 and 2016 the Montreal
region grew at a slower rate than the national average; in contrast, metropolitan To-
ronto’s percentage increase outpaced the nation as a whole. In the early twenty-first
century Toronto was well ahead of Montreal and extending its lead.
Canada’s most rapid urban growth, however, was in the west. In both the Unit-
ed States and Canada the population was continuing its long-standing westwards
movement, and western cities were the chief beneficiaries. According to both the
censuses of 2011 and 2016, the fastest growing metropolitan areas were Calgary
and Edmonton in Alberta. Between 2011 and 2016 both grew at more than double
the rate of metropolitan Toronto and more than three times the pace of metropolitan
Montreal. By the latter date Calgary with 1.4 million people had moved into fourth
position in the hierarchy of Canadian metropolises, surpassing the nation’s capital
of Ottawa. Metropolitan Edmonton was close behind with 1.3 million residents and
poised to nudge Ottawa one more place down the list of largest Canadian metropol-
itan areas. With its vast oil reserves Alberta was the Texas of Canada and, as in the
case of Texas, its metropolitan areas were national growth leaders.
Once known as a cowboy town, Calgary was famed for its wild west Stampede,
a rodeo extravaganza attended by visitors from throughout Canada and the United
States. By the early twenty-first century, however, Calgary had become one of Can-
ada’s leading business hubs. In 2000 it claimed 78 corporate headquarters; 11 years
later this number had risen to 123. By the second decade of the twenty-first century
Calgary was home to about one-seventh of Canada’s major company head offices
and boasted of being the second largest headquarters hub in the nation, trailing only
Toronto (Burton, 2012).
Overall, in both the United States and Canada the metropolitan population trends
of the early twenty-first century generally conformed to those of the 1980s and
1990s. Toronto continued to outpace Montreal; in both nations the west assumed
increasing importance, and in the United States the Sunbelt was the destination for
millions of additional metropolitan migrants. Change largely proceeded along well-
established paths, unfortunately for the lagging Rustbelt and fortunately for inves-
tors in fast-growing Texas and Alberta.

Suburbanisation

Another continuing trend was the persistent flow of population to the outer fringes of
the major metropolises. The number of diatribes against suburban sprawl increased
but so did the populations of the fastest growing peripheral counties. During the
early years of the 2010s a massive wave of housing foreclosures and prevailing
 The North American City 139
economic woes seemed to momentarily reverse centrifugal sprawl and boost the
spirits of suburbia’s critics. Yet as the economy improved in the middle of the decade,
suburban growth rates rebounded, indicating that for millions of Americans and
Canadians the suburban dream was not dead.
Census reports testified to the ongoing appeal of the metropolitan periphery.
Already by 2000 a majority of Americans lived in the suburbs, and in the ensuing
decade outwards migration continued. Counties on the fringe of America’s largest
metropolitan areas boomed. The population of Kendall County on the periphery
of Chicagoland increased 110%, the figure for Rockwell County along the edge
of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex was 109%, and growth in Forsyth, Paulding,
and Henry counties on the outskirts of metropolitan Atlanta ranged between 74%
and 82%. In fact, between 2000 and 2010 suburban growth outpaced central city
population increases in 81 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas. For the 1990s
the figure was 82 of 100, indicating that migration trajectories remained virtually
unchanged (Frey, 2012: 10).
Despite the housing bust of 2008–2012, the 2010s apparently did not usher in a
long-term change. According to census estimates for 2016, four of the top five fastest
growing cities with populations of 50,000 or more were Texas suburbs. Conroe on
the fringe of Houston headed the list, followed by Dallas outliers Frisco and McK-
inney (US Census Bureau, 2017b). Texas central cities continued to add residents,
but their suburbs outpaced them. Between 2010 and 2016 the number of people
living in the city of Austin rose 17%, whereas the figures for outlying Cedar Rock
and Georgetown were 33% and 41%, respectively (Goldenstein, 2017). The Austin
area supposedly appealed to hip millennials who embraced the green alternatives of
walkability and bicycling, yet the Texas capital’s metropolitan district was among
the nation’s leaders in suburban sprawl.
Meanwhile, in declining metropolitan areas peripheral communities remained
among the few centres of growth. By the middle of the 2010s both the city of ­Chicago
and the Chicago metropolitan area as a whole were losing population. Yet Kendall
County continued to attract new residents. The population increased at a slower pace
than a decade earlier, but it remained the fastest growing county in the depressed
state of Illinois.
In Canada the long-term trend was also to the suburbs. Between 1951 and 2011
the share of metropolitan Vancouver’s population living in the city of Vancouver
dropped from almost one-half to a little more than one-quarter. Unlike many cities
south of the 49th parallel, the central city of Vancouver continued to add population
during that half century, but its suburbs grew at a far faster pace. Between 1971 and
2011 nine-tenths of all the population growth in the Vancouver metropolitan area
occurred in the suburbs (Peck et al., 2014: 399–400). This trend continued between
the census of 2011 and that of 2016. During this five-year period the suburban
population increased at a rate of 7.1% as compared with 4.6% for the city of Van-
couver (Yakabuski, 2017).
The same was true for other large Canadian metropolises. Toronto had aggres-
sively extended its boundaries in the late twentieth century, yet by the 2010s a
majority of the metropolitan area residents lived beyond the central city limits. Bet-
ween 2011 and 2016 the population count for Toronto’s suburbs grew 7.7% as
opposed to the city’s rate of 4.5%. Especially impressive was the increase in outlying
140 Jon Teaford
Milton where the population soared 30.5%. The Montreal area conformed to the
norm of suburbanisation. In that metropolis the growth figures were 5.3% for the
suburbs and 2.9% for the city (Yakabuski, 2017). Suburbanisation was, then, alive
and well in Canada as thousands of people migrated to Milton and other once-rural
locales along the metropolitan fringe. In both the United States and Canada, poli-
cymakers and planners bewailed sprawl and warned of the costs resulting from the
inexorable spread of metropolitan development. As yet their cries of alarm seemed
of limited avail.
This continuing wave of suburbanisation transcended racial and ethnic lines.
Whereas in the mid-twentieth century non-Hispanic White people constituted the
overwhelming majority of those moving to the suburbs, by the early twenty-first
century the population flow included millions of Black people, Hispanics, and Asians.
In 1990, only 37% of African Americans in the 100 largest metropolitan areas of
the United States lived in the suburbs. By 2000 this figure had risen to 44% and in
2010 it was 51%. In other words, in the second decade of the twenty-first century a
majority of Black people in America’s major metropolitan areas were suburbanites.
Similarly, the share of metropolitan-area Hispanics living in the suburbs increased
from 47% to 59% during the period 1990 to 2010 whereas the share of metropoli-
tan-area Asian Americans residing beyond the central city limits climbed from 54%
to 62% (Frey, 2011: 1, 9). In 2011, the demographer William Frey summed up the
new reality when he announced that ‘the once widely held stereotype of “chocolate
city and vanilla suburbs” has been obsolete for some time’ (2011: 2). Twenty-first
century suburbia was far from lily white. Rather, it reflected the ethnic diversity of
the nation as a whole.
The various ethnic groups were not evenly distributed throughout America’s sub-
urbs. Instead, there were concentrations of Black people in some suburban areas as
well as a number of outlying hubs with Hispanic or Asian majorities. Almost two-
thirds of the residents of Prince George’s County, Maryland, outside of Washington,
and Clayton County, Georgia, south of Atlanta, were African American. Hispanics
lived in every suburban municipality in the Los Angeles area, but the working-class
suburbs south and east of the central city were overwhelmingly Latino. People of
Latin American ancestry were likewise found in communities throughout southeast
Florida. The Miami suburbs of Hialeah and Hialeah Gardens, however, both stood
out with Hispanics constituting 95% of their populations. Asian Americans were par-
ticularly prevalent in the Silicon Valley suburbs south of San Francisco and Monterey
Park, east of Los Angeles, was the capital of Asian life in southern California.
Canada’s suburbs were the preferred destination for millions of immigrants
from Asia. Waves of newcomers boosted Canada’s population in the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries; according to the 2016 census 22% of the nation’s
population were first generation residents. A disproportionate share of these immi-
grants sought to enjoy the Canadian way of life in the nation’s suburbs. By 2011,
57% of the immigrant population in metropolitan Toronto lived in suburban munic-
ipalities and 72% of Vancouver-area residents born outside Canada lived in outlying
communities (Canada Immigration, 2017).
During the following five years the migration of foreign-born Canadians to the
metropolitan outskirts accelerated and this was most evident in the suburban munic-
ipalities surrounding Toronto and Vancouver. Over 52% of the population of the
 The North American City 141
Toronto suburb of Brampton was foreign-born, with the largest contingent from
India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. According to the 2016 census, Brampton was home
to people from 234 ethnic backgrounds; 115 different languages were spoken in the
suburb (Sharma, 2019). The nearby suburb of Markham had the highest percentage
of ‘visible minorities’ of any Canadian municipality. Forty-six percent of Markham
residents were of Chinese ancestry and 17% were classified as South Asian (computed
from Statistics Canada, 2017b; visible minorities is the official Canadian census
designation for people who do not look like traditional Canadians of European
ancestry – generally it means people of Asian and African a­ ncestry). The suburban
‘Chinatown’ of metropolitan Vancouver was the municipality of Richmond. Seven-
ty-six percent of Richmond’s residents were visible minorities; the suburb’s 107,000
Chinese-Canadians constituted 54% of the population (City of ­Richmond, 2019).
Richmond was the site of Golden Village, a cluster of Asian-themed shopping malls.
The largest was Aberdeen Centre which boasted of being Greater Vancouver’s ‘pre-
eminent cosmopolitan shopping destination’ and ‘a celebration of multiculturalism’
(Aberdeen Centre, n.d.).
By the early twenty-first century in some areas an overwhelming percentage of the
metropolitan population was suburban. In 2010 more than nine out of ten ‘Atlan-
tans’ did not live in the city of Atlanta but in such outlying areas as Gwinnett, Cobb,
and Clayton counties. Similarly, the suburbs constituted 89% of the population of
the St Louis metropolitan area, 87% of metropolitan Pittsburgh, 86% of the Cincin-
nati metropolis, and 84% of the Boston area (Frey, 2012: 21, 23). Throughout the
United States the primary cities of metropolitan areas were not actually so primary.
They housed a relatively small share of their region’s people.
Suburbia was no longer a secondary metropolitan appendage, a relatively insignif-
icant annex capturing the overflow of the central city. In an area such as Atlanta the
suburbs were not simply an outlying part of the metropolis; they were virtually the
entire metropolis. As such they were as varied as the metropolitan area as a whole,
comprising all the many ways of life characteristic of an agglomeration of millions
of people. Stereotypes of suburban homogeneity were erroneous. Suburbia was not
a uniform expanse of single-family homes where everyone lived alike and thought
alike. Instead, it included the full range of metropolitan endeavours and lifestyles.
For example, some suburbs were as large as major central cities and growing
larger at a rapid rate. They were not the small, quiet, neighbourly communities of
traditional lore, but booming dynamos. Robert Lang and Patrick Simmons labelled
this new breed of suburban giants ‘boomburbs’. Lang and Simmons defined boom-
burbs as ‘places with more than 100,000 residents that are not the largest cities
in their respective metropolitan areas and have maintained double-digit rates of
population growth in recent decades’ (2001: 1; see also Lang and LeFurgy, 2007).
In 2001, they identified 53 American municipalities that met this definition; they
were especially common in the fast-growing metropolises of Texas, Arizona, and
California. The largest was Mesa, Arizona, in metropolitan Phoenix. In 2010, it was
the 38th largest city in the United States with a population of 439,000. Mesa was
larger than such well-known cities as Atlanta, Miami, Cleveland, and Minneapolis.
By the early twenty-first century growth was slowing in Mesa, but new boomburbs
were arising. In 2000, McKinney, a suburb north of Dallas, housed 54,000 people;
by 2016 it had an estimated population of 172,000 and continued to grow at a rapid
142 Jon Teaford
rate. Nearby Frisco’s population soared from 34,000 in 2000 to 164,000 in 2016,
and like its neighbour Frisco remained one of the fastest growing cities in the nation.
Canada could claim its share of boomburbs. The Toronto suburb of Mississauga
was not incorporated as a city until 1974; by 2016 it was the sixth largest munici-
pality in Canada with a population of 722,000. It was more populous than both the
cities of Winnipeg and Vancouver and ranked as the third largest city in the Great
Lakes basin, surpassed only by Chicago and Toronto. Though relatively unknown
to residents of the United States, it was larger than Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwau-
kee. The nearby Toronto suburb of Brampton ranked ninth among Canadian cities
with 594,000 people, and the Toronto outliers of Markham and Vaughan topped
the 300,000 mark. On the west coast, the Vancouver suburb of Surrey had 518,000
inhabitants and with a growth rate more than double that of the city of Vancouver
it met the definition of boomburb.
Twenty-first century suburbs not only attracted huge populations but also lured
business and employment. Throughout the late twentieth century jobs moved to the
suburbs. For example, the central city of Vancouver’s share of the Vancouver metro-
politan area’s employment dropped from 57% in 1971 to 30% in 2006 (Peck et al.,
2014: 401). Business hubs appeared throughout suburbia and an increasing portion
of the population was commuting to workplaces located along the metropolitan
fringe. Joel Garreau described this phenomenon in his 1991 book, Edge Cities: Life
on the New Frontier. Garreau’s edge cities were suburban business centres with at
least 5 million square feet of leasable office space, a minimum of 600,000 square
feet of leasable retail space, and ‘more jobs than bedrooms’ (Garreau, 1991: 6–7).
They were places where one made and spent money. The best-known edge city was
Tysons Corner in northern Virginia outside of Washington. With office towers, a
mammoth shopping mall, hotels, and 100,000 jobs, Tysons Corner was a monument
to the outwards flow of business. And it was not unique. Garreau listed 119 edge cit-
ies in suburban areas throughout the United States (Garreau, 1991: 426–438). The
leading Canadian edge city was Mississauga. As the site of Canada’s busiest airport,
it attracted a long list of Canadian headquarters for international corporations. With
two towers soaring more than fifty stories and a score of lesser skyscrapers, its sky-
line testified to its emergence as a major commercial centre.
By the early twenty-first century many suburbs were, in fact, attempting to create
full-fledged downtowns with the commerce and urban amenities associated with big
cities. Tysons Corner was undergoing a transformation intended to increase density,
add high-rise apartments, and create a more walkable community (Mullins, 2015:
92–94, 96–98, 100). The idea was to make the edge city into a lively downtown hub
reminiscent of Manhattan or central Chicago, but minus the grime and panhandlers.
In the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel, Mayor James Brainard likewise embarked on
a long-term programme to create a downtown. The result was Carmel City Center,
a pedestrian core of shops, offices, apartments, and restaurants built on the former
site of a down-at-the-heels strip mall and vacant supermarket. The crown jewel of
Carmel’s new downtown was a grand performing arts centre designed to resem-
ble a nineteenth-century European opera house (Teaford, 2008: 204–205). South of
Miami in the sprawling suburb of Kendall, planners created a new high-rise down-
town adjacent to the existing Dadeland Mall (Phelps, 2015: 81–108). Again the goal
was to make a suburb feel more urban.
 The North American City 143
Canadian suburbs also embraced the goal of building dense, walkable, 24-hour
downtowns so different from the perceived suburban norm. The Toronto suburb of
Vaughan launched development of the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, boasting that
the new downtown was ‘fast becoming the heart of the community, brimming with
new talent, innovation and urban amenities’ (Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, n.d.).
In the Vancouver area, Surrey’s city centre was likewise ‘developing into a walkable,
transit-oriented downtown core for business, cultural, and entertainment activity’
(City of Surrey, n.d.). If the promoters of Tysons Corner, Carmel, Kendall, Vaughan,
and Surrey succeeded, suburban North America would become more urban with
opportunities and amenities associated with major cities.
Whereas boomburbs, edge cities, and fresh-minted downtowns attracted a diverse
mass of residents, shoppers, and employees, some North American suburbs developed
as special lifestyle enclaves. Southwest Ranches, Florida, Barrington Hills, Illinois,
and Rolling Hills, California, were equestrian suburbs dedicated to retaining a semi-
rural environment with large estate-size lots, horse pastures, and bridle paths. Apply-
ing low-density zoning, they were metropolitan enclaves congenial to the wealthy,
horsey set. Sun City, Arizona, and Laguna Woods, California, were suburbs reserved
for senior citizens. Security gates protected the 18,000 residents of Laguna Woods, a
community with a median age of 78 and specially designed sidewalks to accommo-
date electric wheelchairs. West Hollywood, California, and Wilton Manors, Florida,
were suburbs catering to gays. West Hollywood hosted the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual
and Transsexual Parade and Festival; in 2004 a sales office opened in Wilton Manors
for the first gated community targeting a gay clientele (Teaford, 2008: 71–79). As
Barrington Hills, Lagune Woods, and Wilton Manors demonstrated, suburbia was
a diverse world, serving the full range of North American needs, tastes, and desires.
Some suburbs such as McKinney and Frisco were largely the products of the
twenty-first century with miles of newly constructed homes. Yet a number of inner-
ring suburbs were creations of the early twentieth century with an ageing housing
stock from the 1910s and 1920s. Some of these so-called first-tier suburbs shared
the ills of the poorest inner-city neighbourhoods, but others were among the wealth-
iest communities in their metropolitan areas. East Cleveland, Ohio, Highland Park,
Michigan, and East St. Louis, Illinois, were impoverished Black communities indis-
tinguishable from big-city ghettoes. Claiming to be America’s oldest suburb, the
Boston-area town of Brookline remained an affluent enclave, having aged gracefully.
Though largely the product of the pre-World War II era, Bexley, Ohio, was one
of the finest addresses in the Columbus metropolitan area with stately homes and
perfectly manicured lawns. Laid out in the early twentieth century, Highland Park,
Texas, was as much a mecca of the Dallas-area elite in 2018 as in 1918. Highland
Park, Michigan, and Highland Park, Texas, shared a common name, but they repre-
sented the polar extremes of suburban life. The Dallas suburb was white and rich; it
boasted a median household income of $189,000, an excellent school system, and
palatial manses. Its Detroit-area counterpart was black and poor; it had a median
household income of $17,000, distressed schools, and an ample inventory of aban-
doned housing (for first-tier suburbs, see Teaford, 2008: 44–58; Hudnut, 2003).
By the early twenty-first century the persistent wave of suburbanisation had pro-
duced a metropolitan world that was largely suburban. Most residents of North
American metropolitan areas lived in the suburbs. This, however, did not mean that
144 Jon Teaford
they inhabited a world of stultifying homogeneity or look-alike communities. North
American suburbia was a varied landscape that defied simple generalisations. In the
early twenty-first century the suburbs encompassed everything. Suburbia was home
to both the rich and the poor. It included communities built in the 1910s and new
creations from the 2010s. It was a region of office towers and one-story homes. A
majority of metropolitan area Black, White, Latino, and Asian people were subur-
banites. The suburbs offered everything from Walmart to the Asian-theme Aberdeen
Centre. In North America there was no single suburban way of life.

The Central Cities

Perhaps the most dramatic change in metropolitan North America was the shift
in attitude towards the central cities. During the mid-twentieth century the central
city trajectory seemed decidedly downwards. Americans agonised over a perceived
urban crisis; the major cities of the United States faced spiralling population loss,
well-publicised rioting, fiscal distress, and soaring crime rates. By the second decade
of the twenty-first century, however, there was widespread optimism about North
American cities, and urban living was becoming the latest fashion. City streets were
no longer deplored as sites of crime and mayhem. Instead, they were extolled for
their vitality and colourful diversity. A surge in downtown living was both a cause
and consequence of this new optimism. Thousands of relatively affluent White peo-
ple were moving into downtown apartments, transforming central business districts
from nine-to-five work zones into mixed-use residential and commercial neighbour-
hoods with 24-hour life. Millennials aged 25–34 constituted the largest share of the
new centripetal migration, though empty-nesters downsizing from suburban homes
were also among the downtown newcomers. Together these well-heeled apartment
dwellers brought fresh hope to central city mayors and downtown developers.
Nowhere was the shift to downtown living more evident than in New York City.
For decades affluent apartment dwellers had lived close to the offices of midtown
Manhattan, but the financial district at the island’s southern tip had been largely
devoid of residents. It was the preserve of office workers who arrived in the morning
and departed as quickly as possible at the close of the workday. Facing a growing
inventory of vacant office buildings in the Lower Manhattan downtown, the city and
state governments adopted a programme of zoning changes and financial subsidies
to encourage the conversion of empty office space into apartments. The incentives
worked. From 1995 through 2004, developers converted 61 former office buildings
into 6,500 dwelling units (Beauregard, 2005: 2439). Moreover, the transformation
of Manhattan’s downtown continued. In 1993 Lower Manhattan had 14,000 resi-
dents, by 2000 this figure was up to 24,000, and in 2014 there were 61,000 people
living downtown. Financial hardship did not force these new residents to crowd into
the oldest section of the city. Instead, the average annual household income in down-
town Manhattan in 2011 was $204,000, a figure equal to the household incomes of
the poshest suburbs (Alliance for Downtown New York, 2014).
Other cities that had long suffered humiliating decline were also upbeat about the
prospect of a 24-hour residential downtown. For the city of Cleveland bad news had
been endemic. Its population dropped by more than half between 1950 and 2010. It
 The North American City 145
was the seventh largest city in the United States in 1950; in 2010 it ranked 45th. By
the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, Cleveland was celebrating a
downtown residential renaissance. The central business district population increased
77% between 2000 and 2015; in 2017 it reached 15,000 and boosters anticipated
a rise to 20,000 by 2020 (Downtown Cleveland Alliance, 2017). In 2017, a Cleve-
land State University study wrote of ‘repopulating Cleveland from the inside out’
(­Piiparinen et al., 2017). Downtown was the generator of much-needed growth
for the beleaguered metropolis and hopefully the wave of core development would
spread outwards and engulf the city as a whole.
Throughout the United States a similar transformation was bringing new hope to
once decaying downtowns. In Chicago, construction cranes punctuated the down-
town skyline, testifying to a building boom of luxury high-rise apartments. In 2016, in
Rustbelt Milwaukee’s central business district more than 2,000 new residential units
were completed or under construction. ‘As 2020 approaches’, a Milwaukee market
study observed, ‘it is reasonable to assume that more than 7,000 units ultimately
will have been built Downtown over this decade’ (Progressive Urban Management
Associates, 2016: 16). Between 2006 and 2018 the population of downtown Min-
neapolis rose 36%; by the latter date 43,000 people called the city core their home.
Moreover, in 2018 the Minneapolis Downtown Council reported that nearly 1,600
more dwelling units were under construction (Walsh, 2018). In Kansas City, Mis-
souri, the central business district population doubled between 2000 and 2016, and
3,140 housing units had been completed or were under construction between 2013
and 2016 (Stafford, 2016). Downtown Los Angeles was also undergoing a residen-
tial renaissance. Between 2000 and 2015 the number of occupied apartment units in
the central business district more than tripled. The newcomers were bringing wealth
back to the centre of the city. In 2014, the median price for downtown condomin-
iums was $532,000 as compared to a median price of $399,000 for Los Angeles
County as a whole. Average downtown apartment rents exceeded the county figure
by more than 36% (Beacon Economics, 2015: 8).
The same phenomenon was evident in Canadian cities. In fact, Vancouver become
a much-admired model for downtown living. Beginning in the late 1980s high-rise
luxury apartments transformed the Vancouver skyline, creating a residential config-
uration dubbed Vancouverism. Slender apartment towers interspersed with attrac-
tive public spaces and sited along pedestrian-friendly streets were the basic elements
of Vancouverism. Downtown Vancouver’s dense living environment and walkability
precluded the excessive use of automobiles and offered a desirable alternative to
wasteful urban sprawl. With its handsome waterfront parks, its views of the sur-
rounding mountains, its sleek, soaring glass-encased apartment structures, and its
impressive foot traffic, Vancouver was the dream city of urban planners throughout
the world. And it attracted residents. Between 1996 and 2016 the population of
downtown Vancouver rose from 17,400 to 62,000. These downtowners were youn-
ger and less family-oriented than the metropolitan average. Approximately half of
downtown’s residents were between 20 and 39 years old and lived in one-person
households. They also enjoyed a higher median household income than residents
living elsewhere in the city. Downtown Vancouver seemingly had it all. It looked
good and had youth and money. Vancouverism appeared to be a formula that other
North American cities needed to apply (Douay, 2015; Walsh, 2013; Peck et al., 2014).
146 Jon Teaford
One city influenced by Vancouver’s example was Toronto. In the early twen-
ty-first century, downtown was the fastest growing area in the city of Toronto.
Especially notable was CityPlace, a giant development built on former railroad
yards along the Lake Ontario waterfront. Reminiscent of Vancouver, it consisted
of soaring glass towers with street-level retail outlets and dedicated public space.
Whereas Vancouver’s slender towers ensured density, the bulkier, taller structures
in CityPlace looked crowded. Despite some local criticism, the project became
home to many downtown newcomers. As a result of the condo boom sweeping
central Toronto, downtown’s share of the city’s total population rose from 7.6%
in 2011 to 9.6% in 2016 (White and Punter, 2017; Ibrahim, 2017: 4). Again the
migrants to the urban core tended to be millennials of above-average income who
lived in one- or two-person households.
The residential appeal of the central cities was evident not only downtown. It
also fuelled the ongoing gentrification of neighbourhoods surrounding the central
business districts. Middle-class North Americans rehabilitated a number of inner-
ring city neighbourhoods in the 1970s and 1980s, but during the early twenty-first
century real estate investors were especially aggressive in seeking out areas that they
could quick-change from shabby to chic. Artists in need of inexpensive work spaces
were often the pioneers of gentrification. They created bohemian hubs that became
magnets for more affluent buyers in search of inner-city homes. Moreover, the gen-
trification of one area often began a chain reaction leading to the rehabilitation of
adjacent neighbourhoods. In Manhattan, the gentrification of Soho’s factory lofts
spurred the revival of nearby Tribeca followed by new investment in Hell’s Kitchen
farther uptown. By the beginning of the twenty-first century the wave of gentrifi-
cation had spread as far north as the African American hub of Harlem. Wealthier
and whiter residents were appearing on the streets of the cultural capital of Black
America (Furman Center, 2015: 4–6).
The movement of the more affluent to older inner-city neighbourhoods was
apparent in cities across North America. Chicago’s northwest side gradually fell before
the gentrifying wave. Wicker Park and Andersonville became fashionable and devel-
opers seeking to profit from impending change invested in Logan Square and Pilsen.
Neighbourhoods ringing downtown Denver were real estate hotspots, and Portland’s
Pearl District metamorphosed from a warehouse area to a bohemian mecca for art-
ists before attracting older and more affluent residents as well as restaurants and
retailers catering to the upper-middle class. In Toronto, average household incomes
soared in South Riverdale/Leslieville as well as in areas of Trinity Bellwoods, St. James
Town, and the Annex. With soaring condominiums, gentrifying neighbourhoods, and
real estate developers ready to invest in an increasing number of residential projects,
North America’s central cities had reason to be upbeat.
Contributing to the growing optimism about urban America was the dramatic
drop in crime rates. In the 1970s and 1980s most Americans equated urban cen-
tres with crime and violence. Big-city neighbourhoods were dangerous places to be
avoided. Even many central business districts were off limits after dark. For safety’s
sake it was best to remain beyond the central city limits in the more tranquil sub-
urbs. During the 1990s and 2000s, however, crime rates plummeted. Crime dropped
sharply throughout the nation, but the decline was most significant in major cit-
ies. Between 1990 and 2008 violent crime rates fell 29% in the primary cities of
 The North American City 147
America’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. The drop in the property crime rate was
46% (Kneebone and Raphael, 2011: 4, 6). Especially notable was the change in New
York City. In 1990 there were more than 2,200 murders in the nation’s largest city;
in 2017 the total for New York was only 290 (Madhani, 2018). Shedding its reputa-
tion as the nation’s mugging capital, twenty-first-century New York City was one of
the safest urban centres in the nation.
Despite the optimistic accounts of vibrant gentrified neighbourhoods and upscale
high-rise condominiums, shadows continued to darken the portrait of America’s
­cities. The destiny of the urban core seemed less dire, but there were persistent prob-
lems and all-too-evident signs that the road to renaissance remained uphill. Popu-
lations continued to decline in many of the older central cities. Between 2000 and
2010, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Cleveland, St Louis, Pittsburgh, and
Buffalo all lost population and in the mid-2010s they each continued to do so. The
movement of a few thousand people to downtown Cleveland failed to compensate
for the persistent out-migration from the city’s neighbourhoods. Milwaukee’s new
downtown residential high-rises were encouraging to local boosters, but objective
observers could not ignore the continuing decay of vast tracts of the city. New York
City, Boston, and Washington had stanched the outwards flow of residents, and
even Philadelphia was experiencing a slow increase in population. But the return to
central cities was not uniform throughout the United States.
This was most evident in Detroit. In the 2010s, Detroit remained a disaster scene,
a mecca for anyone seeking to witness and study urban decline. During the 2000s
the city’s population dropped 25% and the inventory of vacant houses and empty
lots grew rapidly. Hard-pressed Detroiters turned to urban farming, converting some
of the many abandoned lots into vegetable gardens. Photographers recorded the
Motor City debacle, producing stark portraits of factory ruins, burnt-out houses,
and empty streets. Making matters worse, the city government could not pay its
bills, forcing it to petition for bankruptcy in 2013. Detroit was decaying and broke,
an all-too-visible corrective to overly optimistic visions of the future American city.
Local boosters tried to burnish the city’s tarnished reputation by publicising new
downtown developments. Yet the image of Detroit as an urban wreck remained
firmly fixed in the public’s mind.
Contributing to the slow growth or population decline in many of America’s
central cities was the accelerating departure of African Americans. During the
mid-twentieth century white flight was the prevailing demographic fact of life as
millions of White city dwellers moved to the suburbs. During the early twenty-first
century black flight underlies the depopulation of many older urban hubs. In 2010,
there were 185,000 fewer African Americans in Detroit than in 2000. Chicago lost
181,000 Black residents, and in New York City the African American population
declined by 101,000. Of the 25 cities with the largest Black populations, 16 re-
corded drops in the number of African American residents during the first decade
of the twenty-first century (Frey, 2011: 6, 8). The urban complexion was growing
paler as affluent White people and Hispanic immigrants moved in and African
Americans departed.
In once secure bastions of black life, the African American majority was eroding.
In 1970, Black people made up 71% of the population of Washington, DC; in 2014
only 49% of the residents of the nation’s capital were African American. Washington
148 Jon Teaford
had become a majority non-Black city. Black flight was transforming Atlanta as well.
During the 2000s, the African American share of Atlanta’s population dropped from
61 to 53%. Black people seemed destined to soon become a minority in the home
base of Martin Luther King (Frey, 2011: 7). The Los Angeles neighbourhood of Watts
had been overwhelmingly black when rioting erupted there in 1965. Fifty years
later its population was more than 70% Latino (Bermudez and Esquivel, 2015). In
­Washington, DC, formerly Black neighbourhoods were transitioning to havens of
gentrifying White people whereas in Los Angeles Hispanics were replacing African
Americans. Vacant lots were supplanting Black residents in Detroit.
Black flight was, then, transforming America’s urban hubs, creating a metropoli-
tan mix far different from that in 1970 or 1980. The stereotype of a black city and
white suburbs was increasingly out of date. Like White people of the 1950s and
1960s, twenty-first-century Black people were leaving the urban core attracted by
the superior schools, better housing, and more tranquil environment of the suburbs.
Downtown living may have appealed to some millennial White people and empty-
nesters, but many others were immune to the lure of the city.
One group that remained disproportionately in the supposedly reviving core was
the poor. An influx of well-heeled condominium dwellers and inner-city gentrifiers
brought much-needed wealth to central cities, but it did not diminish the persistent
problem of poverty. America’s central cities continued to have poverty rates well
above the national average. Not surprisingly Detroit topped the list of cities with the
highest levels of poverty. In 2016, 36% of Detroit’s population lived below the feder-
al government’s poverty line as compared to the national rate of 13%. The figure for
Los Angeles was 20%, whereas in Chicago and New York City 19% lived in poverty
(Statista, 2017). Of the cities with more than one million residents, Philadelphia was
the poorest with 26% of its population below the poverty line. Whereas Philadelphia
boosters proudly pointed to the migration of millennials and empty-nesters to the
increasingly upscale Center City, the city’s poverty rate actually had risen dramat-
ically. In 1970, the figure for the city mired in urban crisis was only 15% (Central
Philadelphia Development Corporation, 2017: 4).
Canada’s national government did not mandate an official poverty line, but sur-
veys of major Canadian cities made clear that luxury downtown apartment towers
did not tell the whole story of urban life. A 2016 study labelled the city of Toron-
to Canada’s child poverty capital. It found that 22% of city residents lived below
the ‘low-income measure after taxes’, and 27% of Toronto’s children were in this
poverty category. The study concluded that Toronto was ‘a deeply divided city in
terms of the living conditions and life opportunities for children and youth’ (Polanyi
et al., 2016: 4, 9). It was a hub of significant wealth but also a centre of equally
significant poverty.
An all-to-evident manifestation of central city poverty was the growing number of
homeless people populating the urban core. In 2017 over 553,000 Americans were
homeless, and the greatest concentration of homelessness was in New York City.
Nearly 77,000 New Yorkers were without a residence (McCarthy, 2020). Los Ange-
les was the only city poised to challenge New York City in the field of homelessness.
People in sleeping bags and wrapped in blankets lined the downtown streets of the
southern California metropolis; the lawn of city hall was a favourite resting place for
those without a home. Downtown Los Angeles was a mosaic of economic extremes.
 The North American City 149
Hundreds of feet in the sky the affluent lived in high-rise apartments with breath-
taking views, granite countertops, and spa tubs. Down below the poorest Angelenos
vied for a spot on the sidewalk.
The mild weather of southern California was conducive to outdoor living, but
homelessness also plagued the less balmy cities of Canada. An estimated 35,000
Canadians were homeless on any given night, and 235,000 experienced homeless-
ness sometime in a year (Gaetz et al., 2016: 5). Perhaps the most notorious hub of
the homeless was Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. A 2017 survey
recorded 2,138 homeless people in Vancouver and an estimated 1,200 of these lived
in Downtown Eastside (Swanson et al., 2018: 9). A dismal impoverished district of
single-room-occupancy hotels and tent cities, Downtown Eastside accommodated
those who were largely forgotten by the makers of the city’s much-vaunted Vancou-
verism. ‘Just steps away from high-end luxury shops and hotels downtown’, wrote
one critic, ‘lies Canada’s poorest postal code, where street homelessness and abject
poverty reveal another side of the city, a city that fails to share its enormous wealth’
(Ivanova, 2016: 9). Deaths from drug overdoses were commonplace and a creeping
gentrification added to the woes of those relegated to Downtown Eastside. Rents
were rising and incomes were stagnant, exacerbating the already desperate condi-
tions. This was the dark side of the model city, a miserable reality that admiring
urban planners seemed to ignore. With its harsh extremes of wealth and poverty,
Vancouver was a delight for some and a disaster for others.
The reports from North America’s central cities were not, then, all upbeat. The
good news was the arrival of wealth. The bad news was the persistence of poverty. In
some cities such as Detroit. Cleveland, and St Louis it was sometimes difficult to find
the signs of new wealth amid the prevailing distress. In other urban centres, such as
Vancouver and New York City, construction cranes and soaring glass towers adver-
tised urban prosperity but also diverted attention from continuing economic distress.
A by-product of the back-to-the-city movement was increasing economic inequality.
The new wealth of the cities was not benefiting the urban populace as a whole. Some
had a lot; many had a little.

Conclusion

North American cities of the early twenty-first century were products of both
long-standing trends and more recent reversals in the direction of urban development.
In the United States, the metropolitan population continued to move to the south
and west. The northeast and midwest did not regain their lustre. Americans preferred
Atlanta to Pittsburgh, Houston to Chicago, and Phoenix to Buffalo. The Las Vegas
strip had greater allure than Harvard Square. Similarly, Toronto continued to eclipse
Montreal, and oil-rich Alberta was home to a fast-growing metropolitan population.
Another continuing trend was towards the metropolitan fringe. Despite criticisms
of urban sprawl, in both the United States and Canada outlying communities grew
at double-digit rates. One marked change was in the ethnic composition of sub-
urbanites. Asian immigrants were filling Canadian suburbs as they shared in the
Canadian dream of homeownership. In the United States, Hispanics, Asians, and
African Americans all moved outwards. By 2010 a majority of the metropolitan
150 Jon Teaford
population of each group was suburban. The ethnic/racial divide between city and
suburb was diminishing.
A decided change was the new upbeat attitude towards the urban core. Belief in
the vibrancy of downtown lured people to central business districts, and high-rise
apartment living was increasingly fashionable. Urban no longer had a negative conno-
tation. Instead, it implied hip and cutting edge. Yet attitudes did not necessarily con-
form to reality. In older central cities populations continued to decline. And everywhere
poverty persisted. An objective observer would find as much to deplore as to applaud.
North American urban development of the early twenty-first century has been
evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Whereas twenty-first century sub-Saharan
Africa and much of Asia are experiencing breakneck metropolitan growth that is
rapidly transforming predominantly rural nations into urban societies, in North
America the recent course of metropolitan history has been less disruptive. Traits
of the past have persisted, but metropolitan North America has adapted to chang-
ing economic realities and lifestyle choices. In the process it has accommodated an
increasing share of the continent’s population. North American life has remained
very much a metropolitan existence.

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 Part II
LEADING THEORETICAL
PERSPECTIVES AND
APPROACHES
 8
New Directions in Frankfurt Critical
Theory for Critical Urban Theory
Tino Buchholz

Critical contributions to social theory basically embrace a critical focus on modern

social relations with predominant attention to the productive and destructive forces
in capitalist societies. As such they comprise various disciplines of the social sci-
ences and differing schools of thought that aim at normative progress, political jus-
tice, and human freedom. Critical urban theory focuses on socioeconomic inequality
and spatial relations that allow for the simultaneity of social conflicts and uneven
geographical developments. With such a focus, human geography, urban sociology,
and urban anthropology often circle around the work of Karl Marx (e.g. David Har-
vey, Neil Smith) and Henri Lefebvre (e.g. Christian Schmid, Neil Brenner), who has
been labelled a ‘Marx for our time’ (Gottdiener, 1993). Beyond Marxist approaches
this involves post-structural and postmodern thought (e.g. Edward Soja, Nigel Thrift,
Ash Amin, AbdouMaliq Simone), feminist (e.g. Doreen Massey, Linda McDowell),
post-colonial (e.g. Jennifer Robinson, Ruth Gilmore), and anarchist analysis (e.g.
Simon Springer).
Given a variety of critical approaches to urban theory in this chapter, I discuss
contemporary Frankfurt critical theory, a project that Neil Brenner (2009) has only
begun. In his discussion of the early work of Frankfurt scholars, Brenner is clear that
only a few urban scholars engage with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School,
where only Lefebvre provides a bridge (Aronowitz, 2015; Charnock, 2018). While
limited engagement seems due to the negativist – or pessimist – social analysis of the
first generation (i.e. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno), in this chapter I draw
attention to the latest Frankfurt protagonists – after Habermas – who have substan-
tiated Frankfurt lines of reasoning along a critical theory of justice.

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
156 Tino Buchholz
Focusing on new theoretical directions for critical urban theory I will thus build
upon the seminal contributions by Neil Brenner (2009) and Ugo Rossi (2019)
and extend Brenner’s discussion of the first and second generations with respect
to the third and fourth generations of the Frankfurt School. Deepening the urban
discussion for the philosophical anthropology of Axel Honneth (1995, 2009, 2014)
and Rahel Jaeggi (2014, 2018), I touch upon the inner nature of social inter/action
that allows for a sharper analysis of self-realisation, community formation, and
the social production of second nature, that is, social space. At the core of my
discussion I will focus on the political-philosophical exchange between Nancy Fra-
ser and Axel Honneth (2003), which distinguishes questions of distributive injustice
and a positive formulation for justice that rests on the philosophy of recognition.
The latter focus is central to the Frankfurt School today, where contemporary pro-
tagonists provide a fresh look on fundamental concepts for normative justice that
can be found in Hegel and the young Marx, namely, the notion of alienation and
struggles for recognition.
Making sense of Hegel and Marx for the Frankfurt School it is characteristic to
employ social philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and social psychology for criti-
cal analysis of powerful social relations, subjective notions of human suffering and
historical struggles for emancipatory social change. Stressing the Hegelian notion of
social struggles in history and the Marxist emphasis on human agency in the making
of history the Frankfurt School therefore emphasises negative and positive freedom –
freedom from alienation and freedom for human emancipation – to be central for a
critique of capitalist social relations.
The category of alienation has been pivotal to the early Frankfurt School (Fromm,
1969; Lukacs, 1968 [1922]) and latest generation (Allen and Mendieta, 2018;
­Jaeggi,  2014). Although alienation was crucial to the young Marx and Lefebvre’s
Critique of Everyday Life, the explanatory power of the concept nevertheless faded
over time. Frankfurt scholar Rahel Jaeggi (2014) has revitalised the category for con-
temporary critical theory and also stimulated urban theory as the latest publications
of David Harvey (2014, 2018) and Madden and Marcuse (2016) show. Recognition
relations, on the other hand, have yet to unfold their explanatory power as analytical
category for a critical and urban theory of justice, which is part of the Moral Geog-
raphy of David M. Smith (1994, 2000a) and my own work.
Taking up the question of justice as struggles for recognition, in short, I will high-
light the relevance of philosophical anthropology for social conflict and historical
progress: sharpening our understanding of social recognition relations to be central
for self-realisation, community formation, and a meaningful life in cities. The major
question for justice can be re/formulated as simple as who cares? Who cares for what,
whom, when, where, and why? Thanks to Covid-19 Caring Geographies are back
on the scholarly radar (Springer, 2020) giving weight to recognition of fundamental
social goods nobody can do without: i.e. health, housing, mobility, solidarity and
community. Emphasising conflicts over (alienated) meaning and normative progress
in global history, I will arrive at an agonist understanding of social conflict and social
change that finds the Marxist search for one grand solution in the waiting room
of history (Harvey, 2017; Springer, 2014). Focusing on Honneth’s (1995) moral
grammar of social conflict and Jaeggi’s (2014, 2018) critique of alienation and forms
of life – that do not engage with paternalist critique or assume perfect harmony at
 New Directions in Frankfurt Critical Theory 157
the end of conflict – for progress in critical urban theory, I link recognition theory
to spatial practice and Lefebvre (1991): speaking of a recognition-led production of
space that comes with implications for resignation, resistance, relocation (Buchholz,
2016). Highlighting spatial relations of social struggles I therefore closely link Frank-
furt critical theory to urban theory: pointing at multiple struggles and simultaneous
conflict in cities that target a meaningful life and a place in this world to call home.
For such a task I proceed in four steps. First, I revisit the initial moment for Frank-
furt critical theory that highlights the Hegelian roots of the young Marx, that is, the
distinction between the early humanist philosopher and the later economic critic
of Capital. Aiming to differentiate negative and positive formulations of in/justice,
second, I recall the concept of alienation to be central for a critique of capitalist
social relations. Applying competing concepts of justice to the politics of housing –
where housing distribution is simultaneously justified on egalitarian or competitive
grounds, that is, as common good and social right, on the one hand, and economic
achievement or prestigious investment, on the other – I confront a meaningful theo-
retical category with meaningless urban practices. Aiming at normative justice in cit-
ies, third, I touch upon the Fraser/Honneth debate and briefly outline the philosophy
of recognition. Deepening the urban discussion for the inter-subjective moment of
social recognition relations, fourth, I apply critical theoretical implications to urban
studies: sharpening our understanding for the limits of self-realisation in commu-
nities of shared values on shared space. While socialist ideas for social justice have
lost their innocence in history I conclude with left-wing melancholy, and hope in
fundamental hope.

Frankfurt Critical Theory and the Young Marx

To begin with, in a nutshell, for Frankfurt School critical theory we can basically
speak of four generations, where prominent figures involve (i) Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno, (ii) Jürgen Habermas and Claus Offe, (iii) Axel Honneth and
Hauke Brunkhorst, and (iv) Rainer Forst and Rahel Jaeggi. Connecting social philos-
ophy to social psychology, Frankfurt scholars do not follow one line of thought, but a
school of thought that largely rests on Hegel, Marx, and Freud (Wiggershaus, 1994).
To understand the development of the Frankfurt School and the turn of Habermas
(Deranty, 2009) it is inevitable to acknowledge the Hegelian roots of Marx and see
the protagonists of each generation as members of their time – and space – as Joel
Anderson (2011, 45–46) points out.

The original Frankfurt School generation came of age in the struggle to understand
the non-revolutionary consciousness of the majority of German workers (despite their
‘objectively revolutionary’ situation), and then faced, as mature theorists, National So-
cialism’s crimes against humanity. The second generation came of age in the face of
(revelations of) Nazi atrocities, and participated in the transformations around 1968
as mature theorists. The third generation came of age during the upheavals of the late
sixties and the new social movements of the seventies, and faced as mature theorists the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the resurgence of European nationalism, and the acceleration of
globalisation.
158 Tino Buchholz
The fourth generation, then, takes up the complexity of social conflict and historical
change, that is, the co-existence of multiple forms of life and simultaneous conflicts
that struggle with various forms of alienation and normative justification.
In his foundational essay on critical theory Max Horkheimer (2002 [1937]) dis-
tinguishes traditional and critical theory and argues for academic commitment to
tackle powerful ideologies and historical struggles for human emancipation. If a
theoretical procedure does not take a normative standpoint, he argues, ‘what can it
be but an aimless intellectual game, half conceptual poetry, half impotent expression
of states of mind’ (ibid.: 209)?
With such an agenda, Horkheimer and his colleagues in Frankfurt respond to
the dominant positivism in academia at the time and the dialectic of enlightenment
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 2003) when witnessing the rise of fascism. Aiming to
make sense of historical progress and regression, for the first generation of Frank-
furt critical theorists the election of National Socialists in Germany in 1933, despite
the assumed achievements of enlightened thought, not only threatened their very
lives – as Jews in Germany – but has shaken the philosophical substance of human
progress, rationality, and reason to the core. Reflecting on yet another period of bar-
barism in history did not provide for optimism or idealism but urged them to focus
on critique as primacy of science and damaged life (see Adorno, 2005 [1951]).
From the foundational period we can take at least two things to be relevant
for critical theory, that is, the role of human agency in history, with respect to
the academy and society. For the former this implies social commitment of aca-
demics to reflect on their standpoint in society as ‘no one can turn himself into
a different s­ ubject than what he is at this historical moment’ (Horkheimer, 2002
[1937]:  240). For the latter, it draws attention to Marx’s insight that history is
human-made, which highlights conflict, social struggles, and ‘the idea of a future
society as a community of free man, which is possible through technical means
already at hand’ (ibid.: 217). With such a minimum standard of hope for emanci-
pation Horkheimer has set the standard for critical theorists that domination and
oppression can be overcome.
Differentiating the late Marx of Capital and the humanist philosopher, the early
Frankfurt School has been eager to stress the value of Marx’s (1969) Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts –written in 1844 – and his relationship to philosophy and
Hegel. As Erich Fromm (1969) notes, the young Marx was a materialist in ontology,
who had a deep-seated anthropological interest in the essence and existence of
human kind.

Marx – like Hegel – looks at an object in its movement, in its becoming, and not as a
static ‘object’, which can be explained by discovering the physical ‘cause’ of it. In con-
trast to Hegel, Marx studies man and history by beginning with the real man and the
economic and social conditions under which he must live, and not primarily with his
ideas. Marx was as far from bourgeois materialism as he was from Hegel’s idealism –
hence he could rightly say that his philosophy is neither idealism nor materialism but a
synthesis: humanism. (Fromm, 1969: 10)

The Marxist philosophy can hardly be seen as a homogenous but heterogeneous

field of critical analysis: emphasising historical, material, political, economic,
 New Directions in Frankfurt Critical Theory 159
or cultural critiques of existing social relations. At the core of the controversy
the question of structure and agency divides lines of critique and authors, as the
example of Manuel Castells shows, who first relied on Althusser’s mechanical
materialism and later turned to social networks (see Katznelson, 2004). The young
Marx’s interest clearly was to make theory fruitful for practice – and the other way
around – when setting out to free Hegelian philosophy from idealist abstraction
(see Lukacs, 1968 [1922]).
In light of industrial capitalism and a pauperising working class it is important to
note that Marx himself never explicitly used the moral vocabulary of injustice or jus-
tice. Marx rather chose dialectical thought and immanent critique, which does not
judge miserable social conditions from an outer moral standpoint but criticises given
contradictions from within (Stahl, 2013). The young Marx would rather employ
irony and write sentences as follows:

[D]espite its worldly appearance and pleasure seeking appearance, it [political economy]
is a truly moral science, the most moral of all sciences. Its principal thesis is the renunci-
ation of life and of human needs. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or
to balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence,
etc. the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which
neither moth nor rust will corrupt – your capital. (Marx, 1969: 144)

Injustice as Alienation

Instead of in/justice Marx’s central critique of capitalist social relations targets

economic, political, social, and self-alienation which humans need to be free from
(see Fromm, 1969; Lefebvre, 2014 [1947]). Marx’s understanding of alienation
derives from Hegel, who Marx did not wish to label as a ‘dead dog’ as various
so-called Marxists tend to do (Lukacs, 1968 [1922]). His materialised reading of
Hegelian alienation therefore serves as the central point of his revolutionary critique
of capitalism. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts from 1844 the young
Marx writes:

Alienation is apparent not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else,
that my desires are the unattainable possession of someone else, but that everything is
something different from itself, that my activity is something else, and finally (and that
is also the case for the capitalist) that an inhuman power rules over everything. (Marx,
1969: 151, emphasis in original)

Marx’s point therefore addresses a bizarre situation of social development that

runs counter to any idea of human freedom and self-realisation. ‘For Marx, alien-
ation in the process of work, from the product of work and from circumstances,
is inseparably connected with alienation from oneself, from one’s fellow man and
from nature’ (Fromm, 1969: 53). Hence, he looked at ‘socialism as the condition
of human freedom and creativity, not as in itself constituting the goal of man’s life’
(ibid.: 61).
160 Tino Buchholz
The young Marx’s understanding of alienation not only strongly influenced the
Frankfurt School, but also Lefebvre (2014 [1947]), who reports on idealist allergies
of the time and who – just like Marx – aimed at overcoming philosophy’s distance to
everyday struggles but not to give up on philosophy. Although Marx’s later focus on
Capital has admittedly shifted his attention to political economy, Marx never relativ-
ised the fundamental role that alienation plays in his critique of capitalist social rela-
tions (Fromm, 1969). Here, Neil Brenner (2009) reminds us of ‘Marx’s famous claim in
Volume 3 of Capital that all science would be superfluous if there were no distinction
between reality and appearance’. The current revival of attention is due to a new debate
for an adequate understanding of social conflict, normative justice, recognition, and
freedom, which is pushed forward by the third and fourth generations of the Frankfurt
School (see Honneth, 1995; Jaeggi, 2014). What is at stake here, in other words, is the
strength and weakness of philosophy – along with political practice – when search-
ing for a singular critical framework that embraces multiple actors and simultaneous
conflict. For urban studies, such multiple and simultaneous conflict crucially involves
the struggle for decent housing where commodification paves the way for alienation
and effectively distorts the picture of a common social good beyond recognition.
For Adorno and Horkheimer or Herbert Marcuse the very existence of the alien-
ation phenomenon seemed rather self-evident. As such the concept was at risk of
essentialism and escaped the framework of useful philosophical explanation. In light
of ‘essentialist dangers’ in his foreword to Rahel Jaeggi’s (2014) book, Alienation,
Axel Honneth appreciates her effort to revitalise this crucial category for a critical
perspective on alienated forms of life ‘not because they violate principles of justice
but because they conflict with the conditions of willing and of executing what we
will. In such reactions to the conditions of our social world we inevitably find our-
selves falling back on the concept of alienation’.
In her book, Frankfurt School scholar and Berlin philosophy professor, Rahel
Jaeggi (2014), reaches out towards Rousseau, who conceived of alienation as a mis-
match between the ontological nature of things and human beings and the reality of
social life to arrive at Hegel and the young Marx. Jaeggi’s reading takes up early and
contemporary efforts of the Frankfurt School when analysing social conflict with
respect to suffering subjects and the relation-to-self. Addressing power and power-
lessness in social life, Jaeggi’s argument on alienation points to meaning and mean-
inglessness, self-determination, and the loss of self-control. Since individuals always
need to be able to relate to themselves and the world surrounding them – to know
what they talk about (i.e. communication) and what they are doing – alienation cen-
trally involves the transformation of meaning, what Jaeggi (2014) calls, the relation
of relationlessness.
As a normative and descriptive term, alienation involves somewhat of a dilemma
for the essence of morality, justice, and truth. It involves a solid ethical concept that
allows for objective and subjective interpretation of social constellations in history
and geography. ‘Only if one presupposes a logically, ontologically or historically
prior relation is it possible to understand alienation as the loss of a relation’ (Jaeggi,
2014: 25). At the core of the question one must assume a definition of the good life
that is in conflict with competing notions of what is considered good; which calls
for justification, and which is Rainer Forst’s (2014) project, to whom I come back
later in the chapter.
 New Directions in Frankfurt Critical Theory 161
For an urban discourse, Henri Lefebvre (2014 [1947]) strengthened the con-
cept in his Critique of Everyday Life when he emphasised the ambiguity between
objectification and subjectivity in everyday life (see Charnock, 2018; Goonewar-
dena, 2008). More recently, David Madden and Peter Marcuse (2016: 58) have
employed Jaeggi’s work on alienation and projected it to the commodification of
housing and gentrification struggles in cities. Instead of a humanist perspective on
a fundamental social good that nobody can do without, an alienated commodity
perspective on housing would address the social good as economic good, as liberal
achievement, privilege, or financial investment. ‘If something is alienable’, Mad-
den and Marcuse (2016) point out, ‘it is exchangeable. It can be bought and sold.
Alienation is thus the precondition of all private property’ (ibid.: 56). Residential
alienation, therefore, matches traditional characteristics to a place called home and
crucially transforms fundamental norms that divorce use and exchange value (i.e.
security, shelter, stability, and comfort). The concept of alienation, in short, provides
the crucial category for competing meanings on what housing is about: i.e.
fundamental good and social right vs. economic privilege and financial achievement.
Both logics appeal to normative ideas of justice that are in explicit conflict with one
another (see Buchholz, 2016).
Madden’s and Marcuse’s recent interest in alienation as analytical category
for critical urban research is also shared by David Harvey (2014, 2018). In Sev-
enteen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Harvey (2014) identifies three
major threats to the future of capitalism: ecological degradation, endless capital
accumulation, and universal alienation. Debating Michael Hardt and Toni Negri
on the relevance of Marx today, Harvey (2018) demonstrates further interest in the
concept when explicitly picking up Jaeggi’s question:

[I]s it possible to avail ourselves of the critical import of the concept of alienation with-
out relying on the certainty of a final harmony or reconciliation, on the idea of a fully
transparent individual, or on the illusion of having oneself and the world completely at
one’s disposal or command? (Jaeggi, 2014: 32, cited in Harvey, 2018: 425)

In contrast to Jaeggi, however, Harvey argues more economic with Marx’s Grundrisse.

In the Grundrisse, the universality of alienation arises out of the historical tendency
within capital to create the world market, to establish its social (class) and metabolic
relations everywhere and to inscribe certain identifiable laws of motion into human
history under the rule of the coercive laws of competition … The problem from the
Grundrisse onwards into Capital then becomes to identify the laws of motion of capital
and of value and to understand how these laws govern the conditions of daily life and
labour for the mass of the working population. The political project is to liberate our-
selves, in thought as well as in political and economic practices, from the constraints
imposed by these laws of value and of motion. Alienation is not confined to labour.
(Harvey, 2018: 426)

For Jaeggi’s philosophy it is of crucial importance that she is well aware of the
objective-subjective dimension of alienation that simultaneously aim to get a hold
of the good. Against essentialist or metaphysical presuppositions Jaeggi clearly seeks
162 Tino Buchholz
distance from moral superiority, that is, perfectionist or paternalistic arguments –
what is good for others. Jaeggi therefore does not assume harmony at the end of
conflict but continuous struggle, which leads to more than one form of the good life.
Mediating between unsatisfying alternatives, Jaeggi (2014: 32) highlights the poten-
tial of the concept, which would lie ‘not in the possibility of providing a robustly
substantial ethical theory but being able to criticize the content of forms of life’. Cri-
tique on Forms of Life, in fact, is Jaeggi’s (2018) latest book, which links to conflict,
alienation, and recognition relations: connecting to the legacy of Frankfurt critical
theory (Allen and Mendieta, 2018) and Axel Honneth’s (1995, 2009, 2014) project,
which I discuss below. Recalling Jaeggi’s question that David Harvey engages with,
she answers:

The unalienated life would then no longer be one that is reconciled; it would no longer
be the happy life, perhaps not even the good life. Instead, not being alienated would
refer to a certain way of carrying out one’s own life and a certain way of appropriating
oneself – that is, a way of establishing relations to oneself and to the relationships in
which one lives (relationships that condition or shape who one is). (Jaeggi, 2014: 33;
emphasis in original)

Pointing to the normative pitfalls of a meaningful life, Jaeggi’s perspective thus

draws attention to the local, social context of recognition relations, political aware-
ness, and democratic participation – at moments and places – to be able to relate to
our own environment that likely is the property of others.
To be clear, David Harvey’s (2018) engagement with ‘universal alienation’ and
philosophers other than Marx is remarkable and rare. In Social Justice and the City,
for example, Harvey (2009 [1973]) mentions alienation only anecdotal. Harvey has
been criticised as a rock in a hard place (Thrift, 2006) for his unchanging perspective
on capital and class relations. ‘Harvey is no crude materialist, of course’, Thrift states
(2006: 225), but a member of his time, that is, a US radical scholar, who has not sub-
stantially changed his theoretical argument on class struggle and social justice since
the 1970s (see Castree and Gregory, 2006; Springer, 2014, 2017). In light of Harvey’s
renewed interest in alienation as a meaningful theoretical category to meaningless
social practice, Thrift’s critique of Harvey is somewhat shaken, which is timely. In his
treatment Harvey crucially points to economic and social alienation and addresses
the damage that political alienation does to democratic procedures. Engaging with
the humanist Marx and his philosophical manuscripts of 1844 definitely contributes
to the greater picture.
While re/emerging debate on alienation opens up a complexity perspective on
multiple meaning and simultaneous conflict in social space, for the just city discourse
of the early twenty-first century the concept of alienation has played a marginal role,
if any. Largely occupied with David Harvey, a number of books have come out that
take up the Right to the City (Lefebvre 1996 [1968]), Recapturing Democracy (Pur-
cell, 2008), Searching for the Just City (Marcuse et al., 2009), Cities for People, Not
for Profit (Brenner et al., 2012), and Seeking Spatial Justice (Soja, 2010). The just
city discourse, therefore, rather sought common ground for social struggles when
taking up several seminal thinkers that range from Marx, Lefebvre, Foucault, and
Gramsci to the more liberal formulations of John Rawls.
 New Directions in Frankfurt Critical Theory 163
In her book The Just City Susan Fainstein (2010), for example, searches for more
equity, diversity, and democracy. Instead of equality, Fainstein favours the more
liberal notion of equity, following Rawls, where justice implies fairness. Fainstein
is clear about her reformist approach when advocating the more just city: ‘To the
objection that a humane capitalism is an oxymoron, I have no answer’ (Fainstein,
2010: 6). Edward Soja (2010), by contrast, criticises Rawls’s ‘fundamentally aspatial
and ahistorical notion of justice’ (Soja, 2010: 76), which would only seek to negoti-
ate static forms of social inequality and their unfair outcomes, rather than to address
the global structural processes that produce them. Soja, in the footsteps of Marx and
Lefebvre, then highlights the role of human agency in history that is crucial to social
change. ‘Human geographies are not merely external containers, given and immuta-
ble. Their changeability is crucial’ (Soja, 2010: 104).
One author who is largely overlooked in the just city discourse is British geographer
David M. Smith. Against the zeitgeist of critical geography Smith’s (1994, 2000a)
interest was not so much directed to injustice, but justice when engaging with moral
philosophy and what he coined moral geography.

The Marxism which Harvey was about to embrace, and which was to captivate much
of the discipline’s avant-garde, had little interest in the specification of social justice,
so blatant was the injustice of capitalism taken to be, and so evident the superiority of
socialism. (Smith, 2000b: 1150)

To be sure, Smith has certainly welcomed the work of his Marxist colleagues. His
interest, however, was to make an argument for social justice that connects to
philosophical anthropology and self-realisation in cities. Stressing common human
needs – while respecting differences – Smith’s moral geography conceptualises how
a social order is manifest in space, where people seek a place in this world: to
call home. With Habermas and Hegel’s notion of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), Smith
explicitly refers to interpersonal relations that rely on mutual recognition in order
to get a closer grip on local community formation and a supra-local idea of soli-
darity when he states: ‘We should not be prepared to do to distant others what we
would not do to ourselves and our own kind’ (Smith, 1994: 294; emphasis added).
Smith is clear about the tension between philosophy’s tendency to universalism
and geography’s relativism, but holds that both disciplines enrich one another.
Smith therefore anticipates the recognition paradigm when embracing the inter-
subjective moment of self-realisation with Habermas, but Smith is not aware of
Honneth yet.

Justice and Struggles for Recognition

As indicated before, readers can assume lively discussion within social theory on
how to treat Marx and Hegel for an idea of social conflict and normative justice
(see Jaeggi and Loick, 2014), the seminal debate Redistribution or Recognition
between Fraser and Honneth (2003) illuminates this decisively. In this political-
philosophical exchange, Hegelian scholar Axel Honneth invites Marxist theorist
Nancy Fraser to an ontological discussion of social conflict that is capable of
164 Tino Buchholz
explaining why we are, who we are, what we do, and what we want from life.
Such recognition one finds in others, as the Hegelian formula goes, to be at home
in the other. With such an ontological interest Honneth follows Habermas’s turn in
Frankfurt critical theory that is centred on the nature of human activity and social
­interaction (­Deranty, 2009). Unlike his predecessor, however, Honneth comes with
a different set of tools for his social philosophy: viewing communication rather as
a means not as an end. Honneth (1995) therefore follows Habermas’s epistemo-
logical interest in intersubjectivity but reframes his line of thought with an early
category from Rousseau and Hegel: The Struggle for Recognition. With such a
turn Honneth (2009) reconnects Frankfurt critical theory to its original interest in
social conflict and Pathologies of Reason, when providing a robust foundation for
communicative practices – to know what we are talking about – setting Habermas
‘back on his feet’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003: 242).
As Heidegren (2002) notes, Honneth has started from a neo-Marxist perspective
on social struggles and explored the relationship of Social Action and Human Nature
(Honneth and Joas, 1988) from there. He then asked for the ‘unchanging precon-
ditions of human changeableness’ (ibid.: 7) and critical self-reflection of the social
sciences to defend a ‘meaningful notion of historical progress’ (ibid.: 11). Turning to
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and the social psychology of George H. Mead in
his Struggle for Recognition, Honneth (1995, 92) states:

The reproduction of social life is governed by the imperative of mutual recognition,

because one can develop a practical relation-to-self only when one has learned to view
oneself, from the normative perspective of one’s partners in interaction, as their social
addressee.

With such a focus Honneth touches on foundational aspects for self-formation.

Self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem always require the other to care and
recognise one’s personality in the sphere of social esteem (solidarity), legal respect
(equal rights), and emotional care (love relationships).
Conceptualising self-realisation intersubjectively, that is, as a social process, Hon-
neth therefore shakes the liberal notion of an atomistic self, where individuals are
assumed to take care of themselves individually: what social life would usually dis-
qualify as egocentric, self-righteous, narcissist, or ignorant (see Taylor, 1994). In light
of conflict, disrespect, and social suffering, Honneth conceptualises the victim’s per-
spective and explains engagement in protest and resistance with the restoration of
individual self-confidence. While the first generation of the Frankfurt School has
rather described the sphere of social suffering and social struggle Honneth has con-
ceptualised it (Deranty, 2009). Confronted with power relations Honneth (2007)
is well aware of powerful social hierarchies and hegemonic achievements: explain-
ing instrumental recognition as ideology that can disappear at any moment. With
such a self-critical framework for self-realisation that is true for two people and any
community of value (i.e. family, friends and any other social constellation of shared
values), he regards the question of distribution as a conflict of a second order that
follows from recognition or disrespect in the first place.
Such an understanding is in line with Iris Marion Young’s (1990) Justice and the
Politics of Difference, where she argues that ‘Theorists of justice have good reason
 New Directions in Frankfurt Critical Theory 165
for abstracting from particular circumstances of social life that give rise to concrete
claims to justice’ (ibid.: 4). Distributive injustices may contribute to or result from
forms of oppression, exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperi-
alism, and violence, but ‘all involve social structures and relations beyond distri-
bution’ (ibid.: 9). Young (2007) explicitly comments on the recognition paradigm,
where ‘the self is never in possession of itself, but rather depends on the esteem of
others’ (ibid.: 189), where ‘society is a hall of mirrors for man’ (ibid.: 190) and where
‘Honneth makes relations of love and care constitutive for his conception of justice’
(ibid.: 193).
Political theorist Nancy Fraser, on the other hand, does not share Honneth’s inter-
est in philosophical anthropology, social psychology, and normative reconstruction
of social conflicts in human history that relegate re/distributive struggles to a second
order (see Fraser and Honneth, 2003). Fraser straightforwardly points to existing
inequalities, social hierarchies, and political struggles with class, race, and gender,
which she aims to overcome rather sooner than later. In favour of a deontologi-
cal approach to critical theory and participatory parity of material and immaterial
arguments, Fraser prioritises materialist redistribution claims to counter postmodern
thought that tends to confuse cultural claims for difference with social and economic
inequality. Reducing recognition theory to postmodern identity politics, however,
she runs the risk of advocating a political theory that divorces economy from culture
(see Lukacs, 1968 [1922]; Young, 2007).
For critical theorist Rainer Forst (2014) the debate presents the two most ad-
vanced attempts to construct a comprehensive critical theory of justice, where Fra-
ser’s analysis of the political economy aims to overcome inequality and exploitation,
while Honneth’s reading of social life rests on impoverishment and alienation. ‘In
fact, one could say that representatives of the first tradition [Fraser] already start
from a more “alienated” social-ontological view than those of the second [Honneth]’
(Forst, 2014: 110). Forst’s perspective on a proper framework for critical thinking
is especially interesting, since he comes with an own proposal that goes back to
Kant. Focusing on the process of justification for Forst (2014) Fraser’s redistribution
claim – in the name of participatory parity – is not the goal of justice, but its means.
But Honneth’s central reference point on mutual recognition for Forst also relies on
reciprocal justification in the first place. ‘Hence a critical theory of (in)justice has to
be above all a critique of existing relations of justification’ (ibid.: 120).
For Honneth (2011), on the other hand, ‘mutual recognition always precedes
discourse, and the mutual ascription of normative capacities [Statuseinräumung]
always precedes justification’. The dispute on a proper theoretical framework for
justice therefore shows disagreement with regard to process and outcome but also
coherence within the Frankfurt School. In light of normativity and ‘The Politics of
Recognition’ (Taylor, 1994), the philosophy of recognition is indeed in need of social
sciences (i.e. sociology, anthropology, and geography) to qualify recognition rela-
tions in everyday struggles, where social recognition is mobilized, organised, and
instrumentalised for various political purposes.
To be sure, the above debate can be understood as mutually beneficial if taken
together. With a keen eye on the differing epistemological interest and theory tra-
ditions that Fraser and Honneth apply to the question of justice, their controversy
captures the core of relevant questions for a critical theory of justice. In some sense,
166 Tino Buchholz
one could simply ask why it is important to critically look at social and economic re/
production, re/distribution, politics and culture? This is because people seek social
mobility and a meaningful life, a satisfactory socioeconomic status, a political voice,
and cultural identity in order to relate to who they are and who they want to be as
human beings.

[I]n Honneth’s eyes the lack of a substantive ideal of recognized life in the three spheres
of love, equal rights, and social esteem makes a theory of justice empty and formal,
doomed to forget what justice is really about: the good life. (Forst, 2014: 112)

Progress in Critical and Urban Theory

Sharpening the contours of justice with respect to alienation and recognition rela-
tions, I will now focus on (i) progress in critical and urban theory, (ii) the relation-
to-self and self-realisation in communities, and (iii) bring Honneth in conversation
with Lefebvre, where spatial relations impact the quality of social conflict signifi-
cantly (i.e. relocation). For the last task I link the inner nature of recognition the-
ory (Taylor, 1994) to the social production of a second nature, that is, social space
(Smith, 2008). I will do so with respect to the limits of chance, choice, and the free-
dom of movement. Instead of justice my overall argument will focus on normative
progress, social freedom, and ethical relations that contemporary Frankfurt contri-
butions address with recognition relations and the relation of relationlessness. Such
insights do not imply a new, but sharper framework for critical urban analysis:
deeply rooted in the relation-to-self and human agency in the making of history.
While recognition theory is lively discussed in social philosophy and social theory
on a global scale (cf. Petherbridge, 2011; Schmidt am Busch and Zurn, 2010; Van
den Brink and Owen, 2007), today a new generation of Frankfurt scholars is under-
way to further advance or challenge its heritage. As indicated, this would comprise
Rahel Jaeggi’s work on Alienation (2014) and Critique of Forms of Life (2018) as
well as Rainer Forst’s focus on Toleration in Conflict (2013), Justification and Cri-
tique (2014), and Normativity and Power (2017). With his neo-Kantian approach to
practical reason Forst’s work is recognised by Amy Allen (2016) to make a difference
to the largely Hegelian oeuvre of Habermas and Honneth. Amy Allen is the gen-
eral editor of New Directions in Critical Theory at Columbia University Press, who
strongly relies on Frankfurt critical theory, but also contests implicit normative foun-
dations. In The End of Progress, for example, Allen (2016) confronts Habermas and
Honneth with implicit faith in European progress in their philosophy of modernity
and history, while aiming to decolonize the Frankfurt School. In fact, the Weberian
telos of modernity – as reference point for critical theory – is also shaken by others
(see Deranty and Dunstall, 2017).
Searching for historical progress and alternatives to capitalist urbanisation, sim-
ilar debate took place in human geography. Here, Simon Springer (2014, 2017) has
challenged the primacy of Marxist critique in radical geography and confronted
David Harvey’s analysis to be stuck in the waiting room of history. Arguing for two
theoretical routes to socialism, Springer (2014) relies on anarchist theory and crit-
icises Harvey’s work to be rather static and totalising: overemphasising the role of
the state, while neglecting the role of decentralised ideas of the good and everyday
 New Directions in Frankfurt Critical Theory 167
practices of self-organisation. With a strong focus on social change here and now,
Springer (2014) advocates an agonist perspective on conflict that is aware of mul-
tiple conflicts, which can hardly be solved centrally for good. Springer explicitly
follows Lefebvre and Debord when embracing a situationist framework and the
revolutionary practices of the everyday (ibid.: 260).
Distancing himself from Althusser’s mechanical Marxism while acknowledging
multiple conflicts and many Marxisms in his response to Springer (2014), Har-
vey (2017) continues his search for a grand historical situation and revolutionary
constellation. Although welcoming anarchist contributions to radical geography,
­
Harvey (2017) recalls his argument in Rebel Cities where decentralisation and auton-
omy would serve as ‘vehicles for producing greater inequality’. He therefore defends
the Marxist primacy in radical geography and the ‘critical role’ that the state has
to play for revolutionary movements in need of infrastructure. Pointing to ‘enough
examples of the progressive uses of state power for emancipatory ends (for example,
in Latin America in recent years)’, he does not see any good reason to give up on ‘the
state as a terrain of engagement and struggle for progressive forces of a left-wing
persuasion’ (ibid.).
Instead of speculating about a historical constellation and global master plan, how-
ever, Harvey would have done good to carve out his own historical and geographical
understanding of capitalist social relations: producing and reproducing crisis, not
solving immanent conflict, but shifting it temporarily and permanently through space.
That is the spatial fix for which Harvey has become famous (Jessop, 2006). Neglecting
the power of his own argument, Lefebvre’s (2014 [1947]) emphasis on the ambiguity
of everyday life and the young Marx’s (1969) insights into (self-)alienated social prac-
tices, where ‘reason is at home in unreason’, Harvey holds on to his vision and finds
himself in the waiting room of history.
To be sure, whatever perspective is taken, the above debate provides readers with
another grand example for a recognition-theoretical perspective on conflict and the
limits to progress, where Springer is asked to listen, but ‘Harvey is not really offering
the same courtesy in return’ (Springer, 2017: 280). The debate thus reveals the irrec-
oncilability of normative reference points – and desirable standards – that is also
characteristic to the debate between Fraser and Honneth (2003). All four protag-
onists do not accept the opponent’s standpoint as equally relevant, while insisting
on the primacy of their own position. Such a picture on conflict and controver-
sial debate, in short, does not only stress the fundamental role of inter-subjective
struggle and the scale of progress, it also links to the relevance of intra-subjective
relations, which speaks through the speaker (i.e. Hegel, Marx, Proudhon); highlight-
ing the normativity of recognition relations and the productivity of agonist conflict
for progress here and now.
Acknowledging dialectical limits to social progress for critical urban theory the
role of spatial relations is crucial to normative notions of the good life at places:
who cares for what, whom, when, where, and why? Relational notions to normative
progress in history that is not one history but many (Massey, 2005) can be seen as a
grand invitation to critical urban scholars analysing conflict. Considering a variety
of socio-spatial realities, David M. Smith, for example, has argued that relational
and relativist spatial explanations benefit our understanding of conflict in theory
and practice. Aiming at a closer connection of philosophy, history, and geography,
168 Tino Buchholz
Smith connects to Habermas’s notion of system versus lifeworld and Walzer (1994)
who engages with the difference space and place make, that is, a ‘distinction between
a “thin”, minimalist or universal morality, captured by such grand values as justice
and truth, and a thick, particular or local morality’ (Smith, 1998: 11). Such a per-
spective stresses the social and spatial scale of historical progress (Keil and Mahon,
2010) and links to the relative autonomy of rebellious cities.
To get a hold of the good life for critical urban theory, only few urban scholars have
explicitly taken on the challenge of outlining the good city for an urban discourse.
While Ash Amin’s (2006) approach consists of a negative reconstruction of ‘pol-
luted, unhealthy, tiring, overwhelming, confusing, alienating’ (ibid.: 1011) global
cities that are in need of repair, relatedness, rights, and re-enchantment, John Fried-
mann (2000) has engaged with a positive reconstruction of a good city in defence
of utopian thinking. Here, Friedmann (2000: 468) advocates a ‘solid material base’
founded on common social goods such as adequate education, housing, healthcare,
etc., but goes beyond materialist claims for distributive justice. Similar to Honneth
(1995), Friedmann (2000) highlights autonomy, equality, achievement, and soli-
darity along with a passionate commitment to human flourishing, political rights,
democratic procedures, and equal chances when aiming for universal emancipation
(ibid.: 464). In this line, Friedmann comes close to Honneth’s (2014) idea of social
freedom and Lefebvre’s emphasis on differential space, which can be best experi-
enced in diverse cities.
Searching for the good life in cities – and the scale of progress – therefore involves
an idea of self-realisation in communities, which highlights the sphere of ­membership
for justice and questions of inclusion and exclusion (Walzer, 1983; Young, 1990).
Membership is not a new category to critical urban research, of course, as community
formation is central to human geography, urban sociology, and urban anthropology.
While the largest community imaginable would rest on our membership in human-
ity, we are members of our time and space, which involves citizenship, local patriot-
ism, or where to belong. Regarding the social construction of communities of value
(Honneth, 1995) or communities of character (Walzer, 1983), Benedict Anderson
has made a case for nationalism and identity formation, which leads him to speak of
imagined communities (Anderson, 2006). In her book, Community as Urban Prac-
tice, Talja Blokland (2017) likewise points to imagined communities and difficulties
of theorising the essence of community life that largely relies on urban culture and
permanent change. Instead of assuming harmony at the end of conflict, she con-
cludes: ‘Whether we like it or not, cities change even when they appear unchange-
able; they undergo transformations even if we don’t feel that the transformations
are ours’.
Analysing social change, planetary capitalist urbanisation (Brenner and
Schmid, 2015), propertied citizenship, and property-led displacement (i.e. gentrifica-
tion), a recognition-theoretical lens implies a close focus on the changing composition
of urban community members, who likely share a different set of normative values
which they consider good. The conflictive question for shared identity and community
formation therefore is ‘who we are, “where we come from”’ (Taylor, 1994: 33). Regard-
ing competitive or egalitarian arguments for political justice, for the liberal achieve-
ment principle, for example, the relation-to-self would simply imply self-achievement
 New Directions in Frankfurt Critical Theory 169
and self-use as relevant categories for social esteem between old and new community
members, while an alienated investment perspective on commodified housing and
inherited wealth distorts the ethical picture and the justice of earned deserts. Looking
at limited self-achievement and the accumulation of inherited wealth such a relation-
ship is highly problematic, of course (Piketty, 2014). As Purcell (2008: 88) has noted,
however, property rights are ‘claims not trumps’: shot through with moral expecta-
tions in their use and self-use, so ideological property rights do not convince so easy
(see Heins, 2008, 2009).
The struggle for a meaningful life therefore involves struggles over meaning
and representation, where homes can be conceived of as liberal privilege, achieve-
ment, investment, and private property, on the one hand, while simultaneously
being perceived as a social right and fundamental good that nobody can do with-
out. Connecting recognition theory to spatial practice and the Production of Space,
Henri Lefebvre (1991) stresses the role of normative representation and the simulta-
neous inter-relationship of three moments (i.e. perceived, conceived, lived) that come
together to produce social space. For such a relational picture conflict is likely, since
subjective perception and spatial practice is not unlikely to deviate from plans by
architects, politicians, and owners, who are interested in representations of space;
which is contrasted by the lived experience of inhabitants in everyday life: appropri-
ating representational spaces (see Lefebvre, 1991: 33–42). Questions of meaningful
representation are crucial to self-realisation and one’s performance in history – justi-
fying rights to place, space, and the city – while the question still is: Who cares? ‘[P]
olitical forces which are in fact social forces’, as Lefebvre (1996 [1968]: 163) puts it:

They exist or not. They manifest and express themselves or not. They speak or do not
speak. It is up to them to indicate social needs, to influence existing institutions, to open
the horizon and lay claims to a future which will be their oeuvre. If the inhabitants of
various categories and strata allow themselves to be manoeuvred and manipulated,
displaced anywhere under the pretext of social mobility, if they accept the conditions of
an exploitation more refined and extensive than before, too bad for them.

With Lefebvre (1991, 1996, [2014]) and a relational concept of social space we
can thus conceptualise urban conflicts over meaningful representation, where ‘the
specific quality of urban space arises from the simultaneous presence of very differ-
ent worlds and value systems, of ethnic, cultural, and social groups, activities and
knowledge’ (Schmid, 2012: 48). With Lefebvre we can also conceptualise an online
experience, where new technology and social media extend the options and/or tran-
scend an urban experience, but certainly rely on social recognition relations in social
space. Without recognition relations, the social production of social space would
remain rather formal or abstract. Aiming at representation, human agency, and self-
realisation in social space, recognition theory therefore crucially informs the Lefeb-
vrian philosophy, which makes me speak of a recognition-led production of space.
Interested in the explicit relationship between Frankfurt critical theory and spatial
practice, similar to the Lefebvrian (social) production of (social) space, in my own
work I have put the local in brackets and speak of (local) struggles for (local) recog-
nition, which, if unsatisfactory, imply three options: (i) resignation, which is denied
170 Tino Buchholz
recognition that is painful and results in (passive) suffering, marginalisation, or iso-
lation – lowering one’s expectations of the good life at a specific place but remain in
place; (ii) resistance, which is restoring one’s self-confidence by (actively) engaging
in protest activism and social movements; and (iii) relocation, which is to avoid the
intensification of struggle in one place and struggle for the good life elsewhere. Possi-
bilities of relocation primarily respond to the energy to struggle (i.e. commitment to
values and place), chances for resistance, and the quality of resignation at a certain
moment and place. Relocation further responds to education and imagination (i.e.
the good life elsewhere) and fundamentally requires the freedom of movement and
other resources (i.e. purchase power, citizenship, solidarity), which are limited (Buch-
holz, 2016).
Focusing on the local quality of struggle – or intensity of conflict – next to
qualitative recognition, resignation, and resistance the im/possibility of relocation
makes a decisive difference for social conflicts to develop. Here, the nation-state
finds itself historically and territorially trapped (see Agnew, 2010; E ­ lden, 2010) when
associating its state territory with a container that restricts the freedom of choice and
freedom of movement for its citizens. For contemporary critical urban theory, there-
fore, it is inevitable to realise that social relations are mediated through social space
and a mix of qualitative recognition and/or resignation as well as possibilities for
resistance and relocation. David Harvey’s (2001) spatial fix is crucial here. Without
the very notion of voluntary versus forced relocation – and the spatial condition of
un/free of movement – we cannot understand the ever changing urban community
composition and (i) dynamic movements in cities (i.e. property-led housing careers
and displacement from gentrified neighbourhoods), (ii) the competition between cit-
ies, and (iii) the global history of political, economic, and social migration. Political
philosophy has only recently begun to theorise im/possibilities of free movement
(Carens, 2013; Cassee, 2016; Miller, 2016), while the challenge for critical urban
analysis implies to qualify the spatial dynamics of social conflict: i.e. the legitimacy
of social movements in place and migration movements between places and spaces.
Given the limits of free movement (i.e. political borders/orders, citizenship, pur-
chase power) a great deal of future urban research is needed to better understand
the quality of resignation: i.e. to disconnect or lower expectations of a desirable
life, but remain in place. Here, the power of solidarity networks (friends, family,
and other communities of value) comes into play, where subjects would compensate
for the legal limits of economic or political recognition with social recognition (i.e.
solidarity): engaging in subversive activism and informal or illegal practices. While
such a focus has implications for the legitimacy of a legal framework a resignation
perspective further implies a moral disengagement that must not lead to public activ-
ism, collective protest, or resistance. It must also not imply physical withdrawal – or
territorial relocation – but involve the sphere of moral double standards and modern
cynicism (Vice, 2011), which I address with moral relocation (Buchholz, 2016).
While cynical disengagement from moral discourse can lead to a serious legit-
imation crisis for democratic states (Habermas, 1973), Scott’s (1985) notion of
pragmatic resignation highlights everyday struggles and ethical relations, where a
desirable life is far away; just like the physical possibility of relocation. In other
words, the territorial relevance of local disrespect is crucial to (miserable) urban
 New Directions in Frankfurt Critical Theory 171
experiences in daily life, to what extent individuals may suffer (i.e. losing energy)
and/or substitute the lack of satisfactory urban experiences with an online experi-
ence or imagination: i.e. to relocate one’s consciousness with the help of technology,
literature, music, drugs, or God. For critical urban theory in the Frankfurt tradition
(Brenner, 2009; Charnock, 2018) it would thus be crucial to link social struggles to
spatial relations and the relation-to-self, where self-control and the loss thereof play
a crucial role, while physical and moral relocation complete the picture of agonist
conflict and continuous struggle for a meaningful life.

Conclusion

Summing up, my main argument for a critical and urban theory of justice involves
renewed attention to the Hegelian Marxism of the Frankfurt School in order to focus
on the limits of self-realisation in communities of shared values on shared space.
Acknowledging multiple conflict and normative notions to justice, with regard to
freedom from alienation and freedom for self-realisation, for critical urban theory
it is inevitable to recognise what difference place and space make for the quality of
conflict, social progress, and social change. For the theory–practice relationship this
therefore implies a close analysis of change in everyday community life, where the
ethical process of justification is ever more important for normative progress, while
justice is just some relational outcome.
For desirable progress, contemporary critical theorists clearly seek distance to
teleological progress in history, moral superiority, and paternalist critique. Relying
on immanent critique, contemporary Frankfurt protagonists do not envision har-
mony at the end of conflict but continuous struggles for social freedom and ethical
life (Honneth, 1995, 2014), tackling the various forms of alienation with relational-
ity and critique to forms of life (Jaeggi, 2014, 2018). Self-critical reflection goes so
far that critical theory’s immanent notion of human emancipation was recently the
subject of a conference – hosted by Rahel Jaeggi in Berlin 2018 – where the con-
cept was contested. In light of colonial critique Wendy Brown, for example, aban-
doned the concept altogether. On a similar note, Christoph Menke warned about
inherent idealism and pointed to the dialectics of emancipation, where emancipatory
progress would shift existing power relations but does not overcome them; which
calls for a relational picture of conflict and progress that is informed by histor-
ical and geographical relativism, normative preferences, and a socio-geographical
standpoint. Instead of engaging with leftist populism – as advocated by Nancy Fra-
ser or Chantal Mouffe – Alex Demirovic concluded that it may be wise to opt for
education.
The global picture today indeed does not provide for too much optimism but
Left-wing Melancholia (Traverso, 2016), which requires time to come to terms with
reality, and the damage done to socialist utopias. For critical theorists there is nev-
ertheless hope in fundamental hope that can escape the pathologies of instrumental
reason (see Blöser and Stahl, 2017), while much more work needs to be done to
qualify historical and present (local) struggles for (local) recognition. In any case,
critical urban scholarship would require a decentred recognition perspective on nor-
mative progress, communities of shared values on shared space, and a social idea
172 Tino Buchholz
of freedom that accounts for inclusive spatial relations: involving chances, choice,
and the freedom of movement. Spatial relations do not only allow for the simul-
taneity of multiple conflicts to take place, they moreover allow for possibilities of
movement and, constant comparison of ideals, and local experiences to impact con-
temporary urban struggles and historical progress, which is certainly unfinished.

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 9
Legacies and Remnants of the
Chicago School
Lineage-making and Interdisciplinary Urban
Research at the University of Chicago
Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock

Introduction

On a humid, sunny afternoon in June 2018, a small group of University of Chi-

cago students (doctoral, Master’s, and undergraduate), faculty, and neighbourhood
residents convened outside the Saieh Hall for Economics, a recently renovated
neo-Gothic building located at 5757 South University Avenue in Chicago’s Hyde
Park neighbourhood. The building was formerly home to the Chicago Theological
Seminary and Seminary Co-Op Bookstore before being slated in 2008 for an
extensive adaptive-reuse project that converted the ecclesiastical site into mixed-
use classroom, conference, seminar, collaborative work, and office space, home to
the Department of Economics and the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in
Economics.1
This group came together after several months of planning, meetings, archival
research in the holdings of the University of Chicago Special Collections, and key
interviews with long-time Hyde Parkers. The stage had been set by an initial meet-
ing in the early winter quarter 2017, hosted by the University of Chicago’s Urban
Workshop. The workshop’s more than 30 attendees offered input on the project’s
focus, scope, format, and aims. Over the course of winter and spring 2018, volun-
teers laid the groundwork for the live-narrated ‘test drive’ of the Hyde Park Walking
Tour (hereafter ‘Walking Tour’), an opportunity for this group with various connec-
tions to the university to think collectively about the shifting relationships between

1 
This institute itself was formed in 2011 through the merger of the then three-year-old
Friedman Institute and the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory.

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Legacies and Remnants of the Chicago School 177
university and neighbourhood, between scholarship and praxis, and how changing
institutional arrangements within the university had driven neighbourhood change,
both past and present.
The Walking Tour’s main product will be an audio guide focused on the ‘urban
renewal’ period in Chicago’s history, between the 1950s and late 1970s (Davis and
Vinci, 2013), during which time the character and built form of the Hyde Park neigh-
bourhood changed dramatically. The route begins at the intersection of 57th Street
and South Lake Park Avenue along the 57th Metra commuter railway station. It
passes a number of murals under the Metra underpasses along 57th, 56th, and 55th
Streets – whose artwork reflects in various ways on neighbourhood change in Hyde
Park – and the I.M. Pei-designed University Apartments, an important site in the
neighbourhood’s urban renewal period. Along the way, it reflects on the closing of a
hardware and drugstore; multiple bars and jazz clubs; as well as large-scale evictions
and demolitions of houses occupied by poor, Black residents as a way to combat
‘blight’ (ibid.: 295). Such development sought to promote a ‘racially integrated sta-
ble housing’ situation for middle- and upper-class residents (ibid.: 311). The walk
continues down South Blackstone Avenue to reach 53rd Street, now part of the
rebranded ‘Downtown Hyde Park’, whose multiple storefronts and restaurants have
been developed through the efforts of the South East Chicago Commission (SECC) –
a major player, along with the university, in early urban renewal efforts in the
neighbourhood (Condit, 1974; Hirsch, 1983; Mayer and Wade, 1969). ‘Downtown
Hyde Park’ has received significant university support to ‘revitalise’ the neighbour-
hood with new entertainment and leisure amenities. When the final Walking Tour is
complete, we hope that, through it, participants will reflect not only on the transfor-
mations that have taken place over the decades, but also draw their own parallels to
the current trends of neighbourhood redevelopment and ‘revitalisation’.
We outline the Walking Tour here because the present chapter emerged nearly
concurrently with the Urban Workshop’s collaboration on the project. When we
began thinking about the Walking Tour, we had just started as the Urban Workshop’s
co-organisers. University workshop culture itself has a long history, with workshops
serving as places for graduate students, faculty, interested members of the public, the
occasional undergraduate student, and invited faculty guests from various institu-
tions to gather and provide feedback on scholarly works-in-progress. At the Urban
Workshop’s helm, we were in an advantageous position to observe and reflect on
the workshop’s changing attendee demographics. As biographic individuals, we our-
selves index some of these changes. As a linguistic anthropologist (Babcock) and
sociologist (Diwakar), respectively, both researching in substantive areas outside the
mainstream of our disciplines, both conducting fieldwork in non-US cities, we have
spent the vast majority of our academic careers, and broader intellectual lives, pay-
ing explicit attention to the relationships between institutional legacies and groups’
and individuals’ life opportunities. In terms of workshop attendance, although PhD
students continued to be the majority population of presenters at the workshop in
our year as co-organisers, we saw increased attendance from residents of the Hyde
Park–Kenwood area, to whom the workshop is open. More than anything, we were
surprised by the way in which the perspectives of these neighbourhood residents –
welcomed stakeholders in the workshop community – were often met with bewilder-
ment to outright hostility from the academic attendees.
178 Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock
Beyond the mere temporal convergence of these three things – the Walking Tour,
our terms as workshop co-organisers, and the present chapter – we elaborate this
case here because we think it provides a good overview of the ways that institutional
legacies, new developments, and structural dynamics are shaping urban research at
the university. In the context of Hyde Park’s embittered, even violent history in the
neighbourhood, from Black displacement to the growing attendance of community
members at the Urban Workshop, it becomes all the more important to think about
the connections between the university, its scholarship, its institutional arrange-
ments, and the people who inhabit its physical and imagined geographies.
We have so far managed this extended introduction without any mention of the
‘Chicago School’, which is, in the end, this chapter’s overt substantive focus. The
‘Chicago School’ is a historically and historiographically constituted object, invoked
to refer to many things – methods, theoretical approaches, conceptual activities,
topical frameworks – whether inclusively or exclusively. Abundant and extensive
research has made this point, showing how (or serving as examples of how) invoca-
tions of the ‘Chicago School’ are used to form and contest academic lineages, oppo-
sitional stances, or invitations to debate. It is not our intention either to challenge or
amend this literature as such, nor do we seek to be comprehensive in our treatment
of topics or key works.2 Rather, this piece relies and builds on this work from our
own positions as doctoral students at the University of Chicago to reflect on the ‘Chi-
cago School’ as it stands in the present moment. In the following sections, we outline
the multiple ways that this category functions in the literature in order to then take
a closer look at the ways in which the ‘Chicago School’ is currently situated at the
intersection of university, department(s), discipline(s), and interdisciplinary develop-
ments. Rather than treat the ‘Chicago School’ in isolation, in this chapter we focus
on some of the ways in which it has developed, historically, out of interdisciplinary
engagements. Above all, we reflect on the status of the school’s historical connection
to ‘(the) city’ in the context of an interdisciplinary and institutional impetus to focus
on ‘(the) urban’. While acknowledging the many critiques of the content of urban-
and sociological scholarship produced by what was retroactively constituted as the
‘Chicago School’, we turn to these interdisciplinary engagements – both conceptual
and methodological – to bring a new perspective to extant debates over the ‘Chicago
School’s’ legacies.
The chapter proceeds in four sections. In the first section, we provide a brief over-
view of extant scholarship on the many ways that the ‘Chicago School’ has been
treated. The second part of this section outlines our own conceptual and theoretical
understandings of lineage-making as it relates to concepts drawn from anthropology
and the sociology of knowledge. The second section reflects, first, on some of the
substantive historical overlaps between concepts developed by anthropologists and
sociologists during the early years of department formation, especially theorisation
of race and the rural–urban continuum. Next, it highlights how insights from sci-
ence, technology, and society (STS) research and the history of cartography provide
new ways of reflecting on the growing interest in cartographic methods. We consider

2 
For an overview of the disciplinary history – albeit without a discussion of historio-
graphic difficulties or controversies (Abbott, 1999: 4) – see e.g. Plummer (1997); for a
comprehensive bibliographic survey, see Kurtz (1984).
 Legacies and Remnants of the Chicago School 179
how these early developments are linked to trends in computational and spatial
analytic approaches at the university today. In the penultimate section, we outline
the present institutional arrangements for urban research at the University of Chi-
cago before offering concluding remarks in the last section.

Approaches to ‘The’ ‘Chicago School’

This part gives an overview of what is at this point a familiar history of the ‘Chicago
School’.3 The category towards which this label points can be broad – as in anyone
researching, teaching, or receiving an education at the University of Chicago, or
participating in some quintessentially ‘Chicago’ way of doing things – or specific –
for instance, a particular time period (e.g. 1915–1935), a set of professors (e.g.
Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, Ellsworth Farris, W.I. Thomas, Herbert Blumer, Louis
Wirth), a set of students (e.g. Herbert Blumer, Louis Wirth, Everett Hughes, Harvey
W. Zorbaugh, Ernest R. Mowrer), and/or a body of work. Many historical and his-
toriographical overviews of the Chicago School have attempted to situate the Chi-
cago School with respect to some particular context(s): for instance, the institutional
setting of the University of Chicago social science (Bulmer, 1984); a commitment
to American liberal values (Smith, 1988); corporate interests (e.g. the Rockefeller
fortune that bankrolled the early university; ibid.); a generalised, if loose, approach
to processual sociology (Abbott, 1999); the emergence at the university of other
‘schools’, like that of philosophy; intellectual movements (e.g. pragmatism, ecology);
or the City of Chicago.
Adopting the more specific ‘customary view’ (ibid.: 5) of the Chicago School –
including a time period, set of professors, group of students, and body of work –
the research produced between 1915 and 1935 still cannot easily be summarised
according to a single paradigm. However, much of this research was brought together
by the fact that the City of Chicago acted as its practitioners’ backyard. The view of
the city as young, raw, turbulent, and constituted by paradox – a view echoed in lit-
erature, scholarly writing, social reform manifestoes, journalistic reportage, and the
like – had a strong impact on the ways in which the school’s early researchers under-
took their work. It also imparted a sense of urgency to that work (Bulmer, 1984:
13–16). Within the historical context of Chicago’s explosive growth, destruction
and rebuilding, and rapid demographic and urban transformation, the University of
Chicago had early on made a name for itself through its school of philosophy, asso-
ciated with the pragmatists Dewey and Mead, much earlier in the decade.4 However,
the first description of a school of Chicago sociology came with Milla A. Alihan’s
critique of Chicago’s ‘ecological school’. Characterising it as a ‘school’ surrounding
Park and associates, her 1938 Social Ecology: A Critical Analysis, nevertheless iden-

3 
Our use of inverted commas around ‘Chicago School’ is intended to draw attention to
its multiplicity and contestation. Though we do not include them from this point for-
ward, they should be implied.
4
  In 1903, William James had praised the ‘Chicago University’ school of philosophy as
uniting both ‘thought’ and a ‘school’, a feat that set it apart from both Harvard and Yale
universities (James 1903, cited in Smith, 1988: 28).
180 Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock
tified it as having a particular style of analysis, body of work, a group of adherents,
and a theoretical canon (Alihan, 1938).
After Alihan, the next period in which writing about the Chicago School qua
‘school’ began to effloresce was during the 1960s. Abbott (1999: 15–33) identifies
three major periods of writing about the Chicago School: colligation (1960s and
1970s), consolidation (1970s–early 1980s), and complexification and revision-
ism (1980s–1990s). During the colligation period, scholars worked to delimit the
school’s methods, members, and provenance, thereby condensing a set of facts that
could be located as an object of investigation. The period of consolidation intro-
duced historical and historiographical complexity to the Chicago School as a now-
defined object of investigation. The interpretations that emerged during this period
were divided between emphases on social psychology, on the one hand, and, on
the other, fieldwork and the ecological tradition (ibid.: 13). During this period, the
school also became an object of focus in the European social sciences, as the Swedish
anthropologist Ulf Hannerz (discussed further in the section on interdisciplinary
conceptualisations) took up the Chicago School to claim a lineage for the still-con-
densing field of urban anthropology; other scholars translated influential theoreti-
cal essays, such as Wirth’s ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, into French (ibid.: 13–14).
Finally, during the complexification and revisionism phase of the 1980s and 1990s
(and continuing into the present), scholars sought to return the Chicago School to
the ‘flow of the historical process … No school is an island, these works say, either
in social space or in social time’ (ibid.: 30).
Across these periods, a number of figures worked assiduously to constitute the Chi-
cago School, creating the resources that would make possible future historical and histo-
riographical research. One such figure is Morris Janowitz, who not only championed the
hiring of key faculty to the Department of Sociology, but also established the Heritage
of Sociology series, which from the 1960s onwards republished and reintroduced the
Chicago School’s work. Gary Fine (1995) similarly worked to trace ‘common pattern[s]
of thought’ as they spread through the diaspora of University of Chicago graduates who
moved to places like Kansas, CUNY, Arizona, and Brandeis during academia’s post-war
expansion (Abbott, 1999: 19–20). In general, as Abbott also points out, most work
invoking the Chicago School takes it as foundational in current debates on ‘(the) city’.
But the formal ecological and successional conception of ‘(the) city’ that University of
Chicago sociologists developed in the period 1915–1935 was only systematically chal-
lenged as emblematic of a school of thought since the late 1970s (ibid.: 23). As such,
despite the longer histories of production of scholarship and diversity of thought that
has come to be colligated as the ‘school’, in much current debate the Chicago School
is framed as ‘a tradition to be transcended or an orthodoxy to be overthrown’ (ibid.).
This is not to deny the existence and impact of Marxist and neo-Marxist critiques from
scholars such as Harvey, Lefebvre, and Castells, which began in the prior decade. Rather,
we draw attention instead to the point made by Abbott (1999): that the purported unity
of a school as the object of critique was the result of its retrospective creation as an
object in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result of this retrospective creation, the existence of
a singular Chicago School view of the city has become presumable as such. This object
creation has itself also shifted over time in response to broad shifts in the conditions
under which it has come to be seen as necessary to orient, affirmatively or negatively, to
disciplinary pasts, thereby strategically bringing those pasts into the present.
 Legacies and Remnants of the Chicago School 181
Lineage-making, Predecessors, and Legacies
Before continuing our discussion of interdisciplinary conceptualisations and meth-
odologies in the making of the Chicago School, it is first important to clarify: what
do we mean by lineage? How is it related to other theoretical tools developed to
describe and explain uses of the past in the present? Our purpose in asking and stat-
ing our positions on these questions is to make clear that lineages always emerge
out of projects of lineage-making. Another way of saying this is that prior forms do
not simply continue from the past into the present (what might be referred to as a
cultural survival; see Tylor, 1883: vol. I, 70–159), but instead are actively brought
out as constituting a history.
Talal Asad refers to a ‘discursive tradition’ as a set of didactic instructions regard-
ing the ‘correct form and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is
established, has a history’ and which is used, via appeals to that history, to link a
past to a future through a present (Asad, 2009 [1986]: 20). Such discursive tradi-
tions often rely on ostensibly past things, but this should not be understood – fol-
lowing Kuhn and later scholars in the social study of science – to involve processes
of cumulative accretion, but of creative reinterpretation (Camic, 1992: 431). While
the Chicago School, as a heterogeneous object, can productively be understood as
having been formalised as a discursive tradition (perhaps more accurately, as many
discursive traditions), our project here takes inspiration from Charles Camic’s now-
classic historiographical re-evaluation of the development of Talcott Parson’s soci-
ology. Against the ‘content-fit model’ of predecessor selection – a view according
to which a thinker chooses their predecessors due to ‘fit’ between ‘the arguments,
concepts, themes, materials, orientations, or methods of certain earlier figures and
some aspect(s) of the work of the thinker under study’ (ibid.: 423) – Camic draws
our attention to the ‘socioinstitutional circumstances’, including reputational mech-
anisms (ibid.), that lead to selective uptake of some but not other alternatives from
among a range of more or less intersubstitutable positions (ibid.: 421–422). In short,
one actively chooses one’s predecessors (albeit in ways afforded by institutional
arrangements, historical contingencies, and individual- or group goals), thereby es-
tablishing one’s own position as inheritor of an intellectual legacy. Though ‘legacy’
can refer to an artefact of a prior period that has found its way into present forms
and arrangements, as in the term’s use in computing, originally borrowed from the
‘legacy effects’ described in ecology (see Clements, 1916), we use the term more in
its colloquial sense as something taken up from a predecessor. By emphasising this
process of uptake, we draw attention to the fact that the past never simply is. Rather,
it is constantly made and remade, whether as history (Trouillot, 1995: 26), invented
tradition(s) (Hobsbawm, 2003 [1983]), academic lineage(s), or otherwise.

Interdisciplinary Conceptualisations

In this section, we examine the Chicago School’s engagements with ‘(the) urban’ in
relation to the category’s shifting disciplinary engagements within and beyond soci-
ology. We consider, on the one hand, Chicago School sociologists’ explicit empirical
engagement with a modern American city (Chicago) to think about present-day
182 Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock
legacies and transformations in conceptualisations of urbanism. At the same time,
we draw attention to the ways, historically, in which key Chicago School concepts
and approaches developed out of interdisciplinary engagements, in particular bet-
ween sociology and anthropology. Though theorisation of ‘the urban’ has changed
over time in response to exogenous factors – changing city forms; a meteoric rise
in the number of cities across the United States and the world; shifts in patterns
of urban settlement, movement, segregation, growth, and inequality – our aim in
this section is not to explicate these transformations. Rather, we draw attention to
Chicago School sociologists’ early connection with anthropologists at the university,
which produced important – if under-recognised – mutual impacts on conceptualisa-
tions of ‘the urban’ within sociology, both through overt borrowing, and through
divisions of intellectual labour that defined both disciplines’ subject matter through
a presumed contrast with the other.
In the early decades of its founding, the University of Chicago was noted for the
extent and intensity of its interdisciplinary exchange. In the early years, this was due
in part to its small size; it was also due to a self-consciousness of the university’s own
newness, which afforded its faculty and administrators the possibility to oppose the
perceived orthodoxy of older Eastern Seaboard universities. This interdisciplinary
exchange similarly emerged out of scholars’ close physical proximity to one another,
both in their spaces of work – like the Social Science Research Building (completed
1929) – and leisure – like the Quadrangle Club, where on any given day, one could
overhear lively mealtime conversations among philosophers, zoologists, sociologists,
political scientists, anthropologists, and others. Finally, it was also due to the orga-
nisation of the university’s departments, which were interdisciplinary in the sense
generally meant by the term’s uses today: until 1929, Albion Small’s Department of
Social Science was a joint department of sociology and anthropology.
These exchanges were also inter-institutional and extra-disciplinary: Albion Small
helped to elevate the University of Chicago’s profile in Europe through his work
with the 1904 Saint Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences, which put him in close
contact with figures like Max Weber and Gustav von Ratzenhofer (Bulmer, 1984:
34). Further, as Smith (1988) has argued, far from being cloistered away in the uni-
versity’s Gothic towers, this particular manifestation of a long-standing Chicago
tradition of a liberal critique of capitalism brought faculty and graduate students
alike into contact with Chicago-area reformers, policymakers, community organisa-
tions, and professional- and para-professional groups with whom they shared gen-
eral goals, if not values, methods, or theoretical ambitions. The ‘customary view’
of the Chicago School tends to rest on a distinction between the predominantly
women sociologists at Hull House and the almost entirely men sociologists of ‘the
Chicago School’, framed as a contrast between reformist, policy-oriented zeal – part
of the Hull House mission, after all, was ‘to investigate and improve the conditions
in industrial districts of Chicago’ (Addams, 1990 [1889]: 66) – and a discipline
imbued with theoretical and empirical rigour. However, historiographical writing
on Hull House has shown that such easy distinctions are complicated by overlap-
ping membership, methodological similarities, and sociological substance. There
was extensive intellectual borrowing and collaboration between scholars at Hull
House – such as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Grace Addams – and faculty
at the Department of Sociology such as Albion Small, George Herbert Mead, and
 Legacies and Remnants of the Chicago School 183
Charles Zueblin (Deegan, 2017). Faculty like Burgess, Zueblin, and Mead worked
at Hull House, carrying out statistical surveys or reform efforts alongside women
sociologists. The 1895 publication Hull House Maps and Papers was spearheaded
by Florence Kelley and other women sociologists at Hull House. It contained essays,
maps, and statistical information on a range of topics such as labour, residence,
and employment in Chicago. The work surpassed any contemporary publication
in its meticulous attention to data collection, its commentary on urban sociolog-
ical concerns (e.g. labour and housing conditions), and its methodological tools
(e.g. interviews, surveys, and maps). The University of Chicago faculty often cited
this publication in their lectures and writing.
Despite these collaborations and the rigour of sociological scholarship at Hull
House, the women of Hull House are rarely credited for their scholarship and metic-
ulous recording of social facts in nineteenth-century Chicago. In order to develop
a discipline with an eye towards generalizability, the sociologists who would come
to be known as founders of the Chicago School began to distance themselves from
the reformist and action-oriented research taking place at Hull House. By contem-
porary standards of sociological research, the women members of Hull House were
as instrumental, if not more, to the development of a Chicago School as their male
counterparts, a fact that is elided in much writing on the school’s genesis. Beyond this,
Chicago School sociologists’ ambivalence on the correct form of social change has
been noted, and is especially apparent in Park’s cycle theory of race relations, which
displays Park’s hallmark aversion to radical thought or action around racial reform.
This theory emphasised the ‘inevitability’ of racial assimilation and acceptance of
the Black minority into American cities (Salerno, 2013). Against the backdrop of
violent racial riots during the 1916–1919 Black migration into the city, this perspec-
tive is telling of Park’s own self-consciously ‘moderate’ approach, which was heavily
influenced by Booker T. Washington. It has also been noted that while he showed
no overt discrimination towards his graduate students – Horace Cayton, St. Clair
Drake, Oliver Cox, and Allison Davis, among others – there is ample documentation
of his disdain for the scholarship of W.E.B. DuBois, and no evidence of any voiced
opposition to segregation laws (ibid.).
The role of the Chicago School in the production and legitimation of race – both as
an analytic category and normative ordering project – is relatively well known. Even
when its practitioners aimed at denaturalising the widely accepted link between race
(especially Blackness), immigrant status, and criminality, its reform and advocacy
efforts nevertheless continued to presuppose and entrench race as a necessary category
for understanding social groups in the United States, especially via the production of
race-based crime statistics and discourses on Black criminality (Muhammad, 2010).
Less emphasised, however, are the exchanges between anthropologists, sociologists,
and reformers in the constitution of race as a dominant category – and as a trans-
posable model for differentiation of all kinds – in policy, research, and social life.
While these various groups were drawing on highly distributed, broadly available
discourses of the period, they were also producing them in new ways via direct intel-
lectual influence. That is, such influences were not just abstract or diffuse, part of
a broader social milieu of racialism and racism, but were due also to the sharing of
ideas between key intellectual figures, who in turn implemented these ideas in their
institution-building efforts.
184 Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock
Franz Boas – often called the ‘father of American anthropology’ – is one such
point of contact. Noted for his active involvement in public debates on race,
racism, nationalism, and war (Baker, 2004) – though perhaps especially on the
‘Negro question’ and Native North American tribal policy – Boas was also an
explicit influence on the investigative methods and scholarly conceptions being
developed by Chicago School social scientists. Though he never held a teaching
post at the University of Chicago, he worked in Chicago as assistant to the direc-
tor of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition’s anthropology department. For
decades, the sociologist and polymath W.E.B. DuBois corresponded with Boas;
Robert Park also corresponded with Boas during the early years of the formation
of Chicago’s Social Science department. W.I. Thomas, one of the early institution-
builders at the university – who was an anthropologist by training and self-iden-
tification – was deeply influenced by Boas’s and Boas’s students’ empirical and
theoretical work. In his influential essay on ‘The City’, Park cited Boas’s work
(and the work of Boas’s student Robert Lowie) as models for the burgeoning
sociological discipline:

The same patient methods which anthropologists like Boas and Lowie have expended
on the life and manners of the North American Indian might be even more fruitfully em-
ployed in the investigation of the customs, beliefs, social practices, and general concep-
tions of life prevalent in Little Italy on the lower North Side of Chicago, or in recording
the more sophisticated folkways of the inhabitants of Greenwich Village. (Park, 1984
[1925]: 3)

Boas’s student, the celebrated linguist and ethnographer Edward Sapir, was remem-
bered by sociology graduate students as one of the most noted influences on their
education during his time teaching at the university, second only to scholars in the
department of philosophy (Carey, 1975: 159–163).
Robert Park – through his interaction with Thomas, his work as secretary to
Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee, and his direct correspondence with Boas – was
aware of the anthropological literature on race, and of its relationship to broader
debates during the period (which informed, among other things, his participation
as a member of the Chicago Board for Race Relations). Park was also influenced
later in life by his relationship to his son-in-law, the anthropologist Robert Redfield,
whose work on ‘folk society’ helped in the 1940s to solidify the intellectual sense of
a rigorously defined rural–urban continuum (Howe, 1990), thereby providing the
‘rural’ double to the urban way of life being articulated by scholars like Louis Wirth
(Jones and Rodgers, 2016). Park also corresponded with Bronisław Malinowski,
the great populariser of the fieldwork approach in anthropology and a key figure
in British social anthropology. Speaking later of the functionalist school of British
social anthropology – represented at the University of Chicago from 1931 to 1937
by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown – Park would say that it was ‘nothing more or less than
sociology, with the qualification that it is mainly concerned with primitive peoples’
(cited in Stocking, 1979: 21).
Because of an historical imaginary of anthropology as grounded in ‘folk’ traditions
in ‘rural’ settings, urban anthropology has been a vexed area of research. In a now-
classic critical intervention into the field of urban (social) anthropology, Ulf Hannerz
 Legacies and Remnants of the Chicago School 185
poses the question, ‘what is urban about urban anthropology, and what is anthro-
pological about it?’ (Hannerz, 1980: 3). Versions of this critique appeared earlier as
well. In 1968, Anthony Leeds pointed out urban anthropologists’ tendency to pro-
duce knowledge in cities, rather than on cities generally (Leeds, 1994 [1968]: 233);
that is, research was ‘conducted in urban areas not of urban areas’ (Howe, 1990: 37;
emphasis added). Hannerz and others noted the ways in which anthropologists were
late arrivals to urban research, pulled away from ‘primitive’ people and locales into
cities, as the people they studied were drawn into newly urbanising and industrialis-
ing locales of the developing world through the dynamics of colonial rule, globalisa-
tion, and the like. Anthropologists producing the famous Copperbelt ethnographies
on urbanisation and rural–urban migration were also, it turns out, early proponents
of the world systems theory (Smart and Smart, 2003: 265; see also Ferguson, 1999).
This move to focus beyond ‘(the) city’ and ‘(the) urban’ to more encompassing glob-
al political-economic dynamics is a longstanding tendency in urban anthropologi-
cal research.
Though anthropologists – especially archaeologists – have long been concerned
with cities and urbanism (disciplinary imaginaries notwithstanding), it was from
the 1960s onwards that urban ethnographies began appearing in large numbers.
Such works continue to take various approaches to ‘(the) city’ and ‘(the) urban’ as a
broader context for the specific practices that they analyse.5 Along with these kinds
of monographs, works reviewing urban anthropology scholarship have periodically
assessed the state of the field, linking it to a set of specific contemporary concerns:
for instance (again, this list is non-exhaustive), urban typology in cultural context
(Fox, 1977), globalisation (Smart and Smart, 2003), interdisciplinary borrowings
(Low, 1996), and political ecology (Rademacher, 2015).
One after-effect of the separation of the departments of anthropology and soci-
ology at the university, along with the more general growth of both as disciplines,
is the present situation of relatively fortified boundaries between the two areas
of study. In part this is related to the ways in which pressures towards specialisa-
tion and increased pressure on publication (linked to the growth in the number of
academic journals), brought about by the halt in the growth of academia after 1975
(Altbach, 1995: 30; Henry, 1975), have produced inward-looking intellectual ten-
dencies. Within American urban sociology, this inward-looking tendency is evident
in the under-problematised American-centric characterisations of ‘urban’ life that
have dominated until fairly recently. Because American cities underlay urban soci-
ologists’ model-building, there has been intense grappling over substantive topics
such as neighbourhood, neighbourhood change, depopulation, suburbanisation,
immigration, and gentrification. While there is now a growing body of literature
that utilises models of cities from outside the American norm, our agenda calls for
the definitive dissolving of such boundaries. While specialised theoretical formu-
lations may be an inevitable consequence of the academic demands of publishing,

5 
This can be seen in works such as – among many others – Bottleneck (Melly, 2017),
Endangered City (Zeiderman, 2016), Speculative Markets (Peterson, 2014), The Spectac-
ular City (Goldstein, 2004), Expectations of Modernity (Ferguson, 1999), French Modern
(Rabinow, 1995), The Modernist City (Holston, 1989), and Soulside (Hannerz, 2004).
186 Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock
reading widely across disciplines will only enrich the geographical, theoretical, and
conceptual insights of urban sociology, anthropology, and related fields.

Interdisciplinary Methodologies
As mentioned before, many historiographical accounts of the Chicago School from
the 1960s to the 1980s emphasise the school’s early ethnographies of commu-
nities within Chicago, thus creating its image as exclusively qualitative and ethno-
graphic. However, this unidimensional characterisation elides the extensive use of
survey, statistical, and cartographic methods employed by sociologists in making
sense of social groupings extant within the city. Urban sociologists of the Chi-
cago School, particularly Ernest Burgess and his students, spent decades devising
statistical methods capable of revealing these ‘small territorial groupings’, or com-
munities, to the sociologist (Collins and Makowsky, 2005: 169, 171). In this sec-
tion, we attend to the cartographic, statistical, and quantitative developments that
shaped not only the foundations of urban sociology, but also the administration of
the City of Chicago.
At the same time, we seek to bring a critical sensibility to recent efforts at reclaim-
ing the Chicago School’s cartographic pasts (Owens, 2012). Scholars working in the
history of cartography have insisted on the historical character and construction of
maps and cartographic methods, insisting, among other important points, on their
uses as instruments of power, rather than straightforward representations of (spatial)
realities (Cosgrove, 2007; Harley, 1988, 1989). STS scholarship has also empha-
sised the way that expert technical instruments, like maps, gain authority in and
through their discursively constructed claims to scientific ‘objectivity’, which makes
them interpretable as transparent by non-experts (and also, sometimes, by experts;
Rankin, 2016). Here we consider these insights alongside the exhibition Mapping
the Young Metropolis: The Chicago School of Sociology, 1915–1940, on view at the
Special Collections Research Center’s (SCRC) Gallery from 22 June to 11 September
2015. The exhibition offered a selection of material drawn primarily from the hold-
ings of Ernest Burgess and his students. This exhibited material (accessible as online
exhibit6) highlights maps’ uses as technologies that produce the spatial and social
realities that they are often taken merely to reveal. We delineate these cartographic
approaches to reflect on the resonance between such methods and present method-
ological innovations and interdisciplinary exchanges in urban sociology, while also
reflecting on the disjunctures between cartographic methods of early Chicago soci-
ologists and present urban sociologists.
The materials presented in Mapping the Metropolis demonstrate some of the ways
in which Robert Park and Ernest Burgess made use of existing technologies (census
maps, tabulation methods, diagramming) to represent the City of Chicago according
to what they saw as a self-consciously ‘sociological’ view of the city. According to
this view, the city was a new kind of community, a large-scale agglomeration com-
prised of many other communities, each a ‘world in itself’ that was nevertheless part
of a larger-scale formation:

6 
www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/mapping-young-metropolis
 Legacies and Remnants of the Chicago School 187
Mr. Park and Mr. Burgess looking over the city saw it as an aggregation of many small
territorial groupings … Each of these districts they looked upon as a distinct cultural
complex, as a world in itself with its own characteristic institutions and its own distinct
mode of life. (Report by Vivian Palmer, 1929, ‘The Study of the Growth of the Local
Communities of Chicago’, in Ernest Watson Burgess Papers)

The initial quantitative- and spatial framework in which these communities’

existence was sought came from the US Censuses of 1920, 1930, and 1934. Until at
least 1930, the community areas were identical with the US Census Bureau’s Census
Tracts. As of the 1930 Census, however, the reverse was true: the Census Tracts had
been brought into alignment with the sociological neighbourhood areas. Burgess’s
cooperation with the US Census Bureau, including extensive work by his students,
eventually led to the re-division of Chicago into 75 Community Areas. These areas
have been adopted broadly, and are now used in domains as varied as real estate
marketing, city administration, journalism, and further social research.7 The new
‘sociological’ map, beyond being incorporated into the Census Bureau’s toolkit,
served as an authorising framework for the distributional mapping of a dizzying
array of other phenomena by students of Chicago sociology, brought together by
virtue of their common classification as urban ‘problems’ – manic depressives, those
receiving public aid, households containing ‘Others’ (i.e. non-kin), or the distribu-
tion of ‘Licensed Motion Picture Theatres by Seating Capacity’ – all tabulated by
Community Area.
The maps’ seemingly straightforward visualisations belie both the methods by
which the maps were generated and the complex and conflictual histories of disci-
plinary and departmental ground-clearing that motivated their production in the first
place. As an exercise in disciplinary and departmental ground-clearing, Burgess’s and
students’ mapping techniques, though involving statistical methods, were carried out
in contrast to both the Columbia University sociology department’s advocacy for the
‘survey movement’ as a method of ‘variables and correlations’ and to the ‘social sur-
veys’ approach conducted by ‘social workers or their ancillaries in the charity orga-
nisation movement’(Abbott, 1999: 206). Though the ‘community areas’ programme
was never verified through this extensive empirical research, it nevertheless has a
continuing social salience to this day. Artefacts such as the Community Area maps
and (in)famous Concentric Zone diagram continue to circulate into the present as
evidence, for some, of efforts at situating spatial modelling outside any temporal,
social, or contextual dimensions. As an exercise in methods, or techniques of pro-
duction, Chicago School mapmakers attempted to standardise data-collection proce-
dures into more or less detailed techniques of the body (Mauss, 1973 [1934]) – and
pen – through methods handbooks. Some of these directions were very specific, such
as admonitions to mark ‘householder names’ in black ink, with head of household
first, followed by wife in parentheses. Others involved more abstract descriptions
of how to fill out tables and calculate regressions, generate population pyramids,
administer and analyse personality surveys, and so forth. Others were taught through
coursework in ways never fully formalised or standardised in handbooks or the like:

7 
Due to later subdivisions and the inclusion of O’Hare, there are now 77 Community Areas.
188 Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock
student maps could be made and filled in with things like coloured pencil, crayons,
and store-bought stickers.
In contrast to this crayon cartography, the present moment in social scientific
research is characterised by a turn to digital tools and data. Chicago School
cartography’s lasting legacy lies in a concern with space as ordering social rela-
tions. The availability of instruments such as geographic information systems
(GIS) – and the growth of spatial data sciences and allied computational social
scientific methods – have polarised this spatial (re)turn through the development
of technical methods with which to examine sociological phenomena. Urban soci-
ologists currently stand somewhat split over a quantitative–qualitative divide, a
situation that motivates calls for reconciliation, such as Brown-Saracino’s (2016)
agenda to unite macro- and micro-level studies of urban processes by bridg-
ing the work of quantitative and qualitative sociologists. Writing about gentri-
fication scholarship, Brown-Saracino argues that quantitative methods allow us
to understand the concentration of wealth and inequality within spaces, while
qualitative methods facilitate investigation into the mechanisms whereby these
forms of segregation are produced (ibid.).
Such calls to bridge these divides point to the new methodological alignments
within urban sociology. There is often a sense that quantitative and qualitative
methods are ‘speaking past’ one another, rather than excavating ‘the urban’ at
various scales. Spatial analytic methods have been fortified by the allied data sci-
ences, built on computer languages and software like R, Python, GIS, GeoDa, etc.
Methods built on these technologies have, in turn, driven theory-making: Anselin’s
(1999) recent development of the concept of ‘spatial autocorrelation’, referring
to the tendency for observations that are near each other in space to have similar
values, was made possible by spatial analytic software. At the same time, the con-
cept can be seen as a twenty-first-century extension of Robert Park’s claim that
social distance is correlated with spatial distance. Similarly, Logan et al. (2002)
have examined characteristics of ethnic neighbourhoods in Los Angeles using
spatial clustering methods, which speak to Burgess’s invasion-succession models
of urban growth.
New spatial methods also draw attention to challenges regarding the availabil-
ity of and methods for obtaining data in cities of the Global South, where bureau-
cratic and infrastructural conditions limit such methods’ applicability. Sociologists
in these contexts thus rely on first-hand data collection – which is often arduous
and time-consuming – or in filling the gaps with qualitative, ethnographic, and
interview-based data. While this section has focused primarily on interdisciplinary
alignments and innovations in spatial quantitative methods, this is not to down-
play the ethnographically rich and insightful research that is not only expanding the
conception of ‘(the) urban’ as being potentially more expansive than ‘(the) city’, but
is also questioning what it means to be doing urban research, especially urban soci-
ology. As the historical work on Chicago School cartography has highlighted, ‘the
city’ is in part a product of the technologies through which it is rendered knowable
(De Certeau, 2011; Hull, 2012: 212–213; Scott, 1998), and ‘the urban’ has come to
encompass a broad range of production, consumption, cultural, social, and informa-
tional processes that reach beyond any one pattern or model for constituting it as an
object of research.
 Legacies and Remnants of the Chicago School 189
Shifting Institutional Arrangements for ‘Urban’ Research at the
University of Chicago and Beyond

Chicago social scientists’ engagement with ‘the city’ is now moving in the
direction of a category considered by its users to be more encompassing: ‘(the)
urban’. The complex interplay between and frequent interchangeability of these
terms reflect a range of disciplinary, institutional, and material processes at
work. First, the ever-expanding domain of ‘(the) urban’ has come to replace not
only the, but also often a city as the object of analysis for urban scholars. ‘(The)
urban’ sometimes conceptually supersedes ‘(the) city’, standing for a wide range
of activities, concepts, and dynamics extending beyond, and traversing, multiple
geographies, even while being linked to and emergent out of particular locales.
At other times, invocations of ‘(the) urban’ serves to complement understand-
ings of ‘(the) city’, suggesting the apparently globalised processes – inequality,
residence, movement, occupation, citizenship claims – that appear in cities, albeit
in ways that vary both locationally and relative to stratifying variables like race,
class, gender, and other master statuses (see Hughes, 1963).
Urban sociology in particular has had to contend with the enlarged scope ascribed
to ‘urban’ processes in the wake of critiques of the Chicago School, critiques that
appealed to the inadequacy of the City of Chicago as a site for more broadly ‘urban’
theorisation. Though not the first critique, one prominent urban sociological cri-
tique was inaugurated by Michael Dear’s ‘invitation to debate’, in which he criti-
cised the ostensive myopia of Park, Burgess, and colleagues for their school’s City of
Chicago-centric theory-, concept-, and model-building (Dear, 2002). Dear pointed
to new phenomena characterising the growth and settlement patterns of cities like
Los Angeles, whose ‘edge cities’ and forms of internal diversity were inexplicable via
the Chicago School toolkit. Dear’s critique was important in that it explicitly sought
to eke out disciplinary space for a new ‘school’ in opposition to what had come to
be accepted as a coherent, cohesive Chicago School. Responding to the invitation,
sociologists like Andrew Abbott (2002) and Terry Clark (2006) outlined how Park,
Suttles, Thomas, and Zorbaugh did in fact address the spirit, if not the substance, of
these new urban phenomena. However, such contestations over the agenda for an
‘urban’ sociology reveal the chimera-like nature of the object of analysis. Efforts at
delimiting ‘(the) urban’ as here distinct from merely a model based on a city is an
enduring source of contention for urban sociologists and scholars.
‘(The) urban’ is increasingly a category through which to gain access to fund-
ing, sponsorship, and institutional resources. This seems to be true broadly, but
our focus in this section is in tracing the way that this expanded focus on ‘(the)
urban’ is reflected in the shifting institutional arrangements for University of
Chicago’s ‘urban’ research. Our aforementioned Walking Tour, in its relation-
ship with the Urban Workshop, is an outgrowth of this ‘urban’ turn. The Urban
Workshop has historically received part of its funding from the University of
Chicago’s Council on Advanced Studies (CAS), which funds other university
workshops across the Divinity School and Divisions of the Humanities and Social
Sciences (workshops range in subject matter, as of the 2018–2019 academic year,
from medieval studies and art and politics of East Asia to language processing,
190 Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock
acquisition, and evolution); it also receives funding from UChicago Urban, an
urban research institute that will soon be superseded by the Mansueto Insti-
tute for Urban Innovation. The institute overtook UChicago Urban following a
landmark gift from the eponymous Rika and Joseph Mansueto, who made their
fortune from the Morningstar financial consultancy. As the institute describes in
a section on its website titled ‘Our Challenge’, growing urbanisation – meaning
an unprecedented increase in cities’ population rate – is leading to a ‘new chapter
in human history’ worthy of research utilising ‘dynamic relationships with …
data’, thus ‘empower[ing] people and their governments to realize the positive
potential of our increasingly urban world’. It also emphasises looking at cities
globally, since ‘all cities share common characteristics with other places’ and
advocates a mode of study that defies disciplinary boundaries. The emphasis
on the novelty of urban population growth, discourses on urbanisation, and an
interdisciplinary approach all seem, rhetorically, to characterise the ‘innovative’
aspect of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation.
The availability of new data-related methods; the search for solutions to the
‘problem’ of urban density, particularly in cities of the Global South, and an
interdisciplinarity that seeks to draw together previously unrelated disciplines
marks the university’s current institutional arrangements. Whereas the Chicago
School’s focus on ‘the city’ drew inspiration from the modern City of Chicago
situated in its backyard, organisations like the Mansueto Institute are driving the
search for ‘innovative’ solutions that allow large, cross-city comparisons using
computational and spatial techniques in addition to other quantitative methods,
augmented by insights from the humanities and the arts. The appearance of the
Mansueto Institute also coincides with the launch of new degree programmes –
like the two-year MA in Computational Social Sciences (MACSS) – and research
institutions – like the Center for Spatial Data Science. This constellation of new
organisations all take the complexity of ‘the urban’, hence the necessary ‘interdis-
ciplinarity’ of urban research, as their authorising warrant. The institute explic-
itly articulates its focus as a ‘global’ approach that takes cities across the world
as proceeding along a similar, if not identical, path to urbanisation. Its partner
organisations, some new, some well-established, include the Center for Gender
and Sexuality Studies; the Center for Data Science and Public Policy; the Data
Science for Social Good, a project of the Knight Foundation-funded Place Lab;
the Center for Study of Race, Politics, and Culture; and the Division of the Social
Sciences. The Division of the Social Sciences houses departments such as sociol-
ogy, anthropology, and political science, all of which have had historical connec-
tions in doing ‘urban’ research, but which have since become relatively discrete,
disciplinary formations. In its present form, the ‘interdisciplinary’ focus of the
institute continues to rely on the discreteness of disciplines, even while calling
for their bridging. Shifting institutional arrangements within the University of
Chicago have also crucially reoriented the funding and resource-allocation avail-
able for research on ‘(the) urban’ as detachable from ‘(the) city’. Reflecting on the
legacies of the Chicago School in the present moment provides historical context
to situating these changing institutional arrangements and their impact in pro-
ducing new forms of scholarship, methods, and expertise characterising ‘urban’
research presently at the university.
 Legacies and Remnants of the Chicago School 191
Conclusion

To return to Hannerz’s question – ‘what is urban about urban anthropology, and

what is anthropological about it?’ (Hannerz, 1980: 3) – which has also been asked
for urban sociology by Saunders (1981), the answer could be given, on the one
hand, that urban anthropology exists as such by virtue of its positioning vis-à-vis a
discursive tradition, established through lineage-making projects with earlier urban
anthropology and urban sociology (and in contrast to other alternatives). On the
other hand, the fact that these questions continue to be asked suggests that ‘the city’ –
as a site of study, object of analysis, set of processes and dynamics, a way of life, or
the like – seems, through its construction, to trouble disciplinary and other bound-
aries, whether methodological, conceptual, theoretical, or imaginative.
In reflecting on these histories and transformations, we return also to the Urban
Workshop, which offers a mutable starting point from which, and object with which,
to trace the relationship of the university to its surrounding neighbourhood of Hyde
Park. While it has always been informally referred to as the ‘Urban Workshop’, in the
early 2000s it was rechristened as the ‘Workshop on Social Structures and Processes
in Urban Space’; in 2007, it was renamed ‘City, Society, and Place’ to ‘broaden [the
workshop’s] constituency to include the wide range of researchers originally envi-
sioned in the creation of the workshop’.8 According to an email sent by then-coor-
dinator David Schalliol, the name was changed ‘to reflect a broader emphasis on the
culture and social organisation of life within the urban environments, rather than
focusing on research that is “urban”’. Even in 2007, the workshop’s primary audience
was sociologists, but also included graduate students from anthropology, economics,
the Department of Comparative Human Development, and public policy. By 2010,
the name again changed to just the ‘Urban Workshop’. It was around this time that
endowments and funding for ‘urban’ research reached an unprecedented high, and
the number of activities, workshops, and associations branded as ‘urban’ proliferated:
besides the Urban Workshop, UChicago Urban and the Mansueto Institute began
to host series of talks and events, and urban policy students at the Harris School of
Public Policy began to organise a growing, and increasingly visible, number of events.
In our introduction to this chapter, we briefly outlined our motivations to develop
a walking tour of the University of Chicago’s surrounding neighbourhood of Hyde
Park, bringing attention to its violent history of urban renewal, depopulation, and
Black displacement. University of Chicago administrators and social scientists, who
also doubled as chairpersons of the SECC and neighbourhood block clubs, were
instrumental in facilitating urban renewal in order to combat perceived blight that
would affect land values and residence in and around the university campus. In
talking about Chicago as the backyard for the Chicago School, what often remains

8 
David Schalliol, private correspondence. Information about the history of the Urban
Workshop was curated through oral histories collected from University of Chicago-
trained sociologists that held positions as organisers, faculty sponsors, or participants
at the workshop during their time as graduate students at the university. We thank Terry
Clark, David Schalliol, Gordon C.C. Douglas, and Jeffrey N. Parker for their invaluable
insights on the history of the Urban Workshop.
192 Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock
elided is this lesser-known, contentious connection between the University of Chi-
cago and Hyde Park, as well as the university’s continued involvement in residential
and business restructuring within the surrounding neighbourhoods. At the time that
we began to organise the sessions of the recently (re-)renamed Urban Workshop,
both of us found ourselves unable to ignore this glaring connection between the
University of Chicago’s administration, social scientists, and the shifting fortunes of
Hyde Park’s community members. We also began to reflect upon the stakes of situat-
ing the workshop as ‘urban’, which in common parlance is used not only as a more
or less encompassing category related to ‘(the) city’, but also as a coded reference
to the intersection of race – more particularly, Blackness – and class – specifically
‘poverty’. In these multiple contexts in and around Hyde Park, we found it all the
more urgent to re-evaluate ways in which to critically address connections between
the university, its scholarship, and its effects on the community surrounding it.
Rather than unhesitatingly exalting projects of Park, Burgess, his students, and
others, we have sought also to draw attention to the interdisciplinary entanglements
out of which theories in and about ‘the city’ have emerged, and have come to have
deleterious effects that continue into the present, in domains of scholarship, social re-
form, policymaking, and beyond. Park- and Boas-inspired intellectual assimilationist
or amalgamationist (Baker, 2010) theories have been criticised for their minimisation
of dynamic events such as urban Black migration, racial violence, and ‘New Negro’
resistance, as ‘they posed direct threats to his [Park’s] paradigm of cultural cohesion
and order’ (Rocksborough-Smith, 2018). Burgess’s involvement in the carving-up
of community areas in Chicago have left a troubled legacy, with the continued clus-
tering of Black communities on the south and west sides in community areas that
receive lesser funding for public works than their predominantly White counterparts
(Burgess, 1967). All this to say, the legacies and remnants of the Chicago School
cannot be flattened into a singular story of mere intellectual curiosity, innovation,
and exploration. In the turn (back) to ‘(the) urban’, it is also important to infuse
this sense of urban space with the specificity of place. In other words, the Chicago
School, as it informs urban research in the present, needs to be continually re-situat-
ed in the context of its immediate environs, its uneasy and violent racial legacies, and
the role of scholars from within the university in shaping the still-persistent violence
in the City of Chicago and beyond.

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 10
Environmental Perspectives on Cities
Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza

Introduction

It is in practice hard to see where society begins and nature ends … In a fundamental
sense, there is, in the final analysis, nothing unnatural about New York City.
David Harvey, 1993

Products of complex and interrelated socioeconomic, political, cultural, and,

inevitably, ecological processes, cities cannot but be considered an inherent part of
the natural world; a second nature, as urban political ecologists would argue (Smith,
2006). Cities are the dominant form that humans use to inhabit the earth, acting as
dynamic and expansive constructed ecosystems that have the capacity to connect to
any part of the planet through a globalised capitalist network that connects people,
cultures, ecosystems, and economies (Douglas, 2012). This network encircles the
planet via air, land, and water, moving flows of people, raw materials, and finished
products through transport networks and global production chains, thus creating
material links between cities and from each city to the rest of the world. Augmenta-
tion of these flows reflects an increase in global socioeconomic metabolism (Fischer-
Kowalski and Haberl, 1998), i.e. the rhythm to which we extract natural resources
and transform them into something useless to the economy or dangerous to socio-
environmental health, i.e. into waste.
This socio-metabolic augmentation provokes various climatic and land use
changes, problems of water security, and energy crises around the globe, phenomena
which form a common situation of environmental change, adaptation to and mitiga-
tion of which is now an indispensable part of state agendas worldwide (Pralle, 2009).
In this sense, cities and urbanisations are not only agents of global environmental

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Environmental Perspectives on Cities 197
change and degradation; their own sustainability as socio-ecological systems is
threatened by the same environmental risks that they generate (Castán Broto, 2017).
These two interrelated issues concerning cities and the environment have shaped
environmental perspectives on cities and the research agenda within the wider urban
sustainability debate, as well as urban governance initiatives (Aylett, 2015).
Given that urban environmental issues affect the well-being not only of urban
dwellers, but of remote communities and ecosystems around the world, consid-
erable literature has focused on the ecological characteristics and functions of
cities and on improvement of their self-efficiency in order to slow their metabo-
lism based on principles of eco-efficiency and ecological modernisation (Adloff
and Neckel, 2019) in the line of green capitalism. This line of research looks
into improving the environmental performance and efficiency of urban infra-
structure, i.e. urban water and energy distribution systems, transport networks,
green areas, and housing, in a wider effort to reduce natural resource consump-
tion through more efficient use and recycling (Dias et al., 2018; Petit-Boix
et al., 2018). Another major field of research delves into the adaptation strategies
that cities need to adopt in order to increase their resilience in the face of global
environmental phenomena such as climate change, natural hazards, and natural
resource depletion (Leichenko, 2011). As such, urban resilience is a major con-
cern from an environmental perspective and interest in issues of social and envi-
ronmental justice is growing both in academic and institutional fields, as it is the
most vulnerable populations who are the first to be exposed to urban environ-
mental risks and hazards (Parry et al., 2019).
At the same time, the social impacts and political motivations and implications
of the production of urban space have come under the scrutiny of a school that is
critical of green capitalism and growth, and which studies the city as a hybrid socio-
nature whose evolution is influenced by social power dynamics, economic interests,
and environmental conditions (Swyngedouw, 2006). Strongly influenced by Marx-
ist understandings of the social construction of urban space under power relations,
capital accumulation, exploitation, and conflict, this line of work is developed pre-
dominantly by urban political ecologists that use the concept of urban metabolism
to materially contextualise the production of cities and study the reproduction of
social inequalities within urban spaces (Villar Navascués, 2017).
This chapter summarises the principal theses of each of these environmental per-
spectives on cities and presents the main issues discussed, organised into three main
sections. Rather than being framed within a rural–urban dichotomy based on the
antithesis between nature and society, the present analysis aims to shed light on the
intrinsic and reciprocal relation between the built and natural environments, and on
their mutual impacts, connections, and interdependency.
The first section presents urban environmental problems within cities and
links them to their social and political dimensions using the metaphor of urban
metabolism. Conceptualisation of the city as an organism helps to explain how
the extraction, use, and circulation of natural resources through and by urban
hubs causes environmental problems on the local, regional, and global scales.
Both quantitative and critical perspectives are reviewed, focusing on the industrial
ecology and political ecology frameworks, respectively. The second section delves
into how the environmental problems that cities generate or contribute to – from
198 Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza
the local to the global scale – are transformed into environmental risks and hazards
for the cities themselves and for their inhabitants. To understand the environmen-
tal vulnerability of cities, we focus on work conducted around the development
of urban resilience in a context of global environmental changes and the emerging
issues that these entail. Finally, the third section focuses on urban environmental
justice, central to urban sustainability debates, and revisits the movement that
links it to urban struggles and the resignification of the urban environment. The
chapter then offers conclusions based on the three research lines and proposes
possible urban futures of sustainability, resilience, and justice in a context of envi-
ronmental uncertainty.

The City as Flows: Organic Metaphors on the City and

the Quest for Urban Sustainability

According to their observations of systemic and functional similarities between eco-

logical and human systems, scholars engaged in the field of sustainability science
have created conceptual and methodological paradigms based on organic and eco-
logical metaphors for these similarities. During the first half of the twentieth century,
a group of sociologists from the University of Chicago developed an approach to
urban studies, focusing on the analysis of the city as a natural laboratory for explor-
ing social interaction (Park et al., 1925), using biological metaphors and ecological
models as analytical tools for studying urban social relations. The central approaches
indicated that the city allows to observe dynamics of interaction between diverse
groups, where conflicts, adaptation, and group interaction necessarily take place,
expressing the different human behaviours. Under this perspective, it is considered
that social structures build a complex network of dynamic processes, similar to the
components of an ecosystem, that develop changes, which allows explaining, for
example, the development and use of land within the city, in an interrelated way with
culture and population (McKenzie, 1933)
On the other hand, scholarship under the Chicago School developed a new line
of research on the connections of the population with the ecosystem, called human
ecology. The population adapted through culture and space (social organisation and
technology) to its environment to survive, where if the population expands, the envi-
ronment deteriorates, or does not respond to new needs (Faris, 1967). This ecologi-
cal approach to urban analysis explores the location of large urban populations and
the distribution of different types of neighbourhoods within them as a response to
the advantages offered by the environment – patterns of location and movement that
defines the urban way of life (Short, 1971).
In this context, urban ecology was developed, articulating sociology, cultural
anthropology, social psychology, demography, and human geography. This school
continues to have a great influence on the development of urban knowledge; it is
even possible to identify that the ecological order is relevant to modern assump-
tions within urban studies, where the city is conceived as a natural space for
differentiation and competition. The Chicago School developed ideas that for many
years constituted the main theoretical and research base in urban sociology (Burgess
and Bogue, 1964).
 Environmental Perspectives on Cities 199
The same biological analogies have also been used to conceptualise capitalist econ-
omies as living organisms that feed off the natural world and metabolise it in three
main steps: they ‘ingest’ natural resources such as raw materials and energy carriers,
‘metabolise’ them into goods and services, and, finally, ‘excrete’ them back into nature
as waste in the form of discarded materials and pollution (Matthews et al., 2000).
These three steps make up socioeconomic metabolism (Fischer-Kowalski, 1998;
Martinez-Alier, 2004), a process which entails the constant material, hydrological,
and energetic interchange between a socioeconomic system and the environment
(or society and nature in a broader sense), and can be studied at any level, from
the personal or household to the global, encompassing cities, regions, and countries
(Brunner et al., 1994).
Based on these metaphors, one of the most profound problems that cities face in
terms of sustainability is the intensive and linear use of natural resources by urban
processes, i.e. the volume and linearity of their socioeconomic metabolism (Kennedy,
2016). The vast amounts of energy and materials demanded by cities mean that they
cannot be self-regulating without the existence of stable links with the hinterland
from which they draw energy, food, water, and other materials and into which they
release their waste (Kennedy et al., 2007). As explained earlier, activities relating to
resource extraction and waste disposal are not restricted to a city’s immediate and
surrounding environment, but have regional and global scope and impacts. Local-
ised problems within the urban centre are mainly health related, including poor
environmental quality, inadequate household water and sanitation, poor indoor air
quality, and overcrowding, all of which directly affect the quality of life of urban
dwellers. Regional problems that transcend urban limits include air pollution, inad-
equate waste management, pollution of bodies of water and coastal areas, and the
loss of green spaces. These issues in turn result in environmental problems on a
global scale, such as ecological disruption, resource depletion, and greenhouse gas
emissions, affecting both urban and rural societies worldwide.
It is on these grounds that large urban centres have gained importance in the field
of sustainable development, not only as objects of local studies but as key compo-
nents of global sustainability. They may be the places where pollution has the poten-
tial to cause the most harm, but they are also where opportunities for recycling and
reuse are greatest and, according to Harper and Graedel (2004), where the concept
of sustainability must, in the long term, succeed or fail. These concerns have led
to a series of global summits and urban sustainable development initiatives in the
course of the last decades. Although the first time that the international community
was brought together to discuss matters related to global environment was in the
Stockholm Conference on Human Environment in 1972, the urban environment
was included and prioritised as a United Nations (UN) initiative in Habitat 1976
that officially launched the worldwide dialogue on cities (Holden et al., 2008). In
1992 the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED),
held in Rio, resulted in Agenda 21, which set guiding principles on urban sustain-
ability. This included strategies for sustainable energy and transport, shelter for all,
conservation of historical and cultural heritage, combating poverty, community
empowerment, and promoting local labour and responsible fiscal policies (Holden
et al., 2008). However, it was only in 1996, at the UN Habitat II summit that took
place in Istanbul, when the issues related to cities’ living environment were clearly
200 Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza
brought to the core of the global environmental agenda. Moreover, this was the
first UN conference where city representatives, and not solely heads of states, were
invited to deal with the problems of an urbanising world. The outcome was the
Habitat Agenda, a programme with similar lines as Agenda 21, calling for adequate
shelter and sustainable human settlements for all, directed at nation-states, but with
a designated role for cities and local authorities. Six years later, in the Johannesburg
World Summit on Sustainable Development, there was special focus on local and
urban environments in addressing global sustainability, as an aftermath of Habitat II.
Another relevant initiative is the World Urban Forum (WUF), a biannual global
forum on cities, that started in 2002 in Nairobi, Kenya, and its last forum took
place in 2020 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The WUF was established by the
United Nations to examine rapid urbanisation and its impact on communities, cit-
ies, economies, and policies through the promotion of open dialogue among a wide
range of partners (Holden et al., 2008). Other global projects that have included the
urban issue in their agenda include the World Social Forum and the United Nations
Millennium declaration (UN General Assembly, 2000) setting eight Millennium
Development Goals (MDG). These goals aim to promote and ensure sustainability
and improve the lives of slum dwellers in modern cities, between others, and have
been substituted by the Sustainable Development Goals.
Numerous projects and initiatives related to urban sustainability have appeared
since; the Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development, the European
Commission, and even the World Bank now have sustainable cities programmes.
The UN-Habitat has five flagship programmes related to health and environmen-
tal quality in cities, associated with the Sustainable Development Goals; these pro-
mote inclusive and resilient urban settlements and communities with emphasis on
the urban poor and the design of people-focused smart cities (UN-Habitat, 2020).
At the European level, the Sustainable Cities and Towns Project helped formulate a
set of guidelines for sustainable local development and their main principles were
adopted by a large number of cities signing a charter during a meeting held in Aal-
borg, Denmark, in 1994 at the first European Conference on Sustainable Cities and
Towns (European Commission, 1996; Mega, 2000). This evolved into the European
Sustainable Cities Platform that was launched in 2016, following the eighth meeting
of the same conference, which also had as a main outcome the Basque Declaration
and which proposed 15 pathways to localise the Sustainable Development Goals.
These concerns have resulted in various concepts, indicators, and methodologies
that aim to define the environmental performance and impacts of cities based on
organic metaphors such as ecological, carbon, and water footprints (Fang et al.,
2018). In what follows, we focus on the urban metabolism concept and review how
relevant studies help to describe, monitor, and reduce the environmental impacts of
urban settlements.

Industrial and Political Ecological Approaches: Nature, Concrete, and

Power in the Making of Urban Socio-environmental Inequalities
According to Fischer-Kowalski (1998), the roots of ‘societal metabolism’ go back to
the 1860s, when the concept of metabolism was born almost simultaneously in the
fields of biology and social theory. Although the term has been used in social and
 Environmental Perspectives on Cities 201
anthropological sciences since that time, including the concept of the ‘metabolism
between man and nature’ as defined by Marx (Fischer-Kowalski, 1998), it was not
applied to the study of environmental problems until much later. Ever since, scholars
in the fields of industrial ecology and ecological economics have viewed socioeco-
nomic systems as open systems that are embedded in nature and involve a constant
interchange of material and energy with their natural environment (Martinez-
Alier, 2004). The application of this metaphor to urban systems and the academic
discussion of issues of urban metabolism began in the 1960s when the first urban
metabolic study was published, focusing on the problems of water use and water and
air pollution in an imaginary North American city (Hermanowicz and Asano, 1999).
Building on the urban metabolism paradigm, Huang and Hsu (2003) relate
the major environmental problems of urban ecosystems to the rapid increase in
resource inputs for urban consumption. The analysis of a city’s socioeconomic
metabolism is therefore used to identify unsustainable practices in its use of
natural resources, as well as opportunities to close its material circles through
reuse and recycling. This closed loop design of urban material flows employs indi-
cators of resource consumption and waste production (metabolic input and output
indicators, respectively) that result from quantitative material, water, and energy
balances within urban systems (Barles, 2010). This quantitative description of
urban metabolism is a useful tool for describing the physical dimensions of current
natural resource management policies (Lemos et al., 2013), as it can connect the
sources, routes, and intermediate and final sinks of natural resource and product
flows within an urban system (Brunner and Rechberger, 2004). This perception has
resulted in a proposal of the circular material metabolism of natural ecosystems as
a prototype for urban planning and natural resource management (Castán Broto
et al., 2012) in contrast to the linear metabolic consumption patterns of urban
centres (Sukopp, 1998). This is in line with principles of ‘circular economy’ that
aim to close material and natural resource circles through reuse of products and
materials, also within urban systems (Dijst et al., 2018).
Examples of this include the application of urban water metabolism to close wa-
ter loops and increase efficiency in water use, ultimately in order to achieve water
self-sufficiency in urban hubs (Fragkou et al., 2016; Rygaard et al., 2011). The study
of urban water metabolism also generates useful data for water management by
providing a comprehensive understanding of physical systems in cities or regions
and making the connection between urban water balances and temporal economic
and social processes (Huang, 1998). Urban energy metabolism is central to the sus-
tainable development agenda; identification of the energy flows of a city is crucial
to analysis of the efficiency and progress of the structure and of economic growth,
social organisation, and technological innovation (Krausmann et al., 2004). On the
output side, the amount of waste produced can also be seen as an indicator of a
society’s efficiency, particularly in relation to the use of natural resources and the
nature of waste treatment operations. The study of waste as the output flow from
a society’s metabolism can provide useful information concerning waste generation,
import and export flows, energy recovery and recycling rates, as well as in relation
to the depletion of raw materials (Dijst et al., 2018).
Beyond its application as part of ‘accounting exercises’ (Kennedy et al., 2011)
for urban material and energy flows, principally in the interdisciplinary field of
202 Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza
industrial ecology (Harper and Graedel, 2004), urban metabolism has also proven
to be a useful tool for urban policy analysis and urban design (Chrysoulakis et al.,
2013; Codoban and Kennedy, 2008). Nonetheless, and as an implication of their
descriptive nature, urban metabolism studies have been criticised for overlooking the
political changes in the study area and for failing to consider social factors or simply
to register economic changes (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, 2006). However,
this trend is beginning to change, and the evolution and popularisation of the urban
metabolism approach has resulted in its application across more disciplines, includ-
ing political ecology, urban ecology, and political economy, reflected in the growing
literature published in recent years (Dijst et al., 2018; Pincetl, 2012).
In the field of urban political ecology, scholars expand the meaning of urban
metabolism beyond the simple interchange of flows between nature and society to
include social, political, and other factors of analysis (Zimmer, 2010). This approach
implies a different conceptualisation of social metabolism, as political ecologists
look beyond the nature–society binary and conceive cities as socio-natural hybrids
that are products of both biophysical and sociopolitical processes (Swyngedouw,
2006). In this sense, scholars argue that urban metabolic flows are shaped by and
reflect power relations (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003), and that this social orga-
nisation of metabolised nature creates uneven socio-ecological conditions for urban
dwellers (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, 2006).
Since one of the objectives of research on urban political ecology is precisely to
reveal the economic, political, and cultural forces that produce these uneven urban
spaces through the manipulation of urban metabolism (Swyngedouw and Heynen,
2003), infrastructure is a crucial aspect of related analyses, as it acts as an interface
between nature and society. Urban infrastructure is central to the social organisation
of natural resources and the creation of the ‘material conditions that comprise urban
environments’ (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003: 902), as it mobilises flows of water,
energy, and waste around and out of cities. Its spatial distribution often results in
unequal conditions for urban dwellers (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, 2006) and
supports the physical and political manipulation of urban flows in the interest of
powerful elites and in the production processes of urban space and nature (Heynen,
Perkins, and Roy, 2006).
Urban political ecology scholars who examine, for example, the generation of
water inequalities in cities tend to focus on issues of water access and control, the
production of waterscapes that create unequal socio-ecological conditions for urban
dwellers (Gandy, 2004; Keil, 2003), and the structural power relations and interests
behind the manipulation of urban water metabolism – in short, the circulation of wa-
ter within a city. As such, the socio-spatial distribution of hydraulic and other infra-
structure is a key aspect within urban studies undertaken from a political ecology
perspective, as urban water, material, and energy flows are controlled through tech-
nology and infrastructure which act as a means of access to and transformation of
natural resources (Monstadt, 2009). Such approaches therefore highlight the unequal
distribution of water and electricity networks and waste processing facilities, and
emphasise how the selective expansion and coverage of these systems reproduce
unsafe environmental conditions and social inequalities for the urban poor, prin-
cipally through socio-environmental marginalisation and exclusion in cities in the
Global South (Bakker, 2007; Castán Broto et al., 2012; Kooy and Bakker, 2008).
 Environmental Perspectives on Cities 203
The urban metabolism metaphor has been useful both as a means of expressing
the function of cities and the configuration of urban environments, and as a way to
quantify and improve urban environmental resource use and efficiency. The different
approaches to urban environmental matters presented here not only challenge our
understanding of the nature–society and rural–urban divides and their impact on
our conception and approaches to addressing environmental and ecological prob-
lems. They also reveal the importance of multiscale consideration and analysis when
dealing with (urban) environmental problems, the drivers and forces of which can
be found on either very narrow (personal) or very broad scales (popular beliefs,
political system, etc.).
In what follows, we delve into how the environmental problems that cities gener-
ate or contribute to – from the local to the global scale – are transformed into envi-
ronmental risks and hazards for the cities themselves and for their inhabitants. To
understand the environmental vulnerability of cities, we focus on work conducted
around the development of urban resilience in a context of global environmental
changes and the emerging issues that these entail.

Urban Environmental Risk, Resilience, and Adaptation in

Times of Climate Change

The stages of social metabolism can also be described by the processes of extractiv-
ism, the commodification of nature and the degradation of the environment condi-
tions. As described earlier, the argumentation of societal metabolism thus implies
an escalating rhythm and intensity of these three processes and increasing pressure
on the global environment and quality of life for ecosystems and societies around
the planet.
This pressure is manifested through the increasing depletion of essential natural
resources reserves, such as water and fossil fuels, and the effects on global environ-
mental and land use changes, including land degradation and desertification, the loss
of wetlands and biodiversity. Urban climate change hazards are not only increasing
in severity and frequency, but they also are likely to have a profound impact in a
wide range of urban infrastructures, services, the built environment, and supporting
ecosystems (Castán Broto, 2017).
Yet, not all environmental hazards affect cities in the same manner across the planet.
The possibility of an environmental hazard to become a disaster is called disaster risk
and depends on a city’s exposure to hazards in combination with its vulnerability to
these risks and resilience. In what follows, we analyse the concepts of risks and hazards
to cities, urban resilience, and international initiatives incorporating these approaches
in order to better understand the processes of risk creation and urban vulnerability,
considering their most relevant applications at the international level.

Threats, Risk, and Hazards to Cities

Natural disasters have been studied as temporary and territorially segregated
events, mainly associated with physical-natural phenomena that trigger a social
emergency (Lavell, 2003). In this respect, anthropic causality is revealed in their
204 Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza
generation so that these physical events, which appear to be natural, are in essence
created by human intervention, since they arise at the intersection of the activ-
ities of modern society with the processes of nature itself creating or extending
risk conditions (Romero-Lankao et al., 2014). On the other hand, the city-scale
housing stock, urban form, condition of infrastructures, and buildings and changes
in urban and ecological services – all outcomes of political decision-making and
urbanisation – also affect the capacity of populations to perceive and respond to
hazards. Because of these reasons, the hazards are called socio-natural risks (Ca-
mus et al., 2016; Lavell, 2009).
Risk is a latent condition that when not modified or mitigated through human
intervention, or through a change in the conditions of the physical-environmental
environment, announces a certain level of social and economic impact towards the
future when a physical event detonates or updates the existing risk. This is made
concrete with the existence of human population, production, and infrastructure
exposed to the possible impact of the various physical events that are also in condi-
tions of ‘vulnerability’, that is, in a condition that predisposes society and its liveli-
hoods to suffer damage and loss. The level of risk will be conditioned by the possible
intensity or magnitude of the physical events, and the degree or level of exposure and
vulnerability of the target system observed (Lavell et al., 2012).
In the 5th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, the
Working Group on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability highlights the particu-
larly critical nature of urban settlements in terms of the potential consequences of
climate change (IPCC, 2014). It also notes the cross-cutting nature of the problem,
i.e. the fact that the risks, vulnerabilities, and impacts of climate change are increas-
ing in urban centres of all dimensions, economic conditions, and geomorphological
characteristics. Among the main impacts noted are: the probable increase in disasters
and extreme weather events, such as floods and landslides, heat waves or tidal waves
(in coastal cities); the possible effects of damage to essential infrastructure and ser-
vices as a result of such events (such as water supply, road infrastructure, etc.) and
the loss of or damage to housing; the increase in demand for energy services (due
to changes in temperature, for example), in the context of the vulnerability suffered
by electricity generation, especially in terms of hydroelectricity; the possible scarcity
of drinking water resources; the demand for recreational services and tourism; the
increase in pests; etc.
Other issues are the heterogeneous but interdependent nature of different types
of threats related to climate change, the articulation between these and the risk situ-
ations already existing in cities and derived from non-climate processes and trends,
the importance of ecosystem services – such as those provided by ‘green infrastruc-
ture’ – as factors in both protection against and mitigation of climate change, and
the relevance of incorporating the perceptions and assessments of those affected and
of the populations in the analysis of risk, vulnerability, and climate adaptation.
But climate change is only one of the many stress or shock factors that a city
may have to face and it often occurs in the context of other threats of environ-
mental, economic, and sociopolitical origin, which points to the need to manage
in an integrated manner a variety of risks or disturbances that intersect and over-
lap with each other (Leichenko, 2011). Indeed, the idea of ‘resilient cities’ has been
applied in different cases to talk about urban security, economy, infrastructure and
 Environmental Perspectives on Cities 205
architecture, terrorism, social capital of communities, natural disaster management,
transport services, etc. (Vale, 2014).

Urban Resilience
Since its first appearances in the 1970s, the notion of ‘resilience’ has become
increasingly important as a scientific approach and a policy concept, and a variety
of public and private initiatives have emerged in recent years that focus on pro-
moting more sustainable and resilient cities. The notion of resilience seems to have
the potential to function as a ‘bridge’ between different branches, fields, and dis-
ciplines of research (Baggio et al., 2015), which makes it a particularly fertile con-
cept for promoting interdisciplinary integration efforts, especially in the face of
a plural, complex, and controversial object such as the notion of sustainability
(Jordan, 2008; Pereira and Curvelo, 2015). Thus, in recent years, the notion of
resilience has become increasingly popular in efforts to plan for more ‘sustainable’
cities and their adaptation to climate change (Eraydin and Tasan-Kok, 2013; Fu
and Zhang, 2017; Meerow et al., 2016). In the field of disaster risk management
and reduction, resilience often refers to the ability of a certain group or human
community to anticipate, resist, absorb, mitigate, recover from, and learn from
specific shocks and disasters that may affect them (Ayyub, 2014; Blaikie et al.,
2014). In the early 1970s the notion of resilience was incorporated by C.S. Holling
(1973) as a way of describing the ability of such systems to absorb disturbances in
their surroundings, combining change and preservation of relationships between
their components.
Additionally, the notion of systems necessarily requires drawing a boundary bet-
ween the system itself and its environment: often, even in the case of ecological sys-
tems, such a decision is made in pragmatic, arbitrary, and contingent terms (Olsson
et al., 2015). In this context, a city can hardly be observed as a unitary entity, on
the contrary, it is configured as the set of a variety of processes of ecological, tech-
nological, and social nature and of the complex interactions between these. It is,
to put it another way, a ‘system of systems’ (Ernstson et al., 2010): a system with
emerging characteristics and dynamics, whose constitutive systems are, at least in
part, independent of each other, so that the ‘normal’ performance of each of them
can constantly be transformed into a cause of stress or disturbance for all the others
(Cavalcante et al., 2016).
We could identify at least four lines of research related to urban resilience:

• Different kinds of threats to which cities are exposed. These include both
specific hazards, such as heat waves and flooding, and wider menaces, such as
extreme climate and geophysical disasters.
• Different kinds of urban systems and services exposed to these threats. These
include, on the one side, ‘natural’ endowments, including the availability,
quality and accessibility of water resources, and the preservation and services
provided by urban vegetation; on the other, human-made artefacts, including
energy distribution networks, transport systems, as well as food systems.
• Factors driving resilience. These include both physical-technical attributes
(robust engineering and architecture to uphold disturbances, resilient network
206 Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza
design, and smart technologies) and properties of a rather sociocultural kind
(the importance of social capital, culture, solidarity and shared learning).
• Perspectives on resilience. Some research explicitly strive to measure resilience,
while others include resilience as one factor within a wider effort to assess risk
and vulnerability; some adopt resilience as a principle in the design of cities,
or in their governance, while others employ it to explain how relevant entities
and processes within cities are able to persist despite disturbances that may
affect them.

Considering the advances in these lines of research, resilience can refer to a city’s
ability to cope with a specific threat, but also to its overall adaptability to all pos-
sible threats that may affect it (Cutter et al., 2008; Miller et al., 2010). Both inter-
pretations of resilience aim to promote more integrated and proactive governance
of natural and human systems (and specifically cities) in the face of the diversity
of threats.

International Institutional Tackling

The notion of urban resilience is becoming increasingly relevant as a way of under-
standing and addressing the complex nature of cities and the way in which they react,
transform, and maintain their identity and essential functions in the face of changes
that their components may undergo. Thus, this notion takes on special importance
as an analytical tool for designing, guiding, and evaluating urban planning and
adaptation to climate change.

• At the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Hab-

itat III) held in Quito, in October 2016, the New Urban Agenda (UN, 2017)
was launched, explicitly aimed at serving as a complement to the Sustainable
Development Goals, in promoting more sustainable and resilient urbanisation
processes (ECLAC, UN-Habitat, and MINURVI, 2018).
• UN-Habitat launched in 2012 a Resilient Cities Profile Programme (RCPP)
aimed at developing an integrated approach to urban planning and
management in order to profile, promote, and monitor the resilience of each
city to different types of impacts, including those associated with climate
change.
• In collaboration with UN-Habitat, the United Nations Office for Disaster
Risk Reduction (UNISDR) also launched its global campaign, Making Cities
Resilient, in May 2010, successively incorporated under the umbrella of the
Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030.
• Since 2012, the Inter-American Development Bank’s Emerging and Sustain-
able Cities (ICES) programme has been launched, offering technical and finan-
cial assistance to central and local governments to develop and implement
urban sustainability plans, including conducting a multidimensional diagno-
sis, designing initiatives and preparing pre-investment studies, and facilitating
and monitoring non-reimbursable investments by participating institutions.
• The 100 Resilient Cities programme (100RC) was launched in 2013 by the
Rockfeller Foundation with the dual purpose of supporting participating cities
 Environmental Perspectives on Cities 207
to improve their resilience to conditions of acute shocks and chronic stress of
both natural and social origin, and to facilitate the construction of networks
and good practices of resilience at the transnational level.
• Finally, the Climate Resilient Cities Initiative in Latin America (CRC-Latam),
promoted by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN),
has been underway since 2016 to support research projects on climate resil-
ience in the context of urbanisation, transfer the evidence produced, and con-
tribute to developing solutions and promoting action in these areas.

The following section addresses how class, gender, ethnicity, and other social charac-
teristics that marginalise groups and also leave them more exposed to environmental
risks and hazards. To connect issues on urban environmental concerns and social
equity we employ the concept of environmental justice, given the importance of jus-
tice in the (urban) sustainability framework. In what follows, we revise the roots,
theoretical debates, and main implications that environmental justice has had for
global urban environmentalism.

Urban Environmental Justice

Environmental justice is a concept that merges concerns on social equity and envi-
ronmental issues, broadly defined as the equal distribution of environmental good
(i.e. access to good environmental conditions and services) and bad (e.g. contamina-
tion), and the equal enforcement of environmental laws and policies to all people,
regardless of ethnicity, gender, and economic status. It started out as an urban issue
but soon developed to reach rural and global dimensions. The term refers both to an
activist movement and to an interdisciplinary academic field of research that con-
verges issues of environmental politics, ethics and law, spatial and social justice, and
sustainability, among others.
The origins of environmental justice go back to the US grassroots social move-
ments in the late 1970s, when the first social concerns around the spatial and
social distribution of toxic and waste treatment hazards aroused in the United
States, given that related facilities are associated with local health and environmen-
tal risks, such as soil contamination, air pollution, and loss of clean watercourses,
amongst others. At that time, various studies were demonstrating a direct corre-
lation between the location of toxic and contaminating activities and the social
and racial status of nearby inhabitants. These first preoccupations on the siting
of toxic and hazardous facilities were framed as environmental racism, as most of
these facilities were situated in low-income and minority communities, principally
Afro-American and Latino.
Although concerns of environmental injustice have always existed, the consoli-
dation of the term as a concept and a sociopolitical question is attributed to two
incidents. The first one is the infamous case of Love Canal: in 1977 the basements
of houses built on top of a closed landfill, in Buffalo, New York, were filled with
noxious liquids, causing serious health effects in children of the area. The second one
is the resistance in 1982 of an Afro-American community in Warren County, North
Carolina against the siting of a toxic waste landfill. According to Robert Bullard
208 Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza
(2005), the protests in Warren County can be considered as the process that gave
birth to environmental justice, both as a concept and a social concern.
Environmental justice soon moved beyond its original framing in the United
States and related studies expanded their focus geographically, first to Europe and
later on to other parts of the world, particularly to the Global South, not only to
include other cities around the world but also in order to transfer it to rural settings
and globalise the concept, applying it among nations. The first studies on urban envi-
ronmental justice in Europe were conducted at the end of the 1990s, initially in the
United Kingdom, Germany, France, and eastern Europe. These studies maintained
the original concerns on the distribution of the health and environmental impacts of
locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) to low-income and minority communities. Nev-
ertheless, the parameter of injustice moved from race to class, as European urban
communities were not as racially diverse as the US communities at the time. This
focus was somewhat modified when it was applied to cities in the developing world.
In that case, the research agenda was enriched advocating for a broader set of issues,
such as social justice, indigenous rights, and access to land and water, reflecting
the diverse nature of urban societies and the sociopolitical contexts of southern
megacities.
The amplification of the term to include issues of environmental justice on a
global scale, typically within a north–south approach, focuses on the ecological debt
between countries, attributed to the expansion and globalisation of the extraction,
production, and disposal chain. In other words, the distribution of the environmen-
tal burdens of global metabolic activities is not even, as the places of consumption
(Global North) are disassociated from the places of extraction, production, and dis-
posal (Global South). The European research programme on Environmental Justice
Organisations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT) has created a constantly enriched and
updated Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, mapping conflicts around the world
(EJOLT, 2014).
Another fact that enriched environmental justice studies with theoretical com-
plexity on different levels of analysis was its expansion to an academic field of
research. Scholars working in this field needed a clearer definition of the term than
the engaged activists did in order to comprehend the political mechanisms that per-
mit and produce these injustices beyond the spatial and social distribution of facil-
ities that were associated with local health and environmental risks. In other words,
they advanced towards a conceptualisation and analysis of environmental justice as
a process rather as a result. Three main lines – or dimensions – of research can be
distinguished as the focus of academic research on environmental justice, namely
distributional, procedural, and, more recently, sustainability (Davies, 2006). The
first line focuses on the results of environmental justice, the second on its causes
(Schlosberg, 2007), while the third one expands the environmental justice argument
to communities with no voice, recognition, or participation, such as other species
and future generations (Agyeman and Evans, 2004). Environmental justice studies
are thus developed and advanced based on these three dimensions, principally con-
sidered as complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
Overall, the main contributions of environmental justice literature are the detec-
tion of unequal enforcement of environmental laws and policies concerning minority
and low-income groups, and the lack of political access of these groups through
 Environmental Perspectives on Cities 209
a series of cultural, political, and structural obstacles as the fundamental barrier
to an authentic participation in decision-making processes on environmental mat-
ters. Finally, the third line of research on sustainability contributes in posthuman
scholarship by challenging the anthropocentric character of the environmental jus-
tice discourses, dealing with justice in relation with nature, future generations, and
non-human species, only to include the aim of preventing the creation of risks for all
species and societies in the mode of sustainable development.

Implications for Environmentalism and the Redefinition

of the Urban Environment
The environmental justice movement did not only disclose the racial and class
aspects of urban environmental degradation, it also achieved to bring a major
paradigm shift in environmental concerns and policies in four distinct levels. First, it
transformed environmentalism radically; in its origins, the environmental movement
was engaged in issues of non-urban nature and wildlife conservation, omitting social
aspects and human quality of life. The mainstream environmental organisations of
the time had an eco-centric view and were in line with the political power of the
time (Harvey, 1996), while they had a corporate structure and outlook in order to
be acceptable and credible (Bullard, 1990). By bringing in the centre of the environ-
mental agenda issues of inequalities, and the survival of the poor and marginalised,
the environmental justice movement radicalised the environmental discourse, thus
questioning the status quo of power, decision-making processes, and law enforce-
ment on environmental issues.
Second, it consequently deeply influenced our definition of the environment and
capitalist spatiality, collapsing the established dichotomy between the polluting city
and the pristine wildlife nature. By bringing in the forefront issues of urban quality
of life, the environmental justice movement has achieved to establish a new and
much broader definition of the environment, defined as the place where we work,
play, and socialise, opening the path to new dimensions of analysis for urban sustain-
ability (Anguelovski, 2013).
Third, and as an aftermath of the above, the structures of environmental groups
have been modified and diversified under the influence of the environmental jus-
tice movement and their social, racial, and gender composition has been enriched.
By the 1980s, environmental organisations were principally big non-governmen-
tal professional organisations (like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and WWF)
composed of white middle-class professionals in complete disassociation from the
communities and social movements; citizens would only participate through dona-
tions and memberships. The movements that formed around environmental justice
concerns were not only structurally and ideologically different, but included grass-
roots organisations and affected communities with no expertise on environmental
issues. These popular movements have been principally led by working-class women,
re-signifying the role of gender in environmental issues.
Finally, these movements put the care for environmental issues as a post-material-
ist value in doubt. By then, it was generally assumed that environmental issues could
only be a matter of concern by individuals who had all their basic needs met, thus
making environmental sensibility a first-world issue. The implication of urban poor
210 Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza
and marginalised communities in the environmental movement demonstrated that
a healthy environment affects the health, well-being, and cohesion of communities,
positioning it as a global value and concern. These paradigm shifts had as outcomes
the strengthening of grassroots communities and the creation of environmental pro-
tection partnerships between communities and state authorities. What is more, they
opened the path for the creation of a new research agenda that would provide a the-
oretical ground and fill research gaps in the field of environmental justice.

New Dimensions of Urban Environmental Justice

Environmental justice studies have not only deepened their complexity and diver-
sified their levels of analysis, but also broadened their scope and objects of study
as a direct result of redefining the urban environment. Subsequently, related studies
traditionally analysing the location of ‘brown’ facilities (understood as polluting
and potentially harmful to human health and the environment) have been enriched
by including the provision of ‘green’ facilities and services. Updated environmental
justice concerns embrace the elements that define urban quality of life to include
issues of equal access to affordable and clean transport and connectivity, waste
management and recycling opportunities, street cleaning, clean air and water, green
and public spaces, healthy food options, and affordable and green housing (Angue-
lovski, 2013).
These advances, and the consideration of urban features, have connected envi-
ronmental justice to other concepts and struggles relevant to urban studies. Incor-
porated health, community development, and quality of life concerns have been
enclosed by the term urban liveability, where these issues are a major factor in
defining urban justice and equity between local communities and neighbourhoods.
The same justice concerns link environmental justice to (urban) sustainability. Jus-
tice is a central concern in sustainability debates, both as an intergenerational
(concerning future generations) and an intra-generational (concerning exist-
ing communities) factor. The environmental justice movement and studies have
reinforced the second, resulting in more holistic definitions of urban sustainability
by considering opportunities and hazards for all social spheres and species. What
is more, they enrich and strengthen the issue of socio-environmental equity in
sustainability debates, offering a space for reflecting on the dynamics that create
inequity and the new links between economy, society, and the environment. As a
result, the urban environmental justice movement and scholarship have contrib-
uted in moving debates on urban sustainability beyond its dominant technocratic
interpretations on eco-efficiency and green capitalism.
Ultimately, the unequal distribution of the impacts caused by urban environmen-
tal change have been a main concern in the field of urban political ecology, linking
it with environmental justice studies and theories. Within the tradition of Marxist
urban political ecology, it is held that urban socio-environmental conditions are a
consequence of the uneven production of urban space and organisation of urban
metabolic flows. This line of research complements environmental justice in exam-
ining the social, political, and economic conditions that influence the patterns of
urban configuration (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003), advancing the main streams
of environmental justice research on distributional and procedural processes. In
 Environmental Perspectives on Cities 211
conclusion, the environmental justice movement and the related scholarships have
gradually overcome geographical and disciplinary borders over the last decades and
recent developments in urban environmental justice studies have linked it with strug-
gles on spatial and social justice and the right to the city as broader demands for
urban residents around the globe. What is more, a globalised idea of environmental
justice, coupled with struggles around the newly born food justice, water justice,
energy justice, and climate justice movements, is opening a path to a holistic under-
standing of the term, offering an analytical frame that merges the complex issues of
sustainability, human vulnerability, and environmental protection, both as future
lines of research and political concerns.

Conclusions

The ecology of the cities and the ecology in the cities are central questions in a wide
array of disciplines that tackle the urban and its evolution. In this chapter we briefly
revisited some of the infinite takes on environmental perspectives on cities, using
three core concepts that englobe major urban environmental concerns: urban metab-
olism, urban environmental risk, and urban environmental justice. These three con-
cepts not only tackle ecological, political, and social takes on urban environmental
issues, but also help us set guidelines for sustainable urban futures. The metabolism
concept allows for a physical and political understanding of the environmental deg-
radation associated to urban systems’ function; urban environmental risk discloses
the vulnerability of cities and the importance to enhance this under present and
future environmental challenges; and environmental justice, finally, explicitly dis-
closes the social aspect of environmental perspectives on cities, essential to integrated
analyses for sustainable (urban) futures.
The revision of these underlying environmental perspectives on cities brings us
to three main conclusions concerning the principles that are essential under any
urban governance scheme that aims to secure the sustainability and resilience of
cities while safeguarding quality of life for all urban dwellers and the ecosystems in
which they live.
The first principle implies planning and integration at multiple scales, as the urban
goes beyond its geographical boundaries. The evaluation of the ecological, water,
and carbon footprints is fundamental to building cities with more sustainable and
resilient metabolisms, since efficiency in the use of resources not only reduces cities’
impact on nature, but also reduces their vulnerability to the various threats they face
due to decreased dependence on external resources. At the same time, incorporating
peri-urban environments as part of the urban system makes it possible to observe
hazards and prepare urban infrastructure to deal with them.
The second is an interdisciplinary and intersectoral approach on urban problems;
global challenges are socio-environmental and complex in nature, presenting multi-
ple dimensions and requiring the articulation of diverse actors to comprehensively
address urban challenges. It is essential that we are able to develop common frame-
works that allow the integration of different sources of knowledge, favouring work
between scientists, decision makers from different sectors, as well as incorporating
the affected community. This implies the development of spaces for dialogue and
212 Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza
permanent participation, which allow for the articulation of multiple views on
urban problems.
The last principle is on justice and governance. Urban environmental problems
are essentially problems of inequality; it is not those who make the decisions and
benefit from them who face the environmental consequences. This includes both
intergenerational issues of justice, i.e. different groups in society (by class, gender,
ethnicity, etc.), and intra-generational justice, i.e. between actual and future genera-
tions. Urban governance requires that decisions are made considering the benefit of
different individuals and the community in the present and in the future, where de-
cision-making is fundamental considering multiple forms of knowledge and spaces
for participation.
In this context, it is essential to make the distribution of urban infrastructure, ser-
vices, and ecosystems more efficient, reducing urban segregation, promoting diver-
sity and internal articulation, and encouraging collective learning and preparedness
to reduce possible impacts of other disasters. To advance in structures that allow to
face the problems of the present and the challenges of the future with institutions
that allow to review continuously the necessary adjustments and empowerment of
community-based initiatives.
The future is urban, every year the number of people living in cities increases. Ad-
dressing socio-environmental problems, considering the urban metabolism, taking
into account the urban footprint, vulnerability to certain threats, and environmental
justice would be an opportunity if the co-benefits and side effects of all governance
decisions are considered. Solutions to self-sufficiency, reducing waste generation, and
resources consumption where governance focuses on achieving an adequate quality
of urban life for all its inhabitants, while at the same time reducing its impact on the
natural environment, is the only way to make our existence viable.

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future directions. Erdkunde, 64(4): 343–354.
 11
Feminist Urban Research
Praxis and Possibility across Time and Space
Brenda Parker

Introduction

Feminist studies of the city have a long, if geographically and historically uneven
and sporadic history. Throughout time, women in various geographical locations
have directly reflected upon and engaged in important efforts to transform cities
and bolster gender and other forms of equality in these spaces. These efforts were
perhaps not labelled feminist at the time, but included movements in the late 1800s
in cities like Budapest, Cairo, Chicago, London, and Merita where female reformers
not only created social and safe spaces in cities for women, including schools for
girls, settlement houses, and cooperatives, but also advocated for infrastructure
and better conditions for immigrants, workers, and residents. Often, upper-caste and
upper-class women led these endeavours. At times, these efforts addressed the differ-
ent forms of marginalisation that certain women faced, based on class, race, or other
factors. In many cases, women from low-status racial or caste systems were leaders
within social justice campaigns. These included the untouchable liberation movement
in India and efforts to curtail lynching and address gender and racial inequality in
the United States. These are just some examples of the ways that women and early
feminists (whether labelled so or not) left their mark on cities and urban studies.
Feminist and female activism in cities continued throughout the first part of the
twentieth century and included struggles for suffrage in many countries. However,
feminist scholarship on cities did not cohere into a legible and self-identified body
of work until the 1960s and 1970s, and even then in only some parts of the world.
Another wave of feminism, comprising academic and political endeavours to address
uneven gendered and other power relations, was flourishing in places like Latin
America where groups like the Asociación Madres de Plaza Mayo in Argentina and

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Feminist Urban Research 219
El Movimiento Nacional de Mujeres in Brazil protested military violence and wom-
en’s lack of access to health and reproduction rights respectively. In many parts of
the world, such as Egypt, South Africa, and parts of Latin America, feminism was
connected to anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements. In places like Europe and
the United States, connections to feminism were made in fields such as urban studies,
architecture, geography, and sociology. In several eastern or central European coun-
tries, feminist movements and literatures developed somewhat later as communism
muted research and activist endeavours towards gender inequality (Timár, 2019).
Overall, in the past 40-plus  years feminist urban scholarship has expanded and
diversified, addressing important material and theoretical concerns around housing,
labour, safety, sexuality, colonialism and racial injustice, masculinities, poverty, infra-
structure, and much more. Simultaneously, advances in communication and travel
have made it easier for urban feminist scholars around the world to locate and learn
from each other.
Below, I describe some key contributions and dilemmas in feminist urban scholar-
ship from around the world. Of course, it is impossible to fully convey the complex
and multiple types of academic urban feminisms (such as postcolonial feminism,
socialist feminism, queer feminism, and Black feminism), as well as the deeply varied
terrain of local feminist endeavours and scholarship. There is not perfect agreement,
but rather debates, contingent collaborations, and contested terrain within these var-
ious feminist approaches, some of which I will address. Finally, I am choosing not
to organise this chapter by geographic regions or well-traversed but perhaps prob-
lematic labels such as ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’. Instead, I chart several
thematic areas of scholarship such as homes and housing and related contributions
from urban feminist scholars in diverse locations to give readers a ‘feel’ for the depth
of scholarship available, noting that this review concentrates on research published
in English. Before embarking on that task, I loosely define feminist urban scholarship
and related epistemological and methodological sensibilities.

Feminist Perspectives and Praxis in Urban Research

Not to be confused with simply studying women or even gender, conducting fem-
inist urban research is also about the principles and practices surrounding urban
research as much as the topics under study. The feminist sensibilities that inform
much urban feminist research around the world are geographically and theoretically
varied, but often share core characteristics informed by diverse feminist epistemol-
ogies. These include a commitment to redressing violences and silences in cities and
urban research; emphasis on diverse and intersectional inequalities and power rela-
tions; use of situated and reflexive approaches to knowledge production; and a com-
mitment to everyday life and feminist praxis – politically engaged research. While
not all feminist urban research is structured this way, these are common practices
and principles, as I elaborate on below.
Historically, feminist urban scholarship initially responded to silences in the dom-
inant literature on cities especially related to women and gender, and especially in
the Anglo world. As recently as the 1950s, one could find limited academic scholar-
ship, for example, on the everyday lives of women in cities, or about sex workers
220 Brenda Parker
and domestic workers in cities – who were often women of colour or in marginalised
class and caste positions. This is true even as feminist fiction explored the concept
of utopian cities and as female urban activists such as Jane Addams and Catherine
Bauer wrote about and challenged gendered and urban inequalities in housing and
more (Addams, 1910, 1930; Bauer, 1951; Gilman, 1915).
Academic literature on cities seldom included women or female-identifying
scholars, especially if they were not Anglo or from privileged geographic and social
locations. Initially, feminist urban research began to fill these voids and address
this implicit violence of erasure. To cite a few examples, feminist urban researchers
wrote about how design and urban infrastructure failed women; Black queer femi-
nists formed the Combahee River Collective in Boston to challenge oppressive racial
and other relations; socialist and ‘worker’ feminists in Italy, Latin America, and
other cities critiqued gendered socio-spatial relations and divisions of labour within
capitalism as well as violence against women; and queer and women-only squatting
and housing collectives formed in places like London and Amsterdam (Mies, 1986;
Combahee River Collective, 1983; Cuninghame, 2008).
Since then, even as dominant bodies of urban scholarship have paid limited
attention to gender, race, and other inequalities, urban feminists have been unflag-
ging in their attention to urban violence and exclusions. Gender inequalities and the
experiences of women have been central foci in feminist urban scholarship, with good
reason. Women are much more likely than men to experience sexual harassment in
public spaces or on transportation (92% of women in Rabat, Morocco, and 68% in
Quito, Ecuador, and up to 90% in Mexico City, for example). Women are much less
likely to own land or housing (at rates as low as 25% in Latin America) and related
assets, and are often discriminated against in rent searches and mortgage applica-
tions (UN Women, 2017; Baruah, 2007; Chant and Datu, 2015). In nearly every
city in the world, women are much more likely to be poor and to earn lower wages
than men. In some cities and for women of colour compared to White men, full-time
female workers may earn only half of the wages that full-time male workers earn. In
addition, women often are displaced and/or do not benefit economically from gen-
trification and urbanisation processes that are occurring around the world (Curran,
2017). Finally, women comprise overall less than 25% of local and national govern-
ing bodies (UN Women, 2017), yet they are often disproportionately impacted by
decisions of urban policymakers (Roy, 2003; Ogunyankin, 2019; Parker, 2017).
However, even as these inequalities rooted in gendered structures and the per-
ceived inferiority of female-identifying bodies remain salient, urban feminists now
try to go beyond simplistic categories like women/men, thinking through multiple
axes of cultural and material ‘difference’ in and through cities related to age, ability,
and sexuality (e.g. Fincher and Jacobs, 1998). Indigenous feminists and feminists of
colour have critiqued White feminists for propagating a narrow set of ‘feminist’ con-
cerns while failing to sufficiently acknowledge power relations like colonialism, rac-
ism, and heteronormativity in shaping women’s lives (e.g. Mohanty, 2003) and their
complicity in them. Queer, non-binary, and other urban feminists from Portugal and
other countries have raised awareness about the limitations of dualistic categories
such as ‘man’ and ‘woman’ (Ferreira and Salvador, 2015; Vieira, 2010). Feminists
note that cities were historically constructed and expanded via patriarchal, colo-
nial, and racist practices, and that the ongoing production of urban environments
 Feminist Urban Research 221
is reliant upon the co-production of inequalities (e.g. Roy, 2003; Beebeejaun, 2017;
Ogunyankin, 2019; Sánchez de Madariaga and Roberts, 2013; Isoke, 2013). Indig-
enous and feminists of colour and from regions such as Africa, South America, and
Asia have noted that the urban economies of many European and North American
cities have come at the expense of and erasure of their communities.
The term intersectionality, coined by Black feminist Kimberlee Crenshaw to
convey the interlocking oppressions of race, class, and gender for Black women in
the United States, has become an important part of a not uncontested approach to
understand complex power structures in cities (Cho et al., 2013; Rodó-de-Zárate
and Baylina, 2018). Others prefer terms like assemblages to capture interlocking
and fluid power structures and processes (Isoke, 2013; Puar, 2012). Overall, feminist
urban scholarship contests the stability and continuity of gendered and other power
relations, while engaging in practical strategies to improve everyday life for women,
people of colour, non-binary people, and others encountering oppression in cities
(Parker, 2017).
Epistemologically, feminists have often argued for ‘situated’ and relational knowl-
edges that engage in deep empirical work; clarify the standpoint from which they are
produced; pay attention to geography and place; engage and make visible the voices
and experiences of historically marginalised; and do not make all-inclusive claims
about knowledge, causality, structure, or the world (Bhattacharya et al., 2019; hooks,
1991; McKittrick, 2006; Derickson, 2009; Nagar and Swarr, 2010; Mohanty, 2003;
Wright, 2013; Roy, 2016). For example, in several ‘feminist intervention’ entries
provided in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies
(Orum, 2019), the authors are clear to locate themselves within a specific region and
dominant language and provide details about the geographically particular evolu-
tion of feminist urban research which they are describing (for example, central Eu-
rope or France). Spanish feminist scholars Rodó-de-Zárate and Baylina (2018) have
argued for the use of the term ‘situated intersectionalities’ to note the way that dif-
ferent power relations combine in particular locations and moments. And feminists
have soundly critiqued tendencies towards simplification, monolingualism, overgen-
eralisation, and determination within urban theory and urban research (Kern and
McLean, 2017; Timár, 2019; Peake and Rieker, 2013). Rather, they acknowledge the
messiness, ambiguity, diversity, difference, and undecidability of urban experiences,
and the importance of people and places being able to tell their own story, while
often arguing for ‘contextually grounded solidarities across struggles and against
histories and geographies of interwoven oppression’ (Bhattacharya et al., 2019).
Feminist urban scholarship draws on multiple theoretical persuasions and an
expansive range of methodologies, including urban ethnography, case studies, and
quantitative and spatial analysis. Feminists research and write from postcolonial,
radical, socialist, and other perspectives on cities. While often paying attention to
larger trends and inequalities, feminist urban research is more likely to include
qualitative data and engage with everyday life, embodied experiences, households,
and neighbourhoods than many types of urban research (e.g. Sánchez de Madariaga
and Roberts, 2013; Vieira, 2010; Vaiou and Lykogianni, 2006; Jupp, 2014). This
may be because much feminist scholarship began initially by paying attention to the
daily lives of people in cities, especially women, and legitimating this as an accept-
able mode of urban scholarship.
222 Brenda Parker
Finally, seldom is feminist urban scholarship purely theoretical. Often it is
praxis – centred politically engaged, non-exploitative empirical research that
reveals and challenges unjust power relations and seeks to improve everyday
life (e.g. Rankin, 2009; Nagar and Swarr, 2010; Louargant, 2019). Many femi-
nist urban scholars are activists in addition to being scholars, and much feminist
research has been produced with the aim of changing policies, challenging vio-
lence against marginalised women and girls, transforming systems of knowledge
production, and so on.

Subjects and Subjectivities: Common Topics

in Urban Feminist Research

Just as there is substantive commonality (with variation) in the way that urban fem-
inist research is conducted, there are many topics that appear frequently in urban
feminist research, including homes and housing; work, economic development, and
poverty; and urban spaces, planning, and policy. In each of these topics, feminist
attention to and experiences with difference, place, and subjectivity shine through.
Thus, there is considerable variation in the literature based on geography, theoretical
approaches, and other factors.
In the near past, many scholars tried to capture some of this difference by
delineating the type of feminist urban research that emerges from scholars in or
about the so-called Global South versus the Global North. This delineation was
intended to ensure that research emanating from privileged institutional and geo-
graphic locations and scholars did not dominate the literature while other works
and topics remained invisible or undervalued. It also sought not to presume that
feminists from different places would share the same concerns, epistemologies,
and research agendas. However, this north–south dichotomy can be problematic
for several reasons (Nagar, 2013; Bhattacharya et al., 2019). For example, it
tends to erase the vast variation and local specificity within the Global North
and Global South; they reinforce the implicit hierarchy between the ‘north’ and
the ‘south’; and they ignore regions and places that perhaps do not fit neatly into
either category. Relatedly, north–south dichotomies perhaps make illegible the
commonalities of women in the supposedly different regions of the north and
south. Indeed, some scholars have argued that the experiences of poor women of
colour or indigenous women in poor urban neighbourhoods in the Global North
have distinct parallels to those of women in the colonised Global South. Finally,
it is perhaps too common in urban and other scholarship for north and south
to be not just dichotomised but ‘mapped’ unevenly so that the Global North is
produced as the site of theoretical abstraction and the Global South as the site
of the ‘ethnographic’ or material reality (Bhattacharya et al., 2019). Because of
these problematics with north–south dichotomies/distinctions, I minimise using
them in the descriptions below. Rather, I focus on common research topics in the
feminist urban literature while trying to articulate geographic specificities and
experiences. In the final section, I consider how intersectional and cooperative
feminist imaginations and alternatives might help us build more inclusive and just
feminist futures.
 Feminist Urban Research 223
Homes and Housing
Feminist urban scholars, planners, and architects have built an extensive literature
on gender and housing in cities. Much of this work has explored the need for afford-
able and safe housing especially for women and related problems of homelessness,
lack of assets, and poverty (e.g. Williams, 2004; Chitekwe-Biti and Mitlin, 2015;
Miraftab, 2006; Klodawsky, 2009). This work has critiqued both capitalist and
colonialist disregard for people’s right to safe dwelling space and the marketisation
and individualisation of housing (e.g. Hayden, 2002; Chant and Datu, 2015; Cur-
ran, 2017; Lancione, 2020). Feminist urban scholars have also carried out research
exploring the relations, ideologies, emotions, and meanings surrounding home and
home design (Hayden, 2002). Finally, feminist scholars have explored households
and homes as sites of paid and unpaid labour (e.g. Pavlovskaya, 2004; Vaiou and
Stratigaki, 2008; Yeoh and Ramdas, 2014). All of these dimensions are important in
contemporary urban life and planning.
As part of a broader body of feminist work that focuses on everyday lives and
needs, feminists have clearly articulated how gender and other factors ensure that
some individuals have constrained access to safe, affordable housing while simulta-
neously having a greater need. For example, women and female-identifying persons
are still more likely to be caregivers and/or single parents of children. They are less
likely to be owners of land/housing as assets and more vulnerable to intimate part-
ner violence and related effects (McIlwaine, 2013; Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2015).
Women and children households are most likely to be dislocated during urban gen-
trification processes, disrupting not only housing and centrality, but also the social
ties and relationships that are so important for those in caregiving roles (Curran,
2017; Ha, 2015; Miraftab, 1998). Race, ethnicity and ability are important inter-
vening factors. Women, especially poor women, women of colour, and women with
children, are far more likely to go to rent court, to be evicted, and to be discrimi-
nated against in searches for rental homes and in applications for home mortgages
(e.g. Baruah, 2007; Curran, 2017; Parker, 2017; Chant and Datu, 2015). Meanwhile,
neoliberalism and global gentrification processes have often led to the elimination of
social housing in cities, which disproportionately serve elderly women, women with
children, and, in some cities, people of colour (Ha, 2015; Curran, 2017; Reid, 2013).
In addition, as feminist urbanists have made clear, LGTBQIA individuals (especially
youth and seniors) around the world disproportionately experience homelessness,
violence, and discrimination in housing (Ecker et al., 2019; Yılmaz and Göçmen,
2016; Baruah, 2007; Irazábal and Huerta, 2016; Maruši and Bili , 2016).
Postcolonial, indigenous, socialist, and Black feminists have studied and docu-
mented alternative dwelling strategies and housing activism led by women, including
cooperative housing, squatting, and advocacy within public housing communities.
They rightly note that land and dwelling spaces have been dispossessed through
colonisation and explore the experience of ‘spiritual’ homelessness faced by indig-
enous communities (Christensen, 2016), as well as critique the commodification of
housing. Housing needs for low-income women (and related politics and activism)
remain critical areas for feminist urban scholarship (Rakodi, 2015). Urban feminists
have documented women’s historic and contemporary roles in housing activism in
cities such as Harare, Seoul, London, Cape Town, and Baltimore ­especially poor
224 Brenda Parker
women and women of colour (Williams, 2004; Ha, 2015; Davis, 2004; Isoke, 2013;
Miraftab, 2016; Chitekwe-Biti and Mitlin, 2015). As Curran (2017) and other fem-
inist urbanists note, leading such activist efforts can be invigorating and rewarding
but also involves considerable labour and burdens for women (Miraftab, 2016).
Feminist urban scholarship goes beyond the problem of female-identifying per-
sons being discriminated against or advocating for better housing. Scholars note
that gendered subjectivities, ideologies, and inequalities are spatialised and concep-
tualised in and through practices of housing and urban development (Roy, 2003;
Miraftab, 2006; Bernroider, 2018). As Roy (2003: 223) wrote in her ethnography
of gender, poverty, and urban politics in Calcutta: ‘I have been concerned with a
subject that can only be recovered through its embodiments, in this case through
labor and housing. This is a subject that is not only the site of difference but is also
constituted in and through different sites.’ Writing about single women in Delhi, Ber-
nroider (2018) notes that colliding ideologies and transformations related to gender
and economic globalisation result in single women finding jobs in global industries
in New Delhi, but facing difficulties finding apartments to rent and hostility from
neighbours in light of cultural anxieties surrounding delayed marriage.
Miraftab (2016) explores the gendered performance of ‘invented’ spaces of
citizenship primarily by poor women to shape policy decisions, even as South African
cities rely on their gendered social reproduction labours. Kingfisher (2007) articu-
lates the way that raced and gendered subjectivities figure prominently into policies
and debates surrounding homelessness. In her case, she notes how indigenous men
are framed in housing debates and decisions as lacking independence, work ethic,
and moral responsibility when they are unable to find housing. Meanwhile, struc-
tural problems that lead to homelessness such as deindustrialisation, settler colonial-
ism and its aftermath, and other issues are silenced.
In fact, there is a robust literature on urban feminist scholarship engaging with
homelessness and its gendered and intersectional dimensions. Several studies show,
for example, that homelessness among women in many places is chronically under-
estimated, in part because it is perhaps more hidden than men’s homelessness. In fact,
women’s homelessness has always existed but it gets conceptualised and made visible
in different ways because of gender norms (Oudshoorn et al., 2018). In other words,
one might not see as many women living on the streets as men, especially in cities
in North America. Women’s homelessness often looks like overcrowding, staying in
violent relationships to maintain housing, living in unsuitable or violent situations
to maintain custody of one’s children and paying high rents that make other neces-
sities, like food, unaffordable (e.g. Klodawsky, 2006; Mayock et al., 2015). This
hidden homelessness problem may also make it difficult to fully articulate the way
that indigenous and women of colour are especially vulnerable to homelessness,
especially as homelessness among indigenous communities in places like Canada has
grown recently (Christensen, 2016). These invisibilities, combined often with sexism,
racism, and colonial and imperial legacies, often result in insufficient resources and
housing supports for certain populations.
In other parts of the world, women without housing may not be hidden but still
experience ‘invisibility’ as Menon (2010) explores in her research on pavement
dwellers in Mumbai. Chitekwe-Biti and Mitlin (2015) report on the mobilisation
efforts of these women and their subsequent alliances to address housing, including
 Feminist Urban Research 225
with homeless federations in Zimbabwe. They document both transformations in
gender relations, rights advocacy, housing conditions, and asset building, and also
point to barriers in achieving broader housing gains especially for the most vulner-
able populations.

Work, Economic Development, and Poverty

Work, defined broadly by feminists as the paid and unpaid labour that allows
individuals, households, and communities to thrive, has been studied extensively
by urban feminists. Beginning with labour and households, feminist urbanists
have long examined provisioning and informal labour that occur in these sites.
Such provisioning includes paid and unpaid labour surrounding child care; sew-
ing and other production of goods for barter or pay; telephone help desks; bar-
tering and exchange of skilled labour; and paid and unpaid sex work (see, for
example, Lilius, 2017; Pavlovskaya, 2004; Vaiou and Stratigaki, 2008). Feminist
urban scholars have elaborated on how diverse urban households negotiate their
paid and unpaid labour. They show how the widespread practice of hiring domes-
tic labourers to care for middle-class children involves class, gender, and racial
tensions and inequalities at the household, urban, and global scale, as well as
rural/urban dynamics (Bastia, 2009; Rojas-García and Toledo González, 2018).
Yeoh and Ramdas (2014) note that the prevalence of gendered ideologies based
on ‘Asian familialism’ (Ochiai, 2009) in the East Asian urban economies of Sin-
gapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan encourages families to relegate the duty of aged
care to the privatised family sector in order to conserve some semblance of filial
piety through live-in foreign maids. Here, poorer women from other countries fill
the former labour roles of middle-class women, helping to prop up patriarchal
and familial orders. They also examine the experiences and complex identity
negotiations of domestic labourers within and outside of work sites (homes) –
including with organising for better working conditions and communities (Yeoh
and Ramdas, 2014).
In addition, feminists have analysed gendered and racialised labour markets, per-
formative and emotional labour, and the production of gendered subjectivities vis-
à-vis work in cities. In addition, urban feminists have examined informal economic
labour, survival strategies, disproportionate levels of poverty often linked to racism
and imperialism, and the social reproductive labours of women (Miraftab, 2010;
Kinyanjui, 2014). Since in most cities around the world, women/female-identifying
people still do the vast majority of care and community work, strategies, infrastruc-
ture, and policies that enable or constrain these ‘triple burdens’ (Nagar et al., 2002)
of women are common themes in urban research.
With regard to both paid and unpaid labour, feminists from Africa, Latin America,
and Asia have studied women’s disproportionately high participation in informal
labour markets (such as street vending). Kinyanjui, for example, shows how women
food and clothing vendors are reshaping postcolonial African cities through ‘soli-
darity’ entrepreneurialism that relies on social ties, reciprocity, sharing, and collab-
oration. Rather than victims of an economy or urban planning system that ignores
them, these women have become central socio-spatial actors in Nairobi’s economy
and urban transformation. Miraftab (2010) echoes this argument that women are
226 Brenda Parker
not simply victims but active agents in shaping policies and economies. In her case,
she shows how women in South Africa utilise their social reproduction roles in com-
munities to leverage policy changes.
As suggested above, feminist urban research on work goes beyond studying
women. Several scholars have examined gendered and raced labour markets, related
intersectional inequalities, as well as the production of gendered subjectivities in and
through labour. For example, Tarini Bedi’s forthcoming book, Globalization and the
Affective Labour of Motoring Men, focuses on the connections between masculine
embodiment, technology, and driving in both India and Singapore. Datta and Brick-
ell (2009) have also examined the masculine and heteronormative subjectivities of
Polish workers in London.

Urban Spaces and Urban Planning and Politics

The past ten years has seen a tremendous increase in scholarship and interest in the
role of gender and feminism in urban planning and politics. For a long time, feminist
urban scholars have noted that women (especially of colour or marginalised by caste,
class, ethnicity, or other), LGBTQ2S+ individuals, and other excluded groups par-
ticipate at much lower rates than men in city decision-making and ‘growth politics’.
This is true even as these groups are often disproportionately affected by political
decision-making (Roy, 2003; Miraftab, 2006; Kinyanjui, 2014; Parker, 2017).
Recently, French feminist urbanist Louargant (2015) argued that we need to
‘make the city with gender’ and ‘train with gender’. By this she means that gender
must be considered in urban development projects and in thinking through mobility,
security, public places, and more in cities. Moreover, she notes that urban planning
professionals and societies writ large are sorely uniformed about how to carry out
more inclusive and gender equitable planning. This is true even as local and in-
ternational endeavours have sprung up to try to improve daily lives for women.
These include the development of women-only transit options (such as subway cars
or ‘pink’ taxis) which decrease women’s exposure to sexual assault and violence.
Safe transport is critical to women’s autonomy and mobility, especially in cities like
Mexico City where 90% of women reported in a 2009 survey having experienced
sexual violence on public transportation (Zermeño Núñez and Plácido Ríos, 2010).
While segregated transportation in Mexico City, Bombay, and Tokyo has improved
women’s experiences, mobility, and perceptions of safety, it also raises critical ques-
tions about the limitations of segregation, why it is necessary to secure women’s
safety (Dunckel Graglia, 2016). As Dunckel Graglia (2016) and others point out,
a more concerted effort is essential in which segregated transport works together
with policy changes and public relations campaigns to change social norms. Albeit
imperfectly, she argues that in Mexico City ‘Pink transportation has catalysed cre-
ating wider conversations about gender discrimination, women’s rights, and gender
equality in media and society’.
Similarly, the European Union’s implementation of gender mainstreaming
requirements at all levels of government has had only partial success, a topic
examined in a book co-edited by Sánchez de Madariaga and Roberts titled
Fair Shared Cities (2013). This book looks at gender and design, gender and
sustainability, among other things. For example, Wankiewicz (2013) describes
 Feminist Urban Research 227
how European regional funds have often failed to link infrastructure issues like
public transportation to gender equality. Similarly, Tummers (2013) demon-
strates how experimental gendered housing and planning projects in the Neth-
erlands have produced high-quality results, especially by incorporating the care
economy into design. However, many gender tools remain underused and gen-
dered spatial planning has largely stagnated in the Netherlands. Zibell (2013)
suggests that the compact European cities could be a model for sustainable and
gender-just planning with more intentional efforts.
With regard to planning and politics, feminists have explored the absence of
diverse women and other marginalised individuals in urban politics. Women com-
prise less than 20% of elected officials, including at the global scale (UN Women,
2017). Women of colour, indigenous women, transwomen, and women from mar-
ginalised caste or religious sectors participate at even lower rates. For example, even
in communities in India that reserve spaces for women, there is persistent underrep-
resentation of Dalit and Muslim women (Mangubhai et al., 2020; Nazneen, 2018).
This lack of engagement is consequential, even as feminists note that there is no
single gendered standpoint, that including women does not guarantee other forms
of representation, and that women may actually be participants and even leaders of
conservative urban political groups (see Bedi, 2006; Whitzman, 2007). For example,
Bedi (2006), shows how the mobilisation of women as leaders in urban conser-
vative parties (the dashing ladies of Shiv Sena) to frame a ‘feminist’ politics in a
multi-ethnic, pluralist society. Most critically, it has also raised the troubling issue of
whether the increasing mobilisation of right-wing women by conservative political
and cultural organisations such as the Shiv Sena can actually be seen as part of the
feminist movement itself or whether it needs to be problematised as quite separate
from it (Basu, 1998; Kalpagam, 2000).
Since 2010 especially, feminist scholarship and consciousness raising along with
social trends have led to increases in the number of women and people of colour
in urban planning and leadership. Simultaneously, we have seen more activism and
inquiry about the ways that cities might be more inclusive with regard to gender
and other power relations. In some places, feminism is no longer seen as anathema
to urban planning and urban scholarship, and grassroots feminist planning is
percolating upwards, even as it is still often met with hostility or indifference
(Louargant, 2019; Sánchez de Madariaga and Roberts, 2013; Huning, 2019; Ortiz
Escalante and Gutiérrez Valdivia, 2015). A range of feminist leaders and mayors
in Spain, Uruguay, Liberia, and other places are reshaping concepts, contexts, and
practices of urban leadership.
Even so, there remain vexing questions and problematics with regard to urban
politics and planning that feminist urbanists continue to examine, especially includ-
ing the constrained possibilities for transformation of cities and leadership, and
pervasive and persistent heteropatriarchal, neoliberal, and colonial urban orders.
Urban politics and planning are still largely construed and practised in masculine
and narrow ways (Roy, 2003; Parker, 2017; Curran, 2017; Sweet and Ortiz Es-
calante, 2015). Design, development, and profit are often prioritised over resident
well-being and engagement. Furthermore, as I have argued elsewhere, the tight cir-
cuits of like-minded, elite, urban players help reinforce certain logics and rationales
that subvert potential challenges from diverse or marginalised viewpoints. Those
228 Brenda Parker
outside of the dominant gender, racial, or other norm or those occupying minority
subject positions are particularly pressed to conform to the overarching rationales
or risk the disciplinary effects of further marginalisation (Parker, 2017). In addition,
theories and practices from the Global North continue to dominate the academic
literature within and outside of feminism.

Alternative Feminist Imaginations and Futures:

Praxis and Possibilities

Across time, feminist urban scholars and writers have explored the idea of feminist
utopias or alternative versions of urban life that combined work, life, and dwelling
in unique ways that perhaps better serve women. Some of these imaginations and
endeavours have focused on women-only spaces and others have been more expan-
sive with regard to participation, but rooted in feminist ideals. Queer feminists
have often led or figured predominantly in these narratives, which challenge binary
gendered and sexual norms. In these alternative feminist cities (both real life and
fictional), practices and imaginations vacillate between the provocative and the
practical. For example, as Hudson (2009) recounts, in medieval beguinages, walled
enclaves where only women lived were found in a number of cities in present day
Belgian and the Netherlands in the period 1200–1500. They developed in a period
when the cities in the Low Countries were growing rapidly and there was a short-
age of labour power. Women moved from the countryside to the cities looking for
work in greater numbers than men. Cities were dangerous places for women on their
own and a beguinage represented a safe place for women. No men were allowed
to live there or visit after nightfall when the gates were closed and women could
wander the streets in safety. Dolores Hayden, architect and urban scholar, in her
book, The Grand Domestic Revolution (1982), recounted various experiments with
collective living and labour arrangements in the early 1900s, many led by women
and feminists.
More recently, examples abound of feminist urbanists desiring and leading efforts
at urban transformation and collectivity. In 1970s London, women-only and often
queer squatting communities emerged, offering practical solutions to the lack of
housing for single mothers and single women, and fulfilling political goals for rad-
ical feminists. There were political reasons for living with other women. Equally
important at the time, was the act of engaging directly with the built environment,
adjusting, repairing, and adapting it by women and for women, and making these
communities unique. According to Wall (2017: 83), ‘squats delineated a spatial
framework for the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, providing for wom-
en’s centres, refuges from domestic violence, workplaces, and nurseries as well as
homes’. In 1972, Olive Morris, feminist activist and founder member of the Orga-
nisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD), squatted 121 Railton
Road, an address which subsequently housed a range of community and political
groups until the 1990s (Wall, 2017).
In recent focus groups in Swedish cities, Hudson and Rönnblom (2008) found
women also eager to discuss experiences with collective life in the 1970s.
 Feminist Urban Research 229
A number of women drew on previous experiences of living in collective houses in other
cities. They considered that communal living helped to combat some of the drudgery
of housework and cooking and improve sharing of domestic tasks between men and
women. A number of women reminisced nostalgically on experiences of ‘cooking col-
lectives’ in Umeå in the 1970s where responsibility for preparing a joint meal one day a
week for the other families in the collective rotated between members. Others enlarged
on the possibilities communal living provided for extending the traditional nuclear fam-
ily and breaking the isolation of women making it more difficult to conceal violence
against women. (Hudson and Rönnblom, 2008)

And as feminist research shows, examples of feminist collectives and coalitions that
resist patriarchal and capitalist relations and foreground care and commons can be
found around the world in both recent and distant history (Federici, 2012). In some
cases, these collective endeavours also strive to push against colonialism, ableism,
racism, and other power relations. Bhattacharya et al. (2019) describe a multi-scalar
feminist endeavour, Feminist Africa, where feminists organise across colonial borders
to challenge state violence, neoliberalism, and academic exclusion and where issues
of gender and sexuality are central. The authors note that working and listening with
radical vulnerability and partnerships across ‘differences’ is essential for feminist
coalitions challenging colonial and imperial violence.
Feminist urban scholars and activists in Spain have taken a leadership role in
both cultivating feminist collectives and cooperatives, facilitating worker strikes,
stances against violence against women and queer people, and integrating feminist
approaches into urban planning and development (see Sweet and Ortiz Escalante,
2015; Rodó-de-Zárate, 2015, Garcia-Ramon et al., 2004; Rodó-de-Zárate and Bay-
lina, 2018). At a recent historical materialism conference in Barcelona, a panel of
urban feminist activists called out patriarchal, neoliberal, and racist practices in cit-
ies and proposed strategies to create and sustain just ‘feminist economies’.
In parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, feminist urban scholars have examined
collective organisations of slum dwellers led by women, and ‘solidarity economies’
formed by female vendors based on social ties, reciprocity, sharing, and collaboration
(Chitekwe-Biti and Mitlin, 2015; Kinyanjui, 2014). Feminists are quick to point out
the uneasy paradoxes, complicities, and colonial relations built into many of these
projects, some of which are encouraged, simplified, or imposed by neoliberal organi-
sations in the Global North with vested interests in protecting and disguising struc-
turally uneven global power relations while peddling female empowerment (see, for
example, Bhattacharya et al., 2019). In reality, female-identifying actors who prac-
tice various forms of economic and social solidarity have complex subjectivities and
navigate complicated political terrain, facing structural burdens they often did not
create. They are neither saviours nor saints.
Feminist and queer urbanists have explored temporary, pop-up, and creative
spaces in cities, critically exploring their potential to facilitate belonging, alternative
and egalitarian practices, and social transformation in cities (see LaFrombois,
2017). For example, Lelea and Voiculescu (2017) ponder the meaning of women-
organised music festivals (Lady Fest) in Romanian cities for feminist organising in
post-socialist Europe. Queer pride parades and the complex and contested politics
230 Brenda Parker
that encompass them have been extensively interrogated by feminist queer urban-
ists, who document the colonial, raced, and gendered violence that mainstream
parades often perpetuate, while also exploring possibility and hope. These pos-
sibilities lie, for example, in alternative and counter actions by transgender and
non-binary coalitions, indigenous and queer people of colour, and other activists
that seek to challenge the neoliberal and exclusionary practices that mark many
current pride parades and homonormative politics (Greensmith and Giwa, 2013;
Johnston, 2007).
And finally, poignantly, and perhaps in opposition to the notion of feminist
utopian futures, queer feminist scholar Natalie Osborne (2019) asks us in a recent
article to think about ‘still possible cities’. Osbourne acknowledges that perhaps
aspirational futures of an increasingly ‘feminist and just city’ may not be possible
given the realities of climate change, violence, mass displacement of peoples, and
ascending capitalist heteropatriarchy. However, drawing inspiration from postcolo-
nial and indigenous activists, she questions how we might still live out alternative
feminist practices and ethics of care in the present moment and in our present places.
Giving examples of feminist collective endeavours in Brisbane, Osbourne notes that
feminists do not need to fixate on a particular endpoint or ideas of scaling up and
replication, but instead we can:

focus on nurturing still possible cities in the cracks in the concrete, in the ruins and
wastespaces we find ourselves in. These nurturing practices will be habitual, empha-
sizing the daily and partial rather than the distant and complete, and resonate with
Mary Graham’s (1999, p.183) account of the custodial ethic in Aboriginal worldviews
as ‘achieved through repetitive action, such that gradually, over time, the ethic becomes
the “norm”’. (Osborne, 2019)

In this way, feminist ethics, imaginations, and practices of care – operating in the
present, past, and future – offer the possibility of transforming norms, spaces, and
cities through everyday praxis and more.

Conclusion

Feminists and female reformers have reimagined and reshaped cities in more just and
egalitarian ways for over a century. Within academia, feminist urban scholars have
persistently published about gender and intersectional inequalities in cities, even as
this work has often been side-lined in the mainstream academic literature. Inter-
sectional and diverse feminist studies by postcolonial, queer, and women of colour
feminists (among others) have raised questions about both the way that research on
cities is conducted as well as the topics that are examined. They have foregrounded
issues of justice and inclusion in knowledge production and city building, continu-
ally challenging silences and violences within and beyond feminism.
The contemporary body of feminist scholarship that has emerged is rich, tra-
versing diverse theoretical perspectives, addressing intersectional inequalities, and
transcending geographical borders. While attention to geographical context and
 Feminist Urban Research 231
geopolitical inequalities including colonialism and rethinking the valorisation of
‘Global North’ theories is essential, it is possible to identify common topics across
the global feminist urban literature, including homes and housing; work, economic
development, and poverty; urban spaces and planning; and feminist alternatives and
imaginations. In each of these thematic areas, feminists offer theoretical contribu-
tions tied with deep empirical work that is often aimed at improving communities
and policies. This commitment to praxis (politically engaged research), along with
practices, critiques, and imaginations that (re)centre our attention on justice, equity,
and ethics of care are signatures of contemporary feminist urban scholarship.

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 Part III
METHODOLOGICAL
APPROACHES
 12
A Critical-Empirical Approach to the
Use of Demographic Methods and
Sources in Urban Studies
Ricardo Truffello, Fernanda Rojas-Marchini,
and Monica Flores

Introduction

While censuses, surveys, and similar tools are the bread and butter of demographic
science, other disciplines such as urban studies also rely on these same methods to
elaborate and support their claims. In this chapter, we discuss methods and sources
in demography and urban studies from a critical-empirical perspective to reflect
on ‘how’ and ‘with what effects’ these techniques, practices, and procedures have
affected urban planning and policy interventions. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s
governmentality studies (Burchell et al., 1991; Foucault, 2008), we examine demo-
graphic methods as tools created and mobilised by governing structures: first to
‘discipline’ populations and later to guide their conduct by applying more nuanced
techniques to transform people’s subjectivities. We emphasise the use of these
methods by states, but we also engage with recent trends in demography and urban
studies that have seen these methods shift from their traditional arena of government
uses into the private and corporate spheres. The first section of the chapter presents
a general timeline of historical sources of demographic information while critically
interrogating them by exploring Latin American cases. These are traditional sources
compiled by nation-states: censuses, surveys, and vital records. In the second section,
we present two urban cases where demographic methods were deployed as policy
interventions. Redlining in the United States and the Erradicación de campamentos
during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. In the third section, we take a close look at
Big Data’s entrance into – and transformation of – demographic methods and urban
policy interventions. We conclude by reflecting on the uses and abuses of methods,
while we caution readers about the pitfalls and inherent problems of demographic
methods, for which we claim there are no silver bullets.

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
240 TRUFFELLO, ROJAS-MARCHINI, AND FLORES
Before delving into the following sections, we want to warn readers that our anal-
ysis is more concerned with a critical approach to demographic methods than with
a traditional perspective, which would require reviewing the elements of population
change. We are well aware of the importance of understanding such features, includ-
ing fertility, mortality, and migration – amply reviewed by Yusuf et al. (2014). How-
ever, we use this chapter as an opportunity to engage in a careful reflection about
the risks and pitfalls that arise in the application of demographic methods in urban
studies and policy interventions. Such risks become evident by reviewing cases where
public policies trigger adverse outcomes for specific populations and territories, and
in the more recent trend towards private uses of demographic methods, prompted
by Big Data. More traditional reviews of demographic methods can be found in Rees
(2009) and Mather and Cortes (2016).

Trajectory and Biases of Demographic

Methods and Sources Over Time

In this section, we discuss demographic sources and methods from the vantage points
of history and empirical cases of application. The section pays attention to methods
and sources’ trajectory and failure in censuses, surveys, and administrative records;
it then moves to the main challenges of administrative and vital records. But before
we proceed, a definition of sources and methods is necessary. Demographic sources
correspond to primary survey instruments aimed at representing quantitative and
qualitative features of individuals, as well as the sum of them as populations (via
aggregation and resulting in new groups such as households, subpopulations, and
administrative territories). To undertake a population’s characterisation and analy-
sis, sources are processed by methods (and most often, statistical methods), which
are in turn shaped by methodologies. Examples of methods are life cycles, historical
evolution analyses, and demographic projections, which draw from other disciplines,
such as sociology, geography, and, more recently, data science. Methods and sources
are crucial to the quality of analyses. Consequently, practitioners should always take
care that methods consider context while serving for further examination by other
disciplines and epistemological interpretations.

Population Censuses and Power/Knowledge Dynamics: A Brief History

The importance of population censuses is indisputable. It is the oldest, best-known,
and well-formed source for a wide range of methodologies. It is also a field of research
in itself while widely regarded among the most reliable data sources (Gołata, 2016).
For hundreds of years, population censuses have been the primary source for col-
lecting social, economic, and demographic characteristics of people and their homes,
but its origin is much older. In ancient times, empires and nations such as China,
Egypt, India, and the Roman Empire applied this type of instruments to measure
their assets and armies (Mather and Cortes, 2016).
Unlike current censuses, ancient censuses were not exhaustive. They focused on
sectors of the population, such as the head of households and military personnel,
which were categories of interest to the empires and states of the time. This partial
 A CRITICAL-EMPIRICAL APPROACH 241
focus took place at the expense of major parts of the population that were not
considered citizens (Friesen, 2017). Censuses also responded to states and empires’
demands in surveying people’s assets, among which were the land, cattle, buildings,
money, jewellery, and slaves as a way of linking them to tax collection procedures
(Allen, 1997; King et al., 2019).
The first modern census for which there is a formal record took place in Que-
bec City, Canada, in 1666 (Mather and Cortes, 2016). After this register, the next
century witnessed the implementation of exhaustive censuses in Europe and the
United States – the first of this kind was in 1790 – which included a population
count, addresses, gender and ages, and even some characteristics like ‘race’ (Gibson
and Jung, 2005). This is relevant since censuses were essential tools that revealed
cultural identity processes and often expressed hegemonic ideologies of past and
present times (Leeman, 2004). In this case, these categories refer directly to methods
in demography and, specifically, to population characteristics, in particular those
related to race and ethnicity (Kitchin and Thrift, 2009). These categories are still
mobilised by many governments in various countries, they actively conflate ethnic
recognition with potential acts of racial discrimination. The dangers of such a move
to classify humans according to race are ever more explicit considering that race
does not exist as a material difference among humans and that, from a perspective
based on genetics, it does not bring any scientific detail to population studies (see
Baker et al., 2017). Moreover, the category ‘race’ in the US census already proved to
mislead demographic representations, as concerned watchers have already warned
(Alba, 2018; Brown, 2020). Race as a demographic category is, thus, an inadequate
cultural construct that does not offer proper insights to understand populations’
rapidly evolving dynamics.
Population studies and other demographic methods became fundamental tools in
the early twentieth century for conducting public policy design and evaluations. The
Great Depression pushed for the rising of population studies as new developments
in social sciences like the field of microeconomics became increasingly concerned
with peoples’ dynamics and behaviour. The emphasis was placed on evidence-led
decision-making, and the testing of effects provoked by applied policies in various
scenarios (Heckman, 2001). Alongside the rise of policymaking studies, the Chi-
cago School of sociology led a theoretical endeavour to connect the territorial units
measured by population censuses and neighbourhood studies. This approach took
the city as a vast agglomeration of heterogeneous communities, all of which with
particular characteristics and problems (see Chapter 9, this volume). Furthermore,
the geography units for which demographic estimates and projections were pro-
duced were much smaller at the end of the twentieth century than ever before. The
reduction of geographic unit size allows for better informed place-based public and
private decision-making processes. Moreover, such refinement at the geographic
level allowed for crossing demographic data with urban planning information such
as land uses or values, informing real estate agents, local governments, and other
stakeholders in urban development (Pol, 1997). Currently, the use of Big Data tools
such as imagery recognition can be crossed with demographic data at the smallest
geographical scale available for predicting income or home values. Such techniques
could be used to map wealth and poverty in previously unmeasured areas of the
developing world (Glaeser et al., 2018).
242 TRUFFELLO, ROJAS-MARCHINI, AND FLORES
Surveys and Administrative and Vital Records: The Case of a Crisis of
Territorial Representation in Chile
Surveys are critical tools to evaluate demographic trends obtained from censuses and
develop projections that complete time periods without exhaustive data. These sur-
veys typically focus on a narrow set of characteristics such as employment, health,
sociodemographic features, urban commuting with the aim of ensuring a representa-
tive sample. Surveys seek to represent part of the population while basing their sam-
pling frame on exhaustive instruments and their respective demographic projections.
The process to stratify large surveys to improve their territorial precision uses sam-
pling frames based on census information since it allows a priori calculation of the
level of error of the sampling frame (Nirel and Glickman, 2009). However, the cen-
sus information, due to its characteristics, can present relevant errors, a situation
that can be accentuated in highly populated cities and particularly in metropolitan
areas (Cohen, 2006). The most frequent errors of the Census of 2012 in Chile were
the spatial agglomeration of the omission in certain municipalities’ specific places.1
For example, in peripheral locations of social housing or gated communities.
A clear example of censuses’ pitfalls and potential flaws is one of Chile’s latest
censuses, applied in 2012 and which brought a series of implementation problems.
A change of implementation towards a census of law (regularly the censuses in Chile
are of fact2) generated a high loss of effective responses, adding more difficulties to
the increasing omission of answers due to Chilean cities’ complex urban structure
(see Figure 12.1).
The 2012 census results were highly problematic. More than a lack of data, the
census evidenced a poor implementation. The census also provoked a spatial clus-
tering of errors, that is, the spatial agglomeration of errors around a limited space,
which accounts for the spatial self-correlation of errors (Truffello et al., accepted for
publication). This concentration took place at both the municipal level and specific
urban morphologies, such as gated communities.3 The scale and distribution of the
2012 census’s errors in Chile even foreclosed possible data corrections by imple-
menting methodologies such as data-driven regionalisation4 (Folch and Spielman,
2014). The agglomeration of errors due to spatial autocorrelation prevents obtaining
regular zoning when using regionalisation algorithms. Further, these algorithms tend

1 
In some municipality, the omission percentage reached 20%.
2 
‘Censuses of fact’ are applied on a holiday, while ‘censuses of law’ for a longer period
of time (generally months).
3 
Gated communities correspond to houses in real estate developments located on the
periphery of the middle class and vulnerable municipalities, in general with a higher
socioeconomic level than their urban environment, but surrounded by perimeter fences
that segregate them from the outside (see Hidalgo, 2004b).
4 
Data-driven regionalisation consists in a heuristic spatial optimisation algorithm that is
capable of reducing the margins of error in survey data via the creation of new composite
geographies, a process called regionalisation (Folch and Spielman, 2014).
 A CRITICAL-EMPIRICAL APPROACH 243

12.0%

9.6%
10.0%

8.0%
% omission

6.0%
4.8%
3.8%
4.0%

2.0%
2.0% 1.5%

0.0%
1982 1992 2002 2012 2017
Year

Figure 12.1  Omission of population censuses in Chile.

Sources: Based on: Villalón & Vera, 2011; Bravo, D., Larrañaga, O., Millán, I., Ruiz, M., & Zamo-
rano, F. (2013). Informe final Comisión externa revisora del CENSO 2012.

to generate unbalanced generalisations regarding the resulting population (by using

floor population constraints5) and the resulting size of new zones.
Based on the 2012 census’s highly omitted values, the instrument was officially
declared invalid (Bravo et al., 2013), retaking data collection in a 2017 shortened
census. This methodological mistake provoked a 15-year inter-census gap, impact-
ing surveys based on the census sampling frame. In many cases, these surveys have
precisely the greatest relevance and significance, while they carry the most expen-
sive sample processes. Precisely the problem of under-representation occurs in the
CASEN (Chilean national socio-economic characterisation survey), invalidating in
many cases their territorial representation in many urban municipalities of Chile.
Given the 2012 census’s invalidation, the 2017 CASEN survey used the 2002
census sampling frame and respective population projections. Representativeness at
the municipal level involved serious disagreements, invalidating many cases within
municipalities such as Santiago, Puente Alto, and Maipú, the three municipalities
with the highest population in Chile.
As Figure 12.2 shows, the demographic gap between the population projection
based on the 1992–2002 intercensal growth and the population registered in 2017
at the municipal level is large. This is especially significant for the municipality of
Santiago, with a gap of over three times the estimated projection.
In Santiago’s municipality, demographic phenomena and territorial planning inter-
ventions, such as the urban regeneration process and subsequent residential densi-
fication took place after the year 2000 (Vicuña, 2017). In 2017 the municipality of

5 
See Duque et al. (2012).
 244 TRUFFELLO, ROJAS-MARCHINI, AND FLORES

1,200,000
1,121,070

1,000,000
2017 Census
867,228
2002 Projection
800,000
Total Population

600,000 568,106
521,627

404,495
400,000

208,237
200,000
127,557 100,281 107,954 127,241
60,767
41,063
0
Maipú Santiago Independencia PuenteAlto San Miguel Ñuñoa

Municipality

Figure 12.2  Difference of communal population projected and real to 2017.

Source: Based on Census 2017, Instituto Nacional de Estadistica(INE); CASEN 2017, Ministerio
de Desarrollo Social(MDS).

Santiago accounted for more than 400,000 inhabitants effectively registered in the
census. Thus, there is a wide underestimation on the same year’s CASEN sample
frame (127,557 inhabitants), a population projection based on the 1992–2002 inter-
censal growth, involving an invalidation of representativeness of the instrument for
that territory.
Methodological and implementation difficulties in the censuses and sampling
instruments in Chile and, more widely, in Latin America are becoming increasingly
evident. Failures in the applications of censuses are numerous, either due to economic
conditions (1970 census in Argentina), political (in several Latin American countries
during the 1980s), or downright bad technical decisions like the 1970 census in Co-
lombia and the 2012 census in Chile, reviewed here (also see Tacla Chamy, 2006).
The problem of under-representation in surveys and censuses’ omissions has
pushed towards complementary methodologies (such as correction methodologies
and spatialised sampling) or the use of administrative records, such as vital statistics
(Borchsenius, 2001; Cook, 2004) as plausible alternatives to improve demographic
consistency and coherence. We turn now to a brief review of these alternatives.

Administrative and Vital Records: Contemporary Challenges

Space sampling surveys and large data bases of statistical systems have resulted
from the development of methodologies to fill the gaps in administrative records
(Borchsenius, 2001; Cook, 2004; Wallgren and Wallgren, 2007, 2016). Both meth-
odologies, especially those based on registries, allow improving the consistency and
coherence of demographic data while providing a greater temporal scale (Wallgren
and Wallgren, 2007, 2016).
Despite possible paths opened by the methods mentioned above, these proce-
dures entail high monetary costs and long-term implementation agendas, with
 A CRITICAL-EMPIRICAL APPROACH 245
methodologies that are often complex to apply by governments. In practice, such
efforts entail improving records and technological platforms that support data
collection, storage, and manipulation. These methods also demand the training of
specialised personnel, continuous data management (Jin et al., 2015), and – when
associated to spatialised data – implementation of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs)
to ensure spatial consistency and coherence between sources, as well as their ade-
quate geographical representation (Williamson et al., 2006). Many Latin American
countries are far from achieving this scenario, arguably due to their governmental
institutions. Opportunities to create synergies by sharing data between government
departments and public institutions are often missed amid Latin American bureau-
cratic structures. Yet, perhaps more critical than bureaucracy is the excessive energy
invested by ministries, private consultants, and think tanks working on an overabun-
dance of indicators, data visualisation platforms, and SDIs. These tools often remain
disconnected among these units, missing opportunities to improve their quality and
application through synergies.
Moreover, as with the use of census information, the latest trend indicates that
the private sector is reaching a consolidated information system buttressed by
administrative, commercial, vital, and mobility records based on public information
(Taylor, 2016). As we discuss in Section 3, Big Data plays a major role in this consol-
idation, while it is also changing the field of demography. Yet, these transformations
come with trade-offs like privacy transgressions, which are often led by corporativist
interests. Demographic sources and methods are essential to grasp at the main chal-
lenges that governments and other research institutions have in relation to urban
and territorial planning. From obstacles in the implementation and the subsequent
quality of gathered data, methods and its sources need to be interrogated, especially
in the current trend of privately led production and collection of information. In
the following section we revise two significant cases where demographic methods
and sources were put to work for governmental purposes of control and discipline.
These took place in the first and second half of the nineteenth century; however, they
inform the current interweaving of demographic methods and urban interventions
inasmuch they show how state control – by the implementation or urban planning –
works through the segregation of people according to race and class.

Demographic Methods as a Tool for Urban Planning:

Territorial Equity and Socio-spatial Segregation

Demographic methods are not merely a representation of reality. They have a per-
formative potential that emerges through the exercise of power (Aalbers, 2014;
Foucault, 1980). One way the exercise of power manifests through and by means
of demographic methods are urban policies. Informed by demographic tools such
as censuses or community surveys, urban policies have been historically used for
population control and with particular means – mostly to satisfy economic and
political interests of a few (Aalbers, 2014; Foucault, 1980; Harvey, 2003; Lefebvre,
1991). This section analyses two case studies that demonstrate the use of demo-
graphic methods to explicitly segregate population by race, wealth, and socioeco-
nomic status. These processes entailed the increase of wealth for real estate agents
246 TRUFFELLO, ROJAS-MARCHINI, AND FLORES
and helped macroeconomic stabilisation with devastating consequences for the un-
der-represented, mostly non-white or dispossessed, population. In the first case, we
analyse the ‘residential security maps’ institutionalised by the US federal government
in the 1930s. Later known as redlining maps, this demography-based housing finance
policy tool caused the abandonment of racially mixed neighbourhoods and endorsed
the move of White populations to newly developed suburban land (Jackson, 1985;
Schwartz, 2015). In the second case, a Chilean housing policy programme known as
Erradicación de campamentos (slum clearance), the central dictatorial government
deliberately displaced ‘undesirable’ population out of wealthy neighbourhoods by
combining military power and market-driven urban policy design (Celedón Forster,
2019; Hidalgo, 2004a).

Case Study 1: Redlining in the United States

The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created in 1933 with the purpose
of stabilising the US housing market, which had half of the mortgage debt in default.
It refinanced housing debt and allowed borrowers who already lost their homes to
repurchase them (Jackson, 1985). Although it was designed as short-term relief, it
had long-term impacts on the spatial distribution of population, the suburbanisa-
tion of North American cities, and the provision of public services. More specifically,
HOLC institutionalised the explicitly racist practice of denying mortgages to people
and communities of colour (Faber, 2017). Designed by the HOLC as an appraisal
tool, the ‘residential security maps’, later known as ‘redlining maps’, worked as a rat-
ing system that undervalued neighbourhoods that were dense, socially mixed, or age-
ing. This set of maps categorised most of the urban and suburban areas of the United
States in four colour codes6 according to racial composition and housing stock age
(Jackson, 1985). Likewise, this system classified properties located in racially mixed
and predominantly Black and immigrant neighbourhoods as too risky to warrant
mortgage insurance. Therefore, perpetuating racial discrimination and urban decay
in several neighbourhoods across the United States (Schwartz, 2015).
Most commonly, green or A-coded areas were exclusively White populated and
newly developed outer city residential enclaves (see Figure 12.3). Through this mech-
anism, the HOLC and other agencies that continued to use redlining maps until the
1970s fostered the suburbanisation in North American cities (Jackson, 1985). By
classifying central city areas as too risky to warrant a mortgage, the ‘White flight’
was not just a spontaneous migration phenomenon. The inner-city abandonment

6 
(A) Black diagonal thick lines refer to homogeneous neighbourhoods, hot spots in
demand as residential locations in good times and bad, American business and professional
men. (B) Black dots refer to stable, still good, still desirable areas that had reached their
peak. (C) Four points stars refer to definitely declining, heterogeneous neighbourhoods
that attract undesirable elements and are infiltrated by a lower grade population. (D)
Vertical white lines refer to neighbourhoods in which the things taking place in C areas
have already happened as a result of detrimental influences in a pronounced degree and
where houses have little or no value today, having suffered a tremendous decline in values
due to the coloured element now controlling the district (Aalbers, 2014; Jackson, 1985).
 A CRITICAL-EMPIRICAL APPROACH 247

Figure 12.3  Redlining map of Baltimore, 1930s.

Source: Aalbers (2014) US National Archives, Washington, DC. Adapted by authors for gray
scale version.

and the White suburbanisation of America were assisted by the federal housing
finance agencies and territorially preconceived in the redlining maps (Faber, 2017).
Conversely, the redlining appraisal maps, which were based on demographic
information, were used to explicitly segregate population by race and wealth. Fur-
thermore, the inner-city abandonment of the White population also involved the
governmental abandonment of communities of colour. Public policies derived from
the diminished (White) population in urban neighbourhoods bolstered segregation
and vulnerability by creating a public service shortage. The South Bronx neighbour-
hood in New York City was one emblematically affected community where policies
such as planned shrinkage had devastating consequences in the urban environment
(see Aalbers, 2014; Guimond, 2013).
Discriminatory and racist practices, such as redlining, were made illegal after the
Civil Rights Movement in the Fair Housing Act (1968), the Equal Credit ­Opportunity
248 TRUFFELLO, ROJAS-MARCHINI, AND FLORES
Act (1974), and the Community Reinvestment Act (1977) (see Chen and Phinney,
2004; DeWolfe et al., 1980; Nier, 1999). However, the effects of such a segregational
policy are long-lasting and affecting people of colour and their places. These effects
are significant in the access to housing finance, but also in the overall distribution
of population and wealth (Faber, 2017).7 Furthermore, Aaronson et al. (2017), by
studying the HOLC maps’ boundary neighbourhoods, found that areas located in
the lower graded side of HOLC boundaries in the 1930s experienced an increase in
racial segregation in subsequent decades. They also found evidence of a long-running
decline in homeownership, house values, and credit scores along these areas that still
persists today. These sorts of patterns visible today are an important manifestation
of the stability of racial segregation and the long-lasting effects of processes that
facilitated them (Faber, 2017).

Case Study 2: Slum Clearance in Chile During the Pinochet Dictatorship

The Erradicación de campamentos housing programme was a comprehensive urban
policy applied in Santiago de Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, which relocated
informal dwellers from centrally located urban slums into the periphery. Under this
policy, 28,887 households were eradicated in the period 1979–1985, involving the
relocation of 172,218 individuals (Hidalgo, 2004a). The relocation was made under
the promise of giving access to property rights to informal dwellers and providing
housing units with access to basic urban services and sanitary conditions. However,
the promise was only partially achieved, as property rights were guaranteed only
with the timely payment of quotas and most of the land was not yet urbanised by
the time pobladores (slum dwellers) were relocated (Celedón Forster, 2019; Millan,
2012). Furthermore, the majority of the assigned housing units were composed of a
caseta sanitaria: a roofed precinct of 6–9 m2 containing a bathroom and a kitchen
(Hidalgo, 2004a). To add to the already precarious situations of dwellers, the erad-
icated population had to face significantly increased transportation costs for com-
muting to their jobs as the eradication programme did not foresee a suitable public
transportation plan (Hidalgo, 2004a).
The Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1989) brought a profound restructuring of
the Chilean economy. Based on Chicago School’s neoliberal economic postulates,
Chile was a global reference and an experimental field for testing neoliberal pol-
icies conceptualised by ultra-liberal economists, while transforming the former
socialist model. This transformation included the privatisation of land and natural
resources, reduction of government expenditure in health and education, and a
wider shortage of policies aimed at giving basic guarantees to the population (see
Letelier, 1976; Madero, 2018; Silva, 1991; Stormansan, 2011). Further, the C­ hicago

7 
Faber (2017) found that areas redlined by HOLC in the 1930s had significantly higher
sub-prime lending rates before 2008 and accumulated more foreclosures during the
subsequent recession than areas identified as ‘desirable’. In terms of population distri-
bution, the places that were predominantly White in the 1930s (and were rewarded for
being so with desirable HOLC ratings) are still so today. Conversely, neighbourhoods
with large Black populations in the early twentieth century (and were punished for being
so with C and D ratings) are still predominantly non-white today.
 A CRITICAL-EMPIRICAL APPROACH 249
School’s economic theory explicitly supported segregation based on wealth at the
local level (see Tiebout, 1956) claiming that the most homogeneous municipalities
would have an optimal outcome in public services provision by allocating such
resources according to residents’ willingness to pay – in local taxes. Under this the-
ory, increased segregation by means of separating the poor from the rich was justi-
fied as it allowed to reach society’s economic optimum by providing an ‘adequate
level’ of public goods and services, meaning more and better services for the wealthy
and a reduced provision for poorer localities.8
In the urban field, two key policies were implemented along with the National Pol-
icy of Urban Development (Política Nacional de Desarrollo Urbano, PNDU, 1979),
which helped to understand eradication as a housing policy. These two relevant pol-
icies are the liberalisation of the urban land market – including principles that dis-
card any sustained governmental intervention on land markets – and the municipal
subdivision of 1976 (see Morales and Rojas, 1986). Contrary to the government’s
expectations, after the liberalisation of urban land, land prices abruptly spiked due
to speculation, leading to a value increase of the land informally occupied. The
economic process triggered by the liberalisation of land culminated in raising inter-
ests in expelling slum dwellers from valuable urban land (Hidalgo, 2004a; Sabatini,
2000). Big scale real estate projects were carried out on some of the land occupied
by the informal settlements, which contributed to increased municipal tax collection
and earnings for the private agents benefited by these processes (Celedón Forster,
2019; Hidalgo, 2004a; Millan, 2012). On the other hand, there were well-defined
political interests of the regime on relocating and spreading out the working-class
population (see Figure 12.4). An early task of the Pinochet’s regime was to disartic-
ulate the community organisations located in working-class neighbourhoods and
informal settlements that had a significant political role during Salvador Allende’s
administration (Morales and Rojas, 1986).
The knowledge of Pinochet’s political advisers9 of the above-mentioned Tiebout
model (1956) might have been a key determinant and theoretical justification of the
municipal subdivision policy that accompanied the Erradicación de campamentos
programme. Municipal subdivision happened along with municipal devolution, i.e.
municipalisation of schools and primary healthcare, alongside the administration of
locally collected property taxes (Morales and Rojas, 1986). Conversely, in the 1980s,

8 
Tiebout (1956) argues that in more integrated or heterogeneous localities (income-
wise), local governments would not provide an adequate level of public goods due to
the ‘medium voter problem’. When every resident ‘votes’ for a determined level of public
goods, the winner option always is the medium level, resulting in less than the desired
quantity and quality of public goods for the richer households and more than ‘desired’
for poorer households. Logically, poorer households might desire more and better public
services but they have a budget constraint, in this case, expressed in local taxes.
9 
At the time, Miguel Kast was director of the Office of National Planning (ODEPLAN),
in charge of the eradication program and the elaboration of the PNDU. Kast was a ‘Chi-
cago Boy’ economist – educated in the University of Chicago Department of Economics
during 1971–1972 – and one of the main managers and designers of the Chilean path to
neoliberal capitalism (Hidalgo, 2004a).
250 TRUFFELLO, ROJAS-MARCHINI, AND FLORES

Figure 12.4  Population displacement under the eradication programme 1979–1985. The map
displays the municipal origin in white and the destiny in black, by population size.
Source: Morales and Rojas (1986). Legend translated by authors.

new municipalities in the outskirts of Santiago were formed mainly on the basis of
eradication housing programmes.10 This process resulted in high levels of social seg-
regation, represented in the concentration of low-income populations in peripheral
territories due to governmental interventions (Hidalgo, 2004a). The Erradicación de
campamentos programme and its alongside policies demonstrate the use of demo-
graphic knowledge – through military and political power – used to control and
discipline the population (Celedón Forster, 2019; Morales and Rojas, 1986) and to
segregate the working-class from the affluents.

10 
Paradigmatic cases are the municipalities of Peñalolén and Macul. These two new
municipalities, when detached from the original Ñuñoa, left it completely clean of
the eradicated population. La Pintana, detached from the commune of La Granja,
consolidated a territory built by more than 50% per eradicated population. Cerro Navia,
on the other hand, when detached from Pudahuel, was made up of 60% by eradicated
settlers (Celedón Forster, 2019).
 A CRITICAL-EMPIRICAL APPROACH 251
The case of Erradicación de campamentos in Chile demonstrates a reversed
spatial trend compared to the US redlining policy, but holding similar segrega-
tion outcomes. The Erradicación programme transferred dispossessed inhabitants,
squatters occupying valuable central city land, to peripheral newly created munici-
palities that were barely developed and urbanised (Celedón Forster, 2019; Hidalgo,
2004a; Millan, 2012). In the Chilean case, demographic knowledge was not explic-
itly used to identify the slum settlements, since their location was visually identi-
fiable and of public knowledge. However, the Erradicación de campamentos was
a policy that explicitly changed the existing demographic order and population
distribution, aiming to control potentially subversive populations through the
use of military power. Along with the new municipal subdivision, such policies
and population control measures increased segregation through military forces
for wiping out the poor from rich neighbourhoods. Redlining and eradication are
two spatially opposite demographic interventions that essentially respond to the
same phenomenon: the use of power to manipulate populations’ spatial location
on behalf of increased segregation. And, demographic methods were prominent in
both interventions.
In light of the case studies discussed here, it is worth asking: why can segre-
gation be a desirable outcome? Or why is integration desirable? To what extent
are demographic methods a tool to segregate and integrate? How do methods
influence the spatial arrangements that define winners and losers of spatial urban
interventions? For modern economists and political scientists, inequality is not a
matter of a predetermined social order. Stiglitz (2013) claims that power – often
military power – is at the origin of inequalities. Those in power use it to strengthen
their economic and political positions and attempt to shape thinking and make
wealth differences. Quoting the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, Stiglitz
further claims that ‘right … is only in question between equals in power, while
the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’. Using power
for population control aims especially at the so-called ‘minority population’,
mobilising this concept to under-represent the true majority in power domains
(Hughes, 2011).
Both case studies use demographic methods (spatially located population data) on
behalf of ensuring earnings for the rich self-segregated territories on increased public
services quality at the local level, while diminishing general access to urban services
for the most vulnerable eradicated or abandoned population. However, is segregation
optimal for society as a whole? Urban economists and policy researchers, drawing
from demographic methods like the censuses and American Community Survey
warn of the detrimental effects of segregation.11 Researchers Been et al. (2009) argue
that segregation reinforces economic inequality between whites and minorities. The
authors caution on the effects of spatial isolation for vulnerable population groups
while advocating for the benefits of neighbourhood integration and equitable access

11 
As mentioned, segregation in the United States has a primarily racial component. How-
ever, Been et al.’s (2009) statement can be interpreted more broadly as the inequality bet-
ween the hegemonic or privileged group and the under-represented or vulnerable group.
252 TRUFFELLO, ROJAS-MARCHINI, AND FLORES
to locally provided public services.12 Moreover, heterodox contemporary economists
have warned against the effects of inequality on the access to wealth and opportu-
nity. Stiglitz (2013), for instance, claims that inequality fostered by power institu-
tions may cultivate distrust in democracy, diminish social cohesion, and potentially
break the social contract between citizenship and the state. In the same line, Piketty
(2014) argues that extreme inequality can be harmful to economic growth since
it reduces mobility, and it can be dangerous to society since inequality can lead to
extreme discontent and political capture of democratic institutions. Conversely, hav-
ing a more integrated society can be fruitful for economic wellbeing and mobility, as
well as it can bring remarkably better outcomes for children, as empirical research –
based on the use of demographic methods13 – shows (see Chetty et al., 2014, 2016).

Big Data and Demographic Methods

Big Data may be reconfiguring the field of demography, which is a data-driven field
of knowledge (Alburez-Gutierrez et al., 2019). There is no doubt that Big Data will
remain among demographers and, presumably, urban theorists. And yet, perhaps
because of the characteristic elusiveness of information technologies, Big Data has
no agreed definition (Brayne, 2017; Kitchin, 2013). While Rob Kitchin observes in
Big Data a deluge of directed, automated, and volunteered sources that respond to
increasing interests in digitalisation of varied types of information, Sarah Brayne
argues Big Data’s precise definition varies across fields and institutional contexts,
although it encompasses four features: ‘it is vast, fast, disparate, and digital’ (Brayne,
2017: 980). In this section, we comment on the relationship between demographic
methods and Big Data while we emphasise its critiques and challenges. We focus on
general demographics and urban studies, as this is an area where Big Data enters

12 
More specifically, segregation separates minorities from access to jobs, limits the ben-
efits of agglomeration economies and the access to information and community net-
works, concentrates poverty which magnifies the vulnerability of community members
against economic shocks, limits the exposure of the vulnerable population to financial
information and services, and affects access to homeownership through place-based dis-
criminatory practices (i.e. redlining and its long-lasting effects). Moreover, racial minor-
ities living in socially integrated communities seem to have better educational attainment,
health conditions, better earnings, and fewer single parenting (see Been et al., 2009;
Cutler and Glaeser, 1997; Ellen, 2000; Massey and Denton, 1998; O’Regan and Quig-
ley, 1996).
13 
One such example is The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program fostered by the
US government during the 1990s. It was a randomized social experiment that aimed to
compare outcomes of moving households from poverty enclaves to neighbourhoods with
different levels of poverty and social integration (see http://www2.nber.org/mtopublic).
In recent years, strong empirical evidence supports that higher integration allows for
higher economic mobility and that children exposed to lower-poverty neighbourhoods,
through MTO, have significantly better outcomes in educational attainment, earnings,
and are more likely to live in better neighbourhoods as adults (Chetty et al., 2014, 2016).
 A CRITICAL-EMPIRICAL APPROACH 253
the domain of demographic methods and, consequently, where Big Data both com-
plicates and bolsters demography. We illustrate Big Data’s relationship with demo-
graphic methods and power by looking at population surveillance techniques. Then,
we comment on Big Data’s main risks in relation to urban interventions. In the last
part of this section, we reassess Big Data through reflecting on how to approach and
engage with this trend.

Connecting Big Data with Demographics

Demographers, Alburez-Gutierrez et al. (2019: 1), argued that demography and
its practitioners are in ‘an ideal position to make sense of this new [Big Data]
information’. They place Big Data in a wider trend called ‘the data revolution’, which
consists of the ‘process through which the transition from analog to digital electronic
technologies has resulted in the accumulation of vast amounts of individual-level
data’ (p. 2). The transformation has been notorious in several fields of knowledge
production. In the case of demography this is most visible, the authors suggest,
in the digitisation of traditional sources of demographic data – like censuses and
population registers – and the analysis of digital footprints left by internet users in
platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and more generic engines like Google. Shorter time
periods of data collection and higher detail with individual-focused scale facilitate
an approach to demography previously impossible with the constraints of analogue,
non-automatic, sources. These techniques of data collection are thus enabling a new
era of demographic analyses bolstered by Big Data.
The last five years have witnessed the coming together of demographic methods
and Big Data. One such example is the meeting organised by the International Union
for the Scientific Study of Population, in Sevilla, Spain (IUSSP, 2019). Covering a
wide range of demographic topics like migration, mobility, poverty, and energy, 30
experts of the field gathered to debate on the implications of Big Data for the study
of populations, charting the science’s trajectory onto what they see as a promising
future. From analyses of digital tracing of social media users to trace migrants’ spati-
ality to complex Bayesian probabilistic models, the IUSSP meeting proves Big Data is
gaining ground among demographers. Big Data’s most utilised sources for the study
of demographic trends are social media platforms like Facebook and Google, which
deliver data of user’s preferences that can be connected (and potentially correlated)
with gender, age, civil status, and ethnicity (IUSSP, 2019). While governments can fas-
ten demographic projections to improve decision-making and efficiently distribute
management procedures, academic researchers can develop new fields of knowledge
production based on these new technologies. In sum, the amounts of data collected
and the analytical possibilities for demographers exceed any expectations and call,
hence, for new approaches to process Big Data (Alburez-Gutierrez et al., 2019).
Big Data is also influencing how governments run demographic analyses and
statistical procedures associated with demography. According to Florescu et al.
(2014), Big Data has the potential to transform official statistics, among which
population censuses play a substantial role (Florescu et al., 2014). One case is the
US Census Bureau, whose view of Big Data is wide and considers almost any pos-
sible source of information. They view Big Data as useful to collect and ‘describe
data sources that are fast-changing, large in both size and breadth of information,
254 TRUFFELLO, ROJAS-MARCHINI, AND FLORES
and come from sources other than surveys’. Big Data, according to the US Census
Bureau, allows the capturing of information not available before and which, under
the right techniques, ‘can provide unique insights that were not easily observable
previously’ (US Census Bureau, 2020). While the techniques implemented to anal-
yse Big Data play a major role in its outcomes and usefulness, the sources feeding
Big Data are still a wide spectrum that ranges from retail and payroll transactions
to ‘smart’ devices. Considering that the US Census Bureau produces demographic
products for public agencies and private buyers, as indicated on their website, the
access to information from citizens’ smartphones or consumer behaviour through
retail information makes Big Data-based studies a highly coveted product for inves-
tors and other stakeholders.
The US Census Bureau demarcates its space of action to varied sources of
information, extending beyond the reach of traditional techniques to register
population dynamics like censuses and vital administrative records (see the first sec-
tion of this chapter). The inclusion of smartphones and other digital devices has
pushed the frontier of information gathering to ‘an unprecedented rate of data
creation’ (Gandomi and Haider, 2015), requiring new techniques to manage the
data deluge and get useful outcomes in real-time and personalised analyses. More-
over, smartphones are perhaps the most used device among urban – and increas-
ingly rural – inhabitants. Smartphones also work as data collection devices used
by governments and companies to track users’ travel times or their choices in food.
With the right algorithms and adequate demographic methods, data gathered from
smartphones can feed governmental administrative tasks or promote political and/
or corporativist agendas.
But data alone does not function without methods to process it, as we stressed
at the beginning of this chapter. Gandomi and Haider observed a few years ago
(2015: 138) that the massification of smartphones had made retailers face ‘hun-
dreds of thousands of streaming data sources that demand real-time analytics’ and
for which ‘traditional data management systems [were] not capable of handling’.
Adequate and efficient analytic methods to deal with Big Data are still a major
issue among researchers and practitioners in the field of demography (Gandomi and
Haider, 2015).

Demographic Surveillance Through Big Data

Who surveils and with what purposes? Surveillance techniques have been at the cen-
tre of nation-states’ practices to control their populations (Foucault, 1977). From the
most rudimentary numbers to trace populations’ demographic growth to complex
tracking techniques, states are at the forefront of surveillance agendas. Governmen-
tal engagements with surveillance have multifarious outcomes, both positive and
negative for citizenry.
Sociologist, Sarah Brayne, claims that surveillance and Big Data have shown sim-
ilar rising patterns during the last decade (Brayne, 2017). The combination of mass
digitisation of information with the growth of criminal justice systems in Western
societies explain this similarity, Brayne observes. However, Big Data now integrates
surveillance’s main technologies as it facilitates access to, for instance, individ-
uals’ digital trace. Brayne argues that the adoption of Big Data has modified police
 A CRITICAL-EMPIRICAL APPROACH 255
s­urveillance by amplifying prior surveillance practices and, most importantly for
our argument here, by transforming surveillance activities in ways that can promote
power imbalances: ‘far from eliminating human discretion and bias, big data repre-
sents a new form of capital that is both a social product and a social resource’ that
participates in social control and inequality (Brayne, 2017: 1003–1004).
Expanding the argument raised by Brayne, law researcher, Margaret Hu, argues
that state surveillance methods are going through a substantial transition from what
she terms ‘small data methods’ to ‘big data cybersurveillance methods’ (Hu, 2015).
Among these, virtual representations of targets are defining the approach and tech-
niques to trace individuals. Hu asserts that these targets can be avatars, virtual rep-
resentations of the self that are considered proxies of a person’s life. Even if the
avatar is by no means the individual and that the virtual space where it acts has no
reference to this person’s real life, policing practices still use digital depictions as
reliable sources to understanding peoples’ choices and motivations. Hu emphasises
that Big Data is pushing for a merging of ‘the digitally constructed virtual repre-
sentation of a “target” with an actual person’ (Hu, 2015: 782). Avatars are thus
being reconstructed by police intelligence from an amalgamation of data clues left
by individuals on the internet, with all the risks entailed in such a move. Of course,
this fusion of virtual data is not an adequate representation and can lead to wrong
conclusions, stigmas, and the failed targeting of individuals. This example proves
Big Data remains an incipient field of knowledge production and intervention that
requires unpacking its working and pitfalls.
Despite the necessary attentiveness on Big Data’s interaction with institutional
contexts and the negative outcomes that Big Data can bring – like bias and stigma-
tisation, which authors like Brayne and Hu emphasise – positive outcomes can be
drawn from the use of Big Data in surveillance. One recent case is the management
of the novel coronavirus in South Korea and China (Lin and Hou, 2020), where both
countries achieved to flatten their spreading curves in early stages of the pandemic
in striking contrast with the rest of the world. The South Korean Center for Disease
Control and Prevention created the Smart Management System (COVID-19 SMS).
This system combined multiple sources of tracking technologies such as credit cards,
GPS in smartphones, and security camera footage to trace positive cases and prevent
them from further spreading the virus while identifying and notifying individuals
who had contact with positive cases. In China, the Yuhang District in Hangzhou
City launched the ‘Health Barcode’, a smartphone mini-program that integrates self-
reported health status and travel information with Big Data from transportation
systems, social media, payment records, and the government’s COVID-19 databases
in order to map out individuals’ movements and the spreading of the virus (Lin and
Hou, 2020). The national experiences of China and South Korea prove Big Data can
be put to good use to assist public health management.
Similar experiments than the ones in China and South Korea were put to work
on a global scale. The Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and
Engineering developed a tracking map for cases of COVID-19 across the world by
resorting to Big Data from multiple national sources almost at a real-time pace (see
Wang and Tang, 2020). Positive practices can be prompted by Big Data and improve
public management. However, the use of Big Data in the management of pandemics
and other emergencies comes with trade-offs between privacy and public health. As
256 TRUFFELLO, ROJAS-MARCHINI, AND FLORES
Lin and Hou (2020) observe, Big Data and artificial intelligence can virtually point
to anyone, anywhere, and everywhere. Accordingly, the use of Big Data must come
with an adequate respect for individuals’ privacy.
Big Data is not free of risks for both researchers and governments. This new
data deluge presents itself with several problems. Surveillance techniques can bring
unintended consequences if embedded in powerful states and private agendas that
can target people based on their race, gender, sex, and other axes that have histori-
cally fed the exploitation of certain bodies for processes of capitalist accumulation
(see Federici, 2004; Mies, 1986; Patel and Moore, 2018). In a fundamental way, Big
Data’s potential relies on methods that allow the splitting of groups of the population
to turn individuals into targets. That is why we want to reflect on Big Data’s inner
problems while gesturing towards forms of retooling Big Data for more progressive,
inclusive, agendas.

Pitfalls and Risks of Big Data

Human geographers, Trevor Barnes and Matthew Wilson (2014), argue that despite
the relationship between Big Data and social sciences seems rather new, the epistemic
path that connects them is hard to ignore. One of Big Data’s antecedents is social
physics, a discipline with origins in the seventeenth century. Social physics presents a
monistic foundation that establishes that the social is isomorphic to nature, that is,
that the natural and social worlds organise themselves under equal rules (Barnes and
Wilson, 2014: 3). Various centuries later, mid-twentieth-century scientists concerned
with gravitational models, George Zipf and John Stewart, pushed the natural laws
of physics into population science by developing ‘potentials of population’ graphed
into ‘equipotential maps’ for the US territory – an endeavour requiring enor-
mous amounts of human and computational efforts (Barnes and Wilson, 2014: 6).
Observations of the natural world became, thus, incorporated into the analysis of
population dynamics and entangled with Big Data’s primary ideas, which contend
that the social world can be quantified, modelled, and predicted. Move ahead several
decades, and social physics still lingers in social sciences and demography. Consider
the next quote by the MIT Media Lab:

The engine that drives social physics is big data: the newly ubiquitous digital data that
is becoming available about all aspects of human life. By using these data to build a
predictive, computational theory of human behaviour, we can hope to engineer better
social systems. (MIT Media Lab, 2014, cited in Barnes and Wilson, 2014)

The attention to social physics – through Big Data – and human behaviour model-
ling is palpable in the MIT Media Lab. A similar consideration to Big Data is given
in population science schools as well. The Durham Population Laboratory (DPL) at
Duke University’s Population Research Center recently organised a workshop to dis-
cuss the intersections between data science and population science. Three questions
driving the workshop involved Big Data – the main one was ‘What are the promises
and pitfalls of big data relevant for population science research questions?’ Drawing
from the DPL workshop, we venture to claim that Big Data is indeed defining the
questions that scientists are posing to population science.
 A CRITICAL-EMPIRICAL APPROACH 257
But, what if not everything we see or feel can be quantified? As Barnes and Wilson
(2014: 10) assert, calls to quantify and render visual social-spatial activity ‘enact
a specific visibility that potentially renders invisible other phenomena’. Big Data
undoubtedly presents important challenges to population scientists. Together with
interrogating Big Data under the light of its epistemic history, this new trend also
requires careful attention to identify and unpack those moves that produce Big Data
to render other phenomena – and others – invisible. In what follows, we briefly com-
ment on these moves.
Looking to scrutinise Big Data’s relationship with knowledge/power, critical
research in digital humanities is calling for careful attention to Big Data’s marginalis-
ing and stigmatising power. Some have called for closer attention to the often invisi-
ble but fraught relationship among governments, Big Data, and people (Elwood and
Leszczynski, 2018; Gieseking, 2018). Big data can wrongly target specific groups of
people through computer programs to aid decision-making in a myriad of institutional
settings, among which are universities and police departments. One such case is US
police intelligence’s programmes to predict a criminal defendant’s chance of reoffend-
ing. According to Gillborn et al. (2018), ‘black defendants were 77% more likely to be
assigned higher risk scores than white defendants’ through the use of Big Data-based
computer programs (p. 159). The authors draw from this example to suggest that edu-
cation – their field of expertise – is also affected by biased algorithms that can favour
certain (mostly White) groups of the population while stigmatising others (mostly
racialised people and Indigenous people). Gillborn et al. (2018) conclude by suggest-
ing that ‘data cannot speak for itself’ since ‘numbers are social constructs and likely to
embody the dominant (racist) assumptions that shape contemporary society’ (p. 173).
Critical urban data scholar, Jen Jack Gieseking, takes a queer feminist approach
to analyse how scale plays a salient role in Big Data (Gieseking, 2018). The author
critiques Big Data’s socially constructed authority based on a seeming totality, by
arguing that it neglects small data’s texture and question-driven content (Gieseking,
2018: 151). Big Data, he claims, goes against fundamental claims made by feminist
and queer scholars. Gieseking analysed one of the largest LGBTQ historical archives
in a US city; one which, nevertheless, is nearly one megabyte big (2018: 154). The
small size of the archive is surpassed by its information’s specificities and rich content.
This finding suggests that the ‘big’ in Big Data is not really a quality that adds up. It is
the content that makes a qualitative archive a valuable piece of information, Giesek-
ing argues. Throughout the queer archive, Gieseking proves that context, place, and
positionality are fundamental attributes for understanding how we build data and
how ‘society’s obsession with Big Data further oppresses the marginalised by creat-
ing a false norm to which they are never able to measure up’ (p. 155).
And what about urban interventions aided by Big Data’s intersection with demo-
graphics? Perhaps one example that illustrates such use of Big Data are smart cities.
According to Kitchin (2014), Big Data gained the attention of urban theorists and
analysts because of the possibilities it offered in contrast to sample-based censuses
and surveys traditionally used by governments and the private sector. Urban plan-
ners’ uses of Big Data in highly networked cities aid in the modelling of current
uses of the space and in the projection of scenarios to decide beneficial interven-
tions. According to Hashem et al. (2016), Big Data can ‘transform every sector of
a nation’s economy’ (p. 749) such as transportation, health, energy, and education.
258 TRUFFELLO, ROJAS-MARCHINI, AND FLORES
One example the authors pose is the management of natural disasters, which uses
real-time meteorological data to project meteorological events in advance, contrib-
uting to better decision-making under a time-constrained scenario. Another sector
that can highly benefit from Big Data is urban energy networks, which through
an improvement of power supply management can support the transition towards
smart grids. Hashem et al. (2016) address smart grids as key to improve both energy
production and consumption based on real-time analysis, making investments more
efficient and site-specific (p. 752).
Urban planning in smart cities can benefit greatly from Big Data, as discussed
above. Yet, the novelty – and many times hype – of Big Data should not preclude
urbanists’ constant need for reflexivity. On the one hand, smart cities require the
widespread presence of computing technologies and digital devices ‘built into the
very fabric of urban environments’ (Kitchin, 2014: 2). Efficiency and sustainability
of city management depend on Big Data and digital demographics, while creativity
and innovation are key outcomes and drivers of smart cities. On the other hand, the
pervasive and ubiquitous entrance of Big Data into urban life can further a neolib-
eral ethos that prioritises cost-effective, technocratic, and market-led urban inter-
ventions, as Kitchin observes. Making cities dependent on Big Data is not only risky
as it creates new system vulnerabilities like the ones proven by ‘hackable cities’, but
it also opens the door to the corporatisation of city governance – by extending the
influence of large software services and hardware companies (Kitchin, 2014). Big
Data’s interaction with smart cities also participates in the construction of imagi-
naries that reinforce highly homogenous notions of the urban space. As Jennifer
Robinson (2006) cleverly argued, urban studies need to move away from the limited
view of world cities as path followers of Western models and work instead towards
better-equipped, postcolonial approaches that observe and engage with other forms
of living the city. Urban analyses that remain over-reliant on Big Data may fall into
Robinson’s depiction and reinforce the Western model of the city.

To Use (Big Data) or Not to Use

Demographers should not take for granted Big Data’s main strategies and its ongo-
ing relationship with demographic methods. It is important to interrogate Big Da-
ta’s context, its history, and its purposes. As Trevor Barnes rightly insists (2013:
300), Big Data comes from somewhere. It follows the wider trajectory of numbers
in population management and surveillance whose goals are imbued with political
desires: ‘Numbers emerge only from particular social institutions, arrangements and
organizations mobilised by power, political agendas and vested interests’. Moreover,
constraints in the access to Big Data (Kitchin, 2013) – which is gathered and pro-
cessed mostly by private companies and governments – is producing a landscape
where only those with the capacity to buy and process Big Data have a say in impor-
tant conversations regarding population dynamics and futures. Big Data seems to
reinforce the knowledge/power complex in non-anticipated and rapidly evolving
ways. Are we willing to support the daunting path that Big Data confers to us? Can
we even think in more just ways to use Big Data in population research?
Demographer Stephanie Bohon (2018) argues that Big Data still requires more
attention. Despite its potential to offer massive amounts of information at the
 A CRITICAL-EMPIRICAL APPROACH 259
individual level, Big Data needs to be carefully treated to fit demography’s goals.
Such attention, Bohon suggests, should point towards how demographers engage
Big Data with their research questions and how they model with Big Data. Drawing
from Bohon’s account and others reviewed in this section, we claim that Big Data
is becoming closely entangled with demography. We started this section by plac-
ing Big Data as one method among many. However, it may be the case that Big
Data is turning into something else – this data trend is pushing demographers to
reassess their research questions, methods, and outcomes. Bohon (2018: 324) even
claims that ‘demographers must change as we enter this new [Big Data] frontier’. As
researchers concerned with the rapid pace and effects of Big Data in urban studies,
we contend that social scientists should critically question the current trend of Big
Data. Not doing so risks falling into the empiricist and pseudo-positivist trap: the
belief that data can speak for reality (see Kitchin, 2013). Such risk is a ‘big’ one, too.

Main Conclusions

This chapter critically commented on demographic methods and sources, ­ paying

attention to their risks and main obstacles related to state interests and private agendas.
We emphasised cases where territorial interventions were based on demographic
knowledge, while we observed Big Data’s primary trend in its relationship to population
and urban studies. As we commented above, states’ administrative and vital records
can indeed be biased towards discriminatory practices that neglect and often margin-
alise those that do not conform with often White, masculine, able, and wealthy urban
populations’ imaginaries. Urban interventions aided by ­demographic methods can
also produce spaces of segregation and marginality, as we showed through the cases of
redlining in the United States and the Erradicación de campamentos project in Chile.
Finally, Big Data has arrived to occupy a central place in the new wave of population
studies, which is ever more concerned with posing research questions capable of cop-
ing with Big Data’s deluge of real-time information. Big Data presents risks – ­especially
those in the arena of surveillance and crime investigation – but it also opens new doors
for governments and researchers in the fields of urban studies.
Latin America poses another set of challenges to combine population studies with
Big Data. Considering failures such as the Chilean 2012 census, states and researchers
must develop new protocols to regulate the use of Big Data’s sources of information.
These protocols should seek to incorporate Big Data as a tool to fill information gaps
when censuses do not fulfil their primary goals. Protocols should also take care of
privacy issues and impede Big Data to overwrite the information gathered through
other, often qualitative, means (see discussion in the third section). Such protocols
should also include a set of rules to improve urban and territorial planning.
Our review shows that demographic methods are becoming more oriented
towards private stakeholders while state budget appropriations and technical skills to
gather and process demographic data at the national scale are being rapidly reduced.
Private investments on these procedures to gather and analyse population data are,
hence, occupying the spaces left by the state’s roll-back in a similar move than with
the neoliberal restructurings we have seen as early as the 1980s in Latin America.
260 TRUFFELLO, ROJAS-MARCHINI, AND FLORES
To conclude, we want to reassert a cautionary note to readers from the uses of
methods as these have a contentious history marked by states’ efforts to control
and direct people’s conduct. To be clear, we do not wish to shy away from methods.
Instead, we contend there is no silver bullet to avoid the dangers entailed in demo-
graphic techniques and methods to study – and design interventions on – population.
Drawing from observations made by urban theorists on the ‘disempowering’ effect
that theoretical critique can have on how we built our notions of the world (see
Wyly, 2011), we contend that a more empirically based critique can in turn re-em-
power theorists and practitioners towards the design of better-equipped theories and
interventions that care first and foremost for the equal well-being of people. Demo-
graphic methods in urban studies and their linked interventions should be constantly
unpacked, questioned, and transformed, striving to produce just population demog-
raphies in urban worlds.

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 13
GIS in Urban Studies
A Tool of Expert Analysis, Practical
Application, and Citizens’ Participation
Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel

Introduction: GIS as Tool to Analyse and Solve Urban Problems

In her book on (critical) GIScience (geoinformation science), Nadine Schuurman

(2004) quotes a famous example to illustrate the power of GIS (geoinformation
systems) to analyse and solve urban problems. In 1854, an outbreak of cholera in
London killed nearly 14,000 people. By mapping the households affected by the
cholera, the surgeon John Snow could draw a connection between these households
and a single water well close to Broad Street that they used, which turned out to be
contaminated by waste water. By putting the well out of operation, the disease could
be stopped. With this, hand-drawn visual spatial analysis disproved the contempo-
rary theory of the spreading of cholera due to fumes. Although these insights were
not widely accepted at the time, the example implies the potential of spatial analysis.
Since then, the methods of mapping and spatial analysis have changed signifi-
cantly, particularly from the middle to the end of the twentieth century due to the
spread of (digital) GIS and at the beginning of the 2000s with the emergence of
neocartography. The latter development is guided by untrained persons conquering
the world of map production, resulting in new forms of spatial representations and
analysis beyond the paradigm of absolute spaces.

Basis I: Theoretical Foundation and Recent Development of GIS

Human action takes place in space, it produces and reproduces space and place
by taking into account societal and physical rules, and appropriates space (­Werlen,
1993). Humans attach various meanings to space and hereby construct spaces

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
266 Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel
that limit and pre-structure human action. Beyond a socially accepted attribution
of meaning, we can deconstruct such meanings within the limitations of physical
matter: ‘While it is possible to skateboard on park benches, it is not possible to walk
through walls’ (Cresswell, 2009: 170).
Spatial representations such as maps and GIS help to understand these physical
socially constructed spaces and to communicate several perspectives on space. Fol-
lowing Lefebvre (1993), such representations of space form relational spaces that are
products of humans’ (or, to be more concise, subjects’) understanding of the world
and their will to shape the world.
In technical terms, representations of space are, amongst others, geoinformation
and geomedia. Geoinformation usually consists of a location that is more or less
exactly defined as well as attribute data/metadata detailing specific qualities of the
location, area, or route described. Geomedia comprise all mediums that communi-
cate geoinformation using a broad variety of representations, from map visualisation
to audio (Atteneder, 2018; Gryl et al., 2017).
Historically, current geomedia result from technological innovations available for
mapping agendas starting in the early to the mid-twentieth century. These include
initial aerial photography developed for the military in reconnaissance flights, leading
to a distant view of the earth’s surface from above during World War I, which trans-
formed the view of the world into an additional bird’s-eye perspective. Later, with
the advent of additional computing options, GIS were developed for peaceful pur­
poses in Canadian forestry, profiting from the opportunity to map, store, and analyse
data of large tracts of land. While the technology was quickly enhanced through
computing power, algorithms, and storage capacity, GIS clearly were expert systems
that needed considerable academic and technical education to be used (Jekel and
Gryl, 2020). It took some time before GIS would be used in urban space – needing
more detail and different attribute data not easily captured by then-available tech-
nology of remote sensing. Consequently, early practice examples have been based
on the spatial approach and especially on concepts of the Chicago School of Soci-
ology based on statistical data provided by administrative entities and quantitative
methods such as factorial ecology (see Shevky and Bell, 1955).
In the early 1990s, the first steps were taken to include non-professional users
in GIS routines (Elwood and Mitchell, 2013; Schuurman, 2000), following consid-
erable critique from social geographers and critical cartographers (Pickles, 1995;
Schuurman, 2000). Early public participation GIS (PPGIS) (Ramasubramanian,
2010) allowed for the attachment of values and weights to specific layers of data
in decision support systems. However, the available data were still fixed and the
algorithms used were probably beyond the comprehension of most non-professional
participants.
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, several developments took
place at the same time: the advent of usable and cheap global positioning sys-
tems (GPS) and the end of disturbed GPS signals allowed for the development
of lay mapping (variously dubbed neogeography, neocartography, location-based
media, or volunteered geographic information (VGI) (Goodchild, 2007; Turner,
2006)). At the same time these GPS systems became standard in now ubiquitous
smartphones. Mapping was no longer in the hands of administrative entities,
but was increasingly organised by private companies like Google and ESRI or
 GIS in Urban Studies 267
open-source-based as in Open Street Map. The current landscape may be termed
geoinformation society and can be described through the availability of the fol-
lowing features (Harvey, 2013; Strobl, 2014; Thielmann et al., 2012; summed up
by Jekel and Gryl, 2020):

• universal positioning through various global navigation satellite systems such

as GPS and a wide variety of receivers on humans and moving objects;
• personal sensors as a tool to integrate data via location and personal preferences;
• location enabled apps that allow place-specific personalisation of information;
• augmented reality that provides additional visual information through a
variety of devices;
• a change of the traditional bird’s-eye cartography towards individualised vi-
sualisations of space;
• new interfaces that change human–computer interaction from keyboard/
mouse interaction towards touch and gesture driven forms of interaction; and
• personal and interpersonal devices linked to cloud services.

The newer development can be categorised in three phases (Wilken, 2018). In the
first generation, these services needed an active registration of the users’ location
(such as in the original Foursquare app). The second generation involved passive
location disclosure that automatically tracked the users’ movements and linked
this tracking to other content. Current applications, in a third phase, now inte-
grate location in all aspects of the business model, both in the interface as well
as all algorithms, database population, and monetising, as is the case with Uber
(Wilken, 2018). This phase may be termed ubiquitous data capture and most of this
data capture takes place in urban spaces. Location is the main integrator of all app
processes here and, while it is becoming ubiquitous, the algorithms become increas-
ingly opaque to the end user.
Current developments of urban GIS include highly integrated 3D city models,
links between indoor and outdoor positioning of users, and smart city initiatives.
Spatial design initiatives argue to include participatory approaches at an early phase,
while the ubiquitous surveillance industry integrates surveillance by spatial means.
With this, we stretch the definition of GIS to a broader dimension: All applications
that are useful to generate, operate with, and communicate spatial data might run
under the term GIS. However, these systems do not offer the same transparency to
all kinds of users. Therefore, the term ‘geomedia’ seems to be another alternative as
it is not necessarily related to the traditional – rather complex – GIS instruments
and routines. In the following, we tend to use both terms, while remaining aware of
the broad variety of manifestations of these technologies and the additional changes
since the emergence of traditional GIS.
Of course, the modes of analysis change in the dependency of the system: GIS
store data using vectors and rasters, and use mathematical operations for analysis.
In complex expert GIS these operations can be initiated and selected by the user,
in geolocation services they are included in automated algorithms. In more simple
WebGIS, the users’ visual analysis is of bigger importance and implies an added value
beyond a mathematical-quantitative view. Maps are always interpreted subjectively,
despite socially shared forms of visualisation, and therefore they are a starting point
268 Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel
for subjective hypothesis construction and insights (MacEachren, 1992). Finally, one
can say that both methods of analysis apply for all forms of geomedia to different
degrees and different states of consciousness.
Concerning urban studies, GIS help to understand cities through using geodata.
The developments described lead to enormous quantities of spatial data that are
used to analyse cities and all of their entities, particularly its inhabitants. The analysis
might result in insights on how cities function, in models to estimate the outcomes
of city planning that enable the adaptation of these insights to planning purposes,
in understanding people and offering them location-based services closely linked
to the infrastructures of cities, in people organising themselves in geomedia-sup-
ported grassroot movements, in understanding such movements by analysing their
spatial linkages and spreading (meta-analysis of lay cartography), and in communi-
cating new understandings/interpretations of the world as counter maps (see Turn-
bull, 1998) to political stakeholders. GIS analysis can also help designing smart city
infrastructures based on the artefacts of the city and the people’s everyday prac-
tices and needs (while being aware of the limitations of the smart city concept; see
Kaika, 2017; Sennett, 2012). Although urban studies focus on the options of ana­
lysis provided by these tools (rather than on application, development, and commu-
nication), we cannot deny that GIS tools are also deeply involved in more applied
utilisations that are, in turn, objects of analysis for urban studies, and also based on
the insights that urban studies have provided and will provide in future. Therefore,
GIS is a scientific as well as an application tool and, recently, it has been enriched by
non-professional activities. The latter are driven by non-traditional forms of exper-
tise, and link classical quantitative analysis to visual analysis and everyday action as
known from the beginnings of mapping (see the introductory example) and bring it
into a communicative agenda.

Basis II: Ownership and Interests Behind GIS Technologies

Considering the manifold utilisation of GIS, we need to draw another perspective

beyond the technological and utilisation focus, the perspective of ownership. Nowa-
days, GIS ranges between public and private research interests, public service, com-
mercialisation, and neogeography. Before GPS was released to private use, geodata
were extremely expensive as is still the case with commercial GIS software. At that
stage, a few public institutions were offering limited geodata for lower prices or
at no cost as part of a tax-financed public infrastructure that would allow better
development in many fields of public interest (on-site services, planning, etc.). With
the opening of GPS and the upcoming of the Web2.0 to the public, open geodata
and open-source GIS software emerged, addressing different levels of complexity
from elaborate analysis to visual analysis, communication, and (easy to use) geoloca-
tion services.
Furthermore, the market for GIS broadened, from customers in the geodata expert
field to the involvement of novice data users and data suppliers. As the classical paper
‘Citizens as Sensors’ (Goodchild, 2007) has predicted, users may function as pro-
ducers, who use geomedia and geospatial services and provide geodata, in relatively
open-source fields, and as prosumers, who use geomedia and geospatial services in
 GIS in Urban Studies 269
commercial fields and provide spatial data for commercial use (Bruns, 2008). The
provision is, despite the agreement to terms of trades, often unconsciously and invol-
untarily. So, besides VGI, which supports the idea of democratisation of and by GIS
(Warf and Sui, 2010), a large field of involuntary geographic information (IVGI) has
appeared, raising questions of spatial privacy (Armstrong and Ruggles, 2005). As
Google/Alphabet and other players show, this type of data is economically valuable,
so that users can get attractive services seemingly for free in exchange for their even
more valuable (geo-)data. As the (still) massive utilisation of Facebook shows, these
services allow taking part in public life and sometimes even allow participation in
public decision-making. Through public–private partnerships or just public usage
of commercial services it becomes inevitable to use certain services in order to be
involved in information flows and decision-making (even catastrophe alerts are often
spread on platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp). Hence, for private users
there is a non-monetary price for participation. Some of this private (spatial) data is
openly available and readable owing to Big Data analysis, so that urban studies can
utilise parts of the commercially collected data to gain more insights – consequently,
a new database has evolved. It can be stated that analysis, even elaborated research,
is often conducted by private internet companies in order to improve their services
and business – but research institutions with more epistemological interests such as
institutes for urban studies can profit from the new data pools. Nevertheless, part-
nerships between mainly bigger companies and research institutions are a frequent
practice (e.g. in Google, Microsoft). Thus, economic interests, changing people’s
lives, and the development of societies are apparently closely interconnected.
Apart from this, project-based citizen science initiatives can also collect spatial
data useful to science, which should happen on a more or less voluntary and
mature basis (Edwards and Rasmussen, 2017). Consequently, with these options,
new responsibilities appear for urban studies research and research institutions in
general. While open access initiatives have taken over the responsibility to provide
services, first, in contrast to expensive geodata providers that have excluded private
non-specialist users; second, in contrast to commercial data collectors that allow
non-specialist users to pay with private data, research institutions just recently
started to consider the ethics of the new world of ubiquitous geodata (Light et al.,
2018). From a distant analysis made with self-collected data, they now may analyse
commercially (Geoweb) collected data, or encourage citizens to collect data for
them, so they are deeply involved in new forms of data collection ranging from
volunteering (and motivation) to overpowering. These new opportunities require
some reflection on how to use insights gained with the data for the people’s sake
and how to involve people in understanding and participating in the production of
knowledge.

Critical Perspective on Geodata: Critical GIScience

When asking about the potential of GIS to gain insights for urban studies, one has to
consider the limitations of this tool as well. A critical perspective on GIS has its roots
in critical cartography, for instance, in Harley’s (1989) iconic paper ‘Deconstructing
the Map’. In a wide-ranging composition of theoretical approaches of power and
270 Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel
discourse theory (Foucault, 1984) and deconstruction (Derrida, 1997 [1968]), Har-
ley suggested that maps need to be assessed based on the intentions of their authors,
the power relations involved in their production, and the information that they
hide and keep outside the minting discourses. This idea is echoed – less complex –
by the map definition of the ICA (International Cartographic Association, 2003:
17), stating that ‘[a map is] a symbolised representation of a geographical reality,
representing selected features and characteristics, resulting from the creative effort of
its author’s execution of choices, that is designed for use when spatial relationships
are of primary relevance’. Following critical cartography, human selection processes
need to be deconstructed in order to understand, whether a map is useful and legiti-
mate to answer certain questions or whether it leaves out relevant information.
Similar to classical cartography, classical GIScience has been criticised for ignoring
the social construction of geoinformation. Critical GIScience gathered speed at the
Friday Harbor conference in 1993, where GIScientists and social geographers met
(Schuurman, 2004). Another milestone is the edited book, Ground Truth (Pickles,
1995), that involved contributions from Harley but also by technologists. As critical
cartography discusses the limitations of discourses involved in maps, critical GI-
Science addresses the limitations of GI ontologies. In social sciences, ontology is the
study of being, but due to a rather pragmatic epistemology in GIScience this term
marks a ‘formally defined set of objects in which all the potential relationships bet-
ween the objects are also well defined’ (Schuurman, 2004: 31). Classical GIS ontol-
ogy offers solutions to absolute spaces without considering heterogenous meanings,
such as in relational spaces. Hypotheses are mainly formulated on a technological
basis. Thus, going beyond the GIS ontology into the social realm is one of the main
foci of critical GIScience. A famous example to illustrate the limits of GIS ontologies,
which are indeed human-made, is crime mapping (Belina, 2010). Crime maps should
predict crime, but they partly function on a self-fulfilling prophecy basis, because
the more focus in a certain area, the more crime it will provide for the statistics.
Therefore, metadata provide much more information than analogue maps in helping
to determine a starting point of critical reflection and deconstruction, for instance,
concerning the requirements for the map’s construction.
Apart from the limitations of the data source, critical GIScience understands
classical GIS as commercial elite tools (concerning complexity, required techno-
logical competences, and costs) that exclude those who are affected by conse-
quences of spatial analysis and decision-making. The problem is partly addressed
by neogeography as mentioned above. Commercial sectors as well as open access
initiatives offer approaches to spatial data and simple mapping tools which allow
a certain participation in creating spatial visions. When using commercial tools
for free, the price of participation is mostly the provision of private (spatial) data.
This allows spatial surveillance (Armstrong and Ruggles, 2005) and makes users
part of Big Data analysis, that, in turn, feed the filters of user-adjusted adver-
tisement such as geomarketing (e.g. Cambridge Analytica). Here, the ontology
is limited and algorithms are human-made, so that the processing of spatial and
personal data in GIS and Geoweb applications can lead to conflicting results. As
geoinformation is highly influential to everyday life, e.g. smartphone-directed,
critical GIScience is essential to reflect certain interests in their own way of
interpretation.
 GIS in Urban Studies 271
Although open geodata infrastructures offer freedom from neoliberal data usage
and a higher security of the utilisation of personal data, they are themselves not free
of limitations concerning their ontology and they are not free of power relations. For
instance, some require higher technological competences than commercial platforms
which lead to a very small (mainly white, male) group of active users (Haklay, 2013).
Beyond classical, critical GIScience provides social linkages between infrastructure,
providers’, and users’ interests (Curry, 1997).
With more simple mapping tools, counter-mapping could increase, which pro-
vides opportunities to communicate spatial interpretations and visions beyond a
given ontology (Turnbull, 1998). Counter-mapping may contribute to shaping spaces
because of alternative spatial meanings. A closer look at counter-mapping projects is
useful for urban studies as well, as they may provide a corrective to the ontology of
a professional (or commercial data based) GIS that is limited within a certain ontol-
ogy and discourse.
The following sections will provide examples of the utilisation of GIS related to
urban studies. The first one is a rather classical expert GIS analysis to understand
developments in cities, based on mathematical analysis but being interpreted on the
basis of visual analysis.

Example: GIS Analysis of Urban Problems – the 2011 Student

Movements in Chile

This example analyses the 2011 student movement that demanded a complete trans-
formation of the education system, one of the major reforms from the Pinochet
dictatorship, and took place in the big Chilean cities. By using classical scientific
GIS analysis, in triangulation with theoretical discussion and qualitative evidence,
Parraguez Sanchez (2019) could find some clues to understand the political nature
of urban space in the Chilean context. Particularly, this study proposes that the
formation of students’ critical consciousness is closely related to the socio-spatial
segregation crisis within Chilean metropolitan cities. Urban conditions, such as the
school segregation crisis and the intergenerational crisis, were shaped by socio-spa-
tial processes triggered by authoritarian decisions of the military government (and
reinforced during the post-dictatorial democratic process). Therefore, the formation
of this movement has involved the public arena as well as a conflictive articulation
of private and in-between (transitional) political processes. Thus, this study links the
public and private manifestations of urban space.
The problem is that the traditional way of presenting the movement in the pub-
lic arena by covering the massive marches and other public performances, while
crucial for public recognition, do not offer evidence to sustain the hypothesis that
the process of Chilean students’ resistance formation was far from being spatially
neutral. One way to approach this research gap was identifying the ‘hot spots’ of
mobilisation in 2011 (Figure 13.1). These ‘hot spots’ indicate areas where schools
with secondary education presented some level of mobilisation, based on the
percentage of non-attendance between July and November 2011. The range was
10 to 100% of non-attendance, where 100% corresponds to a 5-month occupation
of the school.
272 Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel

Figure 13.1  Spatial concentration of secondary students’ mobilisation in Greater Santiago (2011).
Source: own visualisation (Parraguez Sanchez, 2019).

Next, the challenge was to characterise those highly mobilised high schools and
their respective ‘catchment territorial communities’. Given the profound school
segregation in Santiago de Chile, the first attempt was approaching this situation
with a monetary lens (Figure 13.2). In a country where parents are not forced to
enrol their children in schools within their neighbourhood, socioeconomic resi-
dential segregation is highly correlated with school segregation. As expected, the
richest territories of the city presented very low levels of mobilisation, except in the
wealthy central municipalities of the city where ‘emblematic’ public high schools
(‘liceos’) are located. For a long time, these ‘liceos’ were the seedbed of the main
political leaders of the country, and the 2011 Chilean student movement was not
the exception. Paradoxically, the ‘hot spots’ of mobilisation involved both public
and subsidised schools (and, with a few traditional exceptions, also some private

Figure 13.2  Level of secondary students’ mobilisation in Greater Santiago by average family
income quintile (2011).
Source: own visualisation (Parraguez Sanchez, 2019).
 GIS in Urban Studies 273

Figure 13.3  Level of secondary students’ mobilisation in Greater Santiago by school economic
dependence (2011).
Source: own visualisation (Parraguez Sanchez, 2019).

schools) (Figure 13.3), including the entire range of high schools in terms of formal
academic performance (Figure 13.4). Therefore, the secondary student movement
was an academic and socioeconomic diverse mobilisation, involving low, medium,
and high performance high schools distributed in different zones of the city. Still,
some areas presented very low political activity, posing the question concerning the
characteristics of passive high schools and their ‘catchment territorial communities’?
Considering these visualisations, Parraguez Sanchez (2019) obtained evidence
about the important ideological role of upper-class private schools as spaces of
training for the new generation of the capitalist class. This is one of the strongest
socio-spatial effects of the depoliticisation of education, an authoritarian process
reinforced from academy and think tanks since the recovery of formal democracy
in 1990. For the elites both schools and universities are not just a business but are
also ideological centres to train professionals under their principles. On the contrary,

Figure 13.4  Level of secondary students’ mobilisation in Greater Santiago by average math-
language PSU score (2011).
Source: own visualisation (Parraguez Sanchez, 2019).
274 Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel
many vulnerable and middle-class high schools are not just spaces to emphasise
discipline and mechanical skills, they are also places for building student resistance,
even in a very segregated educational system within highly segregated cities.
Regarding the private time–space dialectics of students’ resistance, the integration
of classical scientific GIS analysis in the research methodology helped to understand
the role of intimate spaces of life in the youth resistance formation in a post-dicta-
torial neoliberal country. On the one hand, qualitative results coming from in-depth
interviews with a diverse group of active college students participating in the student
movement and, on the other hand, interviews with the most significant members
of their ‘intimate kin’ show that not only educational spaces and their respective
territorial bases have shaped contemporary high school resistance. The results of
these interviews demonstrate that the Chilean student movement has been ‘a family
matter’, not only for its economic role, but mainly because the family, together with
schools, has been another important site of the intimate and conflicting construction
of critical consciousness among the activist students participating in this research.
Refuting the traditional vision of the ideological function of the family (historically
defined as functional to capitalism), Parraguez Sanchez (2016) sustains the idea
that over recent years the family has been politicised and transformed into a rel-
evant space to observe the intergenerational crisis that gives form to the Chilean
student movement.
Two years after the dictatorship ended, the ‘democratic government’ deter-
mined that the inherited educational system was healthy and that it had to be
consolidated rather than reformed. As a result, in 2011 there were one million
higher education students in the country, with 15% belonging to the poorest
income quintile, a number that will likely grow in the near future, making clear the
effects of the diversification of financial sources for post-secondary education. At
the same time, ‘the Chilean neoliberal higher education ideology’ was disseminated
in the population. This ideology shares the basic features of the general ideology of
higher education that came with the neoliberalisation of tertiary education at the
global level, particularly the promise of upward mobility. However, the traumatic
nature of the Chilean neoliberal turn gives a distinct role to this ideology within
the democratic governments’ quest to legitimatise its economic conservatism. By
creating post-secondary education credits with public endorsement, the political
elites fulfil the social pressure to open educational opportunities for the poorest
families, while creating a new mechanism to create capital for the financial system.
Figure 13.5 shows how the family’s expectations for higher education are distrib-
uted in the city.
In turn, when applying a time–space dialectic approach to the segregation tra-
jectories of the elites, a ‘spatial integration’ of the economic and political power
became evident – and not only the so-called vertical integration highlighted by liter-
ature, which rose in Chile with extreme speed because of the benefits that the elites
received during the dictatorship. Indeed, the ‘spatial integration’ between elite edu-
cation and the housing market is so closely linked that it is hard to understand each
phenomenon on its own (Figure 13.6).
This study has shown that significant processes of resistance formation have
occurred within the most intimate spaces of students’ daily life; that is, high schools
and family. Within these contested spaces, time means the conflicting encounter of
 GIS in Urban Studies 275

Figure 13.5  Percentage of parents with tertiary education expectations per school (2010).
Source: own visualisation (Parraguez Sanchez, 2019).

Figure 13.6  Greater Santiago top 100 schools by foundation year.

Source: own visualisation (Parraguez Sanchez, 2019).

different generations and their respective daily mobility experiences, interpretations

of the recent past, and ideologies regarding social change. In a context of highly
segregated spaces of life and study, and a persisting repression and criminalisation
of public resistance by the political elites, Parraguez Sanchez (2016) argues that the
Chilean student movement is forcing us to reconsider the underestimated emancipa-
tory potential of intimate and transitional spaces of resistance formation. Method-
ologically said, while GIS provided a data basis und visualisation, qualitative data
offered the method to interpret these spatial representations.
276 Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel
Example: Public Participation GIS – a Medium of Participation and
Potential Source for Analysis

The next example illustrates the potential of PPGIS. While this seems to be a spatial
open access initiative that provides added value for excluded actors in society, it
may also be a valuable source for urban studies analysis to understand the extend of
inclusion and exclusion in cities via citizen science, and to understand urban initia-
tives and movements for more social equality in detail.
Wheelmap.org is a simple WebGIS based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) and enriched
with tools to evaluate places (particularly public and private service locations such
as museums, restaurants, shops, lavatories) as accessible and non-accessible for
wheelchair users. This map is an example of a more or less de-mathematised map
(for basic users). It is freely available on the web, representing barriers to mobility
with a visually eye-catching traffic light labelling system. Classification is done on
the basis of places documented in OSM, but places may also be added which even-
tually enrich the OSM database. Therefore, all data is saved under the OSM open
database licence. Thus, users need to be registered as OSM users, although OSM
saves very little user data. Therefore, the users’ spatial data is relatively safe and
the interest for commercial utilisation low. The map was initiated by a German
non-profit association (Sozialhelden e.V.) and anyone can annotate or add to the
maps, either one-off by individuals or in organised mapping campaigns, where
people purposefully meet in real life to stroll through a city to add more places
to the map.
As with all GIS, the classification of the wheelmap.org is based on a limited ontol-
ogy (see Schuurman, 2004), that is, a very specific semantic of accessibility. For in-
stance, this system considers the height of doorsteps but not the usability of doors,
although both aspects might limit the access for wheelchair users. However, formal
classifications may be supplemented by comments and photography.
The map is indeed a useful tool to enable wheelchair users to participate in
everyday urban spaces more easily due to knowledge about the accessibility of dif-
ferent places. It can also be used for political communication to reduce the number
of red-marked, not accessible places by making them visible. The technical bar-
riers for consumptive usage, visual analysis, and for mapping as well are very low;
hence, this system is not suitable for complex spatial analysis, that could help to
gain data for political argumentation and produce more concrete suggestions for
professional spatial planning. However, thanks to open licences, data can be trans-
ferred to more complex GIS to address such tasks, as well as a scientific analysis
on inclusion and exclusion in cities based on the user-produced data (cf. citizen sci-
ence). So, all in all, the map appears to be an example for neogeography that fulfils
social purposes and provides data for further usage based on basic participation
and web communication.
Nevertheless, on the other side of that coin using GIS in such a way turns out to
consolidate potentially unequal access. Thanks to the map wheelchair users will visit
non-accessible places less frequently, and their actual exclusion will become invis-
ible. Furthermore, one may ask, particularly in social welfare states, why this map
needed to be realised by a non-compensated voluntary initiative instead of a public
service. Following the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
 GIS in Urban Studies 277
(UN, 2006) the state must account for inclusion. The multitude of red places on
the map shows the state’s malfunction. Therefore, even as a visual analysis this map
might function as a warning sign towards political stakeholders.

Example: GIS Data Acquisition – Tracking as Everyday

Routine and Surveillance

This last example captures the newest forms of the collection of spatial data that are
integrated into everyday action and services but also generates a massive amount of
data to be analysed.
Many forms of tracking (also named tracing when data is viewed after recording)
are a form of unconscious and particularly involuntarily geoinformation collection.
Every step a person takes, is located, mostly with the help of the smartphone. The
data, capturing vast audiences, are often analysed by Big Data methods but it nev-
ertheless contain individual data linked to all aspects of life. For instance, special
devices help parents to track their small school children, which is a practice that
46% of German parents can imagine for their own family (Verbraucherzentrale,
2018). Like wearing ankle bracelets, an alarm alerts parents when children leave their
everyday paths (geofencing). As mentioned above, tracking applied on employees of
delivery services or other geolocationally related services, in order to deploy them
more efficiently, is common. While a service might be linked to spatial data, the own-
ership of this user data is also highly valuable. Particular terms of trade inevitably
link a service with tracking, so the usage of many apps is impossible without activat-
ing this function. Besides economic interests this might even lead to political impli-
cations for example, US military bases have been traced by soldiers wearing fitness
(smart) bracelets connected to a fitness software on their phones (Holland, 2018),
and the newly planned and partly piloted Social Credit System in China will also
include spatial data. Consequently, (location) data can be used to control people:
those who lose points because of unacceptable behaviour, might be excluded from
career opportunities and long-distance travel (Chorzempa et al., 2018).
Tracking, either by the state, companies, private persons, or by all of these actors,
challenges serious questions of spatial privacy (Armstrong and Ruggles, 2005). Dur-
ing the last two decades, this approach has been implemented into the concept of
critical GIScience and, thus, also challenges research. Urban studies do not only have
to put their interest into the area of making use of such data, or letting people col-
lect locational data consciously as part of a citizen science project, they also need to
consolidate the theoretical and empirical perspective within the discussion of spatial
privacy. It is, for instance, their responsibility to balance geodata collection and the
importance of this data to understand and develop a functioning, legitimate smart city.

Open the (GI)space: Conclusion and Outlook

This chapter has shown that GIS is a valuable tool to analyse urban problems and
therefore important for urban studies. However, the task is not only about utilising
GIS, it is also about understanding GIS from a critical perspective and to ­understand
278 Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel
where the geodata that we use for analysis come from and, furthermore, what
influence geodata, from urban studies and other sources, have for urban everyday
life and development. In other words, GIS analysis is only a small part of the problem
and the opportunities that urban studies are faced with when it is about space and
spatial data. Due to the Geoweb and the prevalence of these technologies throughout
commercial and public contexts, geodata, geoinformation, geomedia, GIS, and their
social embeddedness have also become objects of urban studies. Furthermore, con-
sidering the social realm, one need to look more closely at the relation of science to
public, and to the ethics of science, particularly, when it comes to scientific practices
such as citizen science. Still, smart city applications do not necessarily take citizens
as seriously as they should, rather treating them as elements of the system (which
they definitely are not) (Sennett, 2012). Two educational approaches are attempt-
ing to bring public and science to the same level, enabling the public to understand
scientific analysis and to question its meaning, and, almost importantly, to reflect
critically on everyday spatial relations and services alike. This creates new needs in
education.
The spatial citizenship approach is founded in the tradition of critical GIScience,
whereas everyday users will be able not only to reflect on geomedia, but also to
construct their own in the tradition of counter mapping (Gryl and Jekel, 2012). At
this, the approach is developed as a counterpart to classical expert GIS education.
It suggests (very basic) technological competences (not to use complex expert GIS,
but simple WebGIS), competences for critical reflection, and communication compe-
tences. With the communication competences, users can construct visually attractive
spatial representations to communicate their own construction and vision of spaces.
Spatial citizenship also includes citizenship competences based on knowledge (Ador-
no, 1971) to understand spatial constructions as relational spaces and a changeable
result of societal negotiation. In everyday urban spaces that are shaped by mani-
fold divergent interests, this approach realises an added value to ensure that novice/
citizen interests become visible – to political stakeholders, to urban planners, and
to urban studies. Indeed, common geomedia, with a focus on point signature and a
previously provided design, are still not comparable to professional GIS products,
but spatial citizenship does not address classical participation paths, but rather the
generation of public attention and debate through Web2.0 and, within this, social
media services.
Urban consciousness (Conciencia Urban) is an interactive educational platform
that promotes critical spatial consciousness in secondary students in the Santiago
de Chile area (in its first stage), and, later, the main metropoles of the country. It is
a highly practicable, regional approach with the potential to be transferred to other
urban areas. By integrating public quantitative data, spatial georeferencing and daily
life experiences expressed in personal stories, the project seeks to enable students to
understand that space is an important dimension for people’s quality of life; there-
fore, it cannot continue to be omitted anymore when analysing social problems and
developing proposals for social transformation. This approach highlights the added
value of maps and GIS and teaches the benefits of mapping to students. It illustrates
how maps allow us to read general data and link them to a real/physical space – and
spaces – of everyday experiences. By doing so, young students (and any citizens with-
out specialised knowledge in the field) can achieve a more concrete ­understanding
 GIS in Urban Studies 279
of daily urban life and imagine better future alternatives. With spatial relations, stu-
dents discover new ways to rethink and communicate social problems, which would
otherwise remain hidden from their view. The urban consciousness project devel-
oped its own methodology to create an accessible tool for young people to under-
stand and politically use GIS, guided by the particular territorial specificities of this
city. This tool, the ‘stories editor’, connects the different scales of youths’ daily lives
with urban phenomena and its complexity. With this tool, students can connect their
individual problems with socio-spatial explanations, which can eventually turn into
innovative ideas for territorial innovation/transformation.
To conclude, GIS is an important tool to understand cities, even more in the age of
Big Data and smart cities where enormous amounts of (spatial) data about the cities’
inhabitants and the infrastructure are collected. At the same time, to understand the
city you have to increasingly understand the modalities of GIS and geomedia. Here,
a critical attitude towards geodata/geoinformation/geomedia and insights into the
social construction of spaces through these representations of space is necessary. Fur-
thermore, as most spatial data collection happens unconsciously, and partly invol-
untarily, ethics of urban studies gain more importance. It is therefore highly relevant
to understand public movements and, in contrast to commercial services linked to
spatial data, it is also relevant to support citizens to become critical and to partic-
ipate in urban planning and even in urban research. Thus, participatory research
and research for fruitful city planning that involves the actors as subjects (even as
research objects) are achievable.

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Routledge.
 14
Urban Ethnography
Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica
Brown-Saracino

Introduction

What sets ethnographic research apart from other strands of inquiry is that it takes
place in ‘natural’ settings or fields. Fields are social worlds that exist independently
of the efforts of researchers. Typically, fields have their own social organisation, his-
tory, beliefs, values, and code of conduct; most also have their own spatial habitat.
Entire cities, as well as smaller urban and related places – for instance, streets, parks,
transportation hubs, business and entertainment zones, residential neighbourhoods,
suburbs, exurbs, and towns – are the traditional hunting grounds of urban ethnog-
raphers, a diverse group whose members nonetheless tend to agree on two things.
What they share is, first, the idea that cities and related places matter a great deal
in, and for, the lives of ordinary people; and second, the belief that these places are
best understood through ‘being there’, meaning while immersing oneself into the
workings and trappings of field settings. Observing and participating alongside field
members requires a delicate balancing of ethnographers’ simultaneous commitments
to the people and events of the field on the one side, and to their researcher role and
academic goals on the other. Urban ethnographers are certainly not alone in facing
this duality, however, studying cities ethnographically poses some unique payoffs
and challenges to urban fieldworkers that are deliberated throughout this chapter.
The goal of the chapter is to offer an overview of key themes across recent works
by urban ethnographers within the United States and beyond its borders. We seek to
highlight some of the major developments and new directions that have characterised
urban ethnography during the past 20 years, roughly since the beginning of the new
millennium. Due to the immense volume of work that is published in this area, we
decided to focus exclusively on one layer of this literature: book-length ­monographs,

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Urban Ethnography 283
typically written by a single author. This may be justified because books continue
to be the most prominent outlet for in-depth ethnographic studies. Within the book
category, we applied a generous understanding of ethnography as a research strategy
and included studies that are based on participant observation, interviews, and other
data sets, as long as there was a clear commitment to understanding one or more
urban field settings from within and to reconstructing what ethnographers, at times,
call ‘members’ meanings’.
Due to our limited foreign language skills, and as a nod to our primarily English-
speaking audience, the international urban ethnographies mentioned throughout are
restricted to books written in English. Another limitation is that the chapter mainly
focuses on works within the discipline of sociology – arguably the main hub of
urban ethnography but by far not the only one. While we cite a number of out-
standing examples by scholars from other fields, such as anthropology, geography,
and history, we fall woefully short of offering systematic or adequate interdisciplin-
ary coverage.
By way of a brief introduction, a glance back over the shoulder into the early
history of ‘urban ethnography’ may be permitted, even though the term – meant
to connect sociological fieldwork with anthropology and distinguish it at the same
time – did not enter the vocabulary of sociological field researchers until the 1970s
(Emerson, 2001). Most sociologists are well aware that the discipline at large orig-
inated out of concerns over rapid urbanisation and related changes in the wake of
the Industrial Revolution in Europe. In this sense, early sociology is synonymous
with urban sociology. For instance, we know that Marxism, as both a theory and
political movement, in part derives from Friedrich Engels’s compassionate descrip-
tion of the deplorable living conditions in the industrial slums of Manchester during
the 1840s. Engels’s (1974) book The Condition of the Working Class in England,
originally published in 1845 in German, was rooted in first-hand experiences that he
had collected over several years. While one could consider this work to be the first
urban ethnography, it is not known as an archetype for sociological field research.
Rather, the book is deemed significant due to coining some of the vocabulary of
Marxist theory, and due to igniting Engels’s famous collaboration with Karl Marx.
Notwithstanding, it is undeniably the case that sociology began with observations
and analyses of urban social processes, whether passing through the minds of Max
Weber, Émile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, or Georg Simmel, among others.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the young discipline of soci-
ology crossed the Atlantic and took root in the United States. The world’s very first
Department of Sociology, founded in 1892 by Albion Small at the University of
Chicago, is also credited with becoming the birthplace of modern urban sociology
and, more narrowly, ethnography – besides developing symbolic interactionism as
an influential sociological theory. From roughly 1915 to 1940, proponents of the
so-called Chicago School creatively merged sociological and anthropological the-
ory with fieldwork. The city of Chicago famously became a laboratory for detailed,
in person, multi-method investigations of urban dynamics and problems, such as
immigration, poverty, deviance, crime, segregation, and others, carried out to better
understand how people live under varying structural, cultural, and spatial conditions
– an approach that is often characterised as urban ecology. From Nels Anderson’s
The Hobo (1923) to Harvey Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929),
284 Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino
members of the Chicago School produced a series of well-loved urban fieldwork
classics. Some colleagues (Fine 1995) argue that, after World War II, a ‘Second Chi-
cago School’ emerged that included sociological titans such as Erving Goffman and
Howard Becker, and that spread Chicago-style field research to a host of other issues
and concerns.
Beginning in the 1950s, led by European scholars such as David Harvey and
Henri Lefebvre, the paradigm of urban political economy developed in critical
response to urban ecology while drawing on the intellectual legacy of Karl Marx
and Max Weber. This school’s greater emphasis on large-scale theory and on the
social and political ‘production’ of spaces as sites of money, infrastructure, power,
and exclusion tends to favour mixed-method and multi-sited investigations. While it
may, at first sight, appear to be less compatible with an ethnographic approach, this
is not the case. Today’s literature includes many notable ethnographies carried out
within neo-Marxist, feminist, and other critical perspectives aligned with the urban
political economy framework (see, for instance, works by Loic Wacquant, Javier
Auyero, and Daphne Spain). Ethnographies in this theoretical tradition continue to
diversify and strengthen urban ethnography in significant ways, alongside the con-
tinuation of research grounded in Chicago School principles.
Between the mid-1960s and late 1980s, perhaps due to significant advances in
quantitative research techniques, American urban ethnography, at least in the field of
sociology, went through a period of reduced interest and activity (Duneier et al., 2014:
4) before experiencing a revival in the early 1990s that has continued until today. Of
course, there are always exceptions, with some eminent modern classics published
during this time (for instance, Anderson, 1978; Horowitz, 1983; Liebow, 1967; Sut-
tles, 1968). In this chapter, we hope to show that since rebounding in the 1990s,
and very clearly since 2000, urban ethnographers have continued working within
the traditions of their trade while, at the same time, broadening the field beyond
long-standing interests and conventions. For instance, higher degrees of reflexivity
regarding research methods and ethics, and a keen awareness of researchers’ own
positionalities are hallmarks of contemporary work in this area (Emerson, 2001).
Influenced by the Chicago School, especially the works of Louis Wirth and
William Lloyd Warner, urban anthropology became established as a distinct subfield
in the 1960s and 1970s through books such as Soulside by Ulf Hannerz (1969). The
Manchester School of anthropology, pioneered by Max Gluckman in the 1950s,
continues to provide important theoretical and methodological impulses to the study
of urban issues (Evens and Handelman, 2006). While initially rooted in anthropo-
logical theories and methodological conventions, urban anthropologists’ thematic
interests are similar to those of sociological urban ethnographers (see, for instance,
Gregory, 1998, Halperin, 1998, Low, 2004; Miller, 2009; Merry, 1981; Powder-
maker, 1950; Stuesse, 2016).
Today, differences between sociological and anthropological urban ethnography are
blurry at best, and the same is true for fieldwork in urban geography, urban studies,
and other fields. There is no doubt that the interdisciplinary ‘spatial turn’ of the 1980s
and the recent rise of the ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller, 2014) have influenced and
amplified the work of urban ethnographers across paradigms, disciplines, and regions.
Overall, contemporary urban ethnography is characterised by a wide, and growing,
range of disciplinary and geographic homes, topics of concern, ­theoretical frameworks,
 Urban Ethnography 285
study designs, and field methodologies. This can be witnessed in the recent volumes
edited by Auyero et al. (2015), Duneier et al. (2014), Gmelch and Kuppinger (2018),
Low (2018), Ocejo (2012), and Pardo and Prato (2018) as well as in countless other
collections of urban research that include ethnographic studies.
We have structured the remainder of this chapter in the following way. The fol-
lowing section discusses six subject matters that have dominated American and in-
ternational urban ethnographic research during the past 15–20 years, including (i)
inequality and exclusion in the inner city, (ii) urban migration and immigrant com-
munities, (iii) gentrification and middle classes in the city, (iv) suburbs and small
towns, (v) public space, and (vi) urban culture. The next section is devoted to newly
emerging trends in urban ethnography that we expect will continue to grow in sig-
nificance in the near future, alongside longer-standing interests. Within this context,
we pay particular attention to (i) new themes, (ii) new places, and (iii) innovations in
fieldwork methods. The concluding section offers brief thoughts on the overall state
of today’s urban ethnography and on its future outlook in an increasingly global and
mobile world.

Major Themes and Issues

This section portrays six main areas of activity within urban ethnography over the
past two decades.

Inequality and Exclusion in the Inner City

As in earlier decades (for instance, Anderson, 1978; Liebow, 1967; Suttles, 1968),
perhaps the largest share of urban ethnographic research during the past 20 years
has been devoted to investigating dynamics of inequality, exclusion, and community
in inner cities. The daily challenges of inner-city residents and their ongoing social,
economic, and political marginalisation continue to deeply concern urban ethnog-
raphers working within various theoretical, disciplinary, and geographical contexts.
In the United States, racially segregated, economically marginalised, and structur-
ally neglected urban neighbourhoods tend to be concentrated near downtown cores,
while in Europe and other world regions they are often found on the suburban
fringe. Inner cities in both types of locations have been intensively studied, resulting
in a large number of excellent ethnographies.
Prominent recent studies on North American inner cities address the following
three major themes: first, gangs, drugs, and other urban subcultures (Bourgois and
Schonberg, 2009; Contreras, 2013; Duck, 2015; Durán, 2013; Garot, 2010; Jones,
2009; Ralph, 2014; Umemoto, 2006; Wacquant, 2004); second, crime, policing, and
criminal justice (Comfort, 2009; Fader, 2013; Fassin, 2013; Goffman, 2015; Jones,
2018; Rios, 2011; Stuart, 2016; Vargas, 2016); and third, housing (especially pub-
lic housing), neighbourhood, and community issues (Anderson, 1999; Desmond,
2016; Harding, 2010; Lassiter et al., 2004; Pattillo, 2008; Sánchez-Jankowski,
2008; Small, 2004; Taylor, 2002; Venkatesh, 2000; Woldoff, 2011). A smaller, yet
equally important group of studies examines the roles of other civic institutions such
as church (McRoberts, 2005), school (Shedd, 2015), and work (Newman, 1999).
286 Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino
Beyond North America, a number of outstanding international and comparative
ethnographies address issues of urban poverty, crime, violence, marginalisation, and
resilience in inner cities (Auyero and Berti, 2015; Auyero et al., 2015; Auyero and
Swistun, 2009; Blokland, 2003; Freire-Medeiros, 2014; Mathews, 2011; Pine, 2012;
Solinger, 2018; Penglase, 2014; Wacquant, 2008).
Two recent books – Forrest Stuart’s (2016) Down, Out, and Under Arrest and
Robert Vargas’s (Vargas, 2016) Wounded City – are excellent examples of the
growing number of work in this area that focus on how policing and the criminal
justice system shape inner-city residents’ daily lives in the United States. Stuart’s
book documents the lives of those who inhabit Los Angeles’ skid row, including
both those who reside in its shelters, motels, and rooming houses and those who
struggle to survive on its streets. Importantly, his ethnography also extends to police
officers who routinely interact with those residents. Stuart brings to life the immense
resources devoted to managing and (literally) policing the lives of Los Angeles’s most
destitute citizens, as they are arrested for sitting on sidewalks or harassed while
waiting in line for food. Respectively, in his book, Vargas (2016) takes the reader to
Chicago, detailing the concentration of violence in a small area of the city’s Little
Village neighbourhood. Crucially, combining rich ethnographic data with archival
and other historical research, Vargas (2016: 7) demonstrates how ‘street turf wars’
are structured by earlier ‘political turf wars’ that have shaped political representa-
tion, resource allocation, and policing strategies.
A recent debate, especially among those examining crime, policing, and criminal
justice, is devoted to how ethnographers should represent social problems and resi-
dents of the inner city in their writing. Some recent works have come under scrutiny
for highlighting aspects of inner-city daily life, and for portraying field members, in
ways that are perceived to feed into, rather than challenge, popular and damaging
cultural stereotypes (see discussion by Small, 2015). All ethnographers, but espe-
cially those who examine inner cities as outsiders, run the risk of appearing ‘coura-
geous’ at the expense of their study participants, and of prioritising their own story
over the ones of the people they study. Some scholars argue that high doses of ethno-
graphic humility and reflexivity are needed to avoid exoticising, and thereby further
marginalising, one’s study participants (Rios, 2015). The work of Comfort (2009),
Fader (2013), and Rios (2011) are models in this regard. Other, ongoing debates
that transpire in this particular niche of urban ethnography revolve around the role
of the state, the economy, and other structural forces; the moral identities of study
participants; and the ideal ways of connecting empirical evidence with theory, with
the ‘extended case method’ and ‘grounded theory’ offering two competing visions
in this regard (Anderson, 2002; Auyero and Jensen, 2015; Duneier, 2002; Newman,
2002; Wacquant, 2002).

Urban Migration and Immigrant Communities

Urban ethnographers began studying immigrant communities during the early Chi-
cago School years (see, for instance, Thomas and Znaniecki, 1918; Wirth, 1928).
Classic post-war studies on urban immigrants include the books by Whyte (1947),
Gans (1962), Suttles (1968), and Horowitz (1983). While many examples of this
 Urban Ethnography 287
genre, for instance, Beaman (2017) or Small (2004), also fall within other categories,
ethnographies of immigrant communities pay special attention to the dynamics
of transnational cultures and to changing notions of ethnicity within urban con-
texts. Over the past two decades, a strong emphasis on global contexts and larger
processes of migration and displacement has emerged, leading to new exchanges
between urban scholars and their colleagues who primarily study immigration,
mobility, globalisation, and culture (for instance, Levitt, 2001; Smith, 2006). Note-
worthy recent urban ethnographies in this area include the books by Beaman (2017),
Castañeda (2018), Nájera (2015), and Pérez (2004) on immigrant segregation and
exclusion; Besteman (2016) and Tang (2015) on refugees; Kasinitz et al. (2004) on
second generation immigrants; Knowles and Harper (2009) on long-term migrant
communities; Mathews (2018) and Kingsolver (2010) on processes of globalisation;
Lung-Amam (2017) on suburban immigration; Brown (2011) on immigrant care
work; and Ramos-Zayas (2012) on emotion.
One excellent example of this diverse body of work is Debra Shutika’s (2011)
ethnography, Beyond the Borderlands, in which she chronicles the ongoing migra-
tion of Mexican nationals between their hometown of Textitlán in the Oaxaca
region and Kennett Square, a Pennsylvania town believed to be the mushroom
capital of the world. As a folklorist, Shutika devotes much of her book to the
practical, emotional, and interpersonal work involved in the making of home in
both origin and destination communities. In the Pennsylvania location, she depicts
the complex dynamics of integration, appropriation, and exclusion of Mexican
migrants and their culture through the evolving celebration of Cinco de Mayo,
this American-made ‘Mexican’ holiday. Borderlands pays minute attention to the
changing identities and perceptions of return migrants both back home and abroad.
A number of other ethnographies in this group (for instance, Levitt, 2001; Pérez,
2004) have similarly examined migrants’ communities of origin and destination,
and the intricate dynamics of mobility, social networks, and belonging that unfold
between them.
Another recent innovative example of ethnographic work on urban immigrants
and migration is Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s (2014) book Paradise Transplanted.
Intentionally situated at the intersection of migration, culture, and place, the book
critically investigates the cultural and structural dimensions of gardens as an inte-
gral part of the southern Californian landscape. The author offers readers engaging
insights on the history, ecology, experience, and politics of gardens in this region
based on ethnographic research across multiple settings. For instance, Hondagneu-
Sotelo examines the many functions that urban community gardens have in the local
lives of Latino/a migrants who tend to suffer a ‘dual dislocation’ from both home
countries and dominant host communities. Historical images, photographs, and
personal narratives add additional layers to the author’s thoughtful descriptions and
analyses. Besides theorising place, belonging, and migration, Paradise represents an
emerging group of studies in urban ethnography that incorporate aspects of urban
nature, as discussed in more detail below. In sum, these two insightful ethnographies
exemplify that intersecting aspects of migration, place, culture, ethnicity, and cities
are often examined ethnographically outside of the inner orbit of American urban
sociology.
288 Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino
Gentrification and Middle Classes in the City
As seen above, a central line of urban ethnographic research highlights the experi-
ences of the poor and working class, revealing their struggles with exclusion, mar-
ginality, instability, violence, and crime. In contrast to – but also in conversation
with this literature – scholarship on the middle classes, including examinations of
gentrifiers, documents the paths and perspectives of more privileged urban dwellers,
aiming to describe how their views and actions influence other urban residents and
extend from broader political and economic contexts.
Since the early 1980s, many urban ethnographers have explored gentrification, or
the movement of professional classes into historically working-class spaces (see Glass,
1964). This research has taken a number of angles, from focusing on the politics of
redevelopment (Adams, 2013; Ghertner, 2015) to holistic community studies that
seek to capture the experiences, interactions, and perspectives of a diverse set of resi-
dents, including middle-class newcomers and long-time residents (Mele, 2000; Pattillo,
2008). Cumulatively, this scholarship documents gentrification dynamics in a variety
of settings, with a particular emphasis on big city neighbourhoods, such as those in
New York and Chicago. However, ethnographic attention has not been entirely limited
to the largest metropolises: seminal early inquiries also took place in American cit-
ies such as New Orleans, Philadelphia, Seattle, among others, and in rural areas (see
chapters in Laska and Spain, 1980). More recent scholarship explores gentrification in
smaller cities such as Denver, Colorado (Langegger, 2016), as well as in traditionally
understudied urban areas, such as Los Angeles (Deener, 2012; Tavory, 2016). Outside
the United States, examples of studies on urban gentrification and displacement are
featured, for instance, in the books by Ghertner (2015) on Delhi, Herzfeld (2009) on
Rome, Naegler (2012) on Hamburg, and Helbrecht (2018) on Berlin.
Some ethnographic work on gentrification privileges the experiences of long-term
residents. Exemplary studies include the books by Gina Pérez (2004) who traces
the lives of long-time Puerto Rican residents in Chicago (and Puerto Rico), and by
Miranda Martinez (2010) who documents how residents of the Lower East Side of
Manhattan resist the displacement – per upscale development – of long-standing
community gardens. Likewise, Mario Small (2004) provides an ethnographic por-
trait of residents of a predominately Puerto Rican housing project set amidst Bos-
ton’s rapidly upscaling South End.
Another dominant strand of gentrification scholarship explores middle-class
actors who participate in the process (Brown-Saracino, 2009). Take, for instance,
Monique Taylor’s (2002) book, which features first-person narratives of African
American gentrifiers returning to Harlem and embracing its architectural and social
history while also, in the process, displacing (among others) poor and working-class
rooming house dwellers. Likewise, Richard Lloyd’s (2006) ethnography of first-
wave gentrification in Chicago’s Wicker Park documents the perspectives and habits
of artists who fear their own displacement and the loss of neighbourhood ‘grit’ as
Wicker Park becomes increasingly attractive to other members of the middle classes.
Collectively, the portraits painted by urban ethnographers of middle-class life in gen-
trifying contexts are impressively varied.
A relatively new but increasingly well-established direction in the study of gen-
trification is scholarship that devotes ethnographic attention to commercial spaces,
 Urban Ethnography 289
from bars to shopping districts (Deener, 2012; Hyra, 2017; Ocejo, 2014; Zukin,
2009). Richard Ocejo (2014), for instance, profiles the displacement of long-stand-
ing commercial establishments on New York’s Lower East Side, and the emergence
of upscale nightlife venues in their place. He offers glimpses into expensive cocktail
bars and dance clubs, and captures the voices of those who mourn how the neigh-
bourhood once was – at an earlier stage of gentrification.
Another group of studies explores the emplaced lives of the middle classes as
a primary topic, such as Karyn Lacy’s (2007) study of African American upper-
middle-class suburbanites, Mary Pattillo’s (1999) investigation of African American
middle-class residents on Chicago’s South Side, Maria Kefalas’s (2003) portrait of
working and lower-middle-class Whites living in the same part of Chicago, and Te-
resa Caldeira’s (2000) study which explores the lives of affluent populations in Sao
Paulo who live behind gates and walls. While Caldeira’s ground-breaking ethnogra-
phy principally draws on interviews and interactions with informants in the (private)
contexts in which they live, Kefalas, Lacy, and Pattillo additionally bring the reader
into the public and parochial realms of the neighbourhood. Likewise, Rachel Hei-
man (2015), in her study of a middle-class New Jersey suburb, takes us into partic-
ipants’ homes, schools, neighbourhoods, and cars – the ethnographer navigates the
roads, as her suburban informants frequently do.
As we hope to have demonstrated, the ethnographic study of gentrification and
the middle classes is varied – substantively, geographically, and methodologically.
However, one way in which we can read this literature is as offering a path into
considering broader questions regarding the identities, practices, and perspectives of
middle-class actors within and beyond cities.

Suburbs and Small Towns

Once a staple of community ethnography, today the ethnographic study of sub-
urbs and small towns has a less central position in the broader field of urban and
community ethnography. However, a few notable exceptions exist, and there is early
evidence of a resurgence of studies of these domains. These include ethnographies of
villages, small towns, and other rural areas (for instance, Bell, 1994; Brown-Saracino,
2009; Falk, 2004; Gold, 2017; Gray, 2009; Hoey, 2014; Kingsolver, 2010; Salamon,
2003; Salamon and MacTavish, 2017), as well as studies of suburban and exur-
ban communities (for instance, Brekhus, 2003; Heiman, 2015; Jacques and Wright,
2015; Lacy, 2007; Low, 2004; Lung-Amam, 2017).
Many contemporary ethnographies of village or rural life follow the tradition of
classic community ethnographies in that they capture a variety of facets of local life
and seek to engage a diverse set – and, often, a large number – of residents. For in-
stance, to give a 1990s example, Michael Bell (1994) writes lushly about village life
in his ethnography, Childerley. Exploring the varied relationships of distinct classes
of residents – from the wealthy to the working class – to ‘nature’ in the context of
a changing village, Bell takes the reader into a variety of realms of local life. We
encounter fox hunting (and opposition thereto), garden conversations, and interac-
tions at a local pub; the ethnographer also lets readers look at a variety of community
institutions, from the religious to the political and social. In these aspects, the book
follows the model of the early holistic community ethnography, aligning with c­ lassic
290 Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino
studies of rural life that tend to be similarly comprehensive and detailed (see, for
­instance, Blumenthal, 1932; Lynd and Lynd, 1929; Vidich and Bensman, 1958).
Likewise, Lyn Macgregor’s (2013) book Habits of the Heartland explores the
orientations of distinct cohorts of residents to the small Wisconsin town that they
share. Like Bell’s, Macgregor’s ethnography sheds light on a variety of facets of local
life, from the bar to local shops to community social groups. However, she also relies
on extensive interviews that reveal the diverse orientations of cohorts of residents
and match these to the distinct practices that her observations uncover. Together, her
observations and interviews reveal how, even in a very small place, visions of the
past, present, and future can be heterogeneous. Beyond the small town, some scholars
explore the contours of suburban life (Brekhus, 2003; Heiman, 2015; Jacques and
Wright, 2015; Lacy, 2007; Low, 2004; Lung-Amam, 2017). For instance, Wayne
Brekhus (2003) relies primarily on interviews to explore the social position and atti-
tudes of gay men who reside in suburban areas, mapping their cultural orientations
to suburb, city, and, ultimately, their sexuality.
Increasingly, scholars overtly seek to investigate processes and dynamics typi-
cally thought of as urban in non-urban locales. In some instances, they ‘test’ the
applicability of theories developed for urban locales in smaller geographic units.
One example is Sonya Salamon’s (2003) investigation of upscaling in Midwest-
ern rural towns, debating the merits of applying the concept of gentrification to
this non-urban context, in addition to tracing the increasing diversification of the
rural hinterland, a process she calls ‘neighbourhoodisation’. Additional examples
include Brown-Saracino’s study of rural and urban gentrification (2009) and Sti-
man’s (2017) examination of second-homeownership in a rural town in Maine
and in Boston. More generally, studies of smaller locales habitually apply themes,
concepts, and questions that are at the centre of urbanists’ concerns, such as demo-
graphic, economic, and social change; meaning-making and identity; and local
politics. For these reasons, and because they engage broad questions of place, we
regard scholarship on suburbs and small towns as a part of the urban ethnographic
tradition.

Public Space
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most urban sociologists believed
that the anonymity of public space was not sociologically significant or even det-
rimental to the well-being of city dwellers. Consequently, they concentrated their
research efforts on the ‘warmer’ niches of cities, such as neighbourhoods and subcul-
tures. We owe the insight that anonymous public space is a quintessential – uniquely
urban, interactively rich, and often enjoyable – social territory to Erving Goffman
(1963) and the scholars working in his wake, among them especially Lyn Lofland
(1973, 1998). Since about the 1970s, ethnographic research in and about public
streets and other accessible spaces in the city has been a trademark of American
urban sociology. Fieldwork on this important urban realm, which is easy to access
but difficult to study, continues to thrive and diversify today.
Over the past 20 years, ethnographers have published innovative studies on
many kinds and aspects of urban publics (for a collection, see Orum and Neal,
2009). Numerous authors (for instance, Anderson, 2011; Bull, 2000; Gambetta
 Urban Ethnography 291
and Hamill, 2005; Jerolmack, 2013; Kidder, 2012; Monroe, 2016; Vannini, 2012;
Weston, 2008) offer studies of everyday, yet at times challenging, mobility and
sociability in public urban spaces. The varied meanings of streets as symbols of
freedom, identity, consumption, and culture are examined in another group of eth-
nographies (see, for example, Carr, 2004; Goldstein, 2016; Hall, 2012; Zukin et
al., 2015). Closely related are the studies by Caldeira (2000), Langegger (2016),
Mele (2017), and Smithsimon (2011) on the production, control, and politics of
public spaces. Building on a long tradition (Anderson, 1923; Harper, 1982; Liebow,
1993; Snow and Anderson, 1993), a special kind of public space ethnography cen-
tres on homeless individuals and their struggles to build fulfilling personal lives
on city streets (recent examples include the books by Bridgman, 2006; Bourgois
and Schonberg, 2009; Borchard, 2005; Duneier, 1999; Gowan, 2010; Irvine, 2013;
Molina-Jackson, 2008; Stuart, 2016). Finally, noteworthy ethnographies on public
urban space outside the United States include those by Anjaria (2016) on Mum-
bai, Bridgman (2006) on Toronto, Dines (2015) on Naples, and Monroe (2016)
on Beirut.
One exemplary book on public space, besides other topics, is Sidewalk, Mitchell
Duneier’s (1999) study of a group of predominantly African American street ven-
dors who sell printed materials in an affluent Manhattan neighbourhood. Duneier
analyses how Hakim, author of the book’s afterword, and his colleagues turn the
sidewalk into a composite habitat – a space that functions as a home, neighbour-
hood, workplace, third place, and theatre – while testing the limits of formal and
informal social control. For instance, Duneier examines how structural inequalities
related to race, class, and gender clash with the rules of stranger interaction in pub-
lic places and produce the perception of ‘interactional vandalism’. Other parts of
the book likewise investigate the vendors’ contested constructions of decency and
identity in a public urban environment. Regarding methods, noteworthy features of
Sidewalk include its intentional disregard for keeping study participants anonymous,
its ‘extended place method’ research design, and the enticing use of black-and-white
photography. These and other innovations stretch certain conventions and limita-
tions of previous urban ethnographies, turning Sidewalk into one of the first modern
examples of public urban sociology.
Another important study of public space is Elijah Anderson’s (2011) The Cos-
mopolitan Canopy. As characterised by Anderson, the canopy is a subtype of public
space in which more friendly than usual exchanges and relationships are expected to
unfold between strangers of different races, ethnicities, classes, and cultures. Written
in a conversational style that draws on personal experiences across various loca-
tions in Philadelphia, Canopy illuminates readers on the factors that make some
public spaces more welcoming than others to members of minority groups. Ander-
son’s examination of the possibilities for inclusion and the dynamics of exclusion
adds nuance and complexity to the conception of urban public space. Among others,
these two books substantially advance our understanding of interactions, identities,
moral orders, and culture in the urban public realm, whereas other ethnographies
foreground the political processes of production and, increasingly, control over this
type of space (for instance, Langegger, 2016; Mele, 2000, Monroe, 2016). Both per-
spectives are important and together illustrate why public space is such a powerful
and contested urban territory.
292 Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino
Urban Culture
An increasingly high-profile thread within urban ethnography consists of field-based
investigations of diverse urban cultures; this body of work has expanded rapidly
over the last two decades. In fact, when applying a broad ‘culturalist’ perspective
(Borer, 2006), a large share of urban ethnographies explores cultural topics, particu-
larly those devoted to examining the social life of ‘subcultures’ (Fischer, 1975) and/or
neighbourhoods, many of which have been mentioned above. However, what makes
an ethnography cultural in our eyes is that scholars devote sustained empirical and
theoretical attention to exploring the relationships between meaning-making, inter-
action, symbols, and institutions. Collectively, they offer crucial insights on the
cultural worlds, practices, and frameworks of urban dwellers.
Some who study subcultures or neighbourhood cultures conduct holistic
community portraits to investigate the attitudes, values, and practices of certain
groups of urban dwellers. A classic example is Zorbaugh’s (1929) portrayal of the
varied cultural worlds that share space in Chicago’s Near Northside, while modern
examples include the studies by Gowan (2010), Duneier (1999), Kefalas (2003),
Small (2004), Pattillo (2008), Perry (2016), and Woldoff (2011). Take, for instance,
Mary Pattillo’s (2008) ethnography Black on the Block which documents, in vivid
terms, the cultural responses of a variety of residents to gentrification in Chicago’s
North Kenwood–Oakland neighbourhood – from poor and working class African
American long-time residents, to African American professionals moving into the
neighbourhood in increasing numbers. Much of her writing is devoted to analys-
ing contests over cultural practices, with newcomers articulating frustration with
certain long-standing neighbourhood norms and practices relating to the use of pub-
lic space, such as repairing cars on the street or barbequing in public places. Like-
wise, Teresa Gowan (2010) investigates the distinctive cultural world of homeless
individuals in various parts of San Francisco, from an encampment in the Dog Patch
neighbourhood to those living in the Tenderloin.
Importantly, cultural ethnographies are not limited to studies of neighbourhood
residents but can include other, sometimes multiple, urban spaces and actors as well.
Consider, for instance, the portraits of cultural life that emerge from recent book-
length ethnographies, on diverse subjects such as Brooklyn nannies (Brown, 2011);
gay, bisexual, and queer men in Chicago’s Boystown (Orne, 2017); pigeon hobbyists
in various cities around the globe (Jerolmack, 2013); the DIY urbanism movement
(Douglas, 2018); or negotiations over government appropriations of private prop-
erty, known as eminent domain, in Philadelphia (Becher, 2014).
Still other studies are devoted to the very dimensions of city life that many people
associate with the term culture, and urban culture specifically. For instance, ethnog-
raphers such as Farrer and Field (2015), Grazian (2005, 2008), Hoang (2015), and
May (2014) have immersed themselves into the urban nightlife of different cities
and produced nuanced analyses on its varied participants and intricate dynamics.
Likewise, a significant number of works explore the various roles of music in the
urban context (for instance, Grazian, 2005; Lee, 2016; Pine, 2012; Wynn, 2015),
while others offer more holistic portraits of an area’s artistic or cultural life (Jackson,
2001; Weiss, 2009; Wherry, 2011). Some urban ethnographers document sports cul-
tures (Borer, 2008; Brooks, 2009; Grasmuck, 2005; Kidder, 2017; Steets and Frank,
 Urban Ethnography 293
2010), or the use of media, technology, and objects within urban contexts (Archam-
bault, 2017; Bull, 2000; Gray, 2009; Miller, 2009; Welz, 2015).
Another group of scholars engage questions related to urban tourism, which
occupies an increasingly central place in many contemporary economies (for in-
stance, Freire-Medeiros, 2014; Gotham, 2007; Greenberg, 2008; Wynn, 2011), or
cultures of consumption more generally (Borer, 2019; Zukin, 2009; Zukin et al.,
2015). Yet again, other scholars explore issues of faith, ideology, or politics. This
includes those who explore the religious beliefs that organise a community’s life
and identity (Kahn-Harris and Gidley, 2010; Liberatore, 2017, McRoberts, 2005;
Tavory, 2016), and those urban ethnographers who take cultural politics as their
focus, including battles over the changing meanings that actors assign to urban
spaces and processes (Becher, 2014; Berrey, 2015; Greenberg, 2008; Hyra, 2017;
Zeiderman, 2016).
The precise methodological approach that ethnographers who study urban cul-
tures rely on depends, in part, on the ‘cultural object’ (Griswold, 1987) at the centre
of the inquiry. For instance, studies of nightlife cultures tend to rely on extensive
ethnographic observations, as do other studies on public facets of urban cultural
life, such as Jonathan Wynn’s (2011) inquiry into the New York tour guide industry,
while others rely more heavily on interviews to document actors’ meaning-making,
such as Wayne Brekhus’s (2003) study of how gay men living in the suburbs make
sense of their place of residence and forge sexual identities. Likewise, inquiries into
urban cultures vary in terms of the number of contexts that they explore, from a
single cafeteria (Duneier, 1992) or bar (May, 2001) to a variety of blues clubs (Gra-
zian, 2005), to much of the public and private terrain of a neighbourhood (Pattillo,
2008). In short, within and across a growing body of texts, a compelling image
emerges of the varied and changing cultural life of cities, and of some of the sources
of their diversity and evolution. Collectively, ethnographic scholarship on urban cul-
tures provides an increasingly comprehensive portrait of the multitude of cultural
groups, realms, and activities constitutive of urban life.

Emerging Developments

In this part, we devote attention to currently emerging innovations in urban ethnogra-

phy including, first, new topics; second, new places; and, third, new research designs
and methods. We are aware that, due to limited space, our coverage is selective and
largely disregards the diverse broader epistemological contexts of these innovations.

New Topics
Among a range of possibilities, we point here to two rapidly developing topics within
urban ethnography, namely aspects of nature, and sexuality and gender in relation
to urban spaces.
Discovering Nature. The study of non-humans and natural environments is a
twenty-first-century frontier in urban ethnography which has, until recently, almost
exclusively focused on humans and built environments, even in examinations of
urban fringes and rural towns (for a rare exception, see Bell, 1994). However, ­during
294 Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino
the past two decades, some colleagues have anticipated, or perhaps responded to,
Stella Čapek’s (2010) thoughtful invitation to ‘foreground’ nature. One popular new
line of inquiry in this realm aims at the urban production, distribution, and con-
sumption of food, both solid and liquid (for instance, Anjaria, 2016; Bestor, 2004;
Borer, 2019; De La Pradelle, 2006; Ocejo, 2017; Stuesse, 2016). A related new topic
of interest aims at community gardens and urban agriculture (Hondagneu-Sotelo,
2014; Martinez, 2010). Human encounters with urban animals that are not consid-
ered food are another novel research topic (for instance, Irvine, 2013). Within this
last group of studies, Jerolmack’s (2013) already mentioned international ethnogra-
phy on people’s complex relationships with pigeons is particularly insightful and the-
oretically productive. Overall, ethnographic research on food, gardens, and animals
is popular among today’s graduate students and this literature is therefore likely to
grow in volume and variety in the near future.
A less amiable side of urban nature is explored in ethnographic studies of so-called
‘natural’ disasters (for instance, Adams, 2013; Browne, 2015; Gotham and Green-
berg, 2014; Klinenberg, 2003), next to environmental impacts that are human-made
but no less catastrophic (see Auyero and Swistun, 2009; Checker, 2005; Jaffe, 2016).
Even though a small number of community-based ethnographies on climate change
(among them Marino, 2015; Norgaard, 2011) have been published, more in-depth
research on the impacts of warming temperatures, rising seas, and other natural and
human-made hazards on urban life is urgently needed and, we expect, forthcoming.
Sexuality and Gender in Urban Spaces. Building on a group of ground-break-
ing historical works that take the city and sexualities as their focus (e.g. Chauncey,
1994; Faderman and Timmons, 2009; Kennedy and Davis, 1993), contemporary
scholars increasingly turn ethnographic attention to sexualities in the urban con-
text (Barton, 2012; Bernstein, 2007; Brekhus, 2003; Brown-Saracino, 2017; Camp-
bell et al., 2006; Farrer, 2002; Hoang, 2015; Laumann et al., 2004; Orne, 2017;
Panfil, 2017). Many of these works focus on sexual minorities. For instance, Jason
Orne (2017) documents the changing status of queer men’s nightlife establishments
in Chicago’s Boystown, as well as collective response to those changes. Some such
inquiries are attentive to place yet take us out of the city. A crucial example in this
regard is Mary Gray’s (2009) book which explores the lives and community building
strategies of queer rural youth. However, to date, the bulk of ethnographic work
on cities and sexuality attends to gay men, and primarily those gay men who reside
in metro city neighbourhoods with disproportionately White populations (but see
Brekhus, 2003).
A related new development (see Gardner, 1995, for an early example) explicitly
examines the role of gender within urban communities and dynamics (Grasmuck,
2005; Kidder, 2017; Spain, 2016), at times in combination with sexual identities and
subcultures (Bernstein, 2007; Brown-Saracino, 2017; Hoang, 2015). For instance,
Nikki Jones’s (2009, 2018) books on policing in inner-city contexts have focused
first, on girls and, recently, on boys and men. In each, the author carefully attends to
intersections of gender, race, and class, as well as the influences of policing and other
institutional forces. Over the next decade, we expect to see an increasing number of
works on these topics, an expanded geographic scope, and new theoretical develop-
ments. In addition, we anticipate exploration of gender and sexualities in increas-
ingly diverse locales and among a broader set of social actors.
 Urban Ethnography 295
Overall, since about 2000, urban ethnographers have begun training their lenses
on a range of new, or newly discovered, urban field settings and emerging topics
of concern while leaving other, perhaps equally compelling, issues to future gener-
ations. One could argue that ethnographic understanding of important structural,
social, and cultural transformations in today’s urban environments is still lacking
or underdeveloped (see Bodnar 2000, for an early exception). Building on prom-
ising beginnings, increased future attention should, and likely will, be paid to the
following issues, among others: the transformative impacts of social media and new
communication technologies (Archambault, 2017); understudied and novel trends
in housing (Desmond, 2016; Harris, 2018; Lauster, 2016; Salamon and MacTavish,
2017; Sullivan, 2018; Vannini and Taggart, 2014); new patterns of urban diversity
(Hall, 2012; Wessendorf, 2014); emerging political geographies (Hochschild, 2016);
as well as the role of state and non-governmental institutions (Hyra, 2017; Wherry,
2011; Zeiderman, 2016).
On a more abstract level, while contemporary ethnographers pay ample attention
to larger social-structural and spatial factors that influence their fields, they still
appear to struggle with incorporating time as an important contextual horizon in
the production and maintenance of urban environments (Katz, 2010; yet exceptions
are, for instance, Bourgois, 1995; Small, 2004). In the future, we might need to turn
to new and outstanding works in urban history (for instance, Perales, 2010) to learn
how ‘being there’ through time can be accomplished in theory and practice.

New Places
An exciting new development in urban ethnography is the increasing consideration
of small cities (see Norman, 2013, for an overview), of understudied regions, and
of cities beyond the Global North. For instance, the United States South is a region
that had been disproportionally overlooked by American urban ethnographers yet
recently has begun to appear on the map (for instance, Falk, 2004; Nájera, 2015;
Z.F. Robinson, 2014; Rushing, 2009; Stuesse, 2016; Sullivan, 2018; Wynn, 2015; see
Lloyd, 2012, for an overview). Collectively, this work pushes us to recognise both
the limits of some urban concepts and theories developed in North America and Eu-
rope’s largest cities, and the generalizability of some others in studying more diverse
geographic settings.
For instance, within the United States, Wanda Rushing (2009) and Zandria Rob-
inson (2014) have each published important accounts of Memphis, Tennessee. In so
doing, they present timely sociological portraits of an understudied city in the United
States South. Z.A. Robinson’s (2014a) book explicitly interrogates how Memphis is
different from other places, sketching how African American identities take shape
within the specific location – a shape that is different than the one identities take in
Chicago or other northern cities, as well as in other places within the South. Other,
previously neglected United States regions that have begun to receive ethnographic
attention include the Midwest (Perry, 2016; Salamon, 2003), the Rocky Mountains
Region (Langegger, 2016), and other parts of the American West (Borchard, 2005;
Borer, 2019).
Some contemporary ethnographers merge scholarship on neglected regions with
scholarship on understudied place categories, such as non-metropolitan and smaller
296 Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino
cities. For instance, Sarah Mayorga-Gallo (2014) explores neighbourhood interac-
tions and practices in a multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Durham, North Carolina.
Similarly turning to an understudied city, Evelyn Perry (2016) portrays how resi-
dents work to live together in a racially, ethnically, economically, and sexually diverse
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, neighbourhood. Part of the value of these two works, among
similar others, is that they reveal dynamics and patterns that might be more difficult
to locate in larger cities. They also document the lives, attitudes, and practices of
smaller city actors whom we have rarely encountered in urban ethnographies before.
Beyond exploring understudied regions and place categories within North America
and in other Western countries, a sizeable and quickly growing number of urban eth-
nographies carry readers beyond nations and regions of the Global North altogether.
A host of new book-length ethnographies takes place in developing parts of Asia
(Anjaria, 2016; Farrer, 2002; Farrer and Field, 2015; Ghertner, 2015; Gold, 2017;
Hoang, 2015; Mathews, 2018; Simone, 2014; Solinger, 2018), the Middle East (Mon-
roe, 2016), Africa (Archambault, 2017; Hansen, 2012; Peterson, 2014; Simone, 2004;
Weiss, 2009), and South America (Arias, 2006; Auyero and Berti, 2015; Auyero and
Swistun, 2009; Caldeira, 2000; Freire-Medeiros, 2014; Goldstein, 2016; Lazar, 2007;
Penglase, 2014; Wolford, 2010; Zeiderman, 2016). Increasingly, Global South eth-
nographers publish their research in English in response to rising scholarly interest in
their work, especially in the field of urban studies (see J. Robinson, 2014; Roy, 2014).
Nonetheless, as mentioned earlier, due to our decision to only focus on English lan-
guage publications in this chapter, we are very likely ignoring some rich traditions and
developments of national and regional urban ethnographic research around the globe.
Generally speaking, one of the core benefits of turning ethnographic attention to
understudied locales is the opportunity to test, expand, and revise extant theories,
as well as encourage new theoretical development. This benefit arises from study-
ing interactions, patterns, and dynamics that may – or, productively, may not – be
distinct from those encountered in the types of places urban ethnographers habitu-
ally study.

New Research Designs and Methods

Having discussed recent work that is innovative in its attention to understudied
themes and locales, we turn now to field-based scholarship that relies on innovative
methods. This includes new developments in research design, such as multi-sited and
team studies, and new strategies for data collection as, for instance, visual and mo-
bile ethnographic methods.
New Study Designs. Over the past two decades, perhaps inspired by anthropologist
George Marcus’s (1995) seminal article (also see Coleman and Von Hellermann,
2012), we have seen a significant rise in the number of multi-sited urban ethnogra-
phies. Notable recent examples include the works by Brown-Saracino (2009, 2017),
Castañeda (2018), Jerolmack (2013), Simone (2004), Wacquant (2008), and Wynn
(2015). Typically, this type of comparative ethnography is used for distinct purposes.
In some instances, it primarily serves to demonstrate the scope of a phenomenon, or
to examine how that phenomenon takes shape across distinct locales. This is true, for
instance, of Meaghan Stiman’s (2017) investigation into second-homeownership in a
rural town in Maine and in Boston. In subtle contrast, others use multiple ­locations
 Urban Ethnography 297
to compare differences in urban dynamics, attitudes, and practices, and to ultimately
identify their origins. This, for example, applies to Japonica Brown-Saracino’s
(2017) inquiry into the sources of place-specific ‘sexual identity cultures’ in four
small United States cities. Here, differences and similarities in the ecology of cities
are leveraged to determine the basis of identity heterogeneity. Yet another approach
to multi-sited ethnography can be seen in Colin Jerolmack’s (2013) already men-
tioned ethnography in which he followed and examined one ‘cultural object’ (Gris-
wold 1987) – in this case, the pigeon – across a variety of international contexts.
Ultimately, a unique feature of multi-sited, comparative ethnographies lies in their
ability to deliver descriptive depth and breadth at the same time, and in their greater
potential for theory application and development.
Recent years have likewise seen an increase in the number of team ethnographies,
a second notable innovation in study design that challenges the long-standing dom-
inance of solitary, White, male ethnographers exploring little-known worlds on the
fringes of mainstream society. In addition to the rare, classic team projects by Lynd
and Lynd (1929) and Thomas and Znaniecki (1918), modern examples of this genre
include the collaborative studies by Auyero and his co-authors (Auyero and Berti,
2015; Auyero and Swistun, 2009), Baiocchi and Ganuza (2016), Bourgois and Sch-
onberg (2009), Farrer and Field (2015), Jacques and Wright (2015), Kahn-Harris
and Gidley (2010), Knowles and Harper (2009), Snow and Anderson (1993), Las-
siter et al. (2004), and Vannini and Taggart (2014). In a number of cases, research
team members conduct fieldwork in different locations and thus combine the strat-
egies and strengths of team and multi-sited ethnography (for instance, Gambetta and
Hamill, 2005; Gotham and Greenberg, 2014; Salamon and MacTavish, 2017; Zukin
et al., 2015).
Some ethnographic research teams include persons of similar background and
standing, which may offer its own set of advantages, while other teams are com-
posed of members that are notably varied in discipline, level of experience, iden-
tities, and/or field memberships. As many examples within this genre show, it can
be a tremendous benefit to draw strategically on the diversity of team members,
especially if some have privileged access to, or special knowledge of, certain field
regions. However, regardless of the composition of research teams, all group ethnog-
raphies likely facilitate extended time in the field(s), provide multiple viewpoints,
and amplify analytic capacity, which often results in increased descriptive depth and
breadth, as well as explanatory strength. Overall, due to their many advantages, we
expect to see an increase in both multi-sited and team ethnographies in future years.
Methodological Innovations. Limited space only permits brief nods to two recent
innovations in ethnographic research methods, namely a growing usage of visual and
mobile methods. While anthropologists look back on a long tradition of working
visually in their fields, in the 1980s, Douglas Harper (1982, 1987) was one of the first
sociologists to incorporate photography into his research, not only for the purpose of
illustration but as an ethnographic method and form of representation in its own right.
In recent years, a number of urban ethnographers have followed in his footsteps and
either systematically produced or collected images (for instance, Hondagneu-Sotelo,
2014; Jerolmack, 2013), or collaborated with professional photographers (Duneier,
1999; Vannini and Taggart, 2014), in order to visualise aspects of their fieldwork in
ways that facilitate and enhance analysis. Moreover, a significant n­ umber of today’s
298 Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino
urban ethnographies, too many to mention, contain photographs for largely illustra-
tive purposes. Interestingly, in recent years, some prominent American urban ethnog-
raphers – among them Mitchell Duneier, Hilary Silver, Phillip Vannini, and Sudhir
Venkatesh – have produced and/or directed feature-length documentary films based
on their fieldwork, thereby broadening audiences and opportunities for engagement
with their research. We expect this trend towards visualisation to continue, as well as
diversify, in urban ethnography, as new generations of scholars become increasingly
aware of the visual realities and dynamics of their fields, and as they learn to employ
visual tools that capture urban life in previously underexplored and analytically pro-
ductive ways.
Another trend in urban ethnographic research lies in fieldworkers’ recent efforts
to better capture old and new forms of mobility encountered in their fields. In line
with insights facilitated by the mobilities paradigm (see Büscher et al., 2010; Sheller,
2014), and by novel applications of traditional ethnographic methods (for instance,
Kusenbach, 2003; Trouille and Tavory, 2016), urban ethnographers have come a
long way from sitting in lounges and on doorsteps – recalling Robert Park’s famous
quote in which he urged Chicago School students to get the ‘seats of [their] pants
dirty in real research’ – to relying on ‘shoe leather’ (Duneier, 2004) in their studies.
Today, ethnographers often follow field members, as well as cultural objects and
analytic ideas, within and beyond local spatial contexts. For a number of recent
ethnographies, most notably those focusing on migration and on daily modes of
mobility that were cited above, following people on the move is the central strategy.
In some cases, foregrounding mobility leads researchers to conduct multi-sited eth-
nographies and thus triggers novel study designs. Yet regardless of topic or setting,
mobile field research methods are becoming popular. For instance, an increasing
number of studies employ ‘go-alongs’ (Kusenbach, 2003), a systematic tool that
combines interviewing and observation, and promises to deliver novel insights into
the meanings, practices, and other dynamics that shape urban places.
One could argue that today’s popularity of visual and mobile ethnographic
methods reflects urban researcher’s willingness to incorporate a larger trend into
their work, namely the development of more sensory and performative ethnographic
methods which thrives in certain subareas of anthropology and sociology today,
especially outside the United States (Elliott and Culhane, 2016). Lastly, another
important driver of methodological innovation in urban research is the rapid expan-
sion of new information technologies and virtual capabilities. While some urban
ethnographers have begun to incorporate digital worlds and processes into their
fieldwork and analyses (for instance, Lane, 2016; Neal, 2012), as a group, they are
still far from tapping the full potential of these developments.

Conclusion

We have strived to show that, today, urban ethnography is (again) an important

strand of social scientific inquiry within the United States and beyond. Since its
revival in the 1990s, urban ethnography as a way of studying people, places, and
processes continues to be popular among scholars of many generations, disciplines,
theoretical orientations, and global regions. During the past 20 years, this popularity
 Urban Ethnography 299
has brought forth a remarkably large and diverse body of work that we have at-
tempted to broadly characterise in this chapter.
As discussed, all urban ethnographic research originates in the real worlds and
daily lives of people who inhabit cities and related spaces. Nonetheless, and in
addition, today’s ethnographers also look elsewhere to enrich their understanding of
urban settings, dynamics, and conditions. Increasingly, and in complete agreement
with Chicago School traditions, contemporary fieldworkers draw on other realms
and sources in their work, such as virtual realities, social media, nature, material
culture, mobility flows, or governing structures, to name just a few. Likewise, and in
further harmony with early roots, some scholars have begun to enter and shape pub-
lic, in addition to academic, discourses while moving urban ethnography towards
a more relevant and socially conscious position. Without any doubt, there is much
room left for the voices of urban observers to be heard by decision makers and
administrators, as well as the ‘real’ people – especially as cities become increasingly
potent actors in tackling those social problems that are dismissed, neglected, and
in some cases even created by state and regional governments. We are, for instance,
thinking of climate change and housing inequalities here.
The last two decades have seen considerable efforts to further institutionalise
the field. Today, many, if not most, sociology, anthropology, and other social sci-
ence departments have ethnographers on the faculty, and a good number of them
are examining urban issues. Unlike 20 years ago, several research centres for urban
­ethnography operate today, for instance, at Yale University, the University of Texas
Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Toronto, and at Berlin’s
Humboldt University. These centres frequently organise talks, workshops, confer-
ences, and other events (see, for instance, Anderson et al., 2004). In recent years,
graduate student summer schools specialising in urban ethnography have been
offered by the Universities of Trento (Italy) and Kent (United Kingdom), and by
Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Hong Kong), among others.
While the online journal Urbanities, from the University of Kent, is currently the
only publication exclusively dedicated to urban ethnographic research, work in this
tradition can be found in countless other journals specialising in cities, space and
place, mobility, migration, globalisation, culture, and qualitative research methods.
Publishers such as the University Presses of Chicago, California, New York, and
Oxford, as well as Routledge, continue to function as key outlets for urban ethno-
graphic research in book format. Increasingly, these established publishers are joined
by other, international presses that are able and willing to promote this line of work.
In short, and in many ways, urban ethnography’s significance as a vital, interdisci-
plinary subfield is growing, and we expect the current trend towards greater institu-
tionalisation and diversification to continue.
Lastly, over the next two decades, we anticipate an increasingly global focus in
urban ethnographic scholarship, as well as more sustained attention to non-metro-
politan, smaller cities, and to harnessing conceptual insights from the study of sub-
urban and rural locales as well. We also look forward to future innovations in urban
fieldwork methods as our colleagues continue to explore multi-sited and compara-
tive research designs, visual and mobile methods, digital technologies, and employ
a multitude of other new ethnographic strategies for uncovering important urban
dynamics and processes in current and future societies.
300 Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino
Acknowledgements

We thank Andrea M. Brighenti, Gabriela B. Christmann, Robert M. Emerson, James

Farrer, and the three encyclopaedia editors for their many thoughtful suggestions
and/or constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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 15
Cities and Networks
Kathryn Freeman Anderson and Zachary P. Neal

Introduction

Cities are obviously places, but places for what? We think cities are, first and fore-
most, places for interaction. This perspective is certainly not a new one. Indeed,
thinking about cities as places for interaction lies at the heart of some of the most
influential social theories, including Durkheim’s (1893) theories of the division of
labour and Simmel’s (1903) theories of urban social integration and transforma-
tion. It also played a critical role in the birth of urban sociology as a discipline, first
in Park’s (1915) early agenda for the field, and later in Wirth’s (1938) summary of
Urbanism as a Way of Life. Each of these early theories pointed to the fact that as
cities become bigger and denser, the interactions within them become more frequent
and intense. Because large dense cities are now the most typical form of human
settlement, the range of social, economic, political, and creative interactions taking
place there is growing at an ever faster pace (Bettencourt et al., 2007). Turning to the
theories and tools of networks gives us a way to explore what is going on.
Although networks are often framed as a relatively new approach to studying
society, using networks to understand cities and communities actually has quite a
long history stretching several centuries. The foundation of the methodological tools
used today to study networks (i.e. graph theory) were laid by mathematician Leon-
hard Euler (1741), while studying an urban transportation problem. Known as the
Bridges of Königsberg problem, Euler sought to understand why it was impossible
for the residents of Königsberg to visit all four districts of their riverside village,
crossing each of its seven bridges only once, and how the network of bridges would
need to change for this to become possible. Nearly two hundred years later, while
studying the relationships among girls at a reform school and their use of these

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
312 Kathryn Freeman Anderson and Zachary P. Neal
relationships to build community and coordinate their collective action (i.e. to run
away), Moreno (1934) developed the sociogram, an approach to drawing social net-
works using dots connected by lines that is now used not only in network studies of
communities, but in nearly all network research. Working at about the same time,
Festinger et al. (1950), who is today primarily known for his psychological theories
of cognitive dissonance, was among the first to research how and when neighbours
form social relationships and transform neighbourhoods into communities.
As we highlight in this chapter, these early innovations have paved the way for a
broad range of research on how networks shape and influence cities and commu-
nities today. These influences can be found at the local scale (e.g. Giuffre, 2013), the
global scale (e.g. Taylor and Derudder, 2015), and across multiple scales (e.g. Neal,
2013), as well as in the methods used to study networks (e.g. Barthélemy, 2017;
Blanchard and Volchenkov, 2008). However, we focus on a few key issues that are
particularly pressing for today’s cities. First, we reflect on what communities are,
and how thinking about communities in terms of networks can help us grapple with
difficult questions about whether new technologies like social media are building
or breaking communities. Next, we explore some of the latest research pointing to
why such community networks are important, not only for contributing to mem-
bers’ sense of belonging, but also to their health and ability to work together to
address local challenges. In the third section, we take a closer look at the interaction
of two key urban networks – the social networks of people and the infrastructure
networks of the built environment – to understand how they influence one another
in reciprocal ways. Finally, in the last section, we shift from thinking about net-
works within cities to networks between cities, where contemporary research has
sought to understand how global economic and transportation links have afforded
some places privileged positions as ‘world cities’, while relegating other places to the
periphery. We conclude, taking note of the breadth of urban network research now
underway, and briefly speculating on the key challenges and opportunities as this
field of inquiry matures.

Network Conceptions of Community

In urban studies, ‘community’ is among the hardest concepts to define, which is

a problem because it plays such a central role in nearly any urban phenomenon.
Several decades before the advent of new kinds of communities like Facebook and
Twitter, Hillery (1955) noticed that researchers were already using nearly a hun-
dred different definitions of community. Today, there are even more definitions of
community (Neal, 2012), but many of these definitions fall into two basic categories:
community as a place and community as a population.
The community-as-place perspective views a community as a group of people
who live near each other, within a bounded geographic area. Exactly how that geo-
graphic area is bounded may vary from researcher to researcher. Some think of com-
munities as very small geographic areas like a single city block in New York, while
others might think of communities as much larger like an entire small town. Between
these extremes, researchers at the University of Chicago defined 75 communities
throughout the city in 1920, and these communities continue to form the basis for
 Cities and Networks 313
much of Chicago’s urban planning efforts. But, however these boundaries are drawn,
because they define particular parts of a city, this perspective often equates com-
munities with another common concept: the neighbourhood. Indeed, frequently the
terms neighbourhood and community are used interchangeably as synonyms. There
is a certain appeal to this approach for doing research. It provides an intuitive and
common-sense way of locating and identifying people as members of a particular
community. But, is this really what communities are? Imagine a neighbourhood (or
other geographically bounded area) in which the people rarely interact which each
other, and when they do, they do not really like each other. Although this might be a
neighbourhood (perhaps not one I would want to live in!), is it really a community?
The community-as-population perspective adopts a different approach, viewing
community as a group of people who share something in common. For example,
researchers often talk of ‘the Black community’ (Desmond et al., 2016) or ‘the
academic community’ (Bolden et al., 2014). Exactly what the members of such
communities share is often left ambiguous or fairly broad; presumably members of
the Black community share a racial identification while members of the academic
community share an occupation, although they may also share many other expe-
riences in common. Just as the community-as-place definition equates community
with neighbourhood, the community-as-population definition equates community
with group, and thus also offers an intuitive and common-sense way of locating and
identifying people as members of a particular community. But again, is this really
what communities are? Many professors spend long hours alone staring at a com-
puter screen, and may be fairly ambivalent towards their colleagues at department
meetings, so although professors are all engaged in a common occupation, do they
form a community?
Starting in 1979 (Wellman 1979), and continuing in his more recent work (Rainie
and Wellman, 2012), Wellman saw a problem with defining community as place or
population. He was interested in understanding how people answer ‘the community
question’: what happens to community when there are large-scale social and tech-
nological changes, like the industrial revolution or the development of smart phones
and social media. Nearly every generation, confronting its own changes, laments the
loss of community. In the early twentieth century, the telephone was going to destroy
community because people no longer needed to interact face-to-face, while in the
1980s the VCR (video cassette recorder) was going to destroy community because
people could watch recorded television shows and never leave their homes. Today,
some even claim that Facebook is ‘destroying how society works’ (Sulleyman, 2017).
Wellman (1979) knew these alarmist fears that community was lost were wrong,
but how could every generation think community was lost when in fact commu-
nities were thriving? He argued that researchers were looking in the wrong places
and defining community too narrowly. Community does not necessarily happen in
a specific place, and it does not necessarily happen among a specific population.
Instead, community is a pattern of relationships.
By thinking about a community as a pattern, Wellman shifted the conversation
to networks, and to a network definition of community. From a network perspec-
tive, a community is a set of people (or other entities) who interact more with other
people in the same set than with people in another set (Newman, 2006). Figure 15.1
illustrates what this might look like. The five people on the left mostly interact with
314 Kathryn Freeman Anderson and Zachary P. Neal

Figure 15.1  A network definition of community.

each other but only sometimes interact with those on the right, while the five people
on the right mostly interact with each other but only sometimes with those on the
left. Thus, the people on the right form a network community and the people on
the left form a different network community. It is important to note that unlike the
community-as-place definition, the network conception of community is not based
on where these people live. Of course, when people who form a network community
do live near one another, then communities and neighbourhoods might overlap (e.g.
Hipp et al., 2012), but it is not required. Similarly, unlike the community-as-popu-
lation definition, network communities are not based on who these people are. Of
course, people who share something in common may be more likely to interact and
form a network community (this is called ‘homophily’), but again, it is not required.
A key advantage to thinking about community-as-pattern, from a network per-
spective, is that it allows researchers to ask questions like ‘Is this neighbourhood a
community?’ or ‘Does this group of similar people form a community?’
One of the most common questions in urban network research today is ‘Are
there any communities here?’ which urban network researchers explore using sev-
eral techniques. For example, Blokland (2003) used an ethnographic approach to
study the types of social relationships maintained by the residents in the Rotterdam
neighbourhood of Hilleslius, finding that some types of ties (e.g. bonds of affection)
generate community, while others (e.g. non-reciprocal interdependencies addressing
instrumental needs) do not. Others use analytic techniques like community detec-
tion (Fortunato, 2010) to identify which people are members of which communities
in large social networks spanning whole cities, countries, or the world. Most often,
we think of urban communities as relatively small scale, occurring in neighbour-
hoods and parts of cities. Hipp et al. (2012) investigated exactly that issue, exploring
whether the location of network communities line up with the location of neigh-
bourhoods (as defined by the US Census block groups) in several rural North Caro-
lina counties. They found that although the network communities were spatially
compact (i.e. their members live near one another), they often did not follow the
Census boundaries, and thus that Census place boundaries are poor approximations
for community boundaries. Grannis (1998) has shown that the pattern of streets in
a city might help explain why, because social interactions and thus network commu-
nities tend to form in parts of a city where residents can comfortably walk on side
streets without crossing busy streets.
 Cities and Networks 315
Urban network communities are not restricted to just small-scale within-city
groups, however. Expert et al. (2011) examined mobile phone calls throughout all
of Belgium to look for Belgian communities of social interaction. By using differ-
ent understandings about how sets of people need to be connected to count as a
community, they identified two different answers at different geographic scales. At
the smaller scale, they found 18 network communities focused around Belgium’s
major cities and regions, while at a larger scale, they found just two communities
focused around Belgium’s two primary languages: Dutch speaking Flanders in the
north, and French speaking Wallonia in the south. Urban network communities are
not restricted to communities of people either; it is possible to think about and look
for communities of cities. For example, Guimerà et al. (2005) examined patterns of
interactions between cities by looking at airline traffic, finding that large sets of cit-
ies form distinct network communities of global transportation that mirror major
world regions including North America, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and North
Africa. While these communities may not be surprising, their analysis also high-
lighted how cities in some parts of the world – Alaska or Papua New Guinea – form
relatively small and isolated communities, which might both preserve local culture,
but also prevent access to important resources.

The Importance of Community Networks

While we can think about the definition of urban community at these various levels,
returning to the more intimate neighbourhood scale, it also begs the question: why do
the community networks we might find there matter? In early sociological thought
and in our popular understanding of urban social networks, a misconception exists
that urban dwellers have fewer social contacts and that the nature of these relation-
ships is often of poorer quality than their exurban or rural counterparts (Kasarda
and Janowitz, 1974; Putnam, 2000; Simmel, 1950). The image of the city is that
of alienation and social isolation. Although many people are around, people are
more transient and disconnected, and thus, making close and enduring friendships
in the city is more difficult (Simmel, 1950). However, empirical research indicates
that this is usually not the case. Urbanites are generally able to maintain large and
strong social networks, though they tend to be more varied across social settings and
include more non-kin relations (Beggs et al., 1996; Fischer, 1982). Oftentimes these
relationships are not confined to the immediate neighbourhood context, but span
the city in the form of social networks across work, school, recreation, and family
(Guest and Wierzbicki, 1999). Thus, although our understanding of the social net-
work needs to be expanded as noted above, urban life is not a hindrance to strong
social networks, which are crucial for day-to-day quality of life and social support
(Warren, 1981; Wellman and Wortley, 1990).
Though these networks are varied, certain aspects of individuals, their neighbour-
hoods, and their particular urban setting can encourage and facilitate the formation
and maintenance of social networks over time (Greenbaum, 1982). That is, not all
city and neighbourhood settings have the same level of social connectedness. In gen-
eral, stable neighbourhoods with long-term residents who share similar character-
istics, typically from more advantaged social categories, exhibit a higher degree of
316 Kathryn Freeman Anderson and Zachary P. Neal
social cohesion and stronger social networks (Campbell and Lee, 1992; Hipp and
Perrin, 2006, 2009; Sampson, 1988). However, some work has also shown that the
urban poor often have denser and stronger network ties as a coping strategy for
dealing with the challenges of making ends meet (Mazelis, 2017; Small, 2009; Tigges
et al., 1998). Further, some urban areas are better designed to facilitate network link-
ages (discussed in detail in the next section), some exhibit a greater degree of social
capital, and some have more organisational resources which provide the sites where
social networks can be activated. For example, research has shown that residents of
poor and minority segregated communities have smaller and less dense social net-
works in that they have fewer network connections that are strong and high quality
(Deng and Bonacich, 1991; Small, 2007). Some urban scholars attribute this to the
harsher socioeconomic conditions of these neighbourhoods which make it more dif-
ficult to create and maintain social networks (Barnes, 2003; Small, 2007). Others
attribute this to the lack of organisational infrastructure in such areas, both in terms
of civil society as well as through businesses and service providers which can pro-
vide public spaces for social network formation (Small, 2009; Small and Stark, 2005;
Wilson, 1987).
Moreover, research on community social networks has demonstrated that net-
work connections have important consequences for community residents. Connected
communities are better able to mobilise people and resources to accomplish needed
tasks for the community, even when those neighbourhoods themselves may be
resource poor (Bolland and McCallum, 2002; Lelieveldt, 2004; Son and Lin, 2008).
These connections can refer to fellow residents, to organisations across the urban
area, and to urban power structures and governing bodies (Baldassarri and Diani,
2007; Galaskiewicz, 1979; Knoke and Wood, 1981). For instance, this can apply
to political movements and power struggles across the city. Network actors, either
people or local organisations, that are better connected, or more centrally connected,
can serve as power brokers for their communities in order to mobilise resources or
favourable outcomes for their area. An example of this includes NIMBY (not in my
backyard) movements meant to keep undesirable neighbours or facilities out of their
particular community (Shemtov, 2003). Communities that are rich in network con-
nections, both within the community and powerful external local entities, are better
able to mobilise.
Or, this can occur in a much more mundane fashion in the sense that connected
communities have a greater shared understanding of social norms and social cohe-
sion (Sampson, 1991, 2012). This is referred to as collective efficacy and indicates
the shared expectations for social control that reinforce stability and social norms in
the community (Sampson, 2012). However, as with social networks more broadly,
not all communities exhibit similar levels of collective efficacy. In an example of how
this may play out, a community with a strong sense of collective efficacy may have
more informal controls on social behaviour such that if the neighbourhood kids
are engaged in inappropriate behaviours, other neighbours would feel empowered
and compelled to intervene based on the shared sense of social norms within the
community (Sampson et al., 1999). This can also apply to positive behaviours such
as sharing resources, maintaining a pleasant property, inviting neighbours over, etc.
Research shows that these neighbourhood qualities also lead to positive outcomes
for those communities. For instance, well-connected neighbourhoods with a rich
 Cities and Networks 317
organisational life and a high degree of collective efficacy have greater access to
needed resources (Small, 2009; Small et al., 2008), lower crime rates (Sampson et
al., 1997), a lower incidence of environmental problems (Grant et al., 2004), better
health outcomes (Cattell, 2001; Morenoff, 2003), greater opportunities for leisure
activity and recreation (Galaskiewicz et al., 2012; Stokowski and Lee, 1991), and
fare better in the face of natural and human-made disasters (Cagney et al., 2016;
Gillespie and Murty, 1994; Hawkins and Maurer, 2010). However, some work also
indicates that social networks can be activated for more nefarious activities, such
that it can help facilitate crime networks, gang activity, or the circulation of illicit
substances (Browning et al., 2004; McCarthy and Hagan, 1995). On the whole,
though, much of this work indicates that social networks across communities can
allow communities to mobilise during difficult times and can lead to improved
quality of life for its residents.

The Built Environment and Urban Networks

Beyond social networks in urban locales, we can also think about the city itself and
its infrastructure as a network structure (Craven and Wellman, 1973; Neal, 2013).
Urban areas have vast networks of infrastructure, all of which are part of the urban
built environment. Typically, these are designed with the purpose of efficiently dis-
tributing goods, services, and people throughout the city in order to provide for local
needs and ensure the smooth functioning of the city (Neal, 2013). Obvious examples
of these include street networks, sidewalks/walking trails, and public transportation
routes/lines, but these can also include less visible services, such as water/sewage
pipes, the power grid, and internet cable lines (Barthélemy, 2011; Ewing and Cer-
vero, 2010; Schuler, 1992). All of these elements of the city can be thought of in
network terms and have consequences for human outcomes and social interactions.
If we think about the city as a network, we can categorise its various elements
using the language of social network analysis. Using the transportation infrastructure
as an example, in its simplest form, the locations of people (homes), organisations
(businesses), or intersections can be thought of as nodes within the urban system,
and the streets, public transportation lines, and sidewalks that connect them can be
thought of as arcs (or edges), though there have been a number of variations on this
theme (Barthélemy, 2011; Porta et al., 2006). Much like social networks, the distinct
structure of the linkages between the nodes and arcs has implications for how we
understand how things get accomplished in such a system (Jiang and Claramunt,
2004). Indeed, many of the measures, at least conceptually, that we can compute for
social networks can also apply to the case of urban infrastructure networks, such as
centrality or density (Blanchard and Volchenkov, 2008; Crucitti et al., 2006; Jiang
and Claramunt, 2004; Porta et al., 2006). For example, a business which is located
at the intersection of many major streets in the city centre will have a greater degree
of centrality than a business located along a street further away from the city centre.
Depending on the network structure of the city, different patterns or archetypes of
cities may emerge, some of which may be more or less conducive to accessing diverse
elements of the city and which prioritise spatial access for certain groups (Mar-
shall, 2004; Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 2013). For example, many old European
318 Kathryn Freeman Anderson and Zachary P. Neal
cities which pre-date the automobile or other forms of vehicular traffic have a dense
organic structure which may be confusing to outsiders, but which demarcate clear
neighbourhoods and have many linkages between areas. By contrast, more fully
planned urban areas often use a grid system to create a clear pattern within the
street network. Oftentimes, we may observe one system in the city centre (a grid for
example), and an entirely different system in outlying areas (the suburban subdivi-
sion). In all cases, the urban design can shape how residents of such areas perceive
the city and their place within it (Kang, 2017; Lerman and Omer, 2016). Though
not deterministic, the urban network provides the structure by which people learn
to navigate the space around them and gain access to important sites for day-to-day
life, such as work, school, entertainment, etc.
Furthermore, the network infrastructure has consequences that translate into the
social realm, and can influence the social networks of individuals as well. The street
design itself can create or hinder linkages between people or would-be neighbours.
Cities with narrow blocks and two-way streets that are highly interconnected cre-
ate more opportunities for walking and as a result for neighbours to make contact
with one another (Handy et al., 2003; Riggs and Gilderbloom, 2016). Conversely,
though the purpose of suburban communities was to create more safe communities
of like-minded people, the urban design itself often hinders interaction (Freeman,
2001). Because of their distance from central business districts, most suburban
dwellers are forced to drive to work alone in their cars, and commutes are often
longer which detracts from time spent in the community (Duany et al., 2000; Jack-
son, 1985; Putnam, 2000). Moreover, the streets themselves are often meandering,
disconnected, or filled with dead end cul-de-sacs which make it difficult to walk to
anywhere within the neighbourhood, including places which are close in terms of
Euclidian distance (Duany et al., 2000; Handy et al., 2003). Indeed, evidence from
‘New Urbanist’ community movements, which feature short, narrow, pedestrian
friendly blocks, and mixed-used infrastructure demonstrate that these designs facil-
itate interactions between neighbourhoods (Leinberger, 2008; Talen, 2013, 1999).
Thus, we can think of the city infrastructure as a network which has direct implica-
tions for traditional social networks.
Moreover, the street network can also facilitate linkages between individuals/
households and key organisational sites, which are necessary for daily living and
which can improve quality of life (McQuarrie and Marwell, 2009). Much like how a
well-connected city can create spaces for people to run into each other and interact,
it also creates greater opportunity for people to make contact with businesses and
service providers throughout the city. This can be the case for essential places, such
as employment, education, medical care, or grocery stores, but it can also apply to
organisations that serve to make life more enjoyable, such as park spaces, or third
places like coffee shops, bars, and restaurants (Burns and Inglis, 2007; Talen and
Anselin, 1998; Yiannakoulias et al., 2013). A more efficiently connected city allows
greater access to these types of services.
From this thinking, it can become fairly evident how a poorly designed city can
impact the lives of local residents in real ways. As a clear example, many scholars
point to continued residential segregation as a major source of urban social prob-
lems. Racial segregation remains a persistent and pervasive feature of many American
cities despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed housing discrimination
 Cities and Networks 319
on the basis of race (Massey and Denton, 1993). And, more recently urban sociology
has turned its attention to growing income segregation across urban areas (Fischer,
2003; Jargowsky, 1996; Reardon and Bischoff, 2011). This separation is often cre-
ated or reinforced by the urban infrastructure, which can create physical barriers
between parts of the city (Grannis, 1998; Sharkey, 2013). Further, if the infrastruc-
ture is limited for efficiently and cheaply moving about the city (such as with pub-
lic transportation options), it may be difficult for these residents to overcome the
limitations of their position within the network (Sharkey, 2013). Likewise, research
shows that this has clear consequences for such communities. This work has linked
residential segregation to both poorer social and organisational networks in that res-
idents of these communities often have weaker and fewer social ties, and have poor
access to important organisational resources (Allard, 2009; Anderson, 2017; Small,
2007; Small and McDermott, 2006). This line of research has also shown that this
can have real impacts on quality of life indicators as well. For instance, the existence
of safe, pleasant, and greener trails and walkways in a community promotes greater
walking, physical activity, and lower rates of obesity as a result (McNeill et al.,
2006; Sawyer et al., 2017; Schüle and Bolte, 2015). Thus, analysing the urban infra-
structure as a network has important implications for our understanding of urban
social networks and more broadly a variety of urban inequalities and life outcomes.

Global Urban Networks

Much of this chapter has focused on the importance of networks within cities, includ-
ing the communities of social interaction among their residents and the patterns of
mobility made possible by their transportation infrastructures. However, networks
are equally important between cities. Although thinking about cities interacting with
other cities at the global scale naturally brings to mind notions of contemporary
globalisation or the technological innovations that make it possible, global urban
networks actually have a long history.
Some of the first global urban networks were developed for trade. The overland Silk
Road linked silk-producing centres in the East with trading centres in the Mediterranean,
while the maritime Spice Route linked Indian cities and their valuable spices to Europe.
Cities’ positions in this early network gave them particular roles and statutes in the
nascent global economy: all roads really did lead to Rome, which was the consumer cen-
tre of the ancient world, while all goods passed through Constantinople (now Istanbul),
which became significant as the gateway between East and West and a particularly good
place to collect taxes. These urban networks in the ancient world laid the foundation
for similar trade networks in the medieval period, including the highly centralised mar-
itime trading networks controlled by Venice and Genoa, and the more decentralised
Hanseatic League that coordinated economic activity in northern cities like London and
Amsterdam. Technological advances have also been responsible for the formation of
some early global urban networks, including the completion of a submarine telegraph
cable linking North America and Europe in 1858, which evolved into a network that by
1903 linked cities on every continent. These changes led McKenzie (1927) to presciently
observe that ‘the world is fast becoming a closed region … in which centres and routes
[networks!] are gaining precedence over boundaries and political areas’ (p. 28).
320 Kathryn Freeman Anderson and Zachary P. Neal
These large-scale urban networks are also critically important for cities’
development, as Cronon’s (1992) story of Chicago revealed. St Louis was the capital
of the American frontier throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, largely
owing to its natural advantage being situated at the confluence of the Mississippi,
Missouri, and Illinois rivers, which facilitated transportation and trade with the
frontier and rest of the world. At that time, Chicago was just a small town situated
near Lake Michigan. What happened? In 1848, the Illinois–Michigan canal opened,
linking two major trading networks – the Mississippi River network and the Great
Lakes network – with Chicago located at the linking point (not unlike Constanti-
nople centuries earlier). A few years later, in 1852, these two water-based networks
were linked to each other and the newly forming rail network through the comple-
tion of the Chicago and Alton (C&A) railroad. Neither the canal (about 100 miles)
nor the railroad (about 300 miles) were very long compared to the Mississippi River
(about 2,300 miles), but adding these two small links to an existing network trans-
formed what would become of both Chicago and St Louis.
The current wave of research on global urban networks largely traces its origins
to Friedmann’s world city hypothesis (1986), and more specifically to the second
of seven related propositions: ‘Key cities throughout the world are used by global
capital as “basing points” in the spatial organisation and articulation of produc-
tion and markets. The resulting linkages make it possible to arrange world cities
into a complex spatial hierarchy’ (p. 71). Although he did not explicitly reference
networks, it is clearly what he had in mind, having included a drawing of a hypothet-
ical world city network in this early theoretical work. However, testing that hypo-
thesis and examining a real, empirical world city network (rather than a hypothetical
one) has proven challenging because data on the economic relations between cities
are limited.
As we discussed earlier, some research has focused on using transportation
(e.g. Guimerà et al., 2005) and communication (e.g. Expert et al., 2011) data
to study large-scale inter-city relations. But, two dominant approaches to study-
ing economic relations have emerged: corporate relations and advanced producer
service interlocks. The corporate relations approach observes that whereas in
the past companies would do everything in the same place (e.g. the factory and
administration building were adjacent), advances in communication and transpor-
tation technologies made a new international division of labour (NIDL) possible
(Cohen, 1981). The NIDL meant that corporations could locate the production
activities in parts of the world with low wages and raw materials costs, and locate
their management functions in parts of the world with access to banks, law firms,
and nice restaurants. As a result, some cities like New York and London con-
tain many corporate headquarters, and people in these cities exert control and
influence over the cities elsewhere that contain their subsidiaries. Although this
logic had been used to explore urban networks at the national scale (Lincoln,
1978; Ross, 1987), Alderson and Beckfield (2004) extended it to the global scale,
studying a network of global cities in which each city with a corporate headquar-
ters was linked to each city with a subsidiary of that corporation. This network
provided an early empirical confirmation of Friedmann’s hypothesis, that a few
select cities sit at the top of a hierarchy as the most central and important in a
network of corporate control.
 Cities and Networks 321
The advanced producer service interlock approach takes a different, but related,
view. When corporations, as a result of the NIDL, are doing business in many differ-
ent countries simultaneously, they are confronted by the challenges of dealing with
different currencies, laws, and customs. Rather than deal with these challenges them-
selves, they outsource to advanced producer services, firms like banks, law firms, and
management consultants, who handle these complexities on behalf of the corpora-
tions (Sassen, 1991). Taylor (2001) observed that inter-city transactions will be eas-
iest for corporations, and thus more likely, if the bank (or law firm, or consultancy)
that they rely on has a branch office location in the two cities participating in the
transaction. Using this logic, he and others have studied a network of global cities
in which two cities are linked to the extent that they contain branches of the same
advanced producer service firms, and thus are likely to engage in transactions with
each other (Taylor and Derudder, 2015). Again, this network provided empirical
confirmation that a few cities occupy particularly advantageous positions and are
poised for economic prosperity at the expense of more peripheral cities.
More recent research has called some of these early findings into question, how-
ever. Neal (2017) observed that these early strategies for measuring world city net-
works, and specifically the economic linkages between pairs of cities, lacked a frame
of reference. For example, it had become commonplace for researchers to observe
that ‘London is well connected’. But, well connected compared to what? He argued
that nearly any big city will be well connected just because it is big, and that it would
be more informative to explore whether a given city is as well connected as it could
be. Adopting this new frame of reference, he found a rather different picture of the
world city network. It was not a global network with just a few privileged cities at
the top, but instead a highly regional network mostly focused on countries and their
key cities. In spite of McKenzie’s (1927) contention that political areas have lost
their significance, it seems that they still play an important role for economic com-
munities in the global urban network.

Conclusion

In summary, although this chapter only provides a quick glimpse into the world of
urban networks, it is a vast and diverse field of social inquiry. It is also one which
can fruitfully re-orient our thinking about urban landscapes and patterns. In this
chapter, we explore four main themes in urban network research. First, we define
a network conception of urban communities. Though much of our popular under-
standing of networks centres around physical neighbourhoods as communities, or
around clusters of like-minded people, a network approach can provide a way to
expand our thinking about the community and potentially lead us to different con-
clusions about how urban networks operate. Then, we discuss how network ties can
be important for communities, however those may be defined. For instance, research
has shown that certain neighbourhood qualities are more conducive for social net-
work formation, and more connected communities are able to accomplish more
for their constituents. Moreover, we can think about these connections at various
levels, including between people, organisations, local power brokers, etc. We also
discuss how the city itself can be thought of as a network structure through its built
322 Kathryn Freeman Anderson and Zachary P. Neal
environment, in that the infrastructure connects people, goods, and services through-
out the city. Different configurations of such infrastructure can lead to vastly differ-
ent outcomes for urban dwellers. Finally, drawing on the globalisation literature, we
examine how urban networks can be observed between cities, as both political and
economic entities.
Given all of the variation in how we can conceptualise and approach urban net-
works, it is not surprising that this field presents with formidable challenges for
carrying out such work. First, what is readily evident here is that the scale of the
network and who the network actors are may be hard to pin down. The network of
interest may refer to micro-level social interactions between individuals, or to mac-
ro-level economic interactions between cities or regions. Similarly, the network may
refer to cross-level interactions because it may describe relationships, for example,
not only among individuals, or among cities, but also between individuals and cities.
These various levels of analysis and actors involved presents both a conceptual and
methodological difficulty. Given the scope of these issues, another challenge is that
this work is often conducted across disciplinary lines. From our brief overview of
the issues at stake in urban network research, it is clear that there are many ‘cooks in
the kitchen’ so to speak. This field spans across the social sciences, from social net-
work analysts in sociology and political science, to both human and transportation
geographers, to economists, and even to physicists, computer scientists, and mathe-
maticians who are often involved in developing the tools of network analysis. While
this diversity provides a wide range of approaches and methodologies for such work,
it can be difficult to move beyond disciplinary thinking and coordinate these many
fields into a coherent urban network story.
Related to this problem, many of the data collection techniques and methodolog-
ical tools for analysis are still being developed as well. Network data is often more
difficult to collect because it typically involves not only data about the individual
entity in which you are interested in studying, but also about that entity’s relations
(be it friends, organisations, cities, trade partners, etc.). Similarly, missing data is
often a bigger problem in network data collection as any amount of missing data
may provide a vastly inaccurate picture of the network of interactions. Finally, even
where the problems of data collection have been worked out, the methodologies for
analysis are still being innovated. While there are many tools for network analysis of
various sorts, oftentimes when we think of urban network research, we imply both
social interactions and interactions embedded within physical space. Both social net-
works and spatial networks invite problems when it comes to statistical analysis and
these are only compounded when attempting analyses which involve both levels.
Despite these difficulties, many of these challenges also provide considerable
space for opportunity and innovation. Although network thinking is by no means
new, as evidenced by the many studies cited above, recent technological and meth-
odological advances are paving the way for more of this type of work, especially
that which is more sophisticated. Because there is so much that we do not yet know
or understand about urban networks at its various levels, there is much opportu-
nity for that work. Relatedly, although there has been a lot of growth in this area in
academic spheres, outside of transportation planning urban network research has
not gained a lot of traction in the applied and planning community. Both the social
and spatial applications of urban network research provide a relatively untapped
 Cities and Networks 323
opportunity for how we build better policy to address urban inequality and its chal-
lenges. Furthermore, the internet, smart phones, and Big Data collection strategies
provide opportunities for network data, of both the social and geographic varieties,
on a scale that is unprecedented. People are interacting with each other, with organi-
sations, and with places in a manner which is public and readily identifiable which
was not possible before. Though this presents some ethical concerns, it also provides
an expansive opportunity for new ways to think about and conduct urban network
research. It is an ever-expanding field rife with opportunities for discovery, and it is
likely that in the coming years with such technological innovations we will see more
and more of this work.

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 16
Policy Mobilities
How Localities Assemble, Mobilise, and
Adopt Circulated Forms of Knowledge
Astrid Wood

Introducing Policy Mobilities

For almost a century, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists have been
exploring the movement (diffusion, transfer, mobility) of knowledge (practices, pol-
icies, models) across localities (cultures, state, cities) over time (naturally, rationally,
rapidly). The complexity is evidenced in italics and parentheses here to address the
disagreement among different writers at the most basic level over how to describe
what is moving, the involvement of people and places, and the function of historical,
cultural, and temporal conditions. If there is any consensus across the literature, it
is around the messiness of the process, in particular regarding the provisions under
which localities assemble, mobilise, and adopt circulated forms of knowledge.
Within geography and urban studies, research into the peripatetic nature of pol-
icy has ballooned in recent years. Whereas in 2008, there were only five references to
‘policy mobilities’, in 2017, 345 academic publications mentioned policy mobilities
(see Figure 16.1). Among these publications, a number of impressive studies of pol-
icy mobilities have focused on the spread of business improvement districts (Cook,
2008; Ward, 2006), city strategies (Robinson, 2015, 2011a), creative-city strategies
(Peck, 2011a; Prince, 2010), participatory democracy (Peck and Theodore, 2015),
public health (Longhurst and McCann, 2016; Temenos, 2016), smart cities (Kenne-
dy, 2016; Rapoport, 2014), sustainability (Faulconbridge, 2015; Rapoport, 2015;
Temenos and McCann, 2012), tax increment financing (Baker et al., 2016), trans-
port (Bok, 2015; Wood, 2015a), urban regeneration (González, 2011), and welfare
(Peck and Theodore, 2010a); and these have been buoyed by no less than five engag-
ing special issues (Baker and Temenos, 2015; Cochrane and Ward, 2012; Harris
and Moore, 2013, 2015; Kwan and Schwanen, 2016; Peck and Theodore, 2010b)

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
330 Astrid Wood

Figure 16.1  Academic references to ‘policy mobilities’.

Source: By author using data from Google Scholar in August 2018.

and two pivotal volumes by McCann and Ward (2011) and Peck and Theodore
(2015) addressing broader theoretical concerns. Policy mobilities scholarship has
traced the mobility of policy knowledge and models (Freeman, 2012; Peck and
Theodore, 2010b), policy actors (Larner and Laurie, 2010; Prince, 2012; Wood,
2014a), policy organisations (Saunier, 2001; Theodore and Peck,  2012), and the
sites of learning (Clarke, 2010; McCann and Ward, 2012; Wood, 2015a), interpret-
ing policy as moving both topographically (i.e. via policy actors and their physical
travels) and topologically (i.e. through benchmarking, rankings and other com-
parative urbanism tools) (Jacobs, 2012; Prince, 2016). Indubitably, neoliberalism
has been also central to many of these discussions (Bunnell, 2015; Peck and Theo-
dore, 2015).
Within this abundance of literature eyeing the movement of knowledge, there
is a growing demand for more detailed understandings of how policy shapes, and
is shaped by, the adopting/espousing/importing locality. Prince (2016: 424) in
particular appeals to geographers to ‘avoid overly fetishizing the actual movement
of policy’ and instead ‘pay more careful attention to the specific circumstances in
which policy is adopted’. This chapter therefore considers ongoing policy mobil-
ities discussions by deliberating on the procedures through which best practice from
elsewhere is embraced, encompassed, and even at times excluded from new political
systems by local policy actors, their interactions with global advocates and inter-
referencing across space and time. It considers how a policy has arrived once it is
rooted somewhere, an approach that furthers Robinson’s (2013: 20) contention that
‘arriving at policies involves far more than assembling the discrete different entities,
ideas, or objects which we can trace as they move from there to here’ (see also Rob-
inson, 2015). This entails both a scrutiny of how policymakers employ extraterri-
torial influences in composing urban policy (Wood, 2015a) as well as how mobile
policy ideas may also be overwhelmingly local (Wood, 2015b). This focus on the
touching-down of policy mobilities furthers Peck’s (2003) understanding of ‘policies-
in-motion’ but allows for greater attention towards adaption, experimentation, and
even failure (see also Ward, 2006). What follows is a grounded analytic to the geog-
raphy of policy, an approach that enables research to better reflect on the continuity,
connectedness, and convergence of urban policymaking.
 Policy Mobilities 331
Accordingly, I will outline the various practices and people of policy mobilities,
encompassing three overlapping and intertwining, non-linear, and indirect processes,
each of which entertains both intended and unintended outcomes: first, there are
procedures of ‘assembly’, in which local policymakers create and package mobile
policy products from ordinary policies; second, there are practices of ‘circulation’
noted by both the corporal and perceptual movement of policy, plans, and prod-
ucts between A, B, and C; and third, ‘adoption’ wherein a locality determines how
to act based on the circulated information. Importantly, adoption is not necessarily
the final phase of policy mobilities but it can also act as the first phase guiding the
assembly and circulation processes. The adoption of non-local ideas is thus part of a
complex sociopolitical process, I contend, because it is at this juncture when mobile
knowledge starts to hold agency within an otherwise extraterritorial location. Pol-
icies from elsewhere are not adopted simply because they are presented, no matter
how appealing the suggestion, but rather deliberated on slowly, conceivably by a
number of different actors having faith in their experiences elsewhere, or possibly
through entrenched financial interests.
Bearing this in mind, the discussion is divided into two sections. The first pro-
vides an essential background on the evolution and increasing complexity of pol-
icy exchange before turning towards the social-constructivist debates of critical
urban theory. The second part builds on recent debates by advocating for greater
attention towards topographical and topological movement as well as the inher-
ent immobility of adoption. Using the example of bus rapid transit (BRT), I will
illustrate the procedures of ‘assembly’, ‘circulation’ and ‘adoption’. Throughout,
I will also highlight the local and regional dynamics that influence these proce-
dures. Such a critical reading of the entangled practices of assembly, circulation,
and adoption serves as a critical precursor to further empirical analysis of policy
mobilities.

Theoretical Underpinnings to Policy Mobilities

This section presents a theorisation of policy movement, pinpointing the theoretical

underpinnings that inform the current round of policy mobilities research. Research
into the geographies of policy, like policy itself, is multifaceted: this analysis begins
at the start of the twentieth century in France with Tarde’s theory of imitation
(1903) and we can also find relevance in Germany with Simmel’s (1950) thinking
on distance; the work on diffusion (1930s–1970s) taking place in the United States
is another starting point after which the processes of exchange could no longer be
ignored (Rogers, 1962; Walker, 1969). In the 1980s, policy transfer became a preva-
lent research topic for political scientists (Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996; Stone, 2012);
and in the mid-2000s, mobilities (Hannam et al., 2006) became a dominant par-
adigm in geography and sociology. Policy mobilities scholarship (McCann, 2008;
Peck and Theodore, 2001; Ward, 2006) emerged alongside a wider commitment
to critical urban theory (Robinson, 2011b; Ward, 2010). This historical narration
exposes a rich tradition of analytical, multifaceted research and finds interdisciplin-
ary relevance on how mobile knowledge is interpreted and applied within the adopt-
ing locality.
332 Astrid Wood
From Imitation and Distance …
This intellectual tradition of ‘imitation’ and ‘innovation’ originates in the early part
of the twentieth century in the work of the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde. In his
book, The Laws of Imitation, Tarde explains his purpose was ‘to learn why, given
one hundred different innovations, conceived of at the same time … ten will spread
abroad while ninety will be forgotten’ (1903: 140). Social change in societies tran-
spires through ‘imitation’, Tarde suggests, emphasising the importance of interaction
and communication for efficacious translation. He was the first to observe the rate
of adoption as an s-shaped curve, whereby the innovation slowly diffuses into the
social system, followed by a surge of adoption procedures, and finally the rate slows;
this heuristic tool is one of the first attempts to outline the critical role of adoption.
These preliminary understandings of ‘imitation’ can provide useful insight into pol-
icy mobilities thinking, in particular by mitigating the pro-innovation bias, which
reasons that the assumed success of an innovation reduces uncertainty and increases
the likelihood of its adoption.
The work of Georg Simmel and ‘distance’ could also thicken policy mobilities.
His concept of the ‘stranger’ as both an ‘outsider’ with no specific relation to the
group and a ‘wanderer’ maintaining distance from the ‘native’ members of the group
provides the theoretical underpinnings of social distance. This relatively disengaged
individual offers an outsider perspective of the system – something like a policy actor
who is a trusted member of the social system but remains extraneous to its usual
functioning. ‘The groups with which the individual is affiliated constitute a system
of coordinates’, reasons Simmel (1922: 140), ‘such that each new group with which
he becomes affiliated circumscribes him more exactly and less ambiguously’. The
policy innovation can similarly be interpreted as a stranger within existing practices,
sharing a social distance from the adopting community that builds objective trust
within the importing locality. The stranger ‘is not radically committed to the unique
ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group’ and ‘is bound by no commitments
which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given’
(Simmel 1950: 404–405). While this intellectual treatise provides the bedrock for
(urban) sociology, within policy mobilities it has yet to be applied to understand
the role of the adopting locality and the influence of its knowledge brokers (see
Wood, 2014b).
These preliminary discussions on ‘imitation’ and ‘distance’ could be used to explain
decision-making wherein people stop thinking for themselves and assume their pre-
decessors know better than they do. Imitation practices are similar to those directing
people’s selection of investments, political candidates, and technologies which are all
instances of irrational groupthink where people acquire information by observing
the actions of those preceding them. People make decisions not because of peer-pres-
sure or mindless trench-following but because they trust the others’ example. Lessons
are misinterpreted when policymakers presume that all the learning is accurate and
appropriate, and stop evaluating it within their local context. If we apply Tarde and
Simmel to these practices then we can start to understand the uneven, multifaceted
movement of policies across jurisdictional boundaries. Addressing these requires
researchers to reflect and engage with scholarship across a longer and broader field
than many previous assessments.
 Policy Mobilities 333
... via Diffusion and Policy Transfer ...
In the mid-twentieth century, social scientists borrowed the concept of ‘diffusion’
from physics to understand what causes a government to adopt a new programme
or policy (Walker, 1969). Diffusionists were instrumental in, first, establish-
ing that exchanges were in fact taking place and, second, determining issues of
contention that remain at the forefront of contemporary research. Three fundamental
diffusion studies paved the way for almost all subsequent research – the hybrid corn
study by Ryan and Gross (1943), which considered the variables that cause diffusion
in particular the rate of adoption and the factors that explain this rate; the Colum-
bia University drug study (Coleman et al., 1957), which oriented the next genera-
tion of diffusion research towards the interpersonal networks exchanging subjective
evaluations of said innovation; and Hightower’s (1972) study of the diffusion of
tomatoes, which recognised the adopting agents and the negative implications of
their doing so. Diffusion research of course has tremendous implications for urban
studies – much of it was oriented towards interurban communication with localities
looking to one another as references. Diffusionists though rarely identify the inter-
mediaries directing the diffusion, instead measure timing, geographic propinquity,
and resource similarities as the primary contributors to diffusion. They tend to pre-
sume that knowledge is produced by an omnipotent centre and spreads downstream.
Their work, however, remains the academic template, principally their methodology
that rests on interviews and their pro-innovation bias that interprets the speed of
acceptance as a feature of the usefulness of learning.
Research under the rubric of ‘policy transfer’ increased towards the end of the
twentieth century alongside ongoing shifts in industrialisation, globalisation and
regionalism, which to political scientists explained the increased frequency of
transfer and its likelihood of success (for a fuller treatment of policy transfer, see
Benson and Jordan, 2011; Dolowitz, 2003; Dolowitz and Marsh, 2012). Broadly
speaking, policy transfer is defined as ‘a process in which knowledge about policies,
administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political setting (past or
present) is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institu-
tions and ideas in another political setting’ (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000: 5). Wolman
(1992) was perhaps first to describe ‘transfer’ as a technical process in which the pre-
eminent model outcompetes the other options, rather than a process of imitation as
Tarde previously presumed; and Dolowitz and Marsh (1996) as well as Rose (1993)
and Stone (2012) were fundamental in advancing research into both voluntary and
coercive transfer, developing a heuristic for studying policy transfer focusing on the
individual(s) who transfer policy, their reasons for doing so, the elements of policy
transferred, the degree to which they can transfer, from where policies are trans-
ferred, and the factors enabling and/or constraining transfer. Transferists like Rose
(1991) recognised five processes for transfer: copying (the complete transfer of a
programme), emulation (a programme is adapted for transfer), hybrid (a mixture of
policy elements from two places), synthesis (a mixture of policy elements from three
or more places), and inspiration (features from different contexts are used to pro-
duce a new model). Simply put, Rose (1993) concludes that positive lessons provide
insight for local policymakers and negative lessons help them avoid the mistakes of
others. The transfer literature has largely been criticised by geographers for attending
334 Astrid Wood
to this literalist conception of the way in which knowledge moves and focusing too
heavily on state-supported actors, largely ignoring the asymmetrical power config-
urations that both enable and constrain these exchanges (for detailed criticism of
policy transfer, see McCann, 2011a; Peck, 2011b; Temenos and McCann, 2013).
My purpose for resuscitating the diffusion and policy transfer literature is not
to further ensconce the disciplinary differences – political science versus geogra-
phy, or the epistemological foundations – rational versus constructivist, but rather
to consider the overlaps and connections between the disciplinary understandings
of topographical and topological movements that facilitate the reception of policy
ideas from elsewhere. By bringing these early literatures into conversation with pol-
icy mobilities, I hope to depict the processes of assembly, circulation, and adoption as
inherently connected unfolding along an unbroken spatial and temporal continuum.

…to Circulation…
With this in mind, this review of policy mobilities also furthers thinking on
‘circulation’ to draw attention both to agility and friction while also reflecting on the
political economy and historical attributes of the institutionalization of ideas from
elsewhere (McCann and Ward, 2013; Wood, 2015a). The circulation approach has
been used to describe both the process in which policies and practices are mobilised
and introduced into new political systems as well as the stillness, stopping, and stasis
of knowledge. Specifically, circulation has been an investigative for understandings
at the micro level – the political pathology of disease (Zhong and Bian, 2016) –
and at the macro level – the global circuits of capital through which economic and
cultural value is produced (Hardt and Negri, 2000) – as well as the geography of
knowledge and its associated practices (McFarlane, 2011a; Wood, 2015a). The con-
cept originates in the French sociological approach to public action (sociologie de
l’action publique) and in science and technology studies (for details of the French
approach to circulation, see Porto de Oliveira and Pimenta de Faria, 2017). It draws
on the wider post-structuralist framing to understand how policy travels and transfer
alongside a host of urban happenings – capitalism, political contestation, as well as
learning and mobility (Farias and Bender, 2010; McFarlane, 2011b). Scholars such
as McFarlane (2011a) interpret the movement of knowledge across spatiotemporal
circumstances employing the notion of ‘assemblage’ in which the actors and their
knowledge and materials form an agglomeration; and Larner and Laurie (2010)
explain that within these global assemblages, experts easily travel between places
mobilising transnational flows. For Simone (2010: 161), ‘the idea [of circulation]
is to bring a lot of different things together that have no long or intensive history
of being together and to quickly see what comes out of it’. Thus it better allows for
continuous, recursive, and reciprocal understandings of learning by employing a plu-
rality of policy instruments and materialities.

... and Mobilities

The surging interest in knowledge exchange is closely tied to the ‘mobilities
paradigm’ (Hannam et al., 2006), an approach that assimilates scientific and
sociological research on people (e.g. migration and travel), ideas (e.g. cultural
 Policy Mobilities 335
diffusion), and things (e.g. transport). The mobilities paradigm incorporates new
ways of theorising about how these mobilities lie ‘at the center of constella-
tions of power, the creation of identities and the micro-geographies of everyday
life’ (Cresswell, 2011: 551). The approach theorises movement as constant, var-
ied, and multidirectional. Rather than scientifically mapping and calculating the
effects of a new road on traffic flows or its influence on travel times, however, the
mobilities approach emphasises the meaning of movement through a Foucauld-
ian or Latourian lens. It is not a matter of privileging movement and efficiency
but of understanding the discourses, practices, and infrastructure through which
power and its associated knowledge circulates (for a complete review, see Sheller
and Urry, 2016).
Much of the policy mobilities work ‘has been guilty of a tendency to fixate only
on the act of transfer’, concludes Prince (2012: 191), ‘while holding the rest of the
world still’. This conjures up the dialectic of mobility/immobility – the tensions,
incompatibilities, and unanticipated outcomes of these capricious enterprises – what
Tsing’s calls ‘friction’ to describe the ‘sticky materiality of practical encounters’
(2005: 1). ‘If mobility is everything, then it is nothing’, reasons Adey (2006: 75),
evoking an increasingly acknowledged conception that mobilities is far too fixated
on movement, a point recently raised as one of three dualisms of policy mobilities
(McCann and Ward, 2015). Perhaps the (policy) movement between locality A and
locality B is best understood by employing Tsing’s (2005: 5) metaphor of a wheel,
which only turns ‘because of its encounter with the surface of the road’ (i.e. the
locality) without which its movement would be meaningless; or, fire, which Tsing
reminds us is only produced from rubbing two sticks together – ‘one stick alone is
just a stick’. These cumbersome, unequal, and unstable qualities of interconnection
is what makes (policy) movement possible.
Indeed, theorists offer a variety of metaphors for interpreting the way in which
entities move, or don’t move, through a system: the train moves along the tracks
(Latour, 2005), a car departs a petrol station (Normack, 2006), and water flows
through a creek (Tsing, 2000), all of which presuppose the relationship between
the object and the conditions of its mobility. Tsing (2000: 337) reasons that ‘a
focus on circulations shows us the movement of people, things, ideas, or insti-
tutions, but what it does not show is how this movement depends on defining
tracks and grounds or scales and units of agency … If we imagined creeks, perhaps
the model would be different; we might notice the channel as well as the water
moving’. These entities – the train, car, and water – circulate through the system
while maintaining their connection to the fixed elements – the track, petrol station,
and creek bed. These movements underscore the ‘networked nature of intercon-
nectedness’ (Lester, 2006: 135). Even though the relationship between the movable
objects and place is provisional, ephemeral, and transient – the train moves to a
different part of the track, the car to another petrol station, and the water through
the creek – it remains linked through the system. To understand adoption, we must
first consider the way in which the (metaphorical) tracks, petrol station, and creek
shelter circulations by creating a conducive context within the locality for their
touchdown.
Much of this attention towards the pushing and pulling of knowledge can be
traced back to an extensive history of dialogue and exchange. Clarke (2012) for
336 Astrid Wood
one, documents the frequency of overseas visits between the United States and
Europe in the early twentieth century. And with relevance to the Global South,
King (1980) recognises the implications of British colonialism on the urban
realm in India and Wood (2019) considers the influence of the interactions bet-
ween colonial architects and the metropole in the development of segregated
cities in South Africa. Throughout these analyses, scholars maintain a keen eye
towards the influence of these exchanges on the development of networks of
electricity, water, and sewerage (see also Harris and Moore, 2013). Importantly,
these accounts serve to counteract claims of ‘fast policy’, which interpret poli-
cymaking as the consequence of the frantic and hurried transplantation of stan-
dardised best practice policies (Peck and Theodore, 2015), and instead realise
that there is much to learn by studying the protracted and slippery ways in which
new ideas diffuse across geographies.
Having reviewed the breadth of policy learning literature over the past century,
we can clearly conclude that policy exchange is far more complex than a logical and
impartial transfer. Uncertainty, however, remains regarding the role of exogenous
versus endogenous factors – are policy ideas pushed from the outside by dynamic
policy mobilisers eager to introduce particular forms of best practice, or are they
pulled-in by pragmatic local actors eager to strengthen transnational ties? How do
practices of assembly, circulation, and adoption differ when state-led versus consul-
tant-led, translocal versus local, fast, or recurrent? And, what role do historical, colo-
nial informational infrastructures play in ongoing exchanges? The policy mobilities
literature has begun to engage with these questions, considering the way in which
learning, dialogue, and exchange influence global–local policymaking.

A Continuum from Assembly to Circulation to Adoption

The upcoming analysis is thus devoted to reviewing how policy mobilities can
employ the locality as the unit of analysis first, by assessing the process of as-
sembly (i.e. wherein policy models are made up and globalised), second, the pro-
cess of circulation (i.e. through which cities are brought into relation with one
another), and third, the process of adoption (i.e. the decision and determination
to localise mobile knowledge). This exploration is particularly useful in under-
standing the way in which the sociopolitical conditions of the locality intertwine
to capture, trap, and otherwise ground policies in motion. It also considers how
local actors release, set free, and relinquish best practice. Under this schema,
adoption and assembly are never absolute but always in play, constantly moving
and mustering, touching down and lifting up, entangling with the politics of
place and disseminating the involvements of elsewhere. Neither exists without
the other; neither can be studied without the other; and on its own, neither is
objectively trustworthy but always subject to local relational interpretation. That
is to say, adoption in one location may take the form of domination and else-
where a means of resistance. Carrying this point of view forward, the subsequent
venture into the voyage from assembly to circulation, from circulation to adop-
 Policy Mobilities 337
tion, and then back through circulation remains sympathetic to these ephemeral,
ethereal, and experiential assemblages by unearthing the role of the local author-
ity in sustaining and substantiating the movement of knowledge.
A grounded approach is sensitive to the way in which practices of citation and
comparison are socially constructed processes embedded in global–local power rela-
tions and animated by both supply-side innovativeness and demand-side neediness.
Table 16.1 gathers these arguments into theoretical questions to illustrate the blurry
phases of policy mobilities. The first column introduces four potential research areas
– knowledge, actors, context, and temporality – and the following columns identify
the processes of assembly, mobility, and circulation to reflect on the process by which
places are brought into conversation with one another and the extent to which these
learning methods accelerate local policymaking. While these are certainly not the
only potentialities within the field, the table provides insight into the types of ques-
tions that inform policy mobilities.
To provide some insight into how a grounded approach might unfold, I will draw on
extant literature as well as my own research of BRT, a frequently reproduced model of
efficient bus-based transport (Wood, 2014a; see also Montero, 2017). Rather than fixat-
ing on the origins of the modernist model, examples of the role of importing localities are
peppered throughout to provide a practical example of how a grounded approach might
be furthered. The story of BRT will provide an illustration of how to analyse the role
that adopting localities play in the mobility and adoption of best practice as well as their
part in translating their learning back into circulation and the re-grounding of policies
in motion elsewhere. The discussion henceforth unfolds the overlapping and intertwined
processes of assembly, circulation, and adoption that together form policy mobilities.

Table 16.1  Phases of policy mobilities.

Assembly Circulation Adoption

Knowledge, How is local knowledge How does knowledge How does

best practice, assembled into globally mutate through the circu- mobile knowledge
policy model circulated policy models? lation process? hold agency in
attracting adopting
localities?
Actors, agen- How do actors and agen- How do distantiated ac- Who acts on
cies, networks cies assemble circulate tors become involved in mobile knowl-
knowledge? the circulation process? edge and how
do they encour-
age adoption?
Spatio-politi- Under what spatio- How are spatio-political How do spatio-
cal context political conditions is contexts brought into political contexts
knowledge assembled conversation with one create a suit-
into globally circulated another through the able context
policy models? circulation process? for adoption?
Tempo- How does temporality How does temporality How does tem-
ral context affect the assembly of affect the circulation of porality affect
local practice? knowledge? the adoption of
knowledge?
338 Astrid Wood
Assembling Policy
One way of thinking about the process of adoption is by looking at the policy model
to understand how the perceived attributes of said innovation affect its distribution
and dissemination; that is, to understand what about a policy sets off the mobil-
ities process. A ‘policy model’ is defined as a ‘complex social construction (no less
“real” for all that) which can only be understood by studying both its apparent
“internal” characteristics and simultaneously, its “external” relations, which are co-
constituted’ (McCann and Ward, 2013: 4). McCann (2011b) uses the terminology
‘policies’ to describe the formally drafted guidelines for governance, ‘policy models’
for the statements of ideal policies, and ‘policy knowledge’ as the expertise about
good policymaking and implementation. And, the term ‘model’ is generally defined
as ‘a way of doing something from which others learn’ (McCann and Ward, 2013:
3). Policy mobilities uses a neo-Foucauldian lens to frame the role of governmental
technologies and rationalities in shaping contemporary urban–global political econ-
omies focusing on the moulding and mutation of policy models. They emphasise the
seemingly mundane techniques, discourses, representations, and practices through
which policy models are made up as well as the translation and transmutation that
happens along the way. Although models may appear to originate somewhere and
travel by virtue of their own achievements, in actuality, their credibility rests on the
sociopolitical implications of the exchange.
Frequently cited policy models include the Barcelona model of urban regenera-
tion (González, 2011), the Porto Alegre model of participatory budgeting (Peck and
Theodore, 2015), and our primary case, the Bogota model of BRT (Wood, 2015a),
best practices synonymous with their supposed place of origin, and yet, not one
of these models has been objectively proven to be effective. Rather, the practice of
assembly is the art of transforming an ordinary policy into an objective best prac-
tice worthy of substantial financial investment and institutional capacity within a
global context and, in many instances, practices of adoption substantiate practices
of assembly. It can be reasoned therefore that with each replicated programme of
sustainable urbanism, democratic governance, or mobility, the model becomes more
pervasive and its achievements can no longer be doubted because the triumphs in the
new location corroborate the supposed successes in the original.
Policy mobilities accordingly emphasises the mutability and malleability of the
translation process. Models are not moved around as fixed objects but rather they
are ‘prone to change as they are translated and re-embedded within and between
different institutional, economic and political contexts’ (Peck and Theodore, 2001:
427). Some elements of the exported model may not be suited for the importing
locality so it adapts for its new context. Researchers introduce a number of exam-
ples when best practices are only adopted after they have been shaped and reshaped
by the importing locality. A pivotal study by González (2011) looks at how urban
regeneration models travel and mutate by considering the way in which practices
from Bilbao and Barcelona mutated to fit the needs of a diversity of adopting local-
ities. This is most apparent in the Bogota model of BRT where there is significant
variation in both the infrastructure of the system as well as the rhymes and rhythms
of the city in which it is replicated. Critics therefore suggest that the very infrastruc-
ture which made Bogota’s BRT seem so successful (e.g. timely implementation) has
 Policy Mobilities 339
been problematic elsewhere (e.g. rushed implementation) (Hidalgo and Gutiérrez,
2013). Thus BRT has solidified itself as one of the most popular transport models of
the twenty-first century moving by virtue of its professed achievements rather than
any measures of absolute success. It stands to reason that policy models seldom con-
geal because of their ostensible achievements in situ, but rather because the logics of
elsewhere enables a quick and easy transplantation.
This first foray into the topographical/topological space of policy mobilities con-
verges around the physical movement of policies and how policies are deterritori-
alised in their original location, moved, and then reterritorialised elsewhere. This
has been a primary focus of the policy mobilities literature which considers how
policies, programmes, and plans move alongside policymakers and their learning
materials and events. Moving along now, the second incursion considers the role of
local actors in bringing certain ideas to the forefront while shielding others away.
Perhaps as Clarke (2012) suggests relational movement may be an indispensable
antecedent to absolute mobility – from theoretical to material, the sociological to
the geographical, and from topological to topographical. What follows is a system
for thinking back through the circulation process, once again recalling Robinson’s
(2015) attention towards the means by which urban policies are ‘arrived at’.

Circulating Policy
Observing the assembly of the model opens a window into the politics of policy
actors and, consequently, the literature has exploded with evidence-based studies
of knowledge actors – policy consultants (McCann, 2011a), international master-
planners (Rapoport, 2015), policy mobilisers (Wood, 2014a), and travelling tech-
nocrats (Larner and Laurie, 2010) – focusing on the methods through which local
policymakers export homegrown innovation, their global travels, and subsequent
transformation into international policy intermediaries (see also Prince, 2012). Their
physical movement is often indicative of a wider political progression from local
planner to ‘policy guru’ (Peck, 2011b). Wood (2014a) notes the evolution of one
actor from city mayor to the ‘messiah for livable cities’ through his dissemination of
BRT, while Rapoport (2015) charts the global reach of the global intelligence corps,
an elite group of American and European architecture, engineering, and planning
firms, guiding the development of sustainable urban projects around the globe, con-
cluding that their work may be more global than local in nature; and Larner and
Laurie (2010) illustrate the role of travelling technocrats in the movements to global-
ise and privatise telecommunication and water services. Likewise, McCann’s case of
Vancouver’s ‘extrospection’ is driven by ‘an explicitly stated global orientation that
encourages both competition and cooperation with other cities for “greenest,” most
“livable” status’ (McCann, 2013: 11). Their focus on policy actors offers a means of
thinking about the way in which mobile policies are selectively removed from ordi-
nary policy routines and paradigms, then plucked, transplanted, and inserted into
cities elsewhere.
Adding to these examples, investigations of the BRT policy model expose a
variety of advocacy organisations, engineering consultancies, transportation com-
panies, and international banks circulating BRT around the world: the Institute for
Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) based in New York City, Embarq
340 Astrid Wood
in Washington DC, and the World Bank, also in Washington DC, are the pushers of
BRT, affording a robust network of experts as well as the financial support, both of
which are a perquisite to those cities eager to replicate BRT. These BRT enthusiasts
publish training manuals, host workshops, fund study tours, and generate a never-
ending stream of architects, engineers, and planners with BRT expertise and skills
(Montero, 2017; Wood, 2014b). In telling the story of BRT adoption in South Africa,
Wood argues that these international advocates or ‘policy mobilizers’ introduce pol-
icies like BRT to ‘intermediaries’ (e.g. local consultants) that translate and transfer
it to local politicians and planners. Thus Wood concludes that while many global
actors may circulate knowledge about BRT, ‘policy is adopted only through local
actors with governmental support’ (2014a: 1238).
This second glimpse ruminates on the process by which policy actors connect and
disconnect both topographically through their physical travels as well as topologically
through their political realignment. Accordingly, a story of policy adoption can be
told either by examining ‘the people who are convinced, or by looking at the new
associations made to convince them’, aptly concludes Latour (1987: 138); or in a
broader sense, policy mobilities can be understood both topographically by tracing
policy knowledge as it physically moves in the hands of international consultants
and their paraphernalia, or topologically through the relational comparisons made
in city rankings and league tables. Policy mobilities thus need not be concerned with
the measurable achievements of the policy model but rather this argument highlights
the urgency for more robust research into the ideology and power of the policymak-
ers themselves.

Adopting Policy
This third analytical focus examines the processes and mechanisms through which
policy is adopted, underscoring the magnitude of the interactions and exchanges
between importing and exporting localities with the intention of understanding the
depth of relations between cities in attracting or repelling mobile knowledge. This
is especially vital in an era when cities are increasingly powerful and developing
policies and programmes independently of national government. The potential to
innovate is driven by wealth and resources that enable policymakers to select the
paramount policies from elsewhere; perhaps, best practices flow downward so the
most politically-powerful governments reinforce their position by adopting the pre-
eminent policy ideas.
Policy mobilities scholarship reasons that once a policy is on the move it becomes
embroiled within a multitude of cultural, economic, historical and political, social
and spatial landscapes from the exporting locality. ‘Inter-referencing’ as this entan-
glement is often known, refers to the practices of citation, comparison, and compe-
tition as well as the broader sentiments of aspiration, allusion, and alliteration that
operate through policy exchanges (Roy and Ong, 2011). Bunnell (2015) expands on
inter-referencing by developing three groupings of ‘urban antecedence’, the prototyp-
ical city imagined to be the first at something (i.e. Soja’s Los Angeles), the world-class
city that caps a prescribed global hierarchy (i.e. Robinson’s Johannesburg), and the
model city famous for a particular policy or programme (i.e. McCann’s Vancouver),
concluding that policy mobilities has tended to expose the last. Interestingly, this
 Policy Mobilities 341
appreciation for paradigmatic cities furthers Brenner’s (2003) thinking on ‘prototyp-
ical cities’, a city promoted as the precursor (e.g. Los Angeles) ‘archetypical cities’,
a city presented as unique (e.g. Boston) and ‘stereotypical cities’, a city presented as
the ideal (e.g. Johannesburg). In looking specifically at cities in Asia, Shatkin (2011)
suggests that the relevant concern is not whether inter-referencing will lead to the
replication of a particular urban outcome, but rather the countless connections and
disconnections through which knowledge moves. This focus on adoption thus would
fulfil Robinson’s (2011b: 15) suggestion that ‘the connections themselves might well
form the focus of comparison’.
On the one hand, empirical studies reveal that learning often requires localities
to work closely together, sharing private technical and political information and,
in many instances, spending extended periods collaborating. Peck and Theodore
(2010a), for example, present instances of transfer of poverty alleviation policies
between the United Kingdom and United States during the Thatcher/Reagan and
Blair/Clinton eras arguing that the friendship between the political leaders predis-
posed the governments to collaborate. The manner in which contextual common-
alities enable policies to transfer across sociopolitical boundaries is also evident in
studies of the transnationalisation of the business improvement district. In Ward’s
(2011) case, the terrestrial proximity between the United Kingdom and Europe was
disregarded in favour of exchange with their philosophical allies across the Atlantic
Ocean. There have also been studies of similar accounts of ideological exchanges
between the former Soviet countries (Cook et al., 2014) as well as ‘town twinning’
(Clarke, 2010).
Conversely, in this context of toing-and-froing, we see that cities compete for
status and recognition, each gaining legitimacy through the other. A form of place
branding sometimes takes place as a means of attracting capital investment, busi-
nesses, residents, talent, tourists, and prestige – what McCann (2013: 6) calls ‘pol-
icy boosterism’ to define the ‘overarching strategies intended to distinguish cities
as part of interurban competition which include advertising, sloganeering, and
marketing tactics’ – practices that reveal the degree of power which policy mobil-
ities requires and reinforces. In his analysis of ‘speculative urbanism’ in Bangalore,
Goldman (2011: 230) demonstrates how governments, like investors, ‘play one city
off another’ by testing out best practices to attract global investors, often compro-
mising better urban practices. In addition, Mahon and Macdonald (2010) present a
case study comparing poverty alleviation programmes in Toronto and Mexico City.
In this instance, the two cities exchanged ideas particularly because their different
methods offered each city an innovative approach. However, in exchanging local
solutions, Toronto and Mexico City strengthened their relationship thereby demon-
strating that policy exchange can be instrumental in forming relationships between
localities. Under such instances of ‘municipal diplomacy’ (Saunier, 2002: 526), cit-
ies are not merely importers or exporters of policy but part of the global system of
power relations in which policy circulates.
Not only is policy mobilised across diverging sociopolitical contexts but it also
moves alongside ‘sticky, history-laden contexts’ (McCann, 2011a: 107). A note-
worthy symposium on planning history by Harris and Moore (2013) and a num-
ber of historical illustrations of municipal exchanges in Europe (Clarke, 2012) as
well as across the Global South (Wood, 2015b) place a spotlight squarely on the
342 Astrid Wood
adopting locality. Economic, political, religious, and scholarly interchanges took
place between cities in the Greek, Roman, and Mongol empires (Sutcliffe, 1981),
and within the British colonial period, there were instances of internal transfer in
which cities mined innovation from across the empire by hiring international plan-
ners to implement best practice locally as well as external transfer when cities sent
local transfer agents to forage outside the city for ideas. In many cases, concepts
were carried through linear and hierarchical networks of colonial administrators
(Craggs and Neate, 2017; Healey and Upton, 2010) and in other instances, ideas
were exchanged through serendipitous, momentary, and even ethereal exchanges
(Cook et al., 2014). These studies demonstrate that policy learning is fluid, moving
as ‘waves of innovation’ (McCann and Ward, 2010: 175) which only seem to
be arriving more frequently. There are periods of ‘fast policy’ (Peck and Theo-
dore, 2015) facilitated by either need or opportunity, or both as well as periods
when dialogue and exchange is minimal. Temporality is particularly important
for thinking about urban policy and going forward research should foster greater
attention to the temporal repositioning in which cities come into relation with one
another as policymakers slowly, incrementally, and repeatedly warm to an other-
wise foreign notion.
We return to the BRT policy model to provide an example of how one might
approach policy adoption from the perspective of the adopting locality. The systems
in South Africa are the outcome of extensive discussion between policy actors in the
importing locality (e.g. Cape Town and Johannesburg) and the exporting locality
(e.g. Bogota and Curitiba). South Africans proudly boast an association between their
BRT systems and those in South America (Wood, 2014b). They especially call upon
the knowledge of Latin America within a wider rationale of south–south learning
by which South African policymakers adopted BRT because it is dubbed a southern
innovation (Wood, 2015a). This analysis of south–south learning – as well as similar
studies of north–south and south–north exchange (for example, Jajamovich, 2016;
Montero, 2018) – stir up a wider set of questions about the directionality of learning,
in particular, and cooperation and competition between the Global North and South
(Mawdsley, 2017), in general. This thicker theorisation supports the contention that
policy models are constantly floating around but are only adopted when the locality
deems it appropriate.
Rather than fashioning an agenda in which all policy mobilities processes take
place in a prescribed technique, this chapter promotes the need for additional
research into the complexity of adoption as an element of urban practice. I contend
that adoption should not always be seen as the final component of the mobilities
process but also an instigator of the assembly and circulation processes. Maybe
this entails a politician needing a policy and then going out and looking for it
elsewhere, or a city planner inviting a policy expert to present their solutions.
Continuing down this avenue of research might involve scrutinising how a city
that learns becomes a city that teaches. Empirically that means studying how first
adopters package and sell their learning experiences to secondary adopters. For
instance, since opening the first full-feature BRT on the African continent in 2009,
Johannesburg has become a celebrated site of best practice with a number of African
delegations from Dar es Salaam and Dakar coming to learn about the buses. These
visits in addition to the plethora of promotional material has expanded the oppor-
 Policy Mobilities 343
tunity for exchanges across the continent and some would-be adopters are starting
to see Johannesburg rather than Bogota as their common point of reference. Unrav-
elling the process of policy mobilities from adoption to assembly and back through
circulation thus might help us better understand the role of local learning in urban
policymaking.

Concluding Remarks

Within policy mobilities conversations, we are still probing at the most fundamental
questions – what causes policy mobilities and how does it take place? Do certain
kinds of knowledge assemble, mobilise, and localise more readily than others, or is
it the packaging by boisterous individuals which prompts movement? Perhaps there
are moments when international consultants are more likely to mobilise knowledge,
or maybe ordinary policymaking activities engender innovation? And, importantly,
under what circumstances do local policymakers adopt mobile best practices? This
concentration on the distinct practices of policy mobilities, I propose, attends to the
dynamic, processual, and recursive nature of policy mobilities and learning. And in
this chapter, I hope to situate the touching-down of peripatetic policies within the
extensive and intensive processes of assembly, circulation, and adoption. This focus
on adoption as central to policy mobilities further proves that ideas are not intro-
duced into an institutional vacuum but made and remade to suit the conditions of
the importing locale.
This grounded approach to policy mobilities begins with a careful review of lit-
erature, which in spite of so many provocative enquiries remains at times overly
focused on the movement of knowledge, its mutation and manipulation, and only
secondarily on the influence of local decisions and decision-makers. The first part of
this chapter thus sets out by linking the concepts of ‘imitation’, ‘distance’, and ‘diffu-
sion’ with contemporary theories of policy mobilities. This chronological approach
provides a background on the evolution and increasing complexity of the analysis.
In the second part, I operationalise this thinking on topographical and topological
movement questioning the way in which policy models seem to fit into an assortment
of localities, the actors, and their associations as well as the wider sociopolitical
associations of importing knowledge and the multiple temporalities through which
ideas circulate before adoption. Many previous case studies reveal a similar process
of mobility across institutions of dissemination without sufficiently interrogating
how policies are arrived at by learning localities. More needs to be said of the social
and political character of policies, policy models, and policy flows as they are cre-
ated, translated, deployed, and transformed around the world, and thicker theorisa-
tions of how the adoption of mobile ideas shapes urban and regional relations are
still sought after. Alongside so much impressive scholarly work, I advocate for a
grounded appreciation of the multi-directionality and diversity of policy learning,
in particular interrogating the topological spatialities and power relationships that
enable and sustain policy engagements.
It is along this line of inquiry that this chapter builds upon and extends the
thinking of urban scholars, first by bringing concerns of power into question and
second, by problematising notions of governance at a distance. Certainly, policy
344 Astrid Wood
mobilities arguments have given evidence that power is now disseminated across
a host of diverse agents and agencies. I ground policy mobilities within the adopt-
ing locality so as to suggest that power is always exercised in situ, though, in the
case of policy mobilities it often seems as if power is furthered by exterior author-
ities. Indeed, policy mobilities is a practice of both embracing extraterritorial
thinking, but, equally so, a means through which local actors exploit internation-
al advocates and their policy models to justify preordained decisions which might
otherwise be resisted by local politics. Thus policy mobilities, though global in
nature, is an inherently local process, one that is best exposed by scrutinising
the actors and their actions within the adopting locality and then tracing back
through their rationale for implementing a policy, product, or practice also found
elsewhere.

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 Part IV
SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN TWENTY-
FIRST-CENTURY CITIES
 17
Social Heterogeneity and Diversity
Ayda Eraydin

Introduction: Increasing the Social Heterogeneity and

Diversity of Cities and Regions

Cities have never been homogenous entities, but rather places where people with dif-
ferent cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic characteristics coexist. In recent decades,
however, the rise in migration and population mobility, triggered by globalisation
and socioeconomic and political problems in many countries, have contributed
further to the changes in the population profile (Castles, 2003; Zetter, 2007). The
terms ‘social heterogeneity’ and ‘diversity’ are used not only to define the changing
demographics of the population, but also the social dynamics of cities, and although
these concepts are used interchangeably1 in several studies, their meanings are some-
what different. While heterogeneity can be defined as the presence or coexistence of
a number of socioeconomic, sociodemographic, and ethnic groups within a certain
spatial entity, the meaning of diversity has been expanded to refer to the intense
diversification of the population, not only in socioeconomic, sociodemographic,
and ethnic terms, but also with respect to lifestyles, opportunities, attitudes, and
activities.
There are different views on the implications of social heterogeneity and diversity
for cities. While early debates saw social heterogeneity as part of the natural urban
character, since the 1970s strong doubts have been expressed about the contributions

1 
According to Shavit et al. (2016), a tension exists between these two terms. While het-
erogeneity implies a collective entity that interactively integrates with different entities,
diversity implies divergence rather than integration.

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
352 Ayda Eraydin
made by migrants to their recipient societies, along with concerns related to social
integration, exclusion, and discrimination. These worries have been reflected in dis-
cussions of the separate lives lived by different communities sharing the same urban
areas (see Amin, 2002; Cantle, 2012) and the problems connected to them. Put-
nam (2007) claims that the greater the diversity of a neighbourhood in a city, the
less trust exists, leading to even lower confidence in the so-called out-group, but
also to distrust in the in-group. Similarly, Thrift (2005: 140) raised concerns about
the diversity of populations within cities and their potential to fuel and channel
new modes of hatred and division, while Amin (2002) argues that finding a balance
between diversity, harmonious living, and solidarity can be quite difficult. Previous
studies have also highlighted the political tension between solidarity and diversity,
and have raised questions concerning the extent to which citizens associate them-
selves with the collectivised governmentalities of shared risks and solidarities, which
have become the main principles defining a nation-state. Some scholars, such as
Seabeck et al. (2007) have dwelt on this issue, underlining that as countries and cit-
ies in the European Union (EU) become demographically diverse, a collective sense
of politics, identity, and/or shared values becomes impossible. The critical attitude
towards diversity is reflected also in arguments suggesting that there is ‘too much
diversity’ (McLeod and Lobel, 1992).
In contrast, there has been a number of studies opening debates on how immi-
grants can make a positive contribution to the socioeconomic well-being of
neighbourhoods and cities (Eraydin et al., 2010; Fainstein, 2005; Florida, 2002;
Zachary, 2000), along with other studies that claim that despite the differences
among residents, communities can live together in harmony if they accept and
respect the identities of others. Albrow (1997) argued that individuals with very
different lifestyles and social networks can live in close proximity without negative
interference with each other, while Vranken (2004) shared a similar view, assert-
ing that relationships that are non-conflicting and mutually supportive between
diverse groups can be structured at a neighbourhood level. The positive contri-
butions of diversity have recently been highlighted in competitiveness literature
(Florida, 2002, 2005; Storper, 1997; Ta an-Kok and Vranken, 2008; Thrift and
Olds, 1996), emphasising that diversity is an important asset of a city in terms of
creativity and innovation.
As the above paragraphs suggest, there are different views on diversity that
reflect strongly, not only in academic debates, but also in policies, measures, and
institutions. In this chapter, the aim is to provide a summary of the past debates
on social heterogeneity and diversity, as well as the issues, policies, and gover-
nance related to diversity. Following the introduction, the second section of the
chapter is devoted to the changing context of the debates from social heteroge-
neity to diversity, while the third section introduces the governance mechanisms
connected to diversity. Contemporary issues are the focus of the fourth section,
while the fifth section summarises the main questions raised in the literature
regarding the implications of increasing diversity. The conclusion evaluates the
reasons for the lack of proper policies concerning social heterogeneity and diver-
sity, and puts forward a research agenda that may be useful in the building of new
policies and institutions.
 Social Heterogeneity and Diversity 353
Changing the Context of the Debates on Social
Heterogeneity and Diversity

The heterogeneity of cities has been acknowledged as one of their most salient fea-
tures for a very long time. While urbanists take an interest in spatial heterogeneity,
claiming that urban areas have been characterised by heterogeneity since ancient
times, it is the social heterogeneity of cities that have drawn the attention of classical
urban sociologists. In the urban ecological studies initiated by members of the Chi-
cago School, such as Burgess, Park, Hoyt, Harris, and Ullman, it is ethnic, cultural,
and socioeconomic differences that are referred to when the social heterogeneity and
socio-spatial patterns of US cities are held up to the light. These urban sociologists
proposed ecological models aimed at gaining a better understanding of socio-spatial
patterns and the social and spatial segregation within the city (see Park and Burgess,
1984 [1925]).
What was peculiar in the early debates and studies of social heterogeneity by
the Chicago School was their reference to the organisation of the metropolis on
the basis of ‘natural areas’ that are inhabited by different people, particularly those
with similar ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Burgess (1984 [1925]) claimed that ‘In
the expansion of the city a process of distribution takes place which sifts and sorts
and relocates individuals and groups by residence and occupation’ (Burgess, 1984
[1925]: 54). Similarly, Park (2005 [1936]) claims that the city has ‘natural habitats’
that obey the laws of their own making, meaning that the community tends to con-
form to a certain pattern. Interestingly, the definition of social heterogeneity put for-
ward by Wirth (1938: 16) was not restricted to ethnic and cultural differences, but
included also ‘personality types’, as an outcome of ‘the heightened mobility of the
individual, which brings him within the range of stimulation by a great number of
diverse individuals and subjects him to fluctuating status in the differentiated social
groups that compose the social structure of the city’. In his article, ‘Urbanism as a
Way of Life’, he refers to ‘social heterogeneity’ as an important feature of urban life
and claims that social interactions among personality types in an urban milieu can
break away from the rigidity of caste lines (Wirth, 1938: 16).
This brief summary has highlighted some of the interesting ways social heteroge-
neity was evaluated in the early debates introduced by the Chicago School. First, they
considered heterogeneity to be a typical condition of a city. Second, they accepted
segregation as a normal feature of growing metropolises, and even as a source of
urban integration, appreciating the idea of living together in separate worlds, as
voiced by Park (1984 [1925]: 40–41) who claimed that ‘the process of segregation
establishes moral distances which make the city a mosaic of little worlds which touch
but do not interpenetrate. This makes it possible for individuals to pass quickly and
easily from one moral milieu to another and encourages the fascinating but dan-
gerous experiment of living together in several different continuous, but otherwise
widely separated worlds’.
Third, the classical urban sociologists claimed that the contingent, transient, and
informal social interactions are the core of urban social life.
In the 1960s, discussions of social heterogeneity shifted focus, from assuming it to be
a normal feature of cities to its positive role in urban economics, which was supported
354 Ayda Eraydin
by the new discourses on pluralism and multiculturalism. Gans (1961) claimed that het-
erogeneity is desirable in that as long as local taxation is the main source of financing
for community services, undesirable inequality in the provision of services will be pre-
vented. Despite stating that this is not the best means of alleviating social and economic
inequality, he attested that it opened opportunities for all segments of the population
to make social and cultural choices as part of a more egalitarian society. Jane Jacobs
(1970) also approached diversity-related issues from the perspective of the economic
performance of cities, claiming that the diversity and proximity of actors enable urban
development and growth. In her later works, she contended that diversity not only makes
cities more appealing but is also the source of economic productivity (Fainstein, 2005).
In the 1970s and 1980s, social scientists and urban geographers were more
concerned with what had been observed in cities, namely an increase in the diver-
sity of social composition, unequal economic power, and socio-spatial segregation
(Furtado, 2009). Spatial segregation was admonished by scholars as a source of social
inequality (Massey and Denton, 1988, 1993) and concerns on the rise of conflicts
induced by social inequality triggered discussions on the social and moral implications
of the spatial segregation of ethnic groups (Ostendorf et al., 2001; Uitermark, 2003).
They further underlined the importance of social mix policies, defining them as a pre-
requisite for urban social integration, although recently several authors have criticised
the vast gap that exists between social mix rhetoric and effective policy outcomes
besides the negative effects of social mix policies (Blanc, 2010; Bolt et al., 2010).2
In the 1990s, another shift of interest was noted with respect to the social hetero-
geneity of cities, being the use of a broader expression and recognition of different
kinds of differences and the dynamic interplay between them, namely ‘diversity’. The
increased mobility of people as an outcome of globalisation and the rise in skilled
immigrants from different parts of the world have been stated as important in dis-
cussions highlighting the positive role of diversity in urban economic growth, which
have emphasised the role of urban environment on creativity. Florida (2002: 30) as-
serted that ‘places have replaced companies as the key organising units and because
their diversity stimulates creativity’. In the 2000s, new terminologies entered the lex-
icon, with Vertovec (2007) using the term ‘super-diversity’ to define immigrant back-
grounds, socioeconomic positions, legal statuses, and trajectories of adaptation, while
Ta an-Kok et al. (2013) introduced the term ‘hyper-diversity’ when explaining that cit-
ies are diverse not only in socioeconomic, social, and ethnic terms, as they also display
differences with respect to lifestyles, attitudes, and activities. These new terminologies
indicate the shift from ethnic and cultural focus when defining differences in society
to the multiple and overlaying characteristics of immigrants, which is in parallel to
the changing composition of immigrants, and their skill levels, education, and talents.

The Shifting Policies and Governance of Diversity

The debates summarised above reveal not only the importance of social heterogene-
ity and diversity, but also the related political discourse and policies, including those
related to the organisation of space. While diversity-related policies have undergone

2 
See a detailed review in Chapter 23, this volume.
 Social Heterogeneity and Diversity 355
substantial changes in different periods, Grillo (2007: 979) highlights that from
the end of the nineteenth century up to the middle of the twentieth century, ethnic
and cultural identities were suppressed in many countries as part of nationalisation
strategies. Within this environment, the assimilation policies that dominated policy-
thinking until the 1960s emphasised the way in which migrants oriented themselves
to the expectations, norms, and values of the majority society.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, discourse took a more multiculturalist turn (Gril-
lo, 2005) after it was accepted that national norms are not singular, but hetero-
geneous. Accordingly, multiculturalism emerged as an umbrella term to describe
a set of institutional arrangements for the recognition of cultural minorities
and the accommodation of group-differentiated rights (Kymlicka, 1995; Young,
1990), introducing the idea that the institutions of the majority society must also
adapt and accommodate migrant experiences (Oosterlynck et al., 2018). As a
result, policies that supported the recognition of the differences of immigrants,
as well as cultural and ethnic communities, were introduced, although the notion
of multiculturalism came under criticism in many countries beginning from the
1980s onwards (Alexander, 2013; Vasta, 2007). The term then lost its appeal as
a concept in policymaking (Brubaker, 2001; Joppke, 2004; Vertovec and Wes-
sendorf, 2010) and this scepticism of multiculturalism brought with it significant
changes to the policy agenda. For example, Forrest and Dunn (2010) noted that
political support for multicultural policies has diminished in Australia, while
Koopmans (2010) pointed out that the Netherlands, where multicultural policies
have long been the norm, has been regarded as an example of the failure of such
an approach.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the introduction of a pluralist approach to diversity
became apparent, which can be referred to as a ‘return to scepticism about cultural
diversity’ (Vertovec and Wessendorf, 2005). This ‘diversity turn’ enabled scholars to
take into account a wider range of differences and similarities, both between and
within groups, and not only as regards to ethnicity, but also people’s attitudes, life-
styles, and activities. According to Beck (2000), this process ushered in sub-politics
of ‘disembedded individualisation’, in which individuals increasingly changed their
identities and identified less with the national scale and more with other forms of
lifestyle-based identities, both locally and globally. At the same time, policymakers
faced new challenges of how to govern and manage cities as they became more cos-
mopolitan. In some cases, city authorities have promoted the idea of cosmopolitan-
ism as a mark of modernisation, tolerance, and diversity, while in others it has been
seen as a threat to the imagined social order, fuelling neo-assimilationist policies in
many EU cities.
Recently, a very disturbing trend has emerged in many parts of the world in the
form of increased hostility towards differences, and, today, the policies of many
countries have witnessed a shift from those promoting the recognition of ethnic
and cultural identities to those pushing for integration and neo-assimilation (Chan,
2010; Joppke, 2003; Meer and Modood, 2013; Syrett and Sepulveda, 2012). In this
situation, while immigrants are recognised as having diverse backgrounds and differ-
ent demands, the fulfilment of certain expectations of the majority of the population
is prioritised (Ta an-Kok et al., 2013). The introduction of citizenship tests, strong
emphasis on the development of language skills, and shifts in funding practices, from
356 Ayda Eraydin
support for single-identity activities to those that encourage interaction between
different groups, are the symbols of such policy changes (Afridi and Warmington,
2009; Syrett and Sepulveda, 2012).
Why did multicultural policies lose their attractiveness, and how did they come
to be replaced by more negative discourses on diversity? Current literature contains
several different answers to these questions. First, there are studies identifying new
right-wing politics as having an important role in this change, which has been a
significant factor in national and local politics around the world; second, ethnic,
cultural, and religious conflicts have been effective in engendering a shift from ‘mul-
ticultural’ to ‘neo-assimilative’ practices (Grillo, 2007; Vertovec and Wessendorf,
2010); and third, the impacts of the 2008 global economic crisis and the consequent
austerity policies have incited negative attitudes of natives towards those considered
‘others’. Issues concerning the governance of diversity in the contemporary era are
highlighted.

Commodification of Diversity
The interplay of the three issues defined above led the shifts in diversity policies in
the 2000s, which provoked groups with different identities to demand free expres-
sion of their interests. In metropolitan areas, in particular, disadvantaged groups
began to show their discontent in different ways, including terrorist attacks at the
most extreme level, and the response to this was to implement strategies to simplify
and reduce the context of the term ‘diversity’ to use it with reference to economic
growth and competitiveness (Fainstein, 2005; Florida, 2005; Storper, 1997; Thrift
and Olds, 1996; Zachary, 2000).
This strategy can be defined as a commodification of diversity, a ‘whitewash-
ing’ of the increasing problems in urban areas, and a deflection of political
attention away from the negative outcomes of the new policies on different
groups. Besides, different crowd-pleasing policies have been adopted around the
world, including large-scale infrastructure developments, constructions of iconic
buildings, and large-scale renewal and redevelopment projects, with the goal of
creating the impression of great economic power. The announcements of such
projects are usually accompanied by requests for public support of the ongoing
policies, highlighting that everyone stands to benefit, while the negative conse-
quences of such projects on disadvantaged groups, especially low-skilled immi-
grants, are disregarded. Such processes are backed by such strategies as welfare
reform programmes, policies for the disadvantaged, government services for all,
and equal citizenship policies. In this way, diversity is voluntarily concealed with
the promise of access to the services and facilities offered by central and local
governments.

Governance Initiatives and Diversity-Related Policies

As governments finally took an interest in addressing diversity issues, other actors
were prompted to take on roles in the resolution of diversity-related problems.
New governance initiatives saw a shift in responsibilities away from formal insti-
tutions and governmental procedures towards wider governance processes. Such
 Social Heterogeneity and Diversity 357
initiatives are important in enabling diverse voices and views to be heard effec-
tively and thus promote cohesion and social solidarity (Blake et al., 2008). In this
regard, governance initiatives are recognised as key mechanisms in meeting the
unsatisfied needs of disadvantaged groups, especially immigrants, and in making
diversified groups more visible (Fraisse, 2011). Non-governmental actors, includ-
ing civil society-based organisations, grassroots movements and initiatives, and
other local activists have taken on greater responsibilities in representing and de-
fending the rights of diverse groups by addressing their problems, struggling to
ensure their access to resources and services, and participating actively in social
and economic life.
Various governance initiatives served to stir resentment and dissatisfaction in the
stigmatised and segregated groups and became the focus of grassroots opposition
(Eraydin et al., 2016). That said, several governance initiatives have been put in place
to protect the rights of immigrants and refugees, as well as other ethnic, cultural, and
religious groups, who are at particular risk of social exclusion, discrimination, and
exploitative working and living conditions (Ta an-Kok et al., 2013). It is also pos-
sible to find communities intentionally developing an array of organisations, social
networks, and institutions that focused directly on the issue of diversity and defined
diversity as their primary goal (see Nyden et al., 1998), besides communities that are
diverse by circumstance defining maintaining diversity as one objective related to a
broader goal of community development.

Current Processes Concerning Social

Heterogeneity and Diversity

Today, within the discussions of social heterogeneity and diversity, it is still possible
to come across issues which have been on the agenda for a long time, besides new
issues. Being old, however, does not mean they are less important.
Increasing income inequality and social polarisation, defined as the increase of
people or households of high income, together with an increase in people with low
incomes, and a simultaneous decrease of the middle- or median-income groups, are
still among the most significant problems faced by many cities around the world. There
is increasing evidence of a rise in polarisation among groups from different ethnic and
cultural backgrounds, as well as residential segregation between such groups.
Recently, there have been a number of studies detailing the nature of the income
and wealth inequality seen in many countries, such as Piketty (2013: 23) who showed
that while income inequality in the United States declined during the 1940s and sta-
bilised between 1950 and 1970, a rapid rise in inequality has been observed since
the 1980s and, according to him, the magnitude of change from 1980 to 2000 has
been impressive. Other empirical studies concerning the United States have identified
a connection between rising income inequality and the different forms of segrega-
tion. Fry and Taylor (2012) found that the segregation of upper- and lower-income
households had increased in 27 of America’s 30 largest metropolitan regions. Wat-
son (2009) showed that approximately 85% of people in America’s cities and met-
ropolitan areas live in areas that are more economically segregated today than they
were in 1970, while according to the findings of Reardon and Bischoff (2016), the
358 Ayda Eraydin
increase in the share of families living in both poor and wealthy neighbourhoods
doubled over the last three decades. Florida and Mellander (2017), examining the
geography of economic segregation3 in the United States, found that economic segre-
gation was associated with larger, denser, more affluent, and more knowledge-based
metropolitan areas, and was further related to race and income inequality. They also
found that race played a relatively larger role in educational and occupational seg-
regation than in income segregation, although some findings of other studies indi-
cated that racial segregation might not be inevitable in large multi-ethnic US cities.
According to Ong et al. (2016), segregation has decreased in Los Angeles in that,
in 2000, 40% of the city’s population lived in strongly segregated neighbourhoods
and, by 2010, it was 30% of the city’s population. The authors noted also that
income-based dissimilarity was considerably lower than observed ethno-racial dis-
similarities, suggesting that income differences contributed minimally to ethno-racial
residential segregation.
Europe is less divided socioeconomically than North America, although it has
become more unequal. There seems to be a consensus on the notion that social
inequality has increased significantly in many European countries since the mid-
1970s (Atkinson, 2015) leading to more segregated European cities. In their
book, Socio-economic Segregation in European Capital Cities: East Meets West,
Tammaru, Marcińczak, et al. (2016) introduced evidence from 13 European
capital cities4 between 2001 and 2010 showing that the rich and poor are
living at increasing distances from each other. According to their findings, a rela-
tionship exists between income inequality (measured by the Gini coefficient)
and residential segregation (measured by the index of dissimilarity), and both
economic segregation and income inequality has increased in three-quarters of
the studied cities (Tammaru, Musterd, et al., 2016). There are many studies that
follow the same approach as the above-mentioned study in focusing on income
segregation, but they present findings that focus less on ethnic and cultural seg-
regation. As stated by Marcińczak et al. (2016), there are many European cities
with disadvantaged communities and high concentrations of low-income groups
that are populated largely by ethnic minorities, and race and ethnicity still divide
European cities, even those with very different histories. However, the socioeco-
nomic differences between social classes within the natives may be even greater
than those between natives and non-natives (Eraydin, 2008; Tammaru, Musterd,
et al., 2016).
Social inequalities are more significant in the metropolises of the southern hemi-
sphere than in the northern hemisphere, and in South American cities, in particular,
the social inequality in such areas as income and educational attainment is very high.
According to a research compiled as part of the Urban Age Programme in 2009, and

3 
Most studies into economic segregation focus on income, while our research develops a
new measure of overall economic segregation, spanning income, education, and occupational
segregation, which we use to examine the economic, social, and demographic factors asso-
ciated with economic segregation across US metropolitan areas.
4 
Madrid, Milan, Tallinn, London, Stockholm, Vienna, Athens, Amsterdam, Budapest,
Riga, Vilnius, Prague, and Oslo.
 Social Heterogeneity and Diversity 359
entitled ‘Cities and Social Equity’, the main cities in Latin America (Sao Paulo, Rio
de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Lima, Bogota) record the highest Gini coefficients (Urban
Age Programme, 2009: 37), and this is accompanied by residential segregation.
Several studies display not only land market conditions and development patterns,
but also policies and projects concerning gentrification (Becantur, 2014; Lees et al.,
2016), land allocation (Iracheta, 2019), and the development of gated communities
(Ruiz-Tagle, 2014) shaped the pattern of distribution of socioeconomic, cultural,
and ethnic groups on urban space.
There is also a growing literature on residential segregation in several cities. While
studies on Chinese cities display both the importance of the influx of migrants in
urban areas (Zhu et al., 2017) and the importance of new elite spaces triggering
segregation (Wu et al., 2014), the studies on Turkish cities show housing policies
rather than urban dynamics in creating segregated urban spaces (Eraydin and Taşan-
Kok, 2014). In addition, the role of urban policies has been widely debated in the
literature on South African cities and compared to US cities. Several studies under-
lined the positive implications of policies leading to desegregation but most of the
black population in South Africa still remain in segregated areas (McClinton and
Zuberi, 2006; Saff, 1995).
The increase in income polarisation and residential segregation between differ-
ent socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic groups invokes the perception of differ-
ences and the definition of those with dissimilar characteristics as ‘others’, which
can be disastrous for the social stability of a city. In differentiating between ‘us’
and ‘others’, ethnic, cultural, language, and religious differences are used exten-
sively, although a number of other characteristics of both people and groups
that are assumed to belong to different socioeconomic categories can be quite
significant as well (Wimmer, 2004). Unfortunately, there are only a handful of
studies (Hipp and Perrin, 2006; Kearns and Forrest, 2000; Kearns and Parkinson,
2001) explaining how others are defined at an urban level. According to the find-
ings of several studies, language and religion are used as indicators of difference
and serve as an important reason for exclusion and the building of otherness (see
Ehrkamp, 2006).
Increasing hostility towards others and identity-based politics, coupled with the
spatial segregation of the dominant majority and others, can become a breeding
ground for social unrest. Tammaru, Marcińczak, et al. (2016) claim that recent riots
in Paris, London, and Stockholm cannot be considered separate from the concen-
trations of poverty in these cities. It would actually be fair to say that recent urban
policies and practices, by creating inequalities and segregation, have provoked oppo-
sition that in some cases has spawned urban movements. For instance, the privati-
sation of social housing in Britain has prevented lower- and even middle-income
groups from accessing accommodation near the city centre, pushing them away from
the inner cities (Harvey, 2008). Those policies and practices have led to the massive
mobilisations in cities, opposing also the commodification of urban space, socio-
spatial segmentation, and gentrification, among others (Eraydin and Taşan-Kok,
2014; Leitner et al., 2007). In cities in developing countries that have experienced
similar transformations, different insurgencies can be observed, and in some Latin
American countries, insurgencies have even included direct conflict with government
forces (Feliz, 2012; Walton, 1998).
360 Ayda Eraydin
Major Questions on Social Heterogeneity and Diversity
Addressed in the Current Literature

The recent problems faced by cities detailed above concerning social heterogeneity
and diversity have raised several questions aimed at understanding and defining
policies, with the goal of benefiting from the increasing diversity of the population
rather than focusing only on problems.

Implications of Diversity on Economic Competitiveness

Literature exploring the connections between diversity and economic competitive-
ness tend to focus on some specific issues. Early literature placed emphasis on immi-
grant enterprises and entrepreneurs, underlining the positive contribution made by
immigrant entrepreneurs to social cohesion and economic competitiveness (Barrett
et al., 2001; Kloosterman and Rath, 2001; Ratcliffe, 2001; Rath, 2000; Waldinger,
1997; Waldinger et al., 1990), although immigrants face difficulties in participating
actively in urban economies due to low skill levels, language deficiencies, cultural
gaps, and stigmatisation (Nijkamp, 2003: 402). There have also been discussions of
the contributions made by immigrant entrepreneurs in post-industrial and service-
oriented urban societies (Rath, 2001; Sandercock, 2003; Uitermark et al., 2005;
Zachary, 2000), apart from their role in the social integration processes of disadvan-
taged groups (Gerometta et al., 2005; Gonzáles and Healey, 2005; Mumford, 2002).
Recently, literature has pinpointed the importance of diversity for economic suc-
cess, as discussed by Fainstein (2005), whose findings support the earlier debate of
Jacobs (1961). Fainstein (2005: 4) argues that ‘the competitive advantage of cities,
and thus the most promising approach to attaining economic success, lies in enhanc-
ing diversity within the society, economic base, and built environment’, and this
argument has been supported by many others, including Bodaar and Rath (2005:
5), who claim that ‘urban diversity is a vital resource for the prosperity of cities
and a potential catalyst for socio-economic development’. In these debates, special
attention is paid to the creativity and the emergence of creative enterprises in diversi-
fied urban areas, referring to them as factors that stimulate urban economic growth
(Fainstein, 2005; Florida, 2002, 2005; Landry, 2000). In this body of literature,
social, cultural, ethnic, and spatial diversity attract multiple forms of human capital
and encourage cultural and artistic creativity, as well as technological and scientific
innovation (Bellini et al., 2009; Blumenthal et al., 2009; Eraydin et al., 2010; Fain-
stein, 2005; Nathan, 2015; Sepulveda et al., 2011; Thomas and Darnton, 2006).
Literature that focuses on diversity as an asset for economic competitiveness also
emphasises the tolerance of diversified cities and the tolerant atmosphere of neigh-
bourhoods with diverse populations. The argumentation for creative enterprises
(Clifton, 2008; Florida, 2005) highlights the importance of a tolerant atmosphere
in cities, as well as the role of social and ethnic diversity in attracting creative and
highly skilled workers (Florida, 2005). These authors claim that a vibrant and tol-
erant atmosphere can only be created by a mix of people of different cultures and
highlight the increasingly cosmopolitan character of a city, or certain parts of it, as
a stimulating factor in the generation of new types of enterprises, especially those
in the recreation and entertainment sectors. According to Florida and Gates (2003),
 Social Heterogeneity and Diversity 361
‘a connection exists between a metropolitan area’s level of tolerance for a range of
people, its ethnic and social diversity, and its success in attracting talented people
and high-technology firms’.
There are, however, criticisms of the emphasis on diversity. It is argued that empha-
sis on local diversity can be part of a business strategy (Shaw, 2011), and the strong
focus on the cosmopolitan and tolerant atmosphere of neighbourhoods has been criti-
cised with accusations of ‘selling ethnic neighbourhoods’ (Aytar and Rath, 2012). It
is apparent that entrepreneurs use ‘diversity’ to attract urbanites looking for new life-
style activities and a vibrant atmosphere, especially those seeking authenticity. Zukin
(2010) underlines that authenticity has become a material out of which urban entre-
preneurs fashion new consumerist spatial experiences and celebrate the coexistence of
contrasted inhabitants in the same neighbourhood as a means of attracting customers.

Implications of Social Heterogeneity and Diversity on Social Cohesion

One of more the critical questions connected to social heterogeneity and diversity
explores whether people with very different socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic
characteristics and lifestyles can build a common life together in their city or neigh-
bourhood, and how (Oosterlynck et al., 2018). Patterns of interaction and the var-
ious forms of networks within and between different socioeconomic, ethnic, and
cultural groups are of paramount importance for social cohesion since living with
diversity can translate into very different forms of interaction. According to litera-
ture, there are various ways of living with diversity, including stigmatisation of the
disliked others and reluctance to accept newcomers at one end of the scale, to warm
relations of solidarity and friendship at the other. The patterns of interaction among
diverse communities enable people to live in peace and make social cohesion possi-
ble in cities inhabited by people who are very different from one another.
Actually, interaction and networking are vital in creating a sense of community
and social cohesion in neighbourhoods (Bell and Newby, 1974; Blokland and Nast,
2014). A vital role is played by networks in the construction of social cohesion
in different societies, where they act as compensatory mechanisms against existing
prejudices. In this respect, the intergroup contact theory claims that interpersonal
contact is an effective mechanism of reducing prejudice between different social
groups (Allport, 1954, cited in Ruiz-Tagle, 2014). Developing social contacts bet-
ween neighbours and sharing mutual knowledge, familiarity, and interpersonal trust
in everyday neighbourhood interactions may contribute to social cohesion and a
sense of belonging. For example, Hudson et al. (2007), in their study of social cohe-
sion in different British neighbourhoods, emphasise the feelings of community that
come with everyday neighbourhood interactions, although, in networking, it is with
whom relationships are formed and the type of information shared that are impor-
tant. Concerning the benefits of contacts Dixon (2001) defines certain precondi-
tions: personal informal interaction, equal status relationships, and working for a
common goal in addition to support by authorities, law, and customs.
Social networks between individuals, family members, close friends, and members
of the same ethnic group help to create bonding capital and can be a primary source
of emotional and material support in poor and excluded communities (Sabatini,
2008). Studies indicate that the neighbourhoods with high levels of bonding social
362 Ayda Eraydin
capital tend to be those in which low-income households can survive (Foord and
Ginsburg, 2004; Forrest and Kearns, 2001; Turok and Bailey, 2004). Yet, as An-
derson and Neal (Chapter 15, this volume) underline, the harsher socioeconomic
conditions of these neighbourhoods can make it more difficult to create and main-
tain social networks. Moreover, traditional networks can also annul the level of
socialisation and independence of individuals in society and can enhance feelings of
‘otherness’, as highlighted by Turok and Bailey (2004).
In contrast, the weak and cross-cutting social ties between friends and neighbours
allow people to get ahead, given the access to opportunities and resources provided
in social circles other than their own (Forrest and Kearns, 2001; Sabatini, 2008).
Previous studies of social capital claim that weaker, cross-cutting social ties that exist
between heterogeneous individuals, such as ‘friends of friends’ or neighbours create
bridging social capital (Kleinhans et al., 2007). This form of social capital develops
when disadvantaged groups and immigrants become part of a local economy and
establish relationships with people other than their relatives, especially in their
working lives (Forrest and Kearns, 2001), and such networks can act against peo-
ple’s prejudices and can be the key to enhancing social cohesion. In this respect, not
only the density but also the characteristics of interrelations are important. Notions
of trust and willingness to help – in other words, mutual support – are critical in
encouraging interactions between people with different backgrounds and charac-
teristics, therefore raising the level of social cohesion. Nanetti (2006) and Nanetti
et al. (2011) define social trust as the dimension of social cohesion that encourages
widespread confidence in others. In addition, networks built between individual or
social groups with professional and administrative structures and local communities
are also critical in allowing households to adapt to changing circumstances and to
engage in social relationships with those in authority.
However, there are several criticisms on the positive aspects of interrelations that
can be grouped under conflict hypothesis, including their role in exacerbating a
feeling of tension because of different lifestyles and intensifying prejudice, instead of
reducing it. Havekes et al. (2014) assert that differences in beliefs, preferences, and
expectations among residents related to everyday neighbourhood life can negatively
affect social cohesion. Ruiz-Tagle (2014) presents empirical findings showing that
in contexts where inequality is growing, the everyday contact in diverse neighbour-
hoods triggers conflict, instead of reducing prejudice and improving social relation-
ships. Moreover, the dynamic character of cities and the changing composition of
residents in neighbourhoods may be a cause of worry and, as various studies have
illustrated, changes in resident profiles can compel long-term residents to leave the
neighbourhood (Eraydin et al., 2016; Feijten and Van Ham, 2009; Havekes et al.,
2014; Musterd and De Vos, 2007; Van Ham and Clark, 2009).

Living in Diversity: The Importance of Spaces of Interaction

The third question addressed in literature is connected to social life in diverse cities,
questioning how cohabitation can be facilitated, on which existing literature pro-
vides contradictory views. One of the widely accepted views asserts that increases
in urban diversity can lead people to communicate and relate to each other across
cultural, socioeconomic, and other divides, but it can also create tensions between
 Social Heterogeneity and Diversity 363
groups that were formerly isolated from one another. Although a certain amount
of conflict is unavoidable, neighbourhoods and cities with a high degree of diver-
sity are mostly characterised by cohabitation (Cohen and Sheringham, 2016). In
managing living together, literature emphasises ‘tolerance’, which is a widely debated
term used to discuss the possibilities of living with diversity. In light of such debates,
policymakers and academicians have increasingly discussed the value of tolerance
for social relations and order, just as the debates on economic competitiveness and
creativity do. Actually, celebrations of diversity go hand in hand with tolerance for
the practices and ways of life of different social, economic, and cultural groups. A
‘tolerant attitude’ facilitates diversity and can act as a key interface between the
wider objectives of social cohesion and economic competitiveness. However, there
are important criticisms of the emphasis on tolerance. As Putnam (2002) claims, the
delusion that there exist tolerant ‘host’ populations reflects a view of the essential
differences between groups and the particular imaginations of others. Similarly, as
Žižek (2007) claims, tolerance can easily feed into a form of racism and can become
a clichéd and power-infused celebration of exotic authenticity.
While tolerance has been widely debated, there is consensus on the role of spaces
of interaction in cohabitation, and the importance of public spaces in particular.
In many cities, cultural contacts in particular spaces, such as streets, parks, mar-
kets, cafés, and, sometimes, in people’s homes, occur peacefully and have been
described as ‘third places’ of social interaction after the home and workplace (Hick-
man, 2010; Holland et al., 2007). Not only commercial places, but also streets are
defined as important for socialisation (Matthews et al., 2000). Recent literature has
paid increasing attention to the role of specific places within neighbourhoods where
people of different backgrounds meet (Wessendorf, 2011), and some studies claim
that even fleeting encounters in public spaces can shape attitudes towards others
(Vertovec, 2007).
According to Hickman (2010), shops maintain an important social function, and
Eraydin et al. (2017) underline that local shops can act as places of interaction for
people of different backgrounds. Other social places, such as cafés, community cen-
tres, leisure, local clubs, and pubs, also fulfil a significant social role. For different age
groups, different types of social places are defined as extremely important, such as fast
food restaurants for youngsters (Cheang, 2002) and coffee shops (Rosenbaum et al.,
2007) for adults. These places provide for ‘non-obligatory’ social interaction. Similarly,
Low et al. (2009) emphasise the role of urban parks as public spaces in diverse com-
munities that green areas provide residents with much-needed leisure activities and
a ‘reason to get out of the house’. In recent years, although the increasing computer-
mediated interaction creates different opportunities for socialisation, public places in a
neighbourhood still retain important roles in supporting social interaction. As Putnam
(2007) emphasises, people in diverse communities tend to ‘hunker down’ and isolate
themselves from their neighbours, therefore, to avoid isolation, vibrant and welcom-
ing public spaces are important. However, several authors pinpoint a segregated use
of public space (Low, 2000; Mitchell, 1995; Ruiz-Tagle, 2014) and the low level of
accessibility of public spaces to members of the diverse groups (see Orum, 2010).5

5 
See the detailed discussions on public space in Common Ground? Readings and
Reflections on Public Space, edited by Orum and Neal (2010).
364 Ayda Eraydin
Conclusions

This chapter has presented a summary of the changes in the context of arguments on
social heterogeneity and diversity since the first debates introduced by the Chicago
School in the 1920s, along with the evolution of policies on diversity, immigration,
and ethnicity. The problems defined related to diversity-related issues in academic
debates, and in the policies and practices defined by local and central governments,
though not in parallel, have influenced each other in several periods. Unfortunately,
today the distance between the problems referred to in literature and the policies and
measures that are introduced are greater than ever before. Recently, however, while
contemporary literature presents new types of diversities, efforts are being made
to convince policymakers of the benefits of diversity for cities. Existing arguments
supported by such international institutions as the EU and OECD (Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development) first focus on the benefits of diversity
and then underline that diversity is not an obstacle to social cohesion, concluding
that it is possible to live in diversity. Several of the studies introduced in the above
sections put forward the different implications of diversity on the economy by taking
a positive perspective and highlight that, by taking several measures, the benefits of
living in diversity can be enhanced.
While academic discourse has sought to introduce the new types of diversity in
society, those adopted by local and central governments are closely connected to the
economic conjecture, daily politics, and their ideological positions. In general, diver-
sity-related policies in the neoliberal era are quite opportunistic, being in favour of
diversity (highly skilled immigrants) with the view that diversity can help economic
competitiveness and creativity, but adopting a negative attitude towards immigrants
whose contribution to the economy has stayed limited. Local policymakers com-
modify diversity to support their arguments related to economic development, while
there has been a recent rise in the growth of negative attitudes towards diversity
in political discourse, not only due to the growing numbers of refugees and immi-
grants from less developed countries, but also the rise in right-wing politics that has
brought about a shift from ‘multicultural’ to ‘neo-assimilative’ practices. In fact, an
opportunistic attitude can be detected in many cities around the world that has re-
sulted in extreme policy changes concerning the reactions to the increasing diversity
of the population as a result of immigration.
Obviously, the opportunistic and utilitarian approach results in no essentialist
solutions being found to the problems raised in diversity literature, namely inequality,
fragmentation, segmentation, and spatial segregation. Today’s new urban policies,
aside from the residential mix policies adopted by some countries, do not sufficiently
resolve the continuing problems of fragmentation in society, nor the rising inequality
and residential segregation. There is a whole new range of operations in the political,
economic, cultural, and subjective fields that are being reflected on city-branding
policies, investments in large-scale infrastructures, waterfront redevelopments, and
other large-scale urban projects, as the well-known elements of the entrepreneurial
ethos that shows no interest in egalitarian-type policies. Park and Burgess (1984
[1925]) and, separately, Wirth (1938), adopted Chicago as a heuristic space through
which to understand the broader dynamics of industrial capitalist societies and,
today, an analysis of processes concerning urban diversity can provide a broader
 Social Heterogeneity and Diversity 365
perspective of the neoliberal and post-liberal agenda related to global capitalism and
the intersection of major macro-social trends and their particular spatial patterns.
What should be the new research agenda? The role of bottom-up initiatives, inno-
vative forms of solidarity, the creation of a community culture as an alternative to
the ‘loss of community’ narrative, social innovation, and new spatiotemporal frames
in which solidarities are nurtured are just some of the issues that can be considered
important for exploration, in addition to new governance arrangements and prac-
tices. With respect to the urban built environment, there is a need to refocus on
innovative solutions that can enhance urban encounters, taking into account the
newly emerging lifestyles and technological advances that have a strong influence on
patterns of social interaction.

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 18
Inequalities and the City
Gender, Ethnicity, and Class
David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione

Introduction

The question of urban inequalities relates to two interconnected processes of change.

These involve: (i) the increase and transformation of inequalities on global and local
scales and (ii) the urbanisation at a time when the majority of the world’s population
lives in cities and the growth of gigantic conurbations in both the Global North and
South. Today, the traditional historical divide between urban and rural contexts is
not so significant – also the case in the lesser developed countries and regions – with
the social tensions produced by the new forms of inequalities being highly concen-
trated in the cities.
Economic inequalities have been increasing, particularly in industrially advanced
countries (Milanovic, 2016; OECD, 2015; Piketty, 2013), even if extreme poverty
has decreased on a global scale, particularly in the newly developing countries of
the Global South, due to the growth in industrialisation and urbanisation. As will be
seen in this chapter, the decline of rural poverty in the Global South has been coun-
terbalanced by the rise of social fragmentation and new forms of social exclusion
and poverty in both the Global South and the Global North (Sassen, 2014).
In this chapter, we focus on the transformations of the urban systems of inequalities
produced by modernisation, industrialisation, and urbanisation in different urban
contexts of the Global North and South. An urban system of inequalities is here
understood as the different mix and level of gender, ethnicity, class, and demographic
inequalities that characterise cities in different historical and development contexts.
In the next section, we introduce the urban inequalities resulting from early in-
dustrialisation in the industrially developing countries with the growth of the new
urban working class and the development of strong gender and ethnic divisions and

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
374 David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione
discriminations in the new urban-industrial contexts. This is followed by a short
discussion of the disruption of rural communities in the colonial and dependent
countries of the Global South generating, at the same time, unprecedented forms of
rural poverty and the growth of cities mainly inhabited by an urban poor lacking
any form of social protection. Section three deals with the changing inequality sys-
tems that characterise today’s cities in industrially advanced countries, particularly
focusing on European cities. The fourth section focuses on the dynamic of chang-
ing inequalities in the cities of the Global South, and the final section looks at the
unsustainability of the present level of urban inequality and its resistance and resil-
ience. Finally, we consider the impact of social movements and forms of social inno-
vation in dealing with the new difficulties and divisions generated by urban social
inequalities.
The interest in urban social inequalities and social exclusion in cities has pro-
duced a large number of contributions on a wide range of issues.1 Urban scholars
have been debating the impact of social inequalities in cities and the spreading of
new forms of poverty and social exclusion for a long time. More recently, the accel-
erated socioeconomic transformations connected to globalisation, financialisation,
and the great recession, as well as the long-term wave of neoliberal policies started
in the 1980s, have increased the interest in urban social inequalities, with particular
attention to the new forms of poverty and spatial segregation in cities.
In the cities of the old industrialised countries, financialisation, globalisation, and
the strong wave of neoliberalism are transforming the previous Fordist systems of
urban divisions and inequalities. The decline of the manufacturing working class is
accompanied by an increasing social fragmentation as well as the spread of both
new forms of segregation and exclusion and new forms of social reaction to the
commodification trends triggered by contemporary capitalism. Class, ethnic, and
gender divisions have turned into a large, heterogeneous, and unstable area of social
suffering, often segregating inhabitants in the city outskirts – banlieue and ghettos –
where the difficulties of everyday life have been increased by social exclusion and
discrimination. Minorities, new migrants, and less educated young people are the
victims of a selective urban labour market, which gives rise to unemployment and
an increasing number of working poor. At the same time, elderly people with health
and mobility problems, and often with low pensions and suffering from isolation
and solitude, have become a growing element of the urban population of advanced
industrial countries. As will be seen later in the chapter, in these contexts new urban
inequalities are not only a matter of insufficient income and economic poverty but
they also mean a shortfall in social protection and representation. Moreover, gender

1 
Social inequalities and social exclusion in cities have been at the core of urban studies
since the first empirical research of the early twentieth century (Booth, 1902; Park, 1928;
Rowntree, 1901). As we will see in the next sections, spatial inequalities were analysed
in the light of capitalistic development (Castells, 1972; Harvey, 1973), commodification
processes in the cities of developing countries (Acemoglu et al., 2001; Arrighi, 1994), the
polarization between high-income and low-income groups (Sassen, 1991), the strategies
to cope with urban life (Roberts, 1994), and the division of labour and the basic cultures
of ethnic neighbourhoods (Wacquant and Wilson, 1993; Wilson, 1987).
 Inequalities and the City 375
inequalities are persistent, even if contrasted by women movements in many coun-
tries, and new strong ethnic tensions are growing, together with the increasing waves
of immigrants and asylum seekers from less developed countries.
The rise of global inequalities has also hit the cities of the Global South, how-
ever, with different trajectories. In the countries where the manufacturing sector is
growing rapidly (China, India, Brazil), a new working class with very limited access
to forms of social protection has become concentrated in enormous megalopolises
where housing, social services, and food are much more expensive in relation to
the low and uncertain incomes of the workers and their families. This new working
class has become removed from rural poverty, but, at the same time, it has lost the
traditional protection of their village or tribal organisations. The system of inequal-
ities is changing rapidly involving a new urban population of billions of people.
The new working class of the emerging economies not only has problems of income
and job security, but also suffers a dramatic lack of social protection and welfare.
Gender and ethnic/minority discrimination, already present in rural communities,
has been accentuated in the industrially developing cities where advanced tech-
nologies, new communication devices, and consumerism have led to great cultural
contradictions.
In countries where industrial growth has been limited (a large part of Africa and
parts of Central and South America), urbanisation has also often been equally rapid.
However, the underlying causes are due to rural conflicts, wars, and economic crises.
The new urban population, concentrated in gigantic sprawling cities, lacking any
kind of planning and made up of shantytowns without any basic infrastructures,
is exposed to extreme forms of poverty without any hope of protection and repre-
sentation. In this case, urban inequality appears particularly dramatic and pushes
part of the population to migrate to more industrialised countries. The migration
waves (which mainly originate from cities) raise serious problems and contribute
to increasing the inequalities in both the out-migration cities and new settling ones.
Out-migration is quite selective and usually involves young workers with some
degree of education and professional skills. Their departure contributes to exacer-
bating the inequalities in the regions of origin.2 On the other hand, as we shall see
later on in this chapter, in the more developed cities the migration flow provokes
a feeling of insecurity and competition in the native population that may turn into
discrimination, expulsion, and repression, thus fomenting inequalities.

2 
In different terms the selection process of leaving behind the most disadvantaged is
similar to the one noticed by Wilson (1987) in the American ghetto. In his book, The
Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy (1987), Wilson
made an outstanding contribution to the aforementioned processes. As highlighted by
Wilson (1991: 641) ‘Especially since 1970, inner-city neighborhoods have experienced
an outmigration of working- and middle-class families previously confined to them by
the restrictive covenants of higher-status city neighborhoods and suburbs. Combined
with the increase in the number of poor caused by rising joblessness, this outmigra-
tion has sharply concentrated the poverty in inner-city neighborhoods … Outmigration
has decreased the contact between groups of different class and racial backgrounds and
thereby concentrated the adverse effects of living in impoverished neighborhoods’.
376 David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione
Engines of Urban Inequality

In the nineteenth century, the widespread development of capitalism was accom-

panied in many European countries, especially in England, by a rapid process of
urbanisation and industrialisation and the weakening of the traditional social ties
grounded on local communities and family. In England, because of the Industrial
Revolution and the dramatic changes occurring in social protection after the adop-
tion of the New Poor Laws of 1834, masses of migrants and rural workers moved
from the countryside to small towns that then grew into large industrial cities, such
as Manchester.
In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels (1892) offered a detailed
analysis of the first waves of urbanisation in Manchester and the resulting economic
and social changes triggered by the rapid growth of English industrial cities, with the
creation of slums and the spatial segregation imposed by the new division of labour.
Similar to Engels, other nineteenth-century thinkers and social reformers, such as
Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Booth, focused on the social consequences of the
rapid urbanisation and industrialisation with the rise of capitalism. Tocqueville’s
Memoir on Pauperism contextualised the new forms of poverty and social exclusion
produced by industrialisation and urbanisation and their consequences on social
and political stability in the capitalistic societies (Goldberg, 2001). Social reformers
and scholars, such as Booth and Rowntree, documented the spatial segregation of
nineteenth-century London and York, with their dramatic concentration of poverty,
but also the beginning of the first networks of mutual aid and collective action
concerning labour and housing conditions (Morlicchio, 2018).
The first empirical studies on urban poverty, such as in Rowntree’s book, Poverty:
A Study of Town Life (1901), thoroughly documented the massive concentration
of poverty in urban space, by exploring the demographics and features of social
exclusion. Where a rapid industrial growth and division of labour occurred, spatial
segregation spread. The new urbanised working class remained in poverty for most
of their lives, with a short respite only when their teenage children began working
and remained at home. The urban poor were confined to unhealthy housing and
living conditions where life expectancy was lower than in the countryside.
The rise of urban inequalities, involving marked class divisions, was evident
in England during industrialisation and proletarianization that took place in the
nineteenth century. The same process occurred later in most of the other European
cities, where part of the new working class maintained some connections with the
family that had remained in the countryside, thus being able to supplement their
wages with social support from rural relatives (Tilly and Scott, 1978). The living
conditions of the new urban working class in European cities were also difficult and
unstable. The new industrial jobs were insecure and poorly paid, and, until the end
of the century, workers had no social rights nor welfare protection.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, large numbers of workers migrated
to American cities, particularly in what is now known as the rust belt of the
north-eastern United States where industrial growth was concentrated (mainly
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan). It is in this context that ethnic and class
discrimination and forms of spatial segregation originated and developed. Immi-
grant workers were extremely vulnerable, with great difficulties in finding housing
 Inequalities and the City 377
and exposed to widespread discrimination and harassment. They were able to find
a kind of rough protection living in their original national communities, thus giving
rise to forms of spatial concentration and segregation. In American cities, class and
ethnic/race inequalities have been strictly interconnected from the very beginning of
the industrialisation process.
Later, during the Fordist period, the different types of socio-spatial segregation
developed with their own social bonds, cultural identity, and division of labour,
from ethnic neighbourhoods to the ‘black communal ghettos’ of mid-twentieth-
century American cities (Marcuse, 2001). As many scholars pointed out (Marcuse,
2001; Wacquant, 2008), this ‘city within the city’ reflected the high concentration
of specific segregated social groups in urban space enforced and legitimised by the
state. In Europe, Wacquant’s (1996) comparative analysis on French banlieue and
US ghettos showed how scale, structure, and welfare institutions played a pivotal
role in shaping the socio-spatial marginalisation. While the French working-class
banlieues were characterised by ethnic heterogeneity and regular contact with more
central neighbourhoods, the US ghettos were strictly segregated, with a marked
ethnic homogeneity and racial stigma. While in the case of the French banlieues the
segregation was only territorial, the US ghettos assumed a residential, racial, and
symbolic segregation, without any relations with the adjacent white neighbourhoods
(Mollenkopf and Castells, 1991; Sassen, 2006)
As anticipated, it is also in the industrially developing cities of the West that the
modern gender division of work originated and developed. On the one hand, urban-
isation dismantled the protection of rural communities, however, maintaining the
patriarchal ideology. On the other hand, urbanised women remained without basic
support from community or kinship and therefore became extremely vulnerable.
In the early phases of industrialisation, women represented a significant part of the
workforce, particularly in the textile sector. Notwithstanding, they were vulnerable
due to lower wages than men, to work instability, and to the lack of social support
during pregnancy and child rearing. With the advent of the second industrial rev-
olution, Fordism and the Keynesian compromise changed the division and balance
of power between productive and reproductive functions (Mingione, 1991; Morris,
1996; Orlof, 1993). This created a strong division of tasks between, on one side, the
organised male working class (the male breadwinner) and, on the other, the assign-
ment of domestic and care work to women, seen as the main institution regulating
private life (Lewis, 1997). As pointed out by Korpi (2000), during the Fordist period,
power divisions in the family were related to the differences in labour market partic-
ipation. While men benefited from a full institutional social protection due to their
stable working conditions, women were only entitled to protection in their role as a
wife, widow, or mother (Lewis, 1997). The urban context favoured this gender divi-
sion of roles as the need for home care and domestic work grew in order to support
higher productivity workers. Women were forced into long hours of domestic and
care work without any income or into working double shifts of lowly paid or unpaid
work (Hochschild and Machung, 1989; Lewis, 1992; Pfau-Effinger and Geissler,
2005; Esping-Andersen, 1999, 2009).
The forms of poverty and spatial segregation that developed in the cities of the
industrially advanced countries are quite different from the system of inequalities re-
sulting from the commodification process in the cities of the developing and colonised
378 David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione
countries. The early colonial exploitation of the Global South was based on a massive
appropriation of land and labour in rural areas – extensive/intensive agriculture –
without any attempt to establish modern institutions, bureaucratic authorities, or
rules aimed at promoting economic development and a modern division of labour
(Acemoglu et al., 2001; Arrighi, 1994).
The urbanisation and repressive disruption of rural communities led to the expan-
sion of unplanned urban centres, with the accompanying endemic poverty and
social degradation. The disappearance of the indigenous communities and villages
resulting from the massive urban migration flows created new forms of urban seg-
regation and social exclusion. Le Galès (2017) describes the colonial city as a sys-
tem of political control and economic exploitation. Even though colonial elite and
Western oligarchies modernised infrastructures and transportation, the new cities
remained isolated, with a strong division between the elite and the masses segre-
gated in slums, barrios, and ghettos. In a scenario of rising inequalities and economic
exploitation,  the legacy of colonialism led to the creation of huge socioeconomic
inequalities, spatial segregation, illegal settlements, high pollution, and a lack of ser-
vices and governmental capacity to implement public policies.
The combination of steadfast tribal divisions, unregulated economy, violence,
and the new division of labour imposed by Western governments and multinational
companies, continued into the postcolonial phase with the unequal exchange and
the necessity to finance the fast growth of welfare capitalism in the West. How-
ever, as will be seen later, the population of the Global South mainly remained
concentrated in the countryside where poverty levels became chronic and fam-
ines recurrent. Later, the processes of urbanisation and urban growth accelerated
at an unprecedented pace and urban poverty and inequalities have now become
prominent social questions in every continent of the Global South. The gender
division became exacerbated by a mix of persistently strong patriarchy and enor-
mous difficulties for women to organise life in urban slums. On the ethnic ground,
urbanisation and the oppressive dominance of commercial and financial interests
made ethnic and tribal rivalries increasingly strong leading to deadly conflicts and
violent confrontations.

Inequalities in the Contemporary Cities of the Global North

As we have seen in the previous section, the cities of the Global North have been at
the centre of the industrial transformation creating the modern inequality system
through two different phases. In the first phase, during the take-off of capitalist in-
dustrialisation, the new urbanised working class was the victim of widespread urban
poverty, particularly in England, but also in the other industrially developing coun-
tries. In the second phase, which reached its peak in Europe after World War II, the
development of welfare capitalism based on the so-called Keynesian compromise,
led to a massive expansion in urban social policies, social security, education, health
services, and social housing (Flora and Heidenheimer, 1981). Through redistribu-
tive policies, this extraordinary model was able to reduce or at least to keep under
control the major economic and spatial inequalities in Global North cities. In the
welfare capitalist countries, the balance has been financed by high growth rates and
 Inequalities and the City 379
unequal global exchanges (Mingione, 2018) so that welfare policies have been able
to alleviate the impact of the inequalities (legal protection of minorities, progres-
sive taxation, struggle against poverty, increasing social spending, etc.). Democratic
citizenship and social citizenship were able to justify the inequalities produced by the
market economy and to redistribute part of the increasing wealth, without affecting
capitalistic accumulation.
The social effects of the welfare capitalism economic model were particularly
evident in the cities, with huge investments being made in urban development and
in favour of the growing urban population. Every country in the Western world
had to face the challenge of the massive flows of people shifting from rural areas
to the cities in providing housing and public services such as education, transport,
and health. However, forms of spatial segregation and urban poverty persisted,
such as the ethnic neighbourhoods or the ‘black communal ghettos’ of the mid-
twentieth-century American cities (Marcuse, 2001). The class, gender, and ethnic
inequalities of Global North cities remained considerable and gave rise to various
conflicts on both sides of the Atlantic – mainly on racial issues in the United States
and on political cleavages in Europe. However, the increase in welfare investments
in cities contributed to limiting the impact of commodification in terms of short-
falls in social protection in the individualised and consumer-oriented contexts of
Fordist cities.
With the end of the ‘golden age’ and the passage to the ‘fragmented’ era of
Western capitalism (Mingione, 1991; Andreotti et al., 2018), the uncertain com-
promise between market economy, welfare protection, and democracy discussed
by Marshall (1972) became increasingly unable to maintain a balance (see also
Streeck, 2016; Mingione, 2018). Already in the 1970s, Marshall (1972), in a very
important article, explained that the constitutive logics of capitalism, democracy,
and welfare – the basic elements of welfare capitalism – are different and not
compatible with one another. In fact, the logic of the market produces strong and
cumulative economic inequalities that obstruct both the working of democratic
citizenship (because the unequal distribution of resources means unequal distri-
bution of power, representation, and opportunities) and the protective capacity
of welfare. On the other hand, Marshall argues that the egotistic character of
representative democracy often hinders the protective capacity of welfare as the
majority of the population is not in favour of protecting groups of citizens consid-
ered to be undeserving.
During the golden age of welfare capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990), Marshall
argues that democracy and welfare had enough resources to legitimise inequalities
through the expansion of democratic participation and the growth of social invest-
ments, the struggle against poverty, the expansion of education, health, transports
and social housing (particularly concentrated in the growing cities). Class, gender,
and ethnic divisions remained pronounced but made less unacceptable by the
political perspectives of change.3 However, this equilibrium was unstable, as it did

3 
Think of the important achievements that women and ethnic movements realized
everywhere in Western industrialised countries during this period. The real perspectives
of change contributed to produce the legitimation of inequalities.
380 David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione
not take into consideration that, above a certain level, inequality could no longer be
legitimised.4 As will be seen, the economic crisis in the 1970s, de-industrialisation,
globalisation, and financialisation made welfare capitalism no longer a sustainable
option, beginning in the large cities where minorities, migrants, long-term unem-
ployed, and precarious low-income workers were concentrated in more upmarket
urban areas.
In the following decades, the disappearance of the foundations of the Keynes-
ian compromise and the increasing misalignment of market economy, democracy,
and welfare confirmed the correctness of Marshall’s vision of the importance of
the welfare capitalist failure regarding inequalities. The rate of economic growth
in industrialised countries dropped and the new economic dynamism showed a
decreasing capacity to compensate the impact of commodification with investments
in welfare support. On the contrary, redistributive policies began to be substituted
with neoliberal policies, which explicitly denied the capacity and legitimisation of
the state to steer market forces. Therefore, the support for universalistic public pol-
icies decreased, accompanied by a public discourse being more and more centred on
xenophobic, anti-minority, and divisive arguments.
Since the 1980s, financialisation and the neoliberal policies fuelled the rise of
economic inequalities in Western countries (OECD, 2011, 2015), particularly in cit-
ies and metropolitan areas. As mentioned, this change reflected a regime shift from
the post-war order to a new fragmented phase (Mingione, 1991) marked by the
dominance of finance and the limitation of state intervention in the economy and in
social policies. Against this backdrop, ‘trickle-down economics’ claimed that tax cuts
and benefits for the high-income earners were a driver for economic growth favour-
ing new jobs and advantages for low-income groups. After more than 30 years, it is
today clear that trickle-down economics was a hoax (Atkinson, 2015; Piketty, 2013)
and that it was a fundamental tool for the individualisation of social dynamics, fa-
vouring the spread of competition in all social contexts. If in the previous phase, the
Keynesian compromise was legitimised to protect workers and their families from
market fluctuations, welfare has now become an ‘individual affair’ and the ‘losers’ in
the competition are the first culprits for their failure. Today the state is legitimised to
cut the protection for social groups considered undeserving (migrants, ethnic minor-
ities, ex inmates, squatters, and the like).
As stated by Colin Crouch (2009), the fall of the Keynesian compromise has been
accompanied by rising inequalities and cuts to social expenditure, counterbalanced
by a fast-growing financial industry that fuelled internal demand and consump-
tion, especially for low-income groups. Many studies have emphasised this connec-
tion, showing how easy credit to families and private debt has contributed to both
reducing the demand for public social spending and stimulating aggregate demand

4 
As pointed out by Marshall (1972: 30): ‘This malfunctioning of the system of legiti-
mate inequality is probably the most deeply-rooted threat to the viability of the hybrid
or hyphenated social structure … The trouble is that no way has been found of equating
a man’s value in the market (capitalist value), his value as a citizen (democratic value)
and his value for himself (welfare value) … The failure to solve economic inequality is
evidence of the weakness of contemporary democracy’.
 Inequalities and the City 381
without drawing heavily on public debt (Crouch, 2009, 2011; Harvey, 2014; Hay,
2011). Nevertheless, when the real estate bubble burst in 2008, even private debt
used as a mean of social protection entered into crisis, resulting in a new wave of
fiscal restraint and privatisation (Mertens, 2017). Some authors (Dowling, 2017;
Harvey, 2014; Mertens, 2017; Streeck, 2017) interpreted these trends as a continu-
ation of the neoliberal agenda towards an emerging social-investment market based
on private investors replacing public authorities through the financial markets. As
observed by Oberti and Préteceille (2018), all these processes are now resulting in
new waves of privatisation of many public assets – transport, utilities, and land –
as was also the case for the remedies imposed on developing countries by the IMF
and the World Bank in the past. These policies have reduced both the coverage and
the expenditure for welfare protection, handing over greater responsibilities to
individuals and families to take care of their own needs, resulting in an increasing
unpredictability in a citizen’s life trajectory. Moreover, they contributed to increas-
ing the flow of social resources to the very rich and to the most powerful part of
the state bureaucracy and political elite (Franzini and Pianta, 2016; Piketty, 2013;
Stiglitz, 2012).
The city is the social arena where social heterogeneity and fragmentation magnify
the impact of social inequalities (Smets, 2013; Watt and Smets, 2017), mirroring
what Robert Castels (1995) called désaffiliation, i.e. the process of marginalisation
occurring at the same time as the labour market, social ties, and welfare protection.
It is in the cities, also, that new conflicts and tensions arise and threaten the stability
of the economic model of growth based on a new global working class producing
goods and services for a small privileged class (Sassen, 2014). The contrast between
the new largely uninhabited skyscrapers, the squalid relict suburb quarters of the
poor – often under the threat of being redeveloped or gentrified, thus pushing their
population towards outer-lying zones – and an increasing mass of homeless people
compose the new frontier of urban inequalities (Cohen and Watt, 2017; Watt and
Smets, 2017).
The new fragmented forms of urban inequalities become especially clear when we
observe the dynamics of the contemporary city, where the processes of segmentation
and segregation of different groups of citizens are complicating the social geography
of cities. On the one hand, there is a small class of extremely rich people, benefiting
from the financialisation and globalisation of the economy, who earn incredibly high
incomes, who occupy the most prestigious areas of the city, where other citizens are
not welcome and discouraged to enter. The glamorous cities of the super-rich and of
mega events pumped up by Arab oil investors and the international property specu-
lation are a central part of this new picture. According to Mayer (2018a), the pursuit
of such growth-chasing projects has led to exploding property prices. The worldwide
spread of gated communities (Blakely and Snyder, 1997) is one of the most visible
expressions of this increase in inequality and (self) segregation. On the other hand,
the rest of the population is fragmented into more or less disadvantaged subgroups
with decreasing access to urban resources (Mayer, 2018a). In many countries, the de-
standardisation of the labour market, for instance, is creating a new class of workers
in the urban economy with unstable low incomes, no or very limited access to wel-
fare benefits beyond the very basic ones, and no real chances to transit to protected
jobs. Often these workers belong to disadvantaged groups, such as immigrants or
382 David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione
discriminated minorities, but in many other cases, they are young people coming
from low-, middle-, or working-class backgrounds unable to enter the core sectors of
the labour market. Inequality in cities, indeed, is increasing the costs for families to
raise their children and is exacerbating competition and conflict in urban life, espe-
cially regarding education.
With the dramatic increase in social vulnerability and the multiple sources
of fragmentation that affected the labour market, the welfare system, and the
family, inequalities spread across generations and working groups, including the
traditional segment of the stable workforce. The nuclear family, still the main
institution regulating social life, has become less able to offer protection to its
members, due to longer life expectancy, the drop in the number of marriages and
births and the increase in divorces, resulting in rebuilt families and people living
alone. Families and communities are becoming increasingly varied and, often,
unstable. Moreover, the increasing number of women entering the workforce has
generated tensions in family relations and responsibilities. Conciliation between
paid employment and family-oriented activities has become difficult and led to
different gender, ethnic, and cultural tensions. Gender inequalities have decreased
but both average income and working opportunities for women remain lower
than for men. This happens in cities where the cost of living is high and where
single mothers and isolated migrant women face great and increasing difficulties
to cope with their needs.
Since the mid-1970s, American disadvantaged urban areas have attracted new
migrant flows, with the emergence of the so-called hyperghetto as Wacquant and Wil-
son (1993) described the new marginal urban areas in the United States characterised
by both race segregation and a lack of any cultural identity (Wacquant and Wilson,
1993; Wilson, 1987). In this context, while the ghetto functioned as reservoir of a
cheap labour force for the city’s factories, the hyperghetto institutionalised a system of
racial segregation based on social disintegration, violence, and social control. Parallel
to the decline in manufacturing jobs and the new massive waves of migration arriving
from Latin America and Asia, the collapse of the communal ghetto into the hyperghet-
to intensified residential segregation and social control. The decline in public schools
and welfare state institutions, the rise of new forms of repression and an increase in the
numbers of incarcerated people contributed to the process of radical discrimination.
Thus, the hyperghetto in American cities (see also Wacquant, 2008) has become an
extreme form of segregation of the poor based on institutional discrimination, racism,
and repression. According to the concept of ‘carceral continuum’ proposed by Wac-
quant (2001), there is a link between expulsion from the labour market, segregation
in the hyperghetto, and a high level of incarceration of young Afro-American men.
However, the hyperghetto is the other side of the coin of a fragmented urban system
characterised by avoidance. Conversely, the spread of gated communities in the United
States, and more recently in Europe, shows the choice of the more privileged urban
subgroups to avoid interaction with other (lower) subgroups. Therefore, visible and
invisible borders have emerged dividing the different subgroups in a context where
inhabitants have access to different institutional services – education, bars and restau-
rants, public space, sports facilities, cultural events, etc. – and only occasionally inter-
act with other subgroups across the city.
 Inequalities and the City 383
Due to deindustrialisation and financialisation, the hyperghetto further deteri-
orated, with the crisis in communal organisations being replaced by institutions
of social control and a marked increase in homeless, unemployed, and vulnera-
ble people, even in the most dynamic urban contexts (Wacquant, 2008). Sampson
(2019) argues that, despite the fact that all social groups are now less exposed to
violence than in the 1990s, in contemporary American cities racial and economic
disparities remain, with a persistent lack of opportunities for the more disadvan-
taged groups.
Fragmented inequalities have also hit European cities, even if to a lesser
extent and with different issues and consequences compared to US cities. Urban
development created large working-class neighbourhoods that were, more or less,
integrated in the urban social fabric. Some kind of ‘ethnic neighbourhood’ ex-
isted, but it was inhabited by groups that defined themselves according to some
ethnic, religious, or other characteristic in order to preserve basic cultural traits
and to maintain social cohesion. Unlike the US ‘ghetto’ it was not an institution-
alised form of segregation based on the subordination of one group to another
(Marcuse, 2001). Indeed, over time these minority groups were often able to
obtain full citizenship.
Since the 1950s and 1960s in France, the United Kingdom, and Belgium, and since
the 1980s in other countries, such as Spain, Italy, and Ireland, European cities have
been the destination of important flows of immigrants arriving from developing
countries. The first migrant flows in France and the United Kingdom were largely
made up of citizens from former colonies who obtained citizenship and, while facing
forms of discrimination, were integrated in the labour market as part of the working
class. The post-Fordist transition has reopened the question of urban inequality and
the poverty of migrants in terms that are quite new.
Between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, European cities have witnessed
a transformation in the working-class neighbourhoods. First, the number of immi-
grants is increasing everywhere, and they tend to concentrate in specific urban areas.
This ethnic diversification has led to multicultural neighbourhoods that sometimes
generates underlying fears as the number of residents of foreign origins increases. In
countries with a long-standing tradition of immigration (France, the United King-
dom, and the Netherlands), the growing tensions mainly concern the integration of
second and third generations, who struggle to achieve the living standards of the
general population. In southern European countries (Spain, Italy), in a first phase,
immigration has mainly concerned a typical individual immigrant who has just
arrived alone (including single women seeking jobs in personal services). However,
today the second generations also face problems being included in social processes as
they are exposed to high risks of expulsion from the education system and struggle
to find decent jobs. Although their role in both the formal and informal economy
retains considerable economic importance, it is exceedingly difficult to translate this
‘functional integration’ into improvements in working conditions. Immigrants ‘make
the city work’ by cleaning, repairing, maintaining, and serving; however, they have
not been able, so far, to ‘make the city pay’ (fairly).
The other side of the coin is the question of urban security and the ‘criminalisation’
of immigrants, in general, and of some ethnic groups, in particular, such as Islamic
384 David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione
groups after the terrorist season or the Roma communities. Even if urban security in
the present fragmented cities is much higher than in the past and the crime rate has
dropped to historical lows, public opinion is susceptible to claims regarding a lack
of security, as migrants are perceived as dangerous. The difficulties of integration
summed up in xenophobic and racist attitudes make the level of political marginali-
sation of some groups of migrants and minorities (like the Roma; see Picker, 2017)
extremely high and unsustainable.
In addition to the current wave of economic migrants, particularly in the last
years, the wars and violent conflicts in Africa and the Middle East have also result-
ed in massive waves of refugees. This phenomenon is triggering a serious political
crisis in Europe, raising great difficulties in implementing actions for multicultural
integration in cities (Amin, 2012). The new migration waves have a controversial
impact on cities and regional inequalities and mainly concern large cities and met-
ropolitan areas, but some medium and small cities are also affected. Moreover,
the perception of being ‘invaded’ is also strong in cities where the number of new
migrants is limited. Given present conditions, the different traditional policies of
integrating migrants (from assimilation to multi-ethnic ‘melting-pot’ strategies) are
no longer (thought to be) working. The difficulties of integrating migrants and
minorities are reflected everywhere in serious political tensions and social conflicts
on a local scale.
At present, the main difficulties and conflicts giving rise to social inequalities,
particularly in European cities, concern immigrants and minority groups. Since their
number is increasing everywhere, they have to face difficult conditions of living,
housing, and work and lack of adequate welfare protection. Despite their role in
both the formal and informal economy, immigrants and ethnic minorities remain
at the outskirts of the cities. Moreover, discrimination, xenophobia, and mount-
ing racism make their position even more onerous, including second and third gen-
erations in countries with a long-standing tradition of immigration. As previously
mentioned, the city is the social arena where social heterogeneity and fragmentation
magnify the impact of social inequalities (Smets, 2013; Watt and Smets, 2017). The
traditional class divisions and inequalities are less marked but individualisation and
social fragmentation are creating new inequalities and tensions. Young entrants in
the labour market, especially if less educated and low skilled, have difficulties in
finding reasonably paid and tenured jobs. If their family does not protect them, they
end up being a new precarious class without social rights, political representation,
and welfare protection.
Gender inequalities are now less if compared to the Fordist period when women
were overloaded with domestic and care work in heavily bureaucratised urban
contexts. However, nowadays cities with less social investments and more flex-
ible and precarious work conditions are triggering new forms of discrimination
against women. Moreover, gender inequalities tend to produce different impacts
in urban and rural areas. While rural poverty is more affected by inadequate
settlements, limited access to basic services and high rates of crime and vio-
lence, urban poverty is more dependent on income for satisfying basic needs.
This makes urban poverty a distinctive gendered dimension (Gammage, 2010)
in terms of employment opportunities, paid and unpaid work, and quality of life
(Chant, 2010).
 Inequalities and the City 385
Inequalities in the Contemporary Global South

This section describes some of the features of the highly diversified urban change in
the Global South. Urban growth is rapid and massive and contributes markedly to
the changes in social inequalities. The decline in absolute poverty has mainly been
due to urbanisation in the Global South as hundreds of millions of newly urbanised
people now earn higher incomes and enjoy access to public and private services
unimaginable in rural contexts. However, these new urban dwellers have also lost
their village or tribal community support5 and their lives have become exposed to
expensive, chaotic, and violent urban situations and, as a result, have become more
difficult and uncertain. In brief, it could be argued that, at different pace and in
contexts exposed to different production, transport, and communication technol-
ogies, the masses of new urban dwellers of the Global South are repeating the tra-
jectory that Tocqueville and Engels noticed in Western Europe two centuries ago.
What is different is that this is happening over just one or two generations, involv-
ing billions of people, while in Europe it happened over many generations and it
involved ‘only’ millions of people. They are moving from a rural condition charac-
terised by harsh material living conditions, but supported by forms of community
protection to individualised and unprotected forms of urban poverty. Moreover,
this process of change differs across different countries and regions, creating a new
working class, in some cases, or a large population engaged in informal activities
and services living in shantytowns, slums, favelas, or urban self-built villages in
other cases.6

5 
Even in the case of China, the newly urbanised workers lose the basic social protec-
tion that they enjoyed in their rural communities (hukou) (Ren, 2013). In most cases,
the migrant workers have to pay for welfare services (health, education, and so on) in
the cities where they work. As outlined by Müller (2016: 56) ‘When people move, their
household registration stays in the place they came from, the sending area, and this
often means that they are entitled to social protection in a place where they cannot use
it.’ Consequently, a large share of internal migrants remains without an adequate social
protection safety net. In the rising asymmetries between urban contexts and rural areas,
while unskilled workers provide cheap labour for urban industries, social expenditure
remains low, with a further marginalisation of migrant workers (Zhao et al., 2011) and
rising pressures towards market-based welfare solutions.
6 
Even if we consider only the cases of Asian cities, where manufacturing expansion is
particularly important, each case is different from the others. As numerous scholars have
noted, the specific processes of rapid urban growth in Asia are irreducibly national and
local, even while expressing the broader trends of neoliberal globalisation (see e.g. Bar-
thel, 2010; Harvey, 2005; Roy and Ong, 2011). The motivating politics and economies
of slum clearances in Delhi (Ghertner, 2015), for instance, differ from those driving the
spectacular urbanism of Dubai (Elsheshtawy, 2009; Mitchell, 2007) or expressions of the
‘edifice complex’ in Baku (Grant, 2014). Each discloses unique historical trajectories that
demand case-specific assessments alongside reconsiderations of long-standing elements
of urban theory (Roy and Ong, 2011; Datta, 2016; Chien and Woodworth, 2018: 723).
386 David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione
A powerful and extremely rich national upper class and an international business
community, very often living in heavily protected self-segregated luxurious gated
communities, is the other side of the coin of the emerging urban inequality systems
in the cities of the Global South. In these cases, the gap between the small elite at
the top and the enormous and fast-growing poor at the bottom is much larger than
it has ever been in the cities of the Global North. In the middle there are varied,
fragmented, and often unstable middle classes made up of professionals, technicians,
specialised service workers, and people managing informal and illegal businesses.
These composite middle classes are vulnerable to the instability of the national and
local political regimes, exposed to increasing costs of living and housing and often to
high levels of violence and conflict.
For a long time, urban social studies have pointed to some Latin American cities,
such as Mexico City, São Paulo, or Rio de Janeiro, as contexts of extreme urban
poverty and social exclusion, with a lack of public services, sanitation, and state wel-
fare intervention (Castells, 1972). As is widely known (Lattes et al., 2004; Rodríguez-
Vignoli and Rowe, 2018), between the 1930s and 1970s urbanisation in the large
Latin American countries was primarily driven by massive waves of migrations from
rural areas to metropolitan areas. This resulted in a rapid urbanisation marked by
the spreading of slums and favelas in the absence of any public services and welfare
provisions. In this context, marked by social exclusion and a strong division between
the wealthier social groups and the poor located in segregated marginal areas, glo-
balisation, deregulation, and the free movement of capital reinforced spatial segrega-
tion and violence (Roberts, 2005). Repressive slum clearance increased the suffering
of the worst off. Since the 1980s Latin American cities adopted a post-Fordist and
global-bound economic model, supporting the development of city regions strongly
marked by a high concentration of producer services – financial, legal, marketing,
information technologies (Esping-Andersen, 1999; Sassen, 1991). Consequently, a
further trend was the privatisation of urban services. This led to an increasing par-
ticipation of private companies, especially multinational, in providing various public
goods: water, electricity, transportation, and telecommunications (Sosa Lopez, 2017).
Huge investments in large-scale urban and commercial developments changed
the urban landscapes, with the creation of fortified enclaves for the most privileged
social groups and ghettos for the poor (Angotti, 2013). Recent analyses (Marques
and Bichir, 2003; Marques and Saraiva, 2017) documented major changes in
urban policies, especially in Brazil where urban social activism and the spread of
federal programmes aimed at reducing poverty and social exclusion has changed the
structure of social and spatial segregation. In this respect, Latin America metropolis-
es have become more heterogeneous with a more complex mix of gated communities
and social and infrastructure improvements in the segregated suburbs.
One of the most striking emerging models of urbanisation in the Global South –
but with global influence in the new developments for the super wealthy and for
financial speculation – is that of the Arab Gulf cities (Molotch and Ponzini, 2019).
Here, social inequalities have assumed extreme forms between, on the one hand, the
glamorous skyscrapers built for the sheiks and their families, technicians, and profes-
sionals (often coming from the Global North), the business community and tourists,
and guest camps where a large and increasing mass of immigrant guest workers are
confined, on the other hand. The glamorous part of the city is often uninhabited
 Inequalities and the City 387
while the camps and barracks of the workers who have no social rights, citizenship,
nor social protection are overcrowded and largely lacking any urban infrastructure.
It is also important to mention that, today, some African cities are growing even
faster with enormous slums and urban villages springing up, housing an extremely
poor and unprotected population, in contrast to the modern business parts of the
city and fortresses of the super-rich. Lagos in Nigeria now has over 20 million inhab-
itants and is still growing: at the present rate, it will soon be the world’s most-
populated city (Agbiboa, 2016; Akanle and Adejare, 2017; Myers, 2011).
Under the present conditions, inequalities in the Global South cities cannot become
legitimised by means of democracy and welfare, as has been the case for the Western wel-
fare capitalist societies in the golden period after World War II (Marshall, 1972). More-
over, the equilibrium of welfare democracies ended long ago in Europe and was possible
only due to the availability of huge resources deriving from the unequal exchange with
the ex-colonies or poorer countries (Mingione, 2018). The question posed by Waller-
stein and others (2013) 7 if it will be possible to develop a basic welfare that protects the
new billions of urbanite workers in the Global South, still remains open.
It is now worth mentioning the case of China, where a centralised socialist market
economy (Sigley, 2006) regime is expected to keep the spreading of social inequal-
ities under control, despite facing great difficulties. China has gone through a gigan-
tic process of urbanisation and urban growth starting in the late 1970s, ‘with the
urbanization rate going up from 17.92% in 1978 to 54.77% in 2014, and corre-
spondingly, with the urban population increasing by 577 million (from 172 million
in 1978 to 749 million in 2014)’ (Ma, 2018: 161). Many serious difficulties have
emerged concerning the settlement, housing, and welfare protection of millions of
migrant workers, which is giving rise to mounting urban inequalities. Housing short-
ages are widespread and produce various typologies of marginalised poor urban
groups living in extremely unhealthy and harsh conditions.8 However, the housing
marginality is less visible in Chinese cities compared to other Global South cities
where shantytowns and slums occupy a large part of the urban compound, but it
still remains a serious problem. In addition, it is worth mentioning the fact that a
portion of the marginalised housed population is invisible because it lives under-
ground, especially in Beijing, where basements are abundant.9 According to Ren

7 
As noticed by Wallerstein et al. (2013: 186): ‘Only after 1945 were the former peasants
and working classes of the West and Soviet bloc factored into social security and pros-
perity by their national states. In total, this amounted to several hundred million people.
But are there now resources, let alone political will, to factor in several billion people in
the global south?’.
8 
According to Ma (2018: 162), China ‘is facing various challenges, including the unsatis-
fied housing demands of 128 million migrant workers (according to the census of 2010),
young people, urban low-income groups, and other sandwich-class groups. Urban vil-
lages, “ant clans”, “rat tribes”, group renting, as well as cramped living space and high
housing expenditure burdens are the reality of the difficult living situation for so many’.
9 
Of the estimated 7.7 million migrants living in Beijing, nearly a fifth live either at their
workplace or underground, according to state news agency Xinhua, as a Reuters report
pointed out (Ma, 2018: 176).
388 David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione
(2013), urban poverty in China is concentrated in three types of neighbourhoods:
old inner-city areas, degraded work-unit housing compounds, and migrant villages.
Basically, in these neighbourhoods are confined unemployed, laid-off, and working
poor, marginalised from the processes of urban renewal that have changed Chinese
cities in the last four decades.
Through various reforms, the Chinese government has moved from a basic sys-
tem of universal welfare distribution based on a stable work unit in the country-
side to a residual welfare system where the private market plays a crucial role and
families take on their own major responsibilities (Ma, 2018; Zhu, 2008). On the
other hand, the gap between housing prices and income is increasing. Therefore, the
housing demands for various urban groups (including 180 million migrant workers,
the so-called floating population) are unmet. The negative effects triggered by com-
modification concerns housing and welfare protection in general, including health
and education. As previously mentioned, millions of migrant workers in Chinese
cities are without a hukou, a document granting access to free services. ‘According to
census data, urban populations in China increased by 207 million, from 495 million
in 2000 to 666 million in 2010, among which natural growth accounts for 11% (23
million), an increase due to city expansion and migration with a hukou of 27% (56
million), while an increase without hukou (i.e. migrant workers) is at 62% (128 mil-
lion)’ (Ma, 2018: 174). In this regard, also in China, the large majority of the new
urban working class made up of migrant workers without a hukou is poor, living in
bad housing conditions and forced to turn to the market for services. These condi-
tions magnify the social inequalities and prevent a large section of the new working
class to improve its living conditions. The question of social exclusion and inequality
in opportunities remains open even if in recent years Chinese wages have risen. It is
important to underline, in conclusion, that the Chinese centralised planning regime
is also encountering enormous difficulties in dealing with the inequalities resulting
from the impact of the global markets in its present phase of development.

Social Movements as Reactions to Rising Urban Inequalities

The increase in fragmented forms of urban inequalities in the industrialised cities of

the Global North is a sign that the current model of capitalist development is not
sustainable (Stiglitz, 2012; Harvey, 2014; Atkinson, 2015; Streeck, 2016; Waller-
stein et al., 2013; Mingione, 2018, 2019; Andreotti et al., 2018). The present low
level of growth with high global competition and strong financial control is limit-
ing the expansion of the welfare investments able to compensate commodification
with social protection as well as weakening the political agencies and movements
in favour of equality and social rights. This transformation raises an important
question regarding the grounds and perspectives of resistance and resilience to the
present wave of unsustainable development. The working-class organisations and
the urban social movements (Castells, 1983; Hamel et al. 2000; Harvey, 2008) that
accompanied the developments of the welfare capitalist cities are no longer able to
counter the fragmented inequalities. At the same time, urban social innovation and
new movements do not appear to be sufficiently effective and stable to provide a per-
spective of less unequal and more sustainable cities, especially in the Global South.
 Inequalities and the City 389
In the cities of the Global South, the new economic dynamism of the emerging
industrial countries has generated a large and heterogeneous new working class con-
centrated in a few megalopolises and in many large regional cities. This new working
class still appears to be disorganised and unable to tackle the inequalities and foster
the struggle for social rights. On the one hand, this new working class is removed
from rural poverty. On the other, it has lost the basic traditional protection of the
village or tribal organisation while the struggles and movements to obtain social
rights and welfare infrastructures remain rather sporadic, divided, and not effec-
tive. The situation is even more controversial in other Global South cities where the
gigantic urbanisation is not coupled with dynamic industrial growth in a scenario
of tribal, ethnic, and religious conflicts, civil war, and authoritarian and corrupt
regimes. The contrast between an impoverished and vulnerable village life and the
chaotic large slums of the new metropolises is enormous. The out-migration pres-
sures are increasingly stronger, with migrants being the vectors of new inequalities
based on the transformation of the traditional lifestyles into forms of urban precar-
iousness and vulnerability.
All these current trends reflect the dramatic increases in social difficulties and
the multiple sources of fragmentation on a global scale (Harvey, 2014; Streeck,
2016). With the continual tensions affecting contemporary societies, the growth
of capitalism at current conditions is now unsustainable, with few signs of organ-
ised counter-tendencies or new emancipation opportunities, as was the case with
the rise of the ‘golden age of the welfare state’ after the 1929 crisis and World War
II. Reflecting on these pressures and on the chaotic market forces that are leading
contemporary societies, Wolfgang Streeck makes a gloomy prophecy arguing that
this crisis reflects the exhaustion of capitalism’s historical mission (2016: 59): ‘The
demise of capitalism so defined is unlikely to follow anyone’s blueprint. As the
decay progresses, it is bound to provoke political protests and manifold attempts
at collective intervention. However, for a long time, these are likely to remain of the
Luddite sort: local, dispersed, uncoordinated, “primitive” – adding to the disorder
while unable to create a new order, at best unintentionally helping it to come about.’
It is possible, as argued by Streeck, that in the wake of this chaotic demise of
capitalism, even the opposition movements end up being disorganised and unable
to regenerate an alternative social order. However, it is important to take into
consideration the impact and meaning of the variety of agency responses to the pre-
sent trends in the growth of urban fragmented inequalities before dismissing them
as local and dispersed. As argued in this chapter, contemporary societies, and partic-
ularly cities where an increasing majority of the world population is concentrated,
face social conflicts, discrimination, and the spread of new forms of xenophobic
intolerance and social exclusion (Sassen, 2014). This very process gives rise to signs
of dissatisfaction with democracy and pressure to shift towards highly unequal and
exclusionary societies, in the cities of both the Global South and North. Thus, the
new wave of fragmented inequalities is not only a source of protest in favour of a
more open and equalitarian society, but also a source of discrimination, particularly
against minorities and migrants, but also against ‘undeserving’ poor. In some cases,
this attitude favours the consolidation of autocratic governments through democratic
procedures, as is the case of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Viktor Orbàn
in Hungary.
390 David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione
Indeed, the transformation trends of contemporary urbanised societies are once
again rendering the tensions of the double movement visible, as described by Po-
lanyi (1944). Commodification continues to offer new opportunities to work and
consume by emancipating individuals from traditional social conditions (rural
communities and villages, clans, tribes, patriarchal families, etc.) and making them
more individualised and free. At the same time, it causes tensions, creates new social
inequalities, and results in a decline of social protection, which is countered by the
rise of new forms of solidarity. It is worth mentioning that, according to Polanyi, the
dis-embedding process is always out of control, unpredictable, and undecided (Piore,
2008). It may reinforce emancipation and solidarity movements, but it may also
lead to xenophobic, nationalist, and racist organisations defending the supremacy of
some social groups against others. In the contemporary cities characterised by multi-
ple divisions and the cohabitation of populations that are very diversified in cultural
terms, the perspectives of re-embedding movements are not clear at all.
In the current phase of transition, new waves of protests and oppositions are oc-
curring on a global scale (Della Porta, 2015; Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005; Tilly and
Wood, 2009; Welzel, 2013), favouring the mobilisation of movements outside the tradi-
tional political and union organisations. In addition, new communication technologies
have become powerful tools for mobilisation and participation. The Arab Spring move-
ments, the experiences of Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados mobilisation, and
the (until now unsuccessful) protests in Hong Kong to defend its special status against
Chinese control are good examples of the importance of communication technologies.
However, they have also shown their clear limitations when it comes to establishing
permanent and solid forms of social solidarity bonds. In the same vein, the rise of new
social coalitions among unions, civil society organisations and social movements in the
United States and other Western countries (Frege and Kelly, 2003; Piore and Safford,
2006; Simms et al., 2013) have generated re-embedding processes aimed at promoting
new social bonds and counter-balancing the new waves of commodification.
Feminist researchers (Chant, 2003; Kabeer, 1997; Moser, 1995; Kabeer, 2015)
have drawn attention to the fact that women are embedded in family and community
structures that play a crucial role in determining their possibilities and contribu-
tion to urban and local development. Gender-specific issues recall that poverty and
empowerment is not just a question of income but also of power, social legitimacy,
and civic representation, both in Western societies and in the Global South. Despite
efforts to diminish gender gaps, women lack citizenship rights, face growing rates
of political and racial violence, and experience discrimination in gaining access to
employment and basic services. Central to the framework that came out of this
strand of literature was the distinction between vertical and horizontal inequalities.
While the former relates to the income and wealth inequalities, the latter focuses
on discriminations based on social identities, such as gender, race, and caste (Ka-
beer, 2015). This difference reflects the distinction between poverty as ‘state’ and
poverty as ‘process’. Following these premises, these studies outlined how women
and men experience the poverty risk differently, with different consequences in terms
of inequalities, power, opportunities, and mobilisation.
With the increased influence of globalisation and financialisation, urban mobili-
sations have taken different forms. While in the early 2000s urban mobilisations
were strongly influenced by a combination of local mobilisations and transnational
 Inequalities and the City 391
networks for social justice and civil rights, in more recent years they have entered
a new phase with local leaders directly engaged in the local political arena (Hamel,
2014; Andretta et al., 2015; Della Porta, 2015, 2020). In European cities, the privati-
sation of state assets, public land, and public areas has often transformed urban cen-
tres into ‘exclusive citadels of the elites’ (Mayer, 2018a). These ‘enclosure strategies’
led to various contestations and protests, forcing municipalities in some cases to
re-communalise public spaces (see Eick and Briken, 2014). Social coalitions, urban
mobilisations, and protests are part of a variegated ecosystem of practices that are
changing the nature and content of urban mobilisation.
Civil society organisations have been frequently referred to as the civic ‘glue’ that
might compensate for a shrinking public sector (Mayer, 2018b), promoting new
forms of solidarity in the urban space. However, civil society and grassroots move-
ments remain complex. Moreover, as Le Galès (2017) outlined, they include both the
most progressive and the most conservative interest groups, ranging from the social
movements against neoliberal policies and oligarchies, to the illiberal and xenopho-
bic far-right movements against minorities. In Latin American cities, many new social
movements aimed at democratising the policy processes after the domination of oli-
garchies have emerged in the last decades. These new spaces of ‘insurgent citizen-
ships’ (Holston, 2008) have changed the urban landscape of many Latin American
cities, especially in Brazil, where new social programmes have been accompanied by
the resurgence of a new urban activism (Marques and Mirandola, 2003). In other
Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Venezuela, and in the Mexican state of
Chiapas, landmark parties and leftist movements have tried to promote alternatives
to Western-controlled global institutions in development, environmental and foreign
policy issues (Haarstad et al., 2013; Petras and Veltmeyer, 2018).
Most research interpreted this recent trend in Latin America as a new phase in which
progressive urban movements, as well as local, regional, and national governments
changed the urban landscape towards greater social and spatial justice. However, recent
political changes have complicated the picture. Compared to economic and security
discourse, social justice is losing importance. In Brazil, the election of the new far-right
president, Bolsonaro, could mean the return to an authoritarian government system
aimed at recovering the traditional social hierarchies. In the same vein, in China, pro-
tests, local mobilisation, grassroots mobilisations against rapid urban expansion, and
the commodification of rural areas (Chien and Woodworth, 2018) coexist with non-
democratic institutions aimed at maximising economic growth. However, the huge mo-
bilisations of young protesters in Hong Kong (again a specifically urban phenomenon)
in favour of more democracy and participation may be a sign that authoritarian insti-
tutions may also be losing control. The picture remains unstable and controversial.
The counter-movements also include the illiberal and xenophobic far-right move-
ments and populist parties that are spreading across many European countries. In
this case, the cities are the locus of new sources of social exclusion and conflicts
regarding the collective goods and minority, religious, and interethnic segregations
(Le Gales and Vitale, 2013). As stated by Rydgren (2017), radical right movements
in Eastern Europe are a relatively new phenomenon, even though steadily on the
rise. Traditionally, these movements refused to adhere to the rules of democracy
and it is only in recent years that they began to enter the electoral competition,
with different strategies and campaigns against minority groups. On the one hand,
392 David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione
mobilisations have reflected traditional conservative issues against ethnic and sexual
minorities and, on the other hand, they aim at drawing support from the young,
low-income middle class and people from underdeveloped regions. It is worth noting
that, from an economic point of view, their campaigns and political strategies often
stand for protection against globalisation and the negative effects resulting from
the free movement of capital and workers, arguments that are seductive for native
people excluded by economic growth.
As has been argued in this chapter, urban inequalities are giving rise to serious
new tensions in contemporary societies, in both the cities of the Global North and
South. The path of urban change is discontinuous, varied, and unpredictable. New
fragmented inequalities create, at the bottom end, very difficult living conditions and
trigger serious conflicts. At the same time, however, urban concentrations and new
communication technologies favour the mobilisation of people demanding a more
effective democracy, limiting the power of the elite. Moreover, fast and cheap trans-
port opens up new opportunities for mobilisation and agencies in terms of out-migra-
tion and return migration, in commuting and in building new forms of community
and solidarity. In countries with weak democratic institutions, the elite still holds the
reins of power, using it to repress any opposition or protest movements. In addition,
illiberal and xenophobic far-right movements are emerging. In the current phase of
transition, social movements may reinforce emancipation and solidarity. However,
they may also lead to xenophobic, nationalist, and racist organisations defending the
supremacy of some social groups against others. The hope is that the social move-
ments that ensue from the urban environment will enhance democracy.
It is easy to agree on the fact that the extreme forms of urban inequality and
deprivation are not sustainable, but it is not so clear how the trajectories of change
of our diversified cities will change, even in the near future. It is probably right to
assume that, within these uncertain perspectives, the dynamics of change in the cities
of the Global South assume great importance. The outcome of the struggle to gain
protection, participation, and representation of the new urban working class of the
industrially developing countries will design the most important lines of inequality
on the global scale. In fact, we are thinking of populations in the order of billions
of new urbanites. Another question concerns the urban middle classes of the Global
South, so much fragmented, divided, and unstable in respect to their counterpart,
that activated the bourgeois revolution in the West. It is possible, as argued by Ther-
born (2013), that they will assume a decisive role in favour of new forms of equality,
participation, and democracy or that, on the contrary, they will stand steadily on
the side of individual consumerism and the conquest of short-term success at the
expenses of the different, the vulnerable, the new slaves.

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 19
The Role of Residential Context and
Public Policies in the Production of
Urban Inequalities
María Mercedes Di Virgilio

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the interface among spatial concentration of
disadvantage in residential contexts and public policies in the production of urban
inequality, taking into account research findings that, in different areas, have ad-
dressed the issue. To this end, we have dived into the debates around the role of
urban space and public policies in the production of inequalities. In particular, we
focus on two central discussions: on the one hand, those that occur around the geog-
raphies of opportunities and, on the other, those that have to do with the neighbour-
hood effects. Also, we focus on the mechanisms through which they operate (Blanco
and Subirats, 2008; Kaztman, 2001; Najman, 2018) and on the role that residential
context have in the definition of public policies.
The systematic exploration of the effects of the spatial concentration of disadvan-
tages associated with urban poverty begins at the Chicago School.1 2 Its representa-
tives focused on the analysis of

the structural consequences of urbanization for the differential social organization of

the city, especially its neighborhoods. Prominent questions included how the culture
and structure of a community – for instance, its capacity for social control or the age-

1 
The pioneering article by Park (1926) shows how interested this group of intellectuals
was in the issue.
2 
A systematic review of the different perspectives from which this relationship was tra-
ditionally addressed in urban studies can be read in Ruiz-Tagle (2013).

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 THE ROLE OF RESIDENTIAL CONTEXT AND PUBLIC POLICIES 399
graded transmission of social norms – were influenced by economic segregation and
ethnic heterogeneity, and how this process shaped delinquency rates (Burgess, Park, and
McKenzie, 1925; Shaw and McKay, 1942). The unit of analysis … [was] rates of social
behaviour that varied by neighborhood-level cultural and social structure. The theo-
retically implied unit of intervention was the community itself. (Sampson, 2008: 190)

However, the changes occurred in the intensity and characteristics of urban poverty
between the 1970s and 1980s – and that in some countries deepened during the
1990s – prompted a new wave of research on the subject.
One of the works that has marked a turning point along this line was W.J. Wilson’s
The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) (Sampson, 2008; Small and Newman, 2001). Wilson
argues that, since 1970, the structural changes in the economy – the de-industrialisa-
tion processes, the shift from a manufacturing to a service-based economy, the loss
of low-skilled jobs and, concomitantly, the increase in unemployment among the
most disadvantaged groups of the urban ghettos in American cities – have plunged
inner-city neighbourhoods into concentrated poverty (Wilson, 1996). Likewise,
poverty concentration was fuelled by suburbanisation processes carried out by mid-
dle-class and working-class African American families that, taking advantage of fair
housing laws, managed to move to more affluent neighbourhoods (Quillian, 1999).
As the families that managed to maintain their insertions in the labour market left
the central areas of North American cities, the most disadvantaged remained. There-
fore, neighbourhoods progressively turned into areas of concentrated poverty, gener-
ating and accumulating disadvantages in the daily lives of their inhabitants (economic
dependence, violence, and drug consumption, among others) (Small and Newman,
2001; Wilson, 1987). Wilson’s work has facilitated two lines of inquiry: those linked to
geographies of opportunities and those that were related to the neighbourhood effects.

Urban Geography as a Driver of Opportunities and Inequalities

As Wilson poses, the spatial concentration of poverty restricts the possibilities of

access to opportunities. However, how does neighbourhood geography affect oppor-
tunity structures and the neighbour perceptions build around them? Structures are
associated to city life – mainly, in terms of social and economic activities. Oppor-
tunity structures are defined here as ‘the probabilities of access to goods, services
or the performance of activities. These opportunities have an impact on household
well-being, either because they allow or facilitate the use of their own resources
by household members, or because they provide them with resources. The term
structure refers to the fact that welfare paths are closely linked, so that access to
certain goods, services or activities provides resources that, in turn, allow access to
other opportunities’ (Kaztman, 1999: 9).3 Additionally, access (or not) to certain

3 
Within this framework, local welfare institutions are a very important component in
the definition of opportunity structures insofar as they shape the normative and informa-
tional context of decisions about the use of resources and/or channels of access to them
(Blanco and Subirats, 2008).
400 María Mercedes Di Virgilio
opportunity structures is affected by what Galster and Killen (1995) call perceived
opportunities, that is, the possible socioeconomic outcomes (such as future income,
consumption, profits, etc.) that families and their members believe they will have if
they make certain decisions related to education, work, etc. These results, on the one
hand, provide information on the characteristics of households and their members;4
and on the other hand, on the subjective perceptions that household members have
on how opportunity structures can intervene in the transformation (or not) of said
characteristics. In this way, the opportunity structure and perceived opportunities
are articulated in the effective decisions that families and their members make to
access and use goods and services.
Reviewing the literature, some people suggest that the role of geography is a
key factor to understand intra-urban inequalities (Muhammad et al., 2008); Flores,
2008. How does neighbourhood geography affect opportunity structures and the
perceptions that residents build around them?5 On the one hand, it affects access
to goods and services insofar as the dynamics of the markets and the provision of
resources available to the institutions providing goods and services – either public or
private – in the city are not necessarily equivalent. On the other hand, the families
residing in the city do not have the same possibilities of locating themselves in the
areas or neighbourhoods which they consider most desirable (Galster and Killen,
1995). With these disparities as a backdrop, research has attempted to identify the
specific effects of neighbourhood geography on the distribution and use of opportu-
nities to access to goods and services.

According to this approach, the neighborhood configures an opportunity structure deter-

mined by the space where a market sphere (economic-productive), a social-communitarian
sphere (reciprocity) and a public authority sphere (redistribution) acquire specific charac-
teristics. From this point of view, the impact of area effects upon individuals’ life courses
could be explained, for example, by the quality of the infrastructure and the public trans-
port system connecting the neighborhood to the metropolitan central areas; the adequacy
and quality of health, social, cultural and educational services in the neighborhood or its
surroundings; the existence of employment opportunities in the territory, or at least the
absence of labor market marginalizing behavior because of the area of residence (address
effects); the density and energy level of mutual cooperation and supporting networks bet-
ween people, and so on. Of course, all of these factors, operate concurrently. (Blanco and
Subirats, 2008: 133)

4 
Those characteristics have been either structural (such as size, moment of life cycle, or
type in the case of households; or age and gender in the case of its members) or acquired.
5 
The study of the neighbourhood effects on effective possibilities of access to goods
and services (opportunities) has a long history in international urban sociology (Samp-
son, 2008, 2019; Briggs, 2005; Briggs et al., 1997; Ellen and Turner, 2003, Massey and
Denton, 1993; Tienda, 1991; Jencks and Mayer, 1990, among others). The works by
Kaztman (2001, 2008, 2013) and Kaztman and Retamoso (2005), in Montevideo, con-
stitute a compulsory reference in Latin America. In Argentina, among local researches on
this issue, Merklen (1999), Soldano (2005), Di Virgilio (2011), and Najman (2018) are
identified.
 THE ROLE OF RESIDENTIAL CONTEXT AND PUBLIC POLICIES 401
Based on the work by Wilson (1987, 1996), Jencks and Mayer (1990), and Massey
and Denton (1993), Small and Newman (2001) have identified two explanatory
models to account for the mechanisms through which neighbourhood geography
affects access to opportunities: instrumental mechanisms, which describe how the
agency capacity of residents is limited by neighbourhood conditions; and sociali-
sation mechanisms, which describe how neighbourhoods socialise with those who
grow in them. Instrumental mechanisms are ancillary to neighbourhood location in
a metropolitan area and to context characteristics that, directly and indirectly, may
affect the possibilities of access, for example, to employment and/or educational
opportunities through spatial mismatch between the places where the offer is located
and the places where those increasing the demand live. They also refer to the organ-
isational form of activities in the city and service distribution (transport, commercial,
health, etc.) that differentially affect the residents’ daily and residential mobility.
Socialisation mechanisms refer to the fact that neighbourhood geography also has
an impact, due to group characteristics and the socio-territorial networks that are
developed there. The use (or not) of opportunity structures seems to be mediated by
the integration (or not) of families in social networks, their ability to move social
capital and the agency capacity that these groups and their members have.6 Thus,
context seems to affect inhabitants in such a context of socialisation (Rosenbaum,
1991, 1995).
The two dimensions recognised by literature review in the analysis of the distri-
bution and the access to goods and services provide information on the success and
failure in the struggles for the appropriation of the urban space and on the social
background of households and their members (Bourdieu, 2000). That is to say, the
schemes of perception, of appreciation, and of internalised action, the system of will-
ingness to act, to think, to perceive (habitus) that operate as a principle of structuring
practices7 are closely linked to the characteristics of the urban geography where said
willingness and perceptual schemes are developed (Gutierrez, 1999).8

6 
The capacity to dominate space, taking over scarce goods that are distributed in it,
depends on the owned capital (Bourdieu, 2000). Now, among the different types of
capital, economic and cultural capitals are the fundamental principles to structure urban
space, while social and symbolic capitals are rather principles of additional profitabil-
ity of the other two (Gutierrez, 1999). Therefore, location in the city and proximity to
physical space allows proximity to the social space to produce all its effects – negative
or positive – facilitating or hindering the accumulation of different forms of capital. The
facilitating or inhibiting effects of social and spatial proximity depend on the character-
istics of the environment and the economic and social characteristics of its inhabitants.
7 
They allow us to perceive the options, to think about them or not to think about them
and act accordingly.
8 
The concept of habitus is key to understand mobility decisions as practices guided by
‘rationality based on a practical sense, in the sense of the game that has been incorpo-
rated by the social agent throughout its history. The meaning of game is what allows
living – the experienced sense – as something “evident” the sense objectified in institu-
tions, that is, perceptions and representations as a result of the incorporation of objective
conditions’ (Gutierrez, 1999).
402 María Mercedes Di Virgilio
It seems important to note that access to opportunity structures is linked, on the one
hand, to the characteristics of the housing market segment that is accessed and, on the
other hand, to the relative location of households in the city.9 Location conditions ‘are
not only segregative by social groups (insofar as they access land, services, urban facil-
ities and workplaces in differential conditions), but it also affect [s] other aspects. It is
not just a matter of social differentiation of places of residence; the organisational form
of activities in the city differentially affects residential mobility and accessibility to work-
places as they are in the urban space’ (Salazar Cruz, 1999: 44; also see Pinkster, 2007).
Leading research in the field of urban studies – especially those linked to the eco-
logical perspective – indicated that agglomerations defined distance gradients of
neighbourhoods or city areas in relation to the centre.10 According to this scheme,
centrally located sites derived their profits from their proximity to production factors
and clients (demand). With the growth of cities, accessibility – and with it, location –
became a key factor in the access to the value of complex use of the city. Thus, land
uses were seen as economically determined according to the principle of best location.
Even though these pioneering models – that have attempted to understand the urban
space division and the existence of zones or areas destined to different land uses –
nowadays cannot account for the transformations and complexities of post-Fordist11
urbanisation, they continue to call the attention on central aspects to be taken into
account in the analysis of urbanisation and the production of urban inequalities.12

9 
In the case of Latin American cities, this aspect is particularly evident, for example, in
the case of settlements of informal origin located on the margins of metropolitan areas,
where processes of residential (im)mobility or incidents of minor intensity associated
with situations of informal and precarious insertion in the labour market are reported
(Camargo, 2017; Di Virgilio, 2008; Dureau et al., 2015).
10 
These gradients are partly reflected in the income produced by the different sites
according to their location and in the price of said sites and of households built there.
11 
The notion of post-Fordist urbanisation attempts to account for the differences between con-
temporary urban regions and those that were consolidated in the mid-twentieth century. The
post prefix indicates the transition between what has been called the modern metropolis and
the current metropolis composed by new spatial and social forms and processes (Soja, 2008).
12 
The ideas of specialisation of different areas for specific sector activities (productive,
commercial, residential, etc.) and multiple development centres took place in the years
1930 and 1940 (Harris and Ullman, 1945; Hoyt, 1939). The Bind Rent theory – which
emerged in the 1960s and was based on the characteristics of the physical structure of
many cities – helped to explain why the price of rent and real estate varied according to
distance from the central district (Alonso, 1964). The main factors in the explanation
were transport costs and the interaction between construction costs and the price of
land. When transport costs increase, distance decreases the price of land and marginally
construction costs (or they remain unchanged). The higher price of land and buildings
in central areas is what drives developers to substitute capital for land (Söderberg and
Janssen, 2001: 62). Likewise, higher-income households are willing to pay higher trans-
portation costs in exchange for more space at lower cost in the suburbs: when income
increases, the desire for more space available for residential use also increases, even under
conditions when it is impossible to reduce transportation costs (Flores, 2008).
 THE ROLE OF RESIDENTIAL CONTEXT AND PUBLIC POLICIES 403
The locational approach has been widely developed by the neoclassical school’s
representatives. In spite of this, some recent research has tried to (re)define it in
terms of geographic constructivism. Based on the notion of the residential market
of intra-urban locations, Del Río (2010) identifies that ‘the housing position … in
the socio-spatial structure is not neutral, instead it is produced by a commercial
and institutional relationship based on which the urban complex use value referred
to by Topalov is distributed asymmetrically’ (Del Río, 2010: 14).13 Localisation is
defined as a relational position that becomes relevant when analysing the urban
structure as a social product. Thus, focusing the analysis on aspects related to loca-
tion conditions implies considering geomorphological and built-up features that
affect intra-urban inequalities – land availability, physical infrastructure related to
housing and transportation, the existence of old and historic popular urban sectors
and vacant land, etc.14 Such characteristics seem to be especially relevant when
taking into account that urban inequalities are fed by the unequal distribution of
equipment and infrastructure, which tends to reinforce city differentiation into
better equipped areas, concentrating population with greatest resources opposite to
poor areas with a fragile base of equipment and collective spaces and their relative
location in the metropolitan environment (Arriagada Luco and Rodríguez Vignoli,
2003). In a context in which, since the 1970s, employment creation conditions,
insertion in the labour market and the social care structure linked to universal
social policies – education and health – have been progressively degraded, the
effects of neighbourhood geography and its location have intensified (Smet and
Salman, 2008). Therefore, the analysis of neighbourhood geography of opportu-
nities is especially critical when attempting to account for inequality processes at
the metropolitan scale.

The Perspective of Neighbourhood Effects and Its Critics

The ethnographic work of Wilson (1987), based in the Projects of Chicago, opens the
line of study of neighbourhood effects.15 The idea of neighbourhood effects implies that
the demographic context of deprived poor neighbourhoods has a negative effect on res-
idents’ life chances and their individual characteristics (Manley and Van Ham, 2010)

13 
Thus defined, the concept is inscribed in the line of thought of the social division of
residential space and socio-spatial structure of Duhau and Giglia (2008).
14 
These characteristics are related to those specific to segregated spaces and those of the
sites in which they are located (Machado Barbosa, 2001).
15 
‘However, the origin of area-based studies can be found at the turn of the 20th century
with the work of Booth (1889) and Rowntree (1901). Their ecological mapping, based
in the streets of London and York respectively, demonstrated the potential for the forth-
coming neighborhood effects literature and, although the notion of the neighborhood as
an analytical device was still some 25 years away (Burgess, Park, and McKenzie, 1925),
they provided an early expression of the scope for understanding the linkages between
places and people’ (Manley, 2019: 1332).
404 María Mercedes Di Virgilio
and instils dysfunctional norms, values, and behaviours into population, triggering
a cycle of disadvantages (Bourdieu, 2000). Some authors argue that neighbourhood
effects are part of a wider tradition of studies linked with inner-city marginality and
the concept of territorial stigmatisation (Wacquant, 2007; Bourdieu, 2000; Wac-
quant et al., 2014; Freidin et al., 2018).
Galster (2012) identifies 15 potential causal pathways linked to neighbourhood
effects, grouped into four categories: social-interactive mechanisms, environmental
mechanisms, geographical mechanisms, and institutional mechanisms.

Social-interactive mechanisms refer to social processes endogenous to neighborhoods,

which are generally seen as the core of the neighborhood effects argument (social
contagion, collective socialisation, social networks, social cohesion and control, com-
petition, relative deprivation, and parental mediation). Environmental mechanisms
operate through natural and human-made attributes of neighborhood that may affect
directly the mental and/or physical health of residents without affecting their behav-
iors (exposure to violence; physical surroundings; and toxic exposure). Geographical
mechanisms refer to effects of the relative location of neighborhoods (spatial mismatch
of jobs and workers and a lack of quality public services). And finally, institutional
mechanisms which are related to the behavior of actors external to neighborhoods,
who control the resources available and access to housing, services and markets for
neighborhood residents (stigmatization, local institutional resources, and local market
actors). (Van Ham et al., 2012: 9)

Although there is a long history of studies posing problems on relationships between

urban geography and the production of inequalities, it is not possible to ignore that
empirical results have not been unique (Jargowsky, 1997; Lupton, 2003; Darcy, 2010;
Quillian, 2012; Van Ham et al., 2012; Arbaci and Rae, 2014). The bibliographic
review allows us identifying some critical aspects in researching on neighbourhood
effects in the production of inequalities. On the one hand, the question of scaling
appears. What is the most appropriate scale to account for territory effects on the
production of urban inequalities? Kearns and Parkinson (2001) suggest that mul-
tiple scales are articulated into the neighbourhood effect: home area, locality, and
urban district or region (see Table 19.1).

Table 19.1  Scales of neighbourhood (Kearns and Parkinson 2001: 2104).

Scale Predominant function Mechanism(s)

Home area Psycho-social benefits (for example, Familiarity

identity; belonging) Community
Locality Residential activities social status Planning
and position Service position
Housing market
Urban district or region Landscape of social and economic Employment connections
opportunities Leisure interests
Social networks
 THE ROLE OF RESIDENTIAL CONTEXT AND PUBLIC POLICIES 405
Meanwhile, Lukas (2019) poses that ‘urban scale is the product of the centrali-
sation of capital and labour and its boundaries are mainly established through the
commuting zone’. Over recent decades, globalisation has involved a very important
rescaling (Martin et al., 2003; Lukas, 2019). Supranational scales and subnational
scales – such as the urban one – assume a greater role. In this context, national scale
transfers authority and responsibility to supranational governance forms and to sub-
national ones. Due to this rescaling, the subnational levels become most relevant to
urban politics and policy.16 They have become more responsible for ensuring local
areas’ effective competitiveness in the wider global economy. Thus, urban policy ori-
entation has become much more neoliberal (Brenner and Theodore, 2002a; Martin
et al., 2003).
Therefore, the definition of the scale does not seem to be a minor issue. Even
though, in the field of urban studies, there seems to be theoretical consensus on the
importance of place and space in the production of inequalities. Apparently there is
no agreement at an empirical level on which the most suitable scale to account for
them is (see Ruiz-Tagle, 2013).17 Nor has there been any clear progress on research
development that brings into play multiple scalability. In this sense, a group of col-
leagues from the French academy (Dureau et al., 2014; Imbert et al., 2014), taking
advantage of the longitudinal approach,18 have made important contributions to the
investigation, on multiple scales, regarding the effects of socio-spatial reconfigura-
tion processes in the daily life of inhabitants of Latin American cities. This research
focuses on settlement evolution and new forms of social differentiation in urban
space, combining data and records about inhabitants’ behaviour, characteristics of
the urban structure, and about sectorial public policies.
Likewise, scale definition and ways of approaching multi-scalability are associ-
ated to the conceptualisation of what we understand by urban scale or, more specif-
ically, by neighbourhood. What is a neighbourhood?

Neighborhoods [have] ‘intrinsic’ characteristics that are well established and hard to
change, such as their housing stock and economic base. The nature of these character-
istics, in relation to those of other neighborhoods, determines who comes to live there

16 
‘It involves local states and governance institutions accepting more responsibility
and authority as nation-states devolve control from the national scale to the local and
regional scales. National states are increasingly transferring responsibility to urban gov-
ernments for tasks such as economic development, social services, and the provision of
infrastructure. … The augmented responsibilities of local governing institutions have
been accompanied by a shift in their policy orientation’ (Martin et al., 2003: 115).
17 
The lack of agreements on the investigation scale is related to the debates about the
scale of intervention. In the reduction of inequalities and in the provision of more equal
opportunities, are neighbourhood policies more effective than comprehensive redistribu-
tion policies? (Van Gent et al., 2009).
18 
The longitudinal approach emerges in the field of biographical research in the late
1950s. It focuses on the events that occur throughout people’s lives, evolving from individ-
ualist perspectives to contextual and multilevel models that make aggregate characteristics
interact at different levels to explain individual behaviours (Dureau and Imbert, 2018).
406 María Mercedes Di Virgilio
… [Thereby] neighborhoods are simultaneously physical and social. Physical character-
istics, through their impact on population mix, lead neighborhoods to ‘acquire’ certain
other characteristics, such as services and facilities, reputation, social order, and pat-
terns of social interaction, as people and place interact. For example, disadvantaged
individuals in an isolated area will form one set of social relations, while disadvantaged
individuals in a well-connected area may form another. The nature of social relations
may itself impact on individual decisions to stay or move, and on individual outcomes,
such as employment or health (i.e. they are not exogenous). Thus, neighborhoods are
not fixed entities, independent of the people who live in them. They are being constantly
re-created as the people who live in them simultaneously consume and produce them.
(Lupton, 2003: 5)

Then, investigating the effect of urban environment on the production of inequal-

ities involves concomitantly investigating, at least, three aspects suggested in the
definition by Lupton (2003): demography (population composition according to
age, sex, ethnicity, social class, etc.), neighbourhood geography and local welfare
architecture (characteristics of housing stock and forms of producing it, economic
activities therein located, provision of urban services, transportation networks, pro-
vision of education and health care services, social and cultural equipment, etc.),
and the dynamics and/or relationships among those who live there, and those who
circulate there.
Finally, the play of scales in the approach of neighbourhood effects on the
production of inequalities also shows that the territories are not fixed or isolated
entities. Furthermore, they are neither temporal nor spatially fixed entities (Manley,
2019). ‘They are neither bounded entities nor do they have objective characteristics
that are experienced in the same way by all their inhabitants … Their characteristics
are shaped by their relationship to other places as well as by their internal features’
(Lupton, 2003: 4). The work by Giroud (2018) – ancillary to the French tradition to
which we made reference earlier – allows us to appreciate the dynamic and complex
nature of territories. According to the author, residential presence (which includes
both settlement in the neighbourhood and the decision to remain in it) is the product
of inhabitants’ biographical history and of permanent contextual changes which are
in movement. Consequently, the residential presence of the inhabitants depends on
a socio-residential position that, at a given moment, concomitantly expresses con-
textual conditions. Therefore, any residential presence is explained by a dynamic
relationship among society evolution, change of a neighbourhood, and personal his-
tory. In turn, residential presence plays a role in the creation of urban and social
change: some presences speed up the transformation of the social composition of
old working-class neighbourhoods, while others contribute to attenuating it or even
slowing it down.
By way of a synthesis, based on the contributions made by Dubet (2011), it is
possible to think that residential context have an impact on the dual dimension of
inequalities: position and opportunities. The first one focuses on the positions that
individuals and their households occupy in the socio-urban structure. According to
this perspective, inequalities are associated with the position they occupy in the city,
taking into account – as mentioned above – the characteristics of the environment and
its relative location. The second perspective seeks to offer all individuals opportunities
 THE ROLE OF RESIDENTIAL CONTEXT AND PUBLIC POLICIES 407
to allow them to occupy the best positions according to a ‘meritocratic’ principle.
That is, spatial justice would mean giving equal opportunities to all individuals for
them to occupy more advantageous positions in the socio-urban structure, in gener-
al, and in local and real estate markets. The play of scales, the dynamic and relational
character of places and spaces, as well as the multiple transient natures that are put
into play in their production, provide complexity to the analysis of both dimen-
sions. Thus, the approach of neighbourhood effects on the production of inequalities
‘requires to move forward of the one dimensional theories … to develop multidi-
mensional and multi temporal arguments and explanations. This raises the empirical
problem of which dimensions, indicators and units of analysis the researcher must
address’ (Perelman, 2019).

The Importance of Neighbourhood in Public

Policies Against Inequalities

Although debates on the importance of urban geography in the creation of

inequalities are still open, never before has residential context had such a rele-
vance in the definition of public policy as it does today (Arbaci and Rae, 2014;
Di Virgilio and Rodriguez, 2011; Lupton, 2003). Indeed ‘developments in social
policy … have again highlighted the role of spatial policy, and a related percep-
tion that space may be a significant dimension in structuring social and economic
inequality’ (Buck, 2001: 2251). It is possible to ask, however, why have public
policies once again highlighted space as a significant dimension in the structuring
of inequalities?
On the one hand, it is impossible to ignore that the role of access to equipment and
infrastructure in the creation of urban inequalities puts the state at the heart of the
debate. The state is responsible for ensuring levels of provision of more or less homo-
geneous (and equitable) equipment, infrastructure, and urban services in the metro-
politan territory (Nelson et al., 2004). It also defines and manages the regulations
and rules governing the access to housing and location conditions insofar as, in some
contexts, it is this regulatory framework that limits the possibilities of integration
of poor neighbourhoods into the city19 and, therefore, the reduction of residential
segregation (Canestraro, 2008; Clingermayer, 2004; Feiock, 2004; Fischel, 2004;
Ihlanfeldt, 2004; Iracheta Cenecorta and Smolka, 2000; Lungo and Baires, 2001).
Finally, it is a key player in the definition of welfare architecture characteristics –
particularly at the local level. As pointed out by Blanco and Subirats (2008), the
relative weight and type of articulations carried out in each territory among the
market, public authorities, social, and community organisations and social, family,
and kinship networks affect the level of social inequality and its spatial expression
in the city. Thus, although in contemporary societies, welfare depends on multiple
instances; undoubtedly, the state is a key stakeholder.

19 
In the case of Latin American cities, this issue is especially relevant when it comes to
informal urbanisations, which need the intervention of the state to achieve their regula-
risation in both urban and ownership terms (see Ward et al., 2014).
408 María Mercedes Di Virgilio
Nevertheless, it is possible to think that the role played by residential context does
not only and exclusively respond to the privileged position that the state occupies
in the definition of local welfare architecture. Other concomitant processes have
contributed to neighbourhood centrality in the definition of public policy (Camou
et al., 2009). On the one hand, since more than three decades ago, in capitalist
countries, beyond diversity, local level has been turned – for many reasons – into
a privileged space for public policy management, in general, and for welfare pol-
icies, in particular (Varela, 2015).20 Initially, this local level hierarchy was associ-
ated, towards the end of the 1980s and during the 1990s, with the implementation
of decentralisation initiatives through which numerous social and urban services
were left in the hands of local governments21 and/or were implemented through
effectors with a strong territorial anchorage (Fernández Gatica and Serrano, 2005;
Ward et al., 2010; Wilson et al., 2008; Ziccardi, 2008). Within this framework, the
management model accompanying poverty alleviation and employment assistance
programmes in different countries also placed the local level in a privileged position.
More recently, globalisation and market liberalisation at a global scale have deep-
ened the re-emergence of the political power of local governments and subnational
territorial authorities (Varela, 2015).
On the other hand, it must be considered that, additionally since the end of
the 1980s, particularly in the context of structural adjustment processes and
changes in welfare regimes,22 in cities of different latitudes, social conflict in sub-
urban neighbourhoods has broken out (Donzelot, 2006). The social explosion,
which has a strong territorial imprint, challenges the political, institutional,
and administrative skills of local governments to respond to the convulsed

20 
‘With local management spaces, we mean complex processes by which – through dif-
ferent strategies – actors’ skills are increased and developed to reorient resources (includ-
ing those of policies and social programs) articulating them in a local policy in which
policy logics, understood as the deepening of the autonomous capacity of the actors over
that of the market, prevails’ (Chiara and Di Virgilio, 2006).
21 
‘In different degrees, from a minimum of autonomy in centralist models to a more
open scheme in federalism, local governments are ontologically defined by a baseline
that justifies their sovereignty in the exercise of their powers and in the political rela-
tionships with citizenship … The local government is, by nature, the closest to citi-
zens: it assumes daily – life challenges; the specific demands of citizens in relation to
habitat, housing, quality, coverage and spatiality of public services; the very offer of
education and, of course, also the topics that, under the generic heading of “quality of
life”, incorporate the dimensions of cultural industries, entertainment, leisure, night-
life. Even the space for the configuration of urban crime itself has been articulated by
virtue of the supply of this type of goods and the flows of social interactions’ (Varela,
2015: 217–218).
22 
This change of regime mainly consisted in the redefinition of the welfare architecture;
that is, in the redefinition of ‘redistributive objectives, the role of public policies in aspects
such as the amount of resources and their allocation, the criteria to access public services,
the range and duration of benefits and the notion of citizenship that gives them meaning’
(Martínez Franzoni, 2008: 9).
 THE ROLE OF RESIDENTIAL CONTEXT AND PUBLIC POLICIES 409
environment.23 The territorialised social conflict radically modified the conditions
of the context and the functions that local governments effectively performed in
welfare architecture. This resulted in a change in relationships with local players
as new intermediaries (non-governmental organisations, grassroots groups, trade
union organisations), and/or new forms of relationships with old stakeholders –
based on the role attributed to them in programme design and implementation –
emerged.
Although, as Lupton points out (2003: 3), ‘area-based policies are not dependent
on the existence of neighborhood effects and that would most likely be implemented
anyway even if no neighborhood effects were found’. It is possible to think that,
territorialised social conflict, ancillary to the accumulation of disadvantages, which
are also territorialised, is what allows understanding the lost link between policy
priorities and the effect of urban environment in lower income neighbourhoods.
Local welfare policies contribute to the governance of territory. In addition, local
governments have an outstanding role in the coordination of public policies with
governance dynamics (Varela, 2015), regardless of whether neighbourhood effect is
(or not) explicitly recognised or whether a fundamentally instrumental perspective
oriented by the need for governance is predominant.
Within this framework, finally, it is worth asking: does the fact that urban scale
and neighbourhood have become a key part of public welfare policies effectively
contribute (or not) to rethinking its links with the production of inequalities?
The answer, at this point, seems to be a little encouraging. On the one hand, the
fact that space and local governments have become central components in the wel-
fare architecture does not ignore the fact that, in a context of neoliberal globalism,
their main concern is to turn into competitive territories, articulated with central
flows of the capitalist world (Brenner and Theodore, 2002b; Varela, 2007). In this
scenario, on many occasions, public interventions promote pro-market logics and
institutions which, far from alleviating, feed the network of disadvantages (Reyga-
das, 2010). Accordingly, in contexts where articulation and coordination skills of
public players and local governments fail, welfare continues to depend mainly on the
domestic sphere and on the deployment of household members’ work.
Thus, when urban collective consumption management narrows its links with
the global market, a greater fragmentation at a territorial level arises (Sassen, 2018).

23 
In Europe, in cities such as Lyon, rioting was reported in the early 1980s. These riots
intensified more than twenty years later in the neighbourhoods of the Parisian banlieus.
In Argentina, in the context of hyperinflation in 1989, social conflict broke out in sub-
urban neighbourhoods, both in the Province of Buenos Aires and in large urban centres
of the interior of the country. Arias and Rodriguez (1999) report similar episodes since
1983 in the cities of San Pablo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and in the same year 1989,
months before, the caracazo claimed 500 deaths in Venezuela. Since then, their presence
has been sustained with different intensities, but they have not disappeared. In Argentina,
the piquetero movement took over the streets during the 2001/2002 crisis and, since
then, picketing has become the preferred form of demonstration. Perhaps the most con-
temporary expression is that of the yellow jackets (gilets jaunes) in French cities.
410 María Mercedes Di Virgilio
The most vibrant expression of this phenomenon is the privatisation of services
and housing with its differentiating potential regarding the composition of urban
environment. This privatisation process is not simply a change in the ownership
regime, but a transfer of functions to the market, in general, and to families, in
particular.24 The increase in prices and fees associated with the privatisation of basic
urban services also transfers the cost of living in the city to the wages of workers
and modifies the forms of demand management. Likewise, in the context of a sharp
decline in employment opportunities, urban inequalities are exacerbated. On several
occasions – especially in Latin American cities and in the North American black
ghetto25 – these conditions converge into a process of isolation in which integration
possibilities are undermined by the perverse combination of two phenomena: while,
the axis of identity creation moves from the world of employment to the world of
consumption (Kaztman, 2000), the income inequality gap and the gap in access to
worthy housing conditions deepen.
As pointed out by Ruiz-Tagle (2014),the neoliberal policies of municipalisation,
segmented services, and targeted resources are the factors that make the quality
of resources and local opportunities dependent on the socioeconomic level of the
population. From this point of view, the neighbourhood effects are mediated by the
neoliberal spatial equivalence between poor inhabitants, on the one hand, and poor
services, opportunities, and resources, on the other. ‘The main evidence for this is
that in the European welfare states, due to the greater territorial redistribution of
resources, neighborhood effects are not as severe as in the United States and in [the
Global South] (Musterd, 2005) … The neighborhood effects come from powerful
institutions (Gans, 2008), and they are “effects of the state inscribed in the space”
(Wacquant, 2009: 109)’ (Ruiz-Tagle and López, 2014: 40).
As proposed by Torres (2001), the spreading of new patterns of territorial orga-
nisation produces, on the one hand, a strong concentration of investments in precise
areas considered as strategic spaces at the urban level. On the other hand, a relative
abandonment of large areas are beginning to be considered as residual and not of
interest for capital. This is due to the particular residential segmentation presented

24 
In Latin American cities, the most relevant transformations impacting on the intensity
and persistence of socio-territorial inequalities are: (i) privatisation of basic urban ser-
vices; (ii) development of isolation processes for lowest-income sectors that, faced with
the commercialisation of the city, cannot be built in an attractive demand for capital;
(iii) suburbanisation of high-income sectors – configured by low density enclaves – that
gives rise to a dispute over interstitial territories in the periphery, traditionally urbanised
by low-income sectors; and (iv) a process of deterioration of the existing housing stock
that stresses the formal city landscape allowing the slow alteration of use and the status
of material structures.
25 
Among other works, Bayón (2012, 2015) and Bayón and Saraví (2018) can be analysed
in the case of Mexico City; Soldano (2008) and Najman (2018) for the case of the metro-
politan area of Buenos Aires, and Kaztman (2001, 2007, 2013) and Kaztman and Retamo-
so (2005) for Montevideo. As far as the black ghetto is concerned, the works by Wacquant
(1997, 2008, 2014) and works on the relationship between poverty suburbanisation and
neighbourhood effect in cities of the United States, Sampson (2019) may be consulted.
 THE ROLE OF RESIDENTIAL CONTEXT AND PUBLIC POLICIES 411
by the real estate market, the labour market, and the intervention capacity of state
agencies and social networks (Salvia and De Grande, 2007).
As Ruiz-Tagle and López (2014) argue, these processes take different character-
istics at different latitudes. In European cities, differentiation mechanisms seem to
be more sophisticated and/or less evident. The works by Arbaci (2008) and Arbaci
and Malheiros (2010) on spatial distribution of non-Western foreigners in different
cities of southern Europe show that their insertion in the city is featured by defi-
cient residential conditions, high levels of informality in the access to the real estate
market, high suburbanisation, and spatial dispersion. Consequently, the authors
argue that even when these groups are not necessarily concentrated in the territory –
which results in socially and ethnically mixed neighbourhoods – their disadvantages
are expressed as high differentiation in the forms of tenure and access to housing.
Therefore, despite the existence of moderate spatial segregation, there is consider-
able social marginalisation. ‘These forms of dispersed settlement are not the result
of concrete conjunctures, but of structural mechanisms and a broader process of
socio-residential differentiation, which are anchored in: the macro functioning of the
welfare system, the host society ideology, the segmentation of the labor market and,
above all, in the dual housing regime associated with processes of social division of
space’ (Arbaci, 2008: 33).
In this way, even though (on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean) social policies and
the mixture of tenancy types are recurrently developed – as mechanisms to confront
deprivation and reduce social inequalities – Arbaci and Rae (2014), based on a large
selection of study cases in London, show that access to opportunities and resources
for low-income populations ‘does not depend on or improve according to the level
of tenancy mixture in the neighborhood. On the contrary, the integration of both
policies becomes of vital importance: neighborhood integration policies and people-
centered policies, as well as de-commoditized access to welfare services (such as
education, training and employment opportunities)’. Consequently, the production
of urban inequalities does not seem to be linked to territory by territory itself, but
rather because it allows access to welfare services and institutions.
In Latin American cities, several studies have indicated that relegation is more evident
(in this regard, see Note 28). Despite this, a recent study by Ruiz-Tagle (2016) on the
neighbourhood of La Florida, Santiago – a neighbourhood with a history of land sei-
zures, social housing projects that recently received a new population of middle and high
middle-class people – shows the complexity of this coexistence, and how segregation has
moved from housing to other socialisation spheres. Again, Ruiz-Tagle emphasises the
need for an institutional and critical view on the effects of social mixture of territory and
of the territorial redistribution of resources in the production of inequalities.
Thus, over the last decades, far from diminishing, differences have deepened.
Many experts suspect that globalisation has meaningfully contributed to this deep-
ening and, therefore, to the fragmentation of urban populations and the districts
they live in (Smet and Salman, 2008). In addition, it seems to have contributed to the
development of segregation processes in multiple and different scales and modalities.
The complexity currently enshrined in different forms of territorial inequality there-
fore requires greater attention in the context of the analysis of local welfare policies.
The spatial dimension of inequalities thus becomes an especially critical, though
much more sophisticated, less evident, and never mechanical, factor.
412 María Mercedes Di Virgilio
Conclusion

Lower income groups’ daily lives in capitalist societies and, therefore, their inser-
tion in the city are structured based on a wide range of state interventions. These
interventions are articulated in the general welfare system and contribute to the
development of somehow socially oriented and equitable residential contexts.
This work aimed at accounting for the way in which residential context expands
or limits the production of inequalities. There is little doubt that neighbourhood char-
acteristics affect familiar and individual daily life and opportunities. Although, we
do not know enough about the causal mechanisms which operates them, the state,
through its policies, programmes, and territorialised interventions, constitutes an
important driver in socio-territorial differentiation. Thereby, the state enables or limits
the effective possibilities of families to respond to the demands of their daily lives.
These interventions impact on the development of socio-territorial inequalities.
We understand the relationships existing between the production of inequalities and
public policies as a sequence of agreements and disagreements among state interven-
tions, their beneficiaries, and the effects these interventions cause in the spaces where
they reside. When analysing relationship patterns in which low-income households
meet daily needs, it is noted that public institutions (schools, healthcare centres, social
policymakers, etc.) are the main characters in this network, even though their role
is not developed as a harmonious and articulated performance (Di Virgilio, 2008).
Quite the contrary, on many occasions, conflict is a modality by means of which these
relationships evolve. In this context, when we speak of public state-owned institu-
tions, we are referring to multiple interventions that, from different instances and
governmental levels, can shape families’ daily lives and the environments where they
live: we particularly refer to programmes and public welfare institutions deployed at
the regional level (Blanco and Subirats, 2008; Di Virgilio, 2011).26
These interventions produce important scars in the daily life of low-income families
and in their insertion into the city, as they contribute to defining opportunity struc-
tures.27 Access28 to these opportunity structures constitutes a heterogenisation factor

26 
In the 1970s, a good deal of urban research defined a series of urban services, transpor-
tation, and collective facilities which were carried out by the state – as part of a broader
policy of employment and universal services that, until the mid-1980s, regulated minimum
standards of living conditions – as collective consumption goods (Castells, 1974), complex
use values (Topalov, 1979), and basic use values of spatiality (Jaramillo and Cuervo, 1993)
which nowadays have a much more limited scope (Martínez Franzoni, 2008).
27 
Opportunity structures are defined here as ‘the probabilities of access to goods, services or
the performance of activities. These opportunities affect household welfare, either because
they allow or facilitate the use of their own resources by household members or because they
provide them with new resources. The term structure refers to the fact that welfare routes
are closely linked, so that access to certain goods, services or activities provides resources
that in turn facilitate access to other opportunities’ (Filgueira and Kaztman, 1999: 9).
28 
The notion of access and/or accessibility refers to the degree of adjustment existing
between the architecture of welfare – characteristics, location and distribution – and the
resources available to households to take advantage of it (Hernández, 2012).
 THE ROLE OF RESIDENTIAL CONTEXT AND PUBLIC POLICIES 413
among poor groups. Insofar as it enables or limits the effective possibilities of families
to respond to the demands of daily life. Access to opportunity structures is linked, on
the one hand, with the characteristics of the residential context. On the other hand, with
the conditions of their location associated with different forms of access to housing,
services, urban facilities, workplaces, etc. Therefore, opportunity structures enabling (or
not) public interventions in the territory are associated with micro sociological processes
contributing to the (re)production of inequalities.29 As pointed out by Allard and Small
(2013: 6), ‘the fewer the resources to which people have access, the more their circum-
stances will depend on the organizations in which they participate, the systems in which
these organizations operate, and the institutions governing the behavior of both’.

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 20
Immigration and Immigrants in
European Countries
Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman

Introduction

Immigration has changed the demographic composition, the ethnic fabric, and the
social structure of many west European traditional nation-states. Until the middle
of the twentieth century, Europe was a continent of emigration, mainly to North
and South America. The end of World War II was a turning point that transformed
Europe to a major destination for immigrants arriving from all over the world. This
transformation was a result of two main processes: decolonisation that allowed for
the arrival of migration flows from former colonies (e.g. France and the United
Kingdom) and active labour recruitment through guest-worker programmes (e.g.
Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland) (Castles and Miller, 2003). Gradually, ‘against
their will’ most west European countries were transformed into de facto immigra-
tion countries. Unlike traditional immigration societies (such as the United States,
Canada, Australia), European populations have never viewed themselves as ‘coun-
tries of immigration’ or as ‘immigrants societies’ (Parsons and Smeeding, 2006). In
fact, the new reality was a result of economic, demographic and political processes
and not a result of any comprehensive or systematic policy (Fassmann and Reeger,
2012: 71).
In the middle of the twentieth century, after World War II, rich advanced industrial
countries in western Europe had begun searching and recruiting guest workers to
solve serious problems of labour shortage in the domestic labour market. Recruit-
ment of guest workers coupled with arrival of labour migrants, ex-colonials, undoc-
umented immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers have significantly changed the
ethnic composition of the population of many countries, cities, towns, and commu-
nities in Europe. Currently, many cities and towns in western Europe have substan-

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 421
tial numbers of non-European immigrants with new distinct ethnic neighbourhoods
spread over many cities and towns in western Europe (Glikman and Semyonov,
2012; Lahav, 2004; Pettigrew, 1998; Sassen, 1996; Soysal, 1994).
The influx of migrants to west European countries in the post-World War II era
is often explained by the rise in demand for workers in the host countries, on the
one hand, and by a large supply of labour force in poor countries outside western
Europe, on the other hand. The increased demand for workers in western Europe
is attributed to rapid economic growth, rising educational levels, declining fertility
and the ageing population of European countries coupled with the reluctance of the
native-born European population to take low-paying manual jobs in the domestic
labour market.
At the end of the last century the main source for population growth in Europe
is attributed to net migration. Specifically, by 2003, in 19 out of 25 countries within
the European Union, 90% of the population growth was due to immigration and
only 10% was due to natural population growth (i.e. fertility). In other words, with-
out migration most European nations would exhibit negative population growth
(Parsons and Smeeding, 2006: 2–3). We must note here that foreign workers that
arrived in Europe were instrumental in resolving domestic labour shortages during a
period of reconstruction and industrial growth (Triandafyllidou and Gropas, 2014).
Generally speaking, the demand for workers (mostly for cheap labour) in western
Europe was met by the supply of immigrants and labour migrants from poor, less-
developed countries located in Asia, North Africa, sub-Sahara Africa, the Middle
East, Latin America, the East, as well as southern and eastern Europe.
It should also be noted that in recent decades, especially since the mid-1980s,
western European countries have also experienced a substantial influx of refugees
and asylum seekers (mostly from the war raged areas in the Middle East, Africa,
and the former Yugoslavia). The influx of refugees in Europe was coupled with
large number of immigrants from the former Soviet Union following its downfall in
1989 (Castles and Miller, 2003). Consequently, the relative size of the foreign-born
population, whether immigrants, labour migrants, or refugees and asylum seekers in
western Europe has grown steadily, ranging from 9% to 16% across most countries
at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The definition of the immigrant population in western Europe is not a simple,
straightforward matter. Immigrants arrived to different host countries from a wide
variety of countries of origin. Furthermore, the social and legal status of the immi-
grants varies considerably from one host country to another. For example, many
immigrants to Switzerland arrived from the former Yugoslavia, from Turkey, and
from Sri Lanka as asylum seekers but many could not become citizens in Switzerland
(even in the second generation). Germany accepted many ethnic Germans (mostly
from the former Soviet Union) as immigrants (after the downfall of the former Soviet
Union) that could become citizens upon arrival or shortly after arrival. By way of
contrast, considerable numbers of sons and daughters of the guest workers from
Turkey found it quite difficult to become German citizens, until the 1999 reform to
the nationality law. Since then, it has become easier to immigrants and their children
(especially those born in Germany) to acquire German citizenship.
In the Scandinavian countries, most immigrants came from neighbouring coun-
tries, but recent flows include many migrants from Pakistan and the former Soviet
422 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
Union. In Spain and Italy, the immigrant population is composed of migrants from
North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In France and Bel-
gium, most immigrants have arrived from the ex-colonies in the sub-Sahara and
North Africa, but recent flows include many migrants from South East Asia. The
United Kingdom has received large numbers of Indian, Pakistani, and West Indian
ex-colonial immigrants. Large number of immigrants in the Netherlands arrived
from Suriname and Indonesia.
Despite such meaningful differences across both countries of origin and coun-
tries of destination in the legal status and ethnic composition of the immigrants, the
immigrants are often viewed by the native European population (even in the second
generation) as members of out-group populations. That is, they are often viewed by
many Europeans as foreigners that exert a negative impact on society (Semyonov
et al., 2006, 2008) and as a serious social problem. Therefore, in many European
countries immigrants are considered as a threat to society and its culture and have
become, thus, a target for prejudice discrimination and violence (Pettigrew, 1998).
In what follows we focus on the process of immigrant flows to Europe, on the
distribution of immigrants across European countries, on the emergence of immi-
grant and ethnic communities in west European countries, on the composition of
the immigrant population across countries, on the social and economic integration
of immigrants in west European countries, and the influence that the immigrants
exert on views, attitudes, and beliefs held by the native-born European population.
Our decision to focus mostly on the west European countries is rooted in the fact
that east European countries are still immigrant-sending countries much more than
immigrant-receiving countries. In fact, the size of the immigrant population in the
east European countries is very small with most east European countries still losing
people. Moreover, the status and borders of many east European states had changed
in recent decades. Indeed, the immigration experience of western Europe is sharply
different from that of eastern Europe. For the purpose of comparison with west-
ern Europe, however, we also provide information where suitable on several east
European countries.

The Flow of Immigrants Across European States

Table 20.1 provides detailed information (Figure 20.1 provides visual illustration)
on the changes in immigration flows that western Europe have experienced in the
last six decades (i.e. since the middle of the previous century to present). The most
apparent cross-country difference is the stark divide between countries in northern
Europe and countries in southern Europe. In fact, in the 1950s, all south European
countries (as well as Norway as a northern exception) were still immigrant-sending
countries. By way of contrast, countries in northern Europe had begun receiving
(even importing) immigrants in the early and middle of the 1950s. As of the 1970s to
the present times, however, all countries in western Europe have become immigrant-
receiving countries.
In terms of numbers, the largest immigrant destination country in Europe has
been Germany. Since the end of the 1950s Germany has had positive net immigra-
tion rates, surpassing France’s net immigration rates as of the mid-1980s. In fact,
since 1950 total net migration to Germany reached 9.5 million people peaking in the
Table 20.1  Net immigration (in thousands) by country.

1950– 1955– 1960– 1965– 1970– 1975– 1980– 1985– 1990– 1995– 2000– 2005– 2010–
1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

France 298 930 1,467 416 805 147 268 482 303 189 739 481 332
Germany −42 40 667 918 714 289 0 1,711 3,233 744 1 32 1,250
Greece 19 −14 −145 −99 11 330 114 159 465 297 114 80 −136
Italy −204 −559 −232 −232 19 165 266 −10 153 224 1,624 1,006 528
Norway −4 −9 −2 14 29 21 25 39 47 59 67 174 236
Portugal −265 −329 −548 −702 108 199 −67 −148 149 174 178 127 −140
Spain −436 −459 −194 −146 97 77 −43 −68 319 896 2,829 2,250 −593
Sweden 52 47 80 131 19 89 30 135 156 58 142 262 273
Switzerland 132 129 279 93 25 −135 81 131 247 65 186 345 382
United Kingdom −358 70 143 −85 106 39 −97 99 205 499 968 1,524 900

Source: Migration Policy Institute tabulation of data from the United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2015), Trends in International Migrant
Stock: Migrants by Destination and Origin (United Nations database, POP/DB/MIG/Stock/Rev.2015); http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/
data/estimates2/estimates15.shtml.
424 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
United Kingdom Switzerland Sweden Spain Italy Germany France

6,000

4,000

2,000

1950–55 1955–60 1960–65 1965–70 1970–75 1975–80 1980–85 1985–90 1990–95 1995–2000 2000–05 2005–10 2010–15

Figure 20.1  Net total immigration (in thousands) by country. Source: Migration Policy Institute
tabulation of data from the United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2015),
Trends in International Migrant Stock: Migrants by Destination and Origin (United Nations
database, POP/DB/MIG/Stock/Rev.2015). http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/
migration/data/estimates2/estimates15.shtml.

beginning of the 1990s (when 3.2 million people from the former Soviet Union have
made Germany their home after the downfall of the former Soviet Union). Migra-
tion to Germany had increased, once again, in the first decade of the new millennium
when 1.2 million immigrants arrived in the country.
Both France and the United Kingdom have maintained a significant positive net
immigration rates since the 1960s, totalling at 6.8 million and 4 million net immi-
grants, respectively. While net immigration to France peaked in the early 1960s
(during the Algerian War for Independence), the United Kingdom experienced its
immigration peak in the new millennium when almost 3.5 million immigrants
arrived in the United Kingdom between 2000 and 2015.
The Scandinavian countries have begun experiencing positive net immigration
rates since the 1960s. For example, in the four decades between 1950 and 1990
Sweden gained 583,000 immigrants and Norway gained 113,000 immigrants. How-
ever, from 1990 to 2015 migration flows have intensified with Sweden gaining
891,000 immigrants and Norway receiving 583,000 immigrants. Indeed, net immi-
gration to these two Scandinavian countries has increased considerably and steadily
in recent decades.
While western Europe had become a migration regime in the 1950s, southern
Europe turned into immigrant destination countries only at the beginning of the
1990s. The western countries are often referred to, therefore, as ‘old immigration’
countries whereas the southern European countries are considered ‘latecomers’
and often referred to as ‘new immigration’ countries. For example, Italy, with net
positive immigration of 3.4 million since 1995 (peaking in the early 2000s), had
 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 425
lost 787,000 people between 1950 and 1995. Spain had mostly negative net immi-
gration up until the weakening of fascism in 1970, losing 1.2 million people bet-
ween 1950 and 1970. However, from 1990 to 2010 Spain had gained 6.3 million
immigrants. The trend of increasing migration flows to Spain, however, reversed
after the economic crash of 2008 (a net loss of 593,000 people). Similar to Spain,
Portugal lost 1.8 million people until 1970; the trend was reversed between 1990
and 2010 (when Portugal gained a net of 628,000 immigrants). However, and sim-
ilar to Spain, following the 2008 economic crisis, Portugal had lost 140,000 people
between 2010 and 2015.
It is important to note that in 2015 the flows of asylum seekers to Europe
increased dramatically with over one million people arriving by secret sea
crossings across the Mediterranean Sea from Africa. Many of the asylum seekers
died trying to reach the European coasts in overcrowded boats operated by smug-
glers. In addition, hundreds of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers (mostly
from Syria), chose the Balkan route and tried to reach European Union (EU)
countries crossing through Turkey and Greece. To cope with the increasing migra-
tion flows, central and eastern European countries implemented border control
mechanisms that resulted in the effective closure of the western Balkan route to
northern Europe. In addition, in March 2016 the EU signed an agreement with
Turkey, aimed at stopping movement of migrants and refugees travelling across
the Aegean from Turkey to the Greek islands, in exchange for increased financial
support, visa liberalisation, and other incentives. These measures resulted in the
shutting down of the eastern Mediterranean route. Consequently, asylum seekers
had begun arriving mainly through the dangerous central Mediterranean route
crossing by boat to Italy and Spain (Katsiaficas, 2016). Despite all these mea-
sures, countries in Europe, such as Germany, Italy, Sweden, Austria, and Hungary,
have become home to large numbers of asylum seekers and refugees in recent
years (Eurostat, 2018).
Although, the number of asylum seekers to European countries has decreased
sharply after the peak in 2015–2016, thousands of people (mostly from Asia and
Africa) are still trying to find refuge in Europe hoping to make Europe their new
home. This is because the reasons underlying the massive exodus of asylum seekers
from Africa and Asia have not gone away.1 Indeed, the images of asylum seekers
arriving by land or by boat to countries in southern Europe have populated the
news and have given rise to hot debates in the political and public arenas of des-
tination countries in Europe (Bansak et al., 2016).2 This is perhaps because refu-
gees and asylum seekers, more than any other category of migrants, strengthen the
tension between the strong commitment of European democratic nation-states to
humanitarian principles and universal rights, on the one hand, and to the interests
of national communities based on ties of common descent and ethnicity, on the
other hand (Statham, 2003).

1 
It is important to note that most refugees from Syria reside in Lebanon, Jordan, and
Turkey (Turner, 2015).
2 
For a detailed analysis of border crossings to Europe by Mediterranean routes (land
and sea) see Katsiaficas (2016).
426 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
The Distribution of Immigrants Across Countries

Cross-country variations in immigration flows are neither trivial nor random.

Immigrants tend to move to places where economic opportunities are abundant,
where they can attain high economic returns on their human capital resources, and
where the standard of living is high. Subsequently, immigrants have been arriv-
ing in larger numbers to the rich countries of western Europe than to the other
European countries. In Table 20.2 we present information regarding the distribu-
tion of immigrants across countries, thus, providing information on number and
percentage of the foreign-born population, annual inflows of immigrants and asy-
lum seekers and percentage of immigrants coming from poor non-European coun-
tries and from predominantly Muslim countries (in 2014). The data displayed in
Table 20.2 pertain not only to western countries but also to east European countries
for comparison purpose.
The data presented in Table 20.2 reveal that west European countries such as
Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have received large
numbers of immigrants while most east European countries have received relatively
little migration (and in fact, some have been countries sending rather than receiving
immigrants). Indeed, countries in eastern Europe tend to have small percentages of
foreign-born populations, 1.8% in Poland, 4.8% in Hungary, and 7.1% in the Czech
Republic compared with 12.4% in France, 13.2% in Germany, 13.3% in the United
Kingdom, 16.1% in Belgium, and 17.4% in Austria.
A high percentage of foreign-born stock is also apparent in the Nordic coun-
tries; countries that are known in willingness to open their doors and take refugees,
asylum seekers, and humanitarian migrants. Among the Nordic countries, Sweden
has long been singled out as a country most committed to acceptance of refugees
and asylum seekers (as clearly evident in the high ratio of asylum seekers to total
inflows). A similar pattern, although not in the same scope as observed in Sweden,
is also apparent in the other Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, Norway,
and Finland. These countries exhibit higher than average ratios of asylum seekers
to immigrants. It should be noted, however, that as of 2014, Austria, Germany, and
Hungary had also become a destination for asylum seekers from the war-torn zones
in the Middle East (Syria) and Africa.
The flows of immigrants to different European countries have significant con-
sequences for the ethnic homogeneity of the national population. Many of the
immigrants are of non-European ethnic origin and many do not belong to Christian
religious denominations. Therefore, many immigrants differ in ethnic origin
and cultural distinctiveness from the majority native-born group. In several west
European countries there have been large inflows of non-European immigrants and
immigrants belonging to the Muslim faith. This pattern is particularly evident in
France. Likewise, a substantial proportion of immigrants from non-European poor
countries or from predominantly Muslim countries have arrived in such countries
as the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Finland.
Indeed, the new arrivals, whether economic immigrants or asylum seekers, are likely
to change the social composition, ethnic fabric, and cultural character of many west
European countries.
 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 427
Table 20.2  Number of Immigrants and Migration flows to European countries, 2014 (adapted
from Heath and Richards, 2020).

Total stock of Foreign-born Annual Inflow of Percentage Percentage

foreign-born as percentage inflow asylum coming from coming from
(000s) of the (000s) seekers poor non- predomi-
population (000s) European nantly Muslim
countries* countries*

Austria 1,485 17.4 154 28 0.13 0.17

Belgium 1,812 16.1 124 14 0.10 0.08
Czech 745 7.1 39 1 0.13 0.05
Republic
Denmark 501 8.9 49 15 0.31 0.18
Finland 322 5.9 24 4 0.38 0.17
France 7,921 12.4 168 59 0.93 0.69
Germany 10,689 13.2 1,343 173 0.12 0.12
Hungary 476 4.8 26 41 0.32 0.03
Ireland 754 16.4 49 1 0.67 0.20
Netherlands 1,953 11.8 139 24 0.25 0.14
Norway 705 14.4 61 13 0.27 0.17
Poland 675 1.8 32 7 0.27 0.04
Portugal 885 8.1 35 0.4 0.59 0.00
Slovenia 341 16.6 18 0.4 0.00 0.33
Spain 6,155 13.2 266 6 0.44 0.00
Sweden 1,604 16.6 106 75 0.69 0.60
Switzerland 2,355 28.8 152 22 0.05 0.00
United 8,482 13.3 504 31 0.32 0.03
Kingdom

Notes: 000s indicates that the numbers in a given column are in thousands.
*Percentages of the 15 largest sending countries in 2014. (Note: On average the top 15 account for
70% of total inflow of migrants).
Countries classified as Muslim based on CIA World Fact Book (https://www.cia.gov/library/­
publications/the-world-factbook). We include Bosnia and Herzegovina (51% Muslim), Malaysia
(61%), Nigeria (50%). Eritrea and Somalia counted as Muslim majority country despite lack of
statistics. Turkey and Kazakhstan classed as jnon-European.
Sources: OECD (2016, 2017).

Where Immigrants Go

In this section we present and discuss differential flows of immigrant populations

across countries to further examine the thesis that immigrants are pulled into places
with abundant economic opportunities, where demand for labour, returns on human
capital resources, and standard of living are high. In Table 20.3, therefore, we display the
distribution of the foreign-born population (i.e. immigrants), percentage of immigrant
population originated from non-EU countries, percentage of the Muslim population,
and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita across a wide range of European countries.
428 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
Table 20.3  Percentage foreign-born, percentage non-EU residents, percentage Muslims, and
nominal GDP, by country in 2014.
% Foreign-born % Non-EU % Muslim GDP Nominal
2017* 2017* 2010** 2017***
Belgium 16.5 8.8 6.0 $43,582
Bulgaria 2.0 1.3 13.4 $8,064
Czech Republic 4.4 2.7 0.1 $20,152
Denmark 11.6 7.6 4.1 $56,444
Germany 14.7 8.8 5.0 $44,550
Ireland 16.6 4.1 0.9 $70,638
Greece 11.6 8.4 4.7 $18,637
Spain 12.9 8.8 2.3 $28,359
France 12.2 8.9 7.5 $39,869
Italy 10.0 7.0 2.6 $31,984
Latvia 12.9 11.5 0.1 $15,547
Hungary 5.2 2.0 0.3 $15,531
Netherlands 12.5 9.1 5.5 $48,346
Austria 18.8 10.4 5.7 $47,290
Poland 1.7 1.1 0.1 $13,823
Portugal 8.5 6.2 0.6 $21,161
Romania 2.1 1.2 0.3 $10,757
Finland 6.3 4.1 0.8 $46,017
Sweden 17.8 12.4 4.9 $53,218
United Kingdom 14.1 8.6 4.6 $39,735
Iceland 13.6 4.4 0.1 $70,332
Norway 15.2 8.5 3.0 $74,941
Switzerland 28.4 11.6 5.7 $80,591
Average 11.7 6.8 3.4

Sources: *Eurostat
**Pew Research Center (http://pewrsr.ch/2i3TIim)
***International Monetary Fund

In 2017, in an average European country 4.5% of the residents were immigrants.

There is, however considerable variation in the proportion of the immigrant population
across countries. Specifically, in 2017 in most of the rich west European countries the
foreign-born population has become substantial, reaching more than 10% (e.g. 28.4%
in Switzerland, 15.2 in Norway, 17.8% in Sweden, 14.7% in Germany, 18.8% in Aus-
tria, 16.5 in Belgium, 16.6% in Ireland). By way of contrast, in the poor east European
countries (e.g. Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Poland) the size of the foreign-born
population is relatively low, ranging between 1.7% (Poland) to 5.2% (Hungary).
In Figures 20.1, 20.2, and 20.3 we present the relationships between level of GDP
(as an indicator of economic standing and economic opportunities) and the size
 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 429
of the different immigrant populations in the countries: percentage of immigrants
(foreign-born), percentage of immigrants from non-EU countries, and percentage
of Muslim population. The figures clearly reveal that immigration is linked to the
level of economic development and economic opportunities (as seen by the positive
association between GDP and the proportion of the foreign-born population).
Three interesting patterns emerge from the figures: (i) Poor eastern European
countries (e.g. Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Hun-
gary) have small numbers of foreign-born residents; (ii) the relatively poor south
European countries (e.g. Greece, Spain, and Portugal that have only recently
become immigrant-receiving countries) have a slightly below average proportion
of foreign-born populations; (iii) in the rich countries of western and northern
Europe (e.g. Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland)
the proportion of the foreign-born population (i.e. first-generation immigrants) is
well above average.
A similar pattern for the relations between percentage of foreign-born in the
country and GDP per capita (Figure 20.2) is revealed when observing the relations
between the percentage of non-EU non-European Economic Area (EEA) immigrants
and GDP (Figure 20.3). However, the association between the percentage of Mus-
lims in the country and GDP (Figure 20.4) is somewhat weaker than the associations
observed for the other immigrant populations. It seems that the distribution of Mus-
lims across European countries is influenced not only by level of GDP (as indicator
of economic conditions) but also by historical circumstances, and especially by colo-
nial ties of the host country to the Muslim world.

20.0 Cyprus

Austria
Sweden

Belgium Ireland

15.0 Malta Norway

Latvia Estonia Germany
United Kingdom
Iceland
Spain
France Netherlands
Greece Slovenia Denmark
Croatia
10.0 Italy

Portugal

Finland
Hungary Lithuania
5.0
Czech Republic
Slovakia
Romania
Bulgaria Poland

0.0
$0 $10,000 $20,000 $30,000 $40,000 $50,000 $60,000 $70,000 $80,000

Figure 20.2  GDP nominal 2017 (International Monetary Fund) vs percentage of foreign-born,
2017 (Eurostat).
430 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
15.0

13.0 Estonia
Sweden
Latvia
Croatia
11.0
Austria
Slovenia Spain France
Belgium
9.0 Netherlands
Greece Norway
Germany
Malta Denmark
United Kingdom
7.0 Cyprus Italy
Portugal

5.0
Iceland
Finland
Lithuania Ireland
3.0
Czech Republic
Romania
Bulgaria Hungary

1.0 Poland
Slovakia

Ð1.0
$0 $10,000 $20,000 $30,000 $40,000 $50,000 $60,000 $70,000 $80,000

Figure 20.3  GDP nominal 2017 (International Monetary Fund) vs percentage of non-EU, 2017 (Eurostat).

France

6 Belgium
Austria
Netherlands

5 Germany Sweden
Greece United Kingdom

4 Denmark

3 Norway
Italy
Slovenia
Spain
2

Croatia Portugal Estonia

1 Romania
Poland Hungary Finland Ireland
Lithuania
Slovakia
Latvia Malta
0 Czech Republic Iceland
$0 $10,000 $20,000 $30,000 $40,000 $50,000 $60,000 $70,000 $80,000

Figure 20.4  GDP nominal 2017 (International Monetary Fund) vs percentage of Muslim 2010
(Pew Research Center http://pewrsr.ch/2i3TIim).
 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 431
For example, France, with its colonial heritage in North Africa and the Levant,
along with its liberal perception of the nation-state, has the highest percentage of
Muslims (7.5%); much higher than in countries without historic ties with coun-
tries with native Muslim population. Yet the proportion of the Muslim population
in many other west European countries, whether with colonial ties to the Muslim
world or without such ties, is still quite high.
The presence of the Muslim population in many west European countries can
be attributed, first and foremost, to the demand for labour (mainly cheap labour)
generated by the post-war economic boom of western Europe (Belgium, Austria,
Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway). The demand
for labour was met by a large supply of Muslim workers from North Africa and
Turkey who arrived first as guest workers and later brought their families to the host
countries. Subsequently, new immigrant-ethnic communities have emerged in most
European countries, cities, and towns (Castles and Miller, 2003).

Spatial Distribution and Residential Segregation of

Immigrants

Most immigrants are attracted to cities and urban centres where economic oppor-
tunities are abundant and where demand for workforce is high. Consequently
immigrants are more likely to reside and concentrate in urban communities in the
metropolitan centres and are less likely to reside in small localities or in rural agricul-
tures communities and farms that are located outside the major cities. Along this line,
it might be reasonable to expect that the immigrant population in Europe would be
over-concentrated in urban neighbourhoods and under-represented in rural localities.
In order to examine this expectation we compare the spatial distribution of the
immigrant population in Europe with that of native-born Europeans across three
types of residential areas: metropolitan centres (cities and suburbs), small towns, and
rural communities (country and farm). The data presented in Table 20.4 reveal that
in all west European countries, without exception, immigrants are over-represented
in metropolitan communities and under-represented in rural localities and farms.
That is, the data reveal that in all countries the proportion of immigrants that lives
in cities is larger than that of the native-born population, and that the proportion of
immigrants that lives and works in rural and farming communities is smaller than
the native-born population. This finding is indeed consistent with the argument that
the immigrant population in Europe tends to live and work in cities and metropol-
itan centres.
The overconcentration of the immigrant population in cities is especially pro-
nounced in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Austria and least evident in Spain
and Ireland. More specifically, in the United Kingdom about 24% of the native-born
population reside in major cities while more than twice as many of the immigrants
(over 50%) reside in cities. In Belgium, 18% of the native-born Belgians live in major
cities as compared to 40% of the immigrant population, and in Austria almost 60%
of the immigrants reside in cities as compared to 34% of native-born Austrians.
In Spain and Ireland the over-representation of immigrants in the major cities is
relatively small. In both countries presentation of immigrants in cities exceeds that of
432 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
Table 20.4  Percentage of domicile of immigrants (first and second generation) vs natives
by country.
City Town Country
Native Immigrant Native Immigrant Native Immigrant

Austria 33.76 59.96 22.94 23.89 43.3 15.98

Belgium 18.07 39.93 24.36 27.39 57.57 32.68
Denmark 40.52 59.21 32.16 24.92 27.01 15.88
Finland 31.16 52.68 29.41 26.34 39.33 20.97
France 28.01 41.02 30.79 36.43 41.2 22.55
Germany 26.44 38.21 35.69 39.34 37.79 22.45
Ireland 31.45 33.31 27.54 34.56 40.93 31.72
Netherlands 28.58 46.04 24.53 23.86 46.89 30.1
Norway 29.18 42.56 28.53 27.04 42.29 30.15
Portugal 26.9 43.74 36.47 44.65 36.51 11.41
Spain 25.5 27.57 30.16 32.16 44.1 40.28
Sweden 33.73 51.64 34.61 31.33 31.65 17.03
Switzerland 15.41 24.15 18.83 30.02 65.76 45.68
United Kingdom 24.2 50.75 47.84 37.34 27.83 11.81
Total 26.68 41.93 34.15 35.18 39.08 22.84

Note: Total is the weighted average of all ESS 7 countries

native-born inhabitants by only 2%. By way of contrast, immigrants are under-rep-

resented in rural communities and in farms by substantial proportions in all coun-
tries, with only one exception (the over-representation of the Spanish population in
rural communities as compared to immigrants does not exceed 4%).
It is also important to note that the massive influx of immigrants to European cit-
ies and towns throughout recent decades (mostly in the second half of the previous
century) has brought a variety of new ethnic non-European populations into most
European countries. The new immigrant populations have created, in turn, a variety
of new ethnic communities and distinct segregated ethnic neighbourhoods in many
European cities. Indeed, the presence of segregated ethnic neighbourhoods has
become quite a spread and prevalent phenomenon in many cities and towns in west-
ern Europe (Glikman and Semyonov, 2012).
For example, English cities have neighbourhoods populated mostly by Black
Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigrants and by the offspring
of these immigrants; German cities are characterised by distinct Turkish or Mus-
lim neighbourhoods. In France and Belgium many segregated urban areas and city
neighbourhoods are populated exclusively by North African Muslim immigrants
and sub-Saharan African inhabitants; cities in the Netherlands include distinct
neighbourhoods where Surinamese, Indonesian, and Moroccans residents tend to
live; Greek towns have become a home for Albanian immigrants; and in many Scan-
dinavian cities there are ethnic neighbourhoods where refugees of Iraqi, Iranian, and
 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 433
Ethiopian origin are heavily concentrated (Hatziprokopiou, 2003; Karsten et al.,
2006; Logan, 2006; Malheiros and Vala, 2004; Musterd, 2005; Musterd et al., 1998;
Peach, 1997, 2005).
Although patterns of ethic residential segregation in European cities are more
complex than those observed in the United States between Blacks and Whites or bet-
ween Hispanics and Whites, and although ethnic residential segregation in Europe
is not as extreme as racial segregation in North America, several conclusions can
be drawn from the literature regarding the general patterns that characterise immi-
grants’ residential segregation in western Europe (see, for example, Glikman and
Semyonov, 2012; Musterd et al., 1998; Musterd and Van Kempen, 2009).
First, European countries differ both in the composition of their ethnic popula-
tions and in rates of ethnic residential segregation. For example, segregation rates
in the United Kingdom, Holland, and Belgium are higher than those observed in
Germany, Austria, and France (Musterd, 2005). Second, the size and composition
of the ethnic population of west European countries has changed over the years.
Yet, segregation rates have remained, for the most part, quite stable. Whereas some
cities have experienced a modest increase in segregation (e.g. Moroccans in Am-
sterdam), the dominant trend has been either stability or even decrease in the level
of segregation (Musterd and Van Kempen, 2009). Third, residential segregation of
the same group may differ across countries or even across cities within the same
country (Musterd and Van Kempen, 2009). Fourth, rates of ethnic residential segre-
gation vary from one group to another within cities. For example, Moroccans and
Turks in Amsterdam are more segregated than Surinamese in Amsterdam (Logan,
2006; Musterd, 2005; Musterd and Van Kempen, 2009), Caribbean Blacks in cities
in the United Kingdom are less segregated than either Bangladeshis or Pakistanis
(Johnston et al., 2002; Musterd, 2005; Peach, 1999), and in Lisbon Brazilians are
less segregated than Indians (Musterd and Van Kempen, 2009). However, despite
these meaningful cross-city and cross-country differences, ethnic residential seg-
regation in western Europe is substantial and widespread with the ethnic neigh-
bourhoods being viewed as the least desirable place of residence (Bolt et al., 2008;
Semyonov et al., 2007).
It should be noted that state intervention in decisions regarding immigrants’ resi-
dential location is much more common in west European countries than in the tradi-
tional immigrant societies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia (Musterd
et al., 1998). Recently, policies promoting government interventions and policies
supporting greater social mixing have been enacted in several European countries. In
Germany, for example, integration of immigrants into the housing market has been
fostered through housing and urban policies. These policies are aimed at achiev-
ing desegregation by including local quotas for non-German born households in a
variety of housing estates (Sybille, 2009). In Denmark and Finland, where there is
no official dispersal programme, policy documents encourage spatial distribution of
refugees and immigrants through the allocation of social housing in various parts of
the cities (Harrison et al., 2005).
Nevertheless, desegregation policies do not seem to have had significant impact
on residential segregation between immigrant populations and native-born Euro-
peans as succinctly summarised by Bolt et al. (2010: 130): ‘Although a wide array
of desegregation and mixing policies can be found across Europe, they are united
434 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
in their failure to bring about a significant drop in the level of ethnic segregation’.
Furthermore, immigrants are more likely to concentrate and reside in the poorer
and less desirable districts and neighbourhoods in the city (Glikman and Semyonov,
2012; Gorbunova et al., 2015; Semyonov et al., 2007).
Studies suggest that native-born Europeans prefer to live in communities where
immigrants do not reside (Gorbunova et al., 2015; Semyonov et al., 2007).While
there is no evidence that members of ethnic minorities object to having members of
the majority group as neighbours, it is highly possible that some immigrants actu-
ally prefer residing in an ethnic neighbourhood than in an ‘all European’ neigh-
bourhood. This is so because the ethnic neighbourhood can provide members of
the immigrant population with shelter from discrimination and with ample advan-
tages that are not available elsewhere. For example, ethnic communities may provide
easy access to social networks, a base for social and economic support, daily use of
the language, proximity to religious services, availability of ethnic food stores, and
access to ethnic organisations and to cultural centres (Peach et al., 1981). Appar-
ently, whereas discrimination against immigrants and ethnic minorities coupled with
lack of sufficient economic resources may channel immigrants into ethnic neigh-
bourhoods, some immigrants may actually prefer residing in ethnic communities. All
these, in turn, are likely to preserve, if not to increase, patterns and rates of residen-
tial segregation in European cities.
Using data from the European Social Survey Round 1 (ESS, 2002), Glikman and
Semyonov (2012) estimated patterns of residential segregation among immigrants
across countries. They distinguished between three types of neighbourhoods: those
where most residents are ethnic immigrants, those where most residents are native
Europeans, and mixed neighbourhoods. Based on the data, they reported that in
2002, on average, about one-quarter of all immigrants reside in ethnic communities
(where most residents are immigrants); over half reported living in ethnically mixed
neighbourhoods (where some of the residents are immigrants); and slightly under a
quarter (23%) reported dwelling in neighbourhoods inhabited almost exclusively by
native-born Europeans (where there are almost no immigrants).
There are, however, some variations in patterns of residential segregation across
countries. Residence in ethnic neighbourhoods is most pronounced in France (where
almost 40% of the immigrants reported residence in ethnic communities) and least
evident in Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (where less than 14% of
the immigrants live in an ethnic neighbourhood). A considerable number of immi-
grants reported residence in ethnically mixed communities. More specifically,
approximately 73% of the immigrants in Greece and over half of the immigrants
in Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom reported that a ‘mixed
neighbourhood’ is their place of residence.
In Table 20.5 we display patterns of immigrants’ residential segregation using
ESS Round 7 (ESS, 2014) data. The data reveal that the patterns of residential
segregation observed by Glikman and Semyonov (2012) for 2002 have remained
quite similar, if not the same, in 2014. Specifically, the data presented in Table 20.4
indicate that, in 2014, France, the Netherlands, and United Kingdom are still the
most ethnically segregated countries (where over 40% of the immigrants reside
in neighbourhoods inhabited mostly by ethnic minorities). Residential segregation
 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 435
Table 20.5  Percentage of people living in an area (neighbourhood) where most are of minority
race/ethnic group for subpopulations (immigration status: first generation [FG]; second genera-
tion [SG]; Natives; Muslims) in selected countries (ESS, 2014).
Native FG SG European* Non-European Muslim (Native 
(FG + SG) (FG + SG) + FG + SG)
Austria 13.83 31.88 27.87 28.12 37.83 37.39
Belgium 10.59 36.09 22.49 20.18 51.49 55.57
Denmark 9.89 15.53 16.60 12.83 24.37 28.49
Finland 6.29 18.88 7.37 12.78 25.60 49.86
France 22.69 41.02 26.76 26.81 43.39 41.58
Germany 11.62 31.44 20.17 22.77 38.18 40.86
Netherlands 10.09 41.05 30.74 16.58 55.12 67.12
Norway 9.41 18.71 20.47 16.75 22.89 23.50
Portugal 5.54 18.76 13.41 15.72 21.22 —
Spain 18.07 27.31 26.18 15.72 36.71 56.83
Sweden 12.28 22.75 13.13 13.93 30.39 43.84
Switzerland 16.75 29.52 26.44 26.69 39.12 47.97
United Kingdom 15.10 40.74 28.00 21.58 48.36 49.16
Total 12.81 34.02 22.62 21.25 42.85 45.85

Total = Weighted mean of all European ESS Round 7 participants.*Includes the United States, Canada,
New Zealand, Australia, and Israel.

is especially evident among non-Europeans (whether first- or second-generation

immigrants) and among Muslim (whether immigrants or native-born). In an
average west European country, over 40% of non-European or Muslim immigrants
are likely to reside in an ethnic neighbourhood. In some countries (e.g. Belgium, the
Netherlands) more than half of the non-Europeans or Muslims dwell in an ethnic
neighbourhood.
By way of comparison, in France, in the United Kingdom, and in the Nether-
lands, only 22%, 15%, and 10%, respectively, of the native-born population reside
in ethnic neighbourhoods. Residential segregation is somewhat lower in the Scandi-
navian countries than in other west European countries. In Denmark, Norway, and
Sweden only 15%, 19%, and 23% of the immigrant population, respectively, reside
in an ethnic neighbourhood. In Finland, almost 19% of first-generation immigrants
reside in ethnic neighbourhoods. Yet, over 40% of the Muslim in Sweden and Fin-
land are concentrated in an ethnic neighbourhood.
In fact, the data reveal that Muslims, more than any other group, are highly con-
centrated in ethnic communities. The percentage of Muslims that resides in an ethnic
neighbourhood ranges between over 67% in the Netherlands (highest) and 28% in
Denmark (lowest). Indeed the data reveal that Muslims (whether first-generation
immigrants or native-born residents) are more likely than any other subgroup to live
in ethnically segregated neighbourhoods (i.e. neighbourhoods where most residents
are of different race or ethnicity of the local population).
436 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
Native-born Europeans, on the other hand, are less likely to share place of
residence with immigrants. For example, in Denmark and Norway about 9% of
native-born Europeans find homes in ethnic neighbourhoods. In Finland only 9%
of  native-born Europeans report living in an ethnic neighbourhood. It should be
noted, however, that in the second generation (except for Muslims) spatial segre-
gation between immigrants and native-born Europeans tends to decline. In almost
all countries, sons and daughters of immigrants are less likely (as compared to their
parents) to make an ethnic neighbourhood their place of residence.
The findings presented in Table 20.5 reveal that, in general, in the second gener-
ation, sons and daughters of immigrants tend to move out of ethnic areas and into
European neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, immigrants of non-European origin and
especially those of the Muslim faith are more likely than other groups to stay and
reside in ethnic neighbourhoods. One of the possible explanations for the higher
likelihood among non-European than among other immigrants to reside in ethnic
neighbourhoods may lie in cross-group variations in both residential preferences
and in discrimination. Future data and future research may provide an answer to the
question whether and to what extent ‘parallel ethnic communities’ would emerge,
persist, and change the fabric and composition of European cities or whether these
ethnic communities and neighbourhood would disappear with the passage of time.
A series of explanations for cross-country variations in level of residential seg-
regation and for the emergence and persistence of ethnic communities in European
cities were offered in previous papers on the topic (e.g. Arbaci, 2007; Glikman and
Semyonov, 2012; Musterd, 2005). One possible explanation for the cross-country
variation in levels of residential segregation may lie in variations in the nature of
the country’s welfare/housing policies and immigrant integration policies. On this
issue, Musterd (2005) suggested that ‘in general, segregation levels are lower where
welfare state models are characterized by strong redistribution regimes and more
moderate social inequality’ Likewise, Arbaci (2007) argued that social-democratic
and corporatist regimes (as compared to liberal economies or conservative welfare
regimes) are characterised by more balanced housing tenure systems to ensure more
heterogeneous distribution within the urban housing context.

Economic Integration of Immigrants

In addition to lack of complete and successful social and spatial integration

of immigrants (mostly of non-European and Muslim immigrants) in Europe,
researchers point towards difficulties that immigrants face and experience in
the labour market of the host society. More specifically, researchers point to
partial and unsuccessful economic integration of immigrants (as compared to
native-born Europeans) not only in the first generation but also in the second
generation (i.e. among the sons and daughters of immigrants). The economic
disadvantages experienced by immigrants and their offspring appear to be espe-
cially pronounced among non-European and Muslims. Yet, there is considerable
differences across countries in the social and economic integration of immigrants;
differences that might be influenced by the context of reception, especially by the
integration policies implemented by the state.
 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 437
The ever-growing body of research on economic integration of immigrants in
European societies has been conducted either within a single national labour mar-
ket (e.g. Bevelander, 1999, for Sweden; Demireva and Kesler, 2011, for the Unit-
ed Kingdom; Kogan, 2011, for Germany; Neels, 2000, for Belgium) or within a
cross-national comparative framework. Several studies dealt with disparities bet-
ween immigrants and native-born populations in rates of labour force participa-
tion (e.g. employment rates) (e.g. Kesler, 2006; Kogan, 2006; Koopmans, 2010).
Very few studies focused on earnings disparities (e.g. Adsera and Chiswick, 2007)
(mostly due to lack of appropriate data). The studies on the topic reveal that when
compared to native-born Europeans, immigrants, especially immigrants from non-
EU countries of origin, are less likely to become economically active and are at a
disadvantage in the attainment of economic outcomes. By way of contrast, immi-
grants from predominantly Christian countries (or European origin) are at a relative
advantage (compared to other immigrants) in becoming economically active in the
labour markets of host society (Van Tubergen et al., 2004). On this issue, Fleis-
chmann and Dronkers (2010) argued that immigrants (and their offspring) from
Islamic countries have higher rates of unemployment, as compared to immigrants
from western Europe.
The hardships faced by immigrants in finding employment in the labour market
of the host country are clearly illustrated in Figure 20.5, where the ratio of immi-
grants to native-born Europeans by country is displayed. In almost all European
countries, the percentage of immigrants who are not employed is higher than that of
the native-born population. The unemployment gap is most extreme in places such
as Norway (where rate of unemployment among immigrants is threefold that of na-
tive-born) and in Sweden, Belgium, Austria, and the Netherlands (where the rate of
unemployment among immigrants is more than twice than that among native-born).
The gap is not evident in east European countries (where the number of immigrants
is very low) such as Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Lithuania.
There are important differences in labour market outcomes of labour migrants
and refugees in many countries in Europe. For example, in countries in northern

90
80
70
Share Employed (%)

60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Denmark Germany Netherlands Norway Sweden

Years of Residence
2 5 10 15 All Residents

Figure 20.5  Unemployment rate (ratio) of foreign-born as compared to native-born, aged 15 to

64, 2012–2013. Source: Indicators of Immigrant Integration 2015: Settling In – ©OECD 2015.
438 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
Europe, labour migrants display relatively high rates of employment (over 80%)
compared to refugees that are more likely to be unemployed. Figure 20.6 dis-
plays rates of employment of refugees in northern European countries. The data
show that although refugees increase their chances for employment with tenure in
the country, they are still less likely than native-born to be employed, even after
15 years of residence in a country of destination (see Germany for an exception) (see
Joyce, 2018).
Whereas most studies on economic integration of immigrants in European coun-
tries focus on first-generation immigrants, Heath and Cheung (2007) centred their
analysis on integration of the second generation from a variety of countries of origin
as compared to native-born Europeans (without migrant background). The find-
ings revealed by Heath and Cheung (2007) suggest that for most groups, sons and

Norway
Belgium
Sweden
Switzerland
Austria
Netherlands
Denmark
Finland
Luxembourg
France
Germany
Iceland
EU total (28)
Malta
Spain
Greece
Slovenia
Italy
Portugal
Czech Republic
Ireland
United Kingdom
Cyprus1,2
Lituania
Poland
Hungary
Slovakia

0 1 2 3

Figure 20.6  Employment rate of working-age refugees by years of residence and for all residents,
various years.
 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 439
daughters of immigrants are less able to avoid unemployment, and are less likely to
secure salaried jobs. Likewise, Algan et al. (2010) who centred their analysis on the
economic status of second-generation immigrants in three major immigrant-receiv-
ing countries (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) underscore significant
economic disadvantages faced by second-generation immigrants in western Europe.
In a recent study, Gorodzeisky and Semyonov (2017) used data from four major
immigrant-receiving countries in western Europe (i.e. the United Kingdom, France,
Sweden, and Belgium) to examine the following questions: first, whether and to
what extent both first- and second-generation immigrants from different regions of
origin differ from natives in their incorporation into the labour market; and, second,
once incorporated, whether and to what extent they differ from the native-born
population in the attainment of high-status jobs. They also supplement the find-
ings from the four-country comparison with data of nine ‘old immigration’ west
European countries pooled together.
Although they found some country variations and some gender variation in the
economic incorporation of immigrants, the findings suggest that in all countries
immigrants of non-European origin are more likely to be unemployed than immi-
grants of European origin and that the employment disadvantage is especially pro-
nounced in the second generation. The disadvantages in attainment of high-status
jobs are especially evident in the first generation and much less so in the second gen-
eration. These findings seem to be in line with Van Tubergen et al.’s (2004) argument
that ethnic hierarchies play a major role in explaining the underachievement of non-
European ethnic origins in western Europe.
According to Van Tubergen and his colleagues, ethnic hierarchies are shaped and
formed by the social distance between the host society’s native population and the
immigrant group (with social distances being determined by differences and dis-
tinctions in culture and physical appearance). The more distant the native-born
population feels towards an immigrant group, the stronger the prejudice and
discrimination towards the group. According to this view, socioeconomic disad-
vantages experienced by an immigrant population are likely to increase with social
distance between the native-born population and the subgroup of immigrants (e.g.
Portes and Rumbaut, 2001; Van Tubergen et al., 2004).

The Role of Policies

Cross-country variation in terms of labour market integration and economic success

of immigrants can be attributed not only to variations in economic conditions across
countries, and not only to variations in sociodemographic attributes of the immi-
grant population, but also to the context of reception as manifested by social policies
implemented by the state. In general, researchers contend that countries character-
ised by a social-democratic welfare regime are also characterised by more favourable
policies towards immigrants, thus providing more hospitable conditions than those
offered by countries characterised by either conservative or liberal welfare regimes
(according to Esping-Andersen’s [1990] classification).
Indeed, countries differ not only by their welfare state regime but also in the
immigrants’ integration policies that they implement. The multidimensional migrant
440 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
integration policy index (MIPEX) captures the degree that countries’ integration pol-
icies provide favourable and conducive conditions to successful social and economic
integration of immigrants. MIPEX includes policies related to eligibility (e.g. ability
to accept any employment, ability to take up self-employment, procedures for recog-
nition of academic qualifications, etc.), labour market integration measures, security
of employment, and rights associated with employment. The MIPEX can serve as a
measure that captures implementation of policies aimed at integrating third-country
migrants into EU member states and, thus, as a ‘benchmarking’ tool for comparing
differential levels of performance integration of immigrants across countries (Nies-
sen et al., 2007). The distribution of the MIPEX scores by country is displayed in
Table 20.6.
European countries differ considerably in polices towards immigrant integration
as manifested by the migrant integration policy index (MIPEX). Sweden, for example,
received the highest practice score (98) with regard to immigrants’ afforded access
to the labour market. By way of contrast, France was assigned a low score (54).
Belgium and the United Kingdom’s performance with regard to immigrant access to
labour market activity fell somewhere in between, with scores of 56 and 64 respec-
tively (Niessen et al., 2007)

Opposition or Objection to Immigration

According to sociological theory a steady and substantial increase in flows of immi-

grants and in the size of the immigrant populations are expected to increase anti-
immigrant sentiment and opposition to immigration (e.g. Semyonov et al., 2007). It
has been long argued that the rise in the relative size of a minority population (such
as immigrants and ethnic minorities) is likely to an increase threat of competition

Table 20.6  MIPEX index (overall score and labour market score) by country, 2014.

Country Overall Labour Country Overall Labour Country Overall Labour

Austria 50 64 Greece 44 55 Poland 41 38

Belgium 67 64 Hungary 45 40 Portugal 75 91
Bulgaria 42 50 Iceland 45 51 Romania 45 57
Croatia 43 54 Ireland 52 38 Slovakia 37 21
Cyprus 35 34 Italy 59 66 Slovenia 44 38
Czech Republic 45 52 Latvia 31 46 Spain 60 72
Denmark 59 79 Lithuania 37 40 Sweden 78 98
Estonia 46 73 Luxembourg 57 42 Switzerland 49 59
Finland 69 80 Malta 40 45 United Kingdom 57 56
France 54 54 Netherlands 60 73 EU28 Average 51 57
Germany 61 86 Norway 69 90 Total Average 52 59

Source: MIPEX (http://www.mipex.eu).

 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 441
for social, cultural, and economic resources among members of the majority native-
born population. Likewise, depressed economic conditions are likely to increase fear
and threat of competition for social and economic resources among the native-born
population. Threat and fear of competition, in turn, are likely to increase prejudice,
discrimination, hostility, and negative sentiments towards the immigrant population
and opposition to immigration (Quillian, 1995; Scheepers et al., 2002; Semyonov
et al., 2007). Ethnic and racial prejudice, however, can become an additional distinct
separate source of opposition to immigrants or to specific groups of ethnic/religious
immigrants (Gorodzeisky and Semyonov, 2009, 2016).
There are several recent studies that focus on public views towards different groups
of immigrants classified by ethnic or religious origin. These studies observe that atti-
tudes towards immigrants vary across groups being more negative towards non-Euro-
pean or Muslim immigrants. For example, Gorodzeisky and Semyonov (2009), who
compared exclusionary attitudes towards immigrants in European countries found
that support for exclusion is more pronounced when immigrants belong to a race or
ethnic group that differs from the majority population than when immigrants belong
to the same ethnic or race group of the majority population (see also Ben-Nun Bloom
et al., 2015). Similar findings were also observed in Britain by Ford (2011) who
reached the conclusion that attitudes towards immigration in Britain are racialised
with Britons preferring white immigrant groups over non-white immigrants.
Research that centred on opposition to Muslims in Europe found a higher
percentage of the majority population objecting to Muslims as neighbours than
those objecting to immigrants (in general) as neighbours (Strabac and Listhaug,
2008). Cross-country comparative evidence from probing in a web survey demon-
strates that thinking of immigrants from Islamic and eastern European countries
is connected to higher levels of xenophobia, whereas thinking of immigrants from
Asia, EU-15 countries, and sub-Saharan countries is connected to lower levels of
xenophobia (Braun et al., 2013). In Table 20.7, we present the percentage distri-
bution of respondents who object to immigration (‘allow none’) by ethno-religious
groups of immigrants by country. The ethno-religious groups distinguished in the
table include ‘immigrants of the same race/ethnicity’, ‘immigrants of different race/
ethnicity’, ‘Muslims’, and ‘refugees’.
The data reveal that the level of opposition to immigration varies considerably
across groups and across countries. Scandinavian countries are characterised by
relatively low level of opposition to immigration and high level of acceptance. By
way of comparison, east European countries are characterised by relatively high
levels of opposition to immigration and low willingness of admission (regardless of
the origin of the immigrant group).
At the same time, there is a clear hierarchical order in the level of opposition
towards various groups with almost uniform order in all European countries. Oppo-
sition is least pronounced towards ‘immigrants of a same race or ethnic group as
most country people’ and most pronounced towards Muslim immigrants. In most
European countries, opposition towards ‘immigrants of a different race and ethnic
group’ is higher (and ‘level of acceptance’ is lower) than that expressed towards
immigrants of a same race and ethnic group with very few exceptions. Curiously, the
level of opposition to refugees is highly similar to the level of objection to Muslims
(perhaps because many recent refugees are originating in Muslim countries).
442 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
The average levels of objection across countries (percentage of those who checked
the ‘allow none’ option) towards the various groups of immigrants in Europe are listed
at the bottom row of Table 20.7. The data suggest that, in an average country, oppo-
sition to immigration (i.e. those not willing to admit any immigrants from specific
groups) is quite moderate. Specifically, only 6.5% of Europeans object to immigra-
tion of people of the ‘same race or ethnic group as those living in the country’, and
only 11.1% object to immigrants of a different race or ethnic group. The percentage
of opposition to Muslims is considerably higher than those expressed towards other
groups of immigrants (20.2%).
The values displayed in Table 20.8 point towards a hierarchical order of the level
of opposition (or desirability) towards different groups of immigrants with immi-
grants of the same race/ethnicity being ‘most desirable’ and Muslims ‘least welcome’.

Table 20.7  Percentage of respondents who are opposed to immigration of a group (allow none
from this group to come and live here), native citizens of whom both parents were born in the
country (weighted valid percentage).

Same Jewish Different Muslims Gypsies N

race/ethnic people race/ethnic from other from other
group from other group countries countries
countries

Austria 7.7 12.7 15.3 23.5 28.3 1,417

Belgium 8.1 10.7 13.6 20.5 31.9 1,338
Czech Republic 16.8 17.9 29 56.5 63.5 1,891
Denmark 2 2.6 6 11.3 25.5 1,304
Estonia 4.2 12 12.2 41.8 51.2 1,133
Finland 2.5 5.3 8.7 17.9 23.3 1,945
France 6.7 7.2 12.4 14.3 20.4 1,420
Germany 1.3 2.3 3.7 6.7 12.6 2,457
Hungary 12.4 35.2 32.6 56.3 66.1 1,623
Ireland 9.4 10.9 14.3 25.5 45.1 1,963
Lithuania 7.6 20.9 12 38.6 50.3 1,967
Netherlands 5.3 4.1 6.5 14.6 17.3 1,576
Norway 0.8 2.4 1.3 8.3 17.8 1,193
Poland 6.5 14.2 10.6 34.4 28.7 1,518
Portugal 13 29.2 18.8 35.5 46.4 1,120
Slovenia 6.5 17 11.4 22.9 34 1,002
Spain 8.8 12.7 12.5 22.9 29.6 174
Sweden 0.4 0.9 0.5 3.8 5 1,414
Switzerland 1.5 6 4.4 14.9 20.5 898
United Kingdom 10.2 7 14.4 19.4 31.6 1,743
Europe 6.5 9.2 11.1 20.2 26.4 30,636

Source: ESS Round 7 (2014).

 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 443
Table 20.8  Percentage of respondents who support admission of immigrants to the country
according to ethnic/racial origin (allow immigrants of same or different race\ethnicity to enter
country) by country.

Allow many/ Allow many/ Allow many/ Allow refugees

some immigrants some immigrants some Muslims (1 and 2 on a
of the same of different 5-point scale)
race/ethnicity race/ethnicity

Austria 69.68 52.66 46.93 40.53

Belgium 72.38 58.06 51.1 30.28
Switzerland 84.72 63.18 57.13 34.9
Czech Republic 42.9 27.93 14.9 21.04
Germany 89.57 74.62 68.66 39.49
Denmark 81.37 58.79 51.28 45.05
Estonia 72.85 48.13 29.68 25.65
Spain 63.56 56.36 44.25 60.04
Finland 65.42 47.31 38.11 50.03
France 73.2 60.24 64.4 58.83
United Kingdom 64.62 58.2 55.89 46.55
Hungary 51.31 19.2 11.14 23.15
Ireland 61.93 53.68 44.66 56.52
Lithuania 70.99 57.44 30.06 28.3
Netherlands 71.01 66.68 54.03 31.97
Norway 82.83 75.84 64.24 57.38
Poland 69.31 58.43 32.63 63.47
Portugal 65.96 55.25 39.53 68.49
Sweden 94.36 92.11 81.14 59.49
Slovenia 75.74 65.87 55.77 39.36
Total* 72.87 61.08 53.39 48.36

*Weighted mean of all European ESS Round 7 participants.

Source: ESS (2014).

In light of the hierarchical order of the level of desirability of different groups of

immigrants, it is reasonable to expect that those who object to immigration of the
‘more desirable’ groups (i.e. same race or ethnicity) are likely to also oppose immi-
gration of the ‘less welcomed’ groups (i.e. Muslims or immigrants of different race or
ethnicity). Indeed, more than 90% of respondents who oppose immigrants of a same
race and ethnic group object to the admission of any immigrants of different race
or ethnicity and 75% of those who oppose immigrants of a different race or ethnic
group (from most countries) also oppose Muslims.
The proportions of Europeans who are willing to admit many or some immi-
grants into their country are quite substantial. On average, across European coun-
tries, 72.8% agree to allow immigrants of the same race/ethnicity into the country,
444 Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
61.0% are willing to admit some or many immigrants of different race/ethnicity,
and 53.4% agree to allow Muslims while only 48.4% agree to allow refugees (see
Table 20.8).
There is considerable cross-country variation in the level of willingness of
admission of immigrants to the country. For example, the Swedes (94.4%) express
most welcoming attitudes towards immigrants of the same race or ethnicity, followed
by the Germans (89.5%) and the Swiss (84.7%). By contrast, the Czech (42.9%),
the Hungarians (51.3%), and the Irish (61.9%) are not as welcoming of immigrants
belonging to the same race/ethnicity as the Swedes, the Germans, or the Swiss people
or as respondents in other west European countries.
The willingness to open the country’s doors and to allow immigrants of a dif-
ferent race or different ethnicity into the country is somewhat lower than that
of immigrants of the same race or ethnicity. Yet, it is quite high in many west
European countries. For example, it reaches 92.1% in Sweden, 75.8% in Norway,
and 74.6% in Germany. By contrast, the willingness to admit immigrants of dif-
ferent race and ethnicity is quite low in eastern European countries, such as Hun-
gary (19.2%) and the Czech Republic (27.9%), or in a Nordic nation such as
Finland (47.3%).
Concerning Muslims, Europeans are less tolerant. The strongest opposition to
Muslims immigrants is found in east European countries, e.g. Hungary (11.1%),
the Czech Republic (14.9%), and Estonia (29.7%), despite being countries with
extremely small populations of Muslims. By way of comparison, residents of nations
most accommodating to Muslims are the Swedes (81.1%), the German (68.6%), and
the French (64.4%); all having large Muslim populations. Finally, with respect to
refugees, the Portuguese are the friendliest (68.5%), followed by the Polish (63.4%)
and the Spaniards (60.0%). The least friendly are the Czech (21.0%), the Hungar-
ians (23.2%), and the Estonians (25.6%).
Opposition to admission of immigrants of a different race or different ethnic-
ity to the country (mostly Muslim immigrants) can be also explained by feelings
of cultural threat and feelings of anxiety over personal and national security. A
perceived security threat is based on fear stemming from potential involvement
of members of an out-group population in crime and terror activity that may
jeopardise the population or even undermine the existence of the host-state insti-
tutions (Huddy et al., 2002). In light of the current salience of actual terror or
threat of terror, intense feelings of security threat may induce antagonism towards
the out-group members manifested through exclusionist attitudes towards them
(Canetti-Nisim et al., 2008).
The sense of cultural threat reflects fear of intrusion on values and practices
perceived as both alien and potentially destructive to the society. Such feelings
stimulate prejudice, which leads to discrimination against out-group populations.
Thus, exclusionary attitudes towards immigrants (especially migrants of a differ-
ent race or ethnicity) are based not only on a socioeconomic rationale but also on
the perception of threat to the mere existence of the society (both at the cultural
and security realms). Such threats can be more consequential than economic threat
to emergence of negative attitudes towards out-group populations (see Canetti-
Nisim et al., 2008).
 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 445
Conclusions

Since the middle of the twentieth century immigrants have been arriving in west-
ern European countries in ever-growing numbers, making western Europe their new
home. As a result of these migration flows the social, demographic, and ethnic com-
position of many European countries has substantially changed. Currently, most
European nations have large populations of non-European origin and of the Muslim
faith that are not fully integrated yet into society, economy, and culture; not even in
the second generation. Many European cities and towns are populated by distinct,
separated, and segregated ethnic communities and neighbourhoods where immi-
grants are concentrated, resulting in substantial rates of spatial segregation between
native-born Europeans and ethnic and religious minorities.
The immigrants are not only residentially segregated in the poor quarters of the
city, they are also not fully integrated into the labour market of the host society.
Immigrants are less likely than native-born Europeans to find employment and
their economic returns on human capital resources are significantly lower than the
economic returns of comparable native-born populations. The inability to integrate
into the social and economic system is especially evident among the non-Europe-
an and Muslim immigrants. That is, although the economic status and standard of
living of most immigrants is possibly better than the status and standard of living in
their country of origin, they are still socioeconomically disadvantaged as compared
to the native-born population.
Furthermore, the presence of immigrants in Europe has prompted negative atti-
tudes and opposition to immigration among large segments of the population.
Although anti-immigrant sentiment and objection to immigration vary consider-
ably across countries, the data reveal that in all countries objection to immigrants
is more pronounced towards immigrants of different race or ethnicity, especially
towards Muslims, than towards immigrants of the same origin. Indeed, immigration
in Europe has significant consequences for social organisation and for intergroup
relations.
Acknowledgement
Work on this chapter was supported by an ISF grant (ISF 769-2018) awarded by
the Israel Science Foundation. The authors wish to thank Yoav Roll for assistance in
preparation, organisation, and careful analysis of the data.

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 21
Migration and Migrants in
Post-reform Chinese Cities
Da Liu and Zhigang Li

Introduction

As one of the fastest growing and most powerful economies in the world, China
is undergoing an unprecedented transformation of concomitant marketisation, glo-
balisation, and migration (Shen et al., 2002; Song and Timberlake, 1996; Wu and
Ma, 2004; Zhou and Ma, 2003). The process is marked by both internal and in-
ternational ‘migration’, or what is termed in China as the ‘floating’ population. On
the one hand, along with marvellous economic growth and unprecedented changes
(Campanella, 2008), the arrival of millions of migrants and the related residential
restructuring are the most prominent features of post-reform Chinese cities. In 2013,
there were about 220 million members of the floating population in China. The
mobility of the floating population also brings about a growing modernisation and
urbanisation in rural areas. On the other hand, there is also an ongoing increase of
international ‘immigrants’ in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Though they can
barely be defined in the usual sense as ‘immigrants’, as most are required to return
to their homelands, the rise of international residents, sojourners, and expatriates in
Chinese cities has been phenomenal, reminding local Chinese residents of their semi-
colonised history before 1949.
The relaxed state control of the mobility of the population, the newly emerging
housing markets, and the input of foreign direct investment (FDI) jointly provide
the floating population with many opportunities to work and to live in cities (Wu,
2007). The result has been the emergence of various types of migrant enclaves: urban
villages (or chengzhongcun in Chinese) (Zhang et al., 2003), factory enclaves, and in-
ternational resident communities (Farrer, 2019). The determinants of this new socio-
spatial structure in China include not only individual factors such as the ­individual’s

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Migration and Migrants in Post-reform Chinese Cities  451
socioeconomic status, but also institutional forces such as household registration
(hukou) status, property rights, government policies, and global forces. A virtual
avalanche of literature has been produced that studies migrant communities in post-
reform Chinese cities (see, for example, Douglass et al., 2012; Farrer, 2019; Wu
et al., 2013). Specific topics include spatial structures (Feng et al., 2007), housing con-
ditions of migrants (Li, 2010; Wu, 2002), social integration (Farrer, 2019; Wissink et
al., 2013), as well as many others.
Across various contexts of cities and regions, the marginalised, segregated, and even
the unfavourable treatment of the floating population has been noted (Fan et al., 2011;
Huang and Tao, 2015; Ren and Qiao, 2010). The floating population is featured by
its poor, low-quality, and marginalised living spaces, especially in the large and coastal
cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. The unique landscape of
urban villages has been identified (Hao et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2015; Tian, 2008;
Wang et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2003; Zhu, 2002). Underlying the differences in land-
scapes are various structural and institutional constraints that prevent members of the
floating population from gaining access to equal welfare as well as various opportu-
nities and resources compared to their urban counterparts (Chen and Wang, 2015).
The differences between the floating population of the most recent generation,
i.e. those born after 1980, and older generations, have been noted as well (Chen
and Fan, 2018; Yue et al., 2010; Zhu and Lin, 2014). For instance, the most recent
generation appears to possess larger social networks than earlier migrants (Liu et
al., 2012). Neighbourhoods also have an impact on the floating population’s social
networks and their social integration in cities (Liu et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2016;
Wissink et al., 2013).
This chapter will focus on this vast migration as viewed in the context of the
development of markets and globalisation in post-reform China. We will first exam-
ine the history and the developmental trends of the floating population and link
it to the reform of the hukou system. Then we will examine the impact and future
of this massive wave of migration. In particular, we will explore the landscapes of
variegated migrant communities: urban villages, factory enclaves, and internation-
al resident communities. In this regard, we hope our discussion can contribute to
the literature of migrant studies by highlighting the daily lives of various types of
migrants, especially by discussing them within the specific context of post-reform
China. We hope to clarify our understandings of migrants and their communities by
specifically examining how entrepreneurial migrants negotiate their lives given the
restrictions and activities imposed by the state.

Migration in Post-reform China

To begin we will examine two types of migrations, that of the floating population or
the native Chinese residents and international residents. We will argue that the state
plays a key role during the process, as the character of migration is closely linked to
and largely decided by government policies. The reforms of the hukou system and
open-door policies brought about new and tremendous changes in urban China,
paving a way for the accumulation of both the floating population and international
residents in large cities.
452 Da Liu and Zhigang Li
Hukou and the Rise of the Floating Population After 1976
The institutional division of the Chinese population is based on the hukou system
(Chan, 1994), through which the Chinese are divided into two types, urban and rural,
largely according to the places of birth. China has experienced an unprecedented
wave of floating population, or those who move from rural to urban areas, during
the last four decades. The figure of the floating population rose sharply, from 21.35
million in the early 1990s to 260 million in 2012. The ‘rural migrant’ or ‘floating
population’ mainly refers to an individual who works and lives in a city without
holding a local urban hukou. The hukou system is by no means the only component
of the state regulations designed to control the mobility of the population. Those reg-
ulations also include a series of social welfare, property management, educational,
and related arrangements.
In pre-reform China, the hukou system and the residential permit system strictly
controlled the movement of general residents. In particular, the state strictly con-
trolled the conversion from ‘agricultural hukou’ to ‘non-agricultural hukou’ (Chan
and Zhang, 1999; Chan and Buckingham, 2008). There are few ways for rural vil-
lagers to escape their work doing agricultural production and to obtain employment
opportunities and satisfactory living conditions in cities. Meanwhile, the welfare
enjoyed by non-agricultural urban residents, including education, housing, medical
care, old-age support, and funeral services, are all provided by their employers or
their work units, so-called danwei in Chinese. In fact, in the pre-reform period urban
residents could only find employment in either collective enterprises or state-owned
enterprises. At the same time, people residing in rural areas who were governed by
rural collectives or village committees received more limited welfare benefits.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution, China initiated its reform and open-door
policies in 1978. The economic reform aimed to transform the socialist economy
into a market economy. With the transition to a market-orientated economy, changes
were gradually implemented in the hukou system along with other reforms such as
the new ‘household contract responsibility system’ and the permission obtained by
rural residents to secure residency and employment rights in cities (Young, 2013).
With the establishment of rural social insurance in key domains, such as medi-
cal and elderly care, the wide gap between the urban and rural hukou in terms of
social security benefits began to diminish. The social welfare entitlement gradually
became d ­ ecoupled from the hukou, the impact of hukou itself declined, and the rural
migrants living in cities, the floating population, had less incentive to abandon their
rural residences.
Many studies examined the incentives for population migration across regions
in terms of regional income gaps. Regions like Anhui, Sichuan, Henan, and Hunan
provinces became the leading centres for the origin of the floating population. Large
cities, especially those in coastal regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou,
became the major destinations of the floating population (Wu et al., 2013). Most
members of the floating population still retained a rural hukou and thus had no
access to the benefits of urban social welfare, including healthcare, schooling for their
children, social insurance, and the like. However, members of the floating population
also adopted various strategies to deal with the variety of economic and institutional
constraints that they faced and, thereby, to enhance their own social and economic
 Migration and Migrants in Post-reform Chinese Cities  453
well-being (Fan and Wang, 2008; Ma and Xiang 1998; Solinger, 1999). For example,
many people moved back and forth between their homes in rural areas and their res-
idences in urban areas, often separating their families between two different places.
This helped them to maximise their material gains while at the same time minimis-
ing their personal risks (Fan, 2009; Fan et al., 2011; Fan and Wang, 2008; Zhu and
Chen, 2010). Those who moved into cities remitted most of their earnings back to
family members whom they left in rural areas. And with these funds family mem-
bers could build new homes and even set up small business in their hometowns (Fan
and Wang, 2008; Ma, 2002). The ultimate goal of many rural migrants was not to
settle down in cities. Instead their goal was to accumulate skills, experiences, savings,
and other resources in the city (Fan, 2011; Yang et al., 2016; Zhu and Chen, 2010).
The majority of the floating population do not intend to remain in cities and thus
to assimilate to urban life. Instead, many are constantly negotiating and redefining
their lives so as to accommodate their ever-changing living circumstances (Nelson
and Hiemstra, 2008).
Moreover, both their families and their communities provide significant social
capital for the floating population. This helps them to become integrated into the
local communities (Liu et al., 2015). More than half of the floating population con-
sider social networks as key factors in deciding where to move (Fan, 2008). They
often look for jobs or housing in destination cities with the assistance of kinship as
well as hometown ties (Liu et al., 2012; Ma and Xiang, 1998; Zhang and Xie, 2013).
Even after they settle down in cities, most retain strong connections to their relatives,
friends, and laoxiang1 at home, and go back frequently.
The floating population suffer many institutional and social constraints in cities,
which limit their opportunities to be successful and reinforce their desire to return
as family needs arise (Song, 2016; Wang and Fan, 2006). Their access to local labour
markets is heavily influenced by the state controls (Fan 2002). In 2018 a survey
of migrants from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou shows that only 6% earn an
income above CNY6,000 (about US$850) per month. About 14% have university
degrees or above.2 Most work in the private sector (about 56%) or low-end occupa-
tions (about 24%). About 13% work in industrial and 50% in service sectors.
In terms of their residence, members of the floating population must resort to
­informal housing markets as it is difficult for them to afford formal housing with
high prices (Li and Wu, 2008; Shen, 2002; Wu, 2002). Often members of the floating
population find themselves in a precarious status: they can barely integrate into the
local society of large cities, yet, simultaneously, it is also hard for them to readapt to
their villages or rural areas (Mohabir et al., 2017). As a result, they come to occupy a
liminal status, no longer being fully a member of their hometowns nor of the cities to
which they have migrated. This precarious social situation is evident across a variety
of regional contexts (Fan et al., 2011; Huang and Tao, 2015; Ren and Qiao, 2010).

1
Laoxiang is a native word in Chinese, meaning friends and fellows from the same
hometown.
2
According to the sixth census of China (2010), about 9.5% of Chinese have educational
attainments of university degree or above, and for cities the figure is as high as 21.5%,
while for rural areas it is just 2.1%.
454 Da Liu and Zhigang Li
Most studies have portrayed the members of the floating population as passive
and powerless sojourners. Normally they have been exploited by the system of glob-
al production, constrained by hukou system, and trapped in the lowest tier of the
urban labour and housing markets (Chan and Zhang, 1999; Fan, 2004; Wu, 2008).
Nonetheless we would argue that many such individuals are very effective at negoti-
ating the variety of institutional, social, and cultural constraints that they face (Fan,
2011; Fan and Wang, 2008; Liu et al., 2012; Solinger, 1999). There also are some
new trends. First, the motivation of members of the floating population to settle in
cities or townships has been discovered to be weak in recent studies, even declining
(Fan, 2011; Yang et al., 2016; Zhu and Chen, 2010). Over the past four decades,
only a small percentage of the floating population has settled down in cities. The
hukou system has become a barrier to the integration of the floating population into
cities (Chan, 2010; Wang and Fan, 2012). Along with the changing values both of
rural hukou and urban hukou, the impact of hukou itself is decreasing. Since putting
forward its new urbanisation strategy in 2014, the Chinese central government has
accelerated the consolidation of urban and rural social welfare systems. The gap bet-
ween urban and rural social security systems has started to disappear. In addition,
the access and benefits that are tied to rural hukou – including farming and housing
land, compensation for land requisition, and more relaxed birth control – are con-
sidered increasingly valuable (Chen and Fan, 2016). Thus, many members of the
floating population are opting to straddle and circulate between the city and coun-
tryside rather than abandoning their rural hukou (Chen and Fan, 2016).
Return migration is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to a report in
2018 on China’s migrant population development, 22.8% of the floating population
returned to their hometowns in 2017. And they have much to contribute to their
hometowns and their families. This includes their knowledge and skills, experiences,
savings, and the entrepreneurial activities in which they have engaged. Through
return migration, the transfer of knowledge may occur in emerging markets
(Giannetti et al., 2012). For example, the return migration has been found to play a
significant role in the agricultural modernisation process (Qian et al., 2016). Local
cadres/officials also use the resources generated through return migration towards
the construction of rural industries and towns (Murphy, 2000). Often self-employed
return migrants and their repatriated capital can be a key stimulating factor in pro-
moting rural entrepreneurial activities (Démurger and Xu, 2011). Above all, the
return of rural migrants to their hometowns can help to revitalise rural economies
and to reduce poverty, changes that are essential to implementing China’s recent
national strategy of ‘rural revitalisation’.

‘Open Door’ and International Residents

Just like other civilisations in history, Chinese people regarded China as the cen-
tre of the universe, viewing foreigners as barbaric, marginal, and underdeveloped
(Fairbank et al., 1989). Beginning in the late Qing Dynasty (1636–1912) the Chinese
started to view the world from a global perspective, especially after their conflicts
with and defeat at the hands of Western imperialists. The modern concept of inter-
national ‘immigrants’ first appeared in port cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, and
Wuhan. Foreign residents concentrated themselves within specific areas of the cities,
 Migration and Migrants in Post-reform Chinese Cities  455
areas that became known as the ‘concessions’ of international residents because the
Chinese government allowed, or conceded, those areas as ones that could be settled.
During the era of the Republic of China (1911–1949), about 150,000 international
residents lived and worked in Shanghai, the ‘Pearl of the East’ (Xiong et al., 2003).
Yet when the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, they viewed the
immigrants and the immigrant settlements as a scar on the face of modern China; and
they worked relentlessly to eliminate all elements of Western capitalism from China.
Today the PRC is by no means a major destination site for international immi-
grants. Instead China has come to be seen as an emigration nation (Lyons et al.,
2008). Its doors once largely shut to any Western influences; pre-reform PRC tightly
controlled its borders. After the implementation of so-called open-door policies in
1978, when the period of reform began, more and more Chinese people travelled
to such places as Hong Kong, the United States, and Japan, in search of greater
wealth and a better life. Now after four decades of reform and economic growth,
China is fast becoming a major destination for international immigrants (De Giorgi,
2017; Farrer, 2010; Lehmann and Leonard, 2019; Pieke, 2012). The rise of interna-
tional visitors and residents in post-reform China is phenomenal. According to the
data of the newly constituted National Immigration Administration (NIA), in 2018
China’s foreign visitors numbered about 95 million. Previous visitors to post-reform
China primarily included diplomats, business figures, tourists, and technical experts,
especially those from developed countries (Wang and Miao, 2019). The Chinese
government, eager to introduce foreign investment and advanced technology into
China, warmly welcomed these foreign elites. In recent years, a growing number of
foreigners from developing countries have begun to come to China as they seek new
business opportunities and their ‘Chinese dreams’ (Lyons et al., 2012). However, for
the Chinese government it is by no means easy to govern the booming communities
of international residents, especially those from the Global South.
It is hard to define China’s international visitors in the same manner as those immi-
grants in the West, as most of them may either go back to their home countries or travel
frequently between China and their homelands. In fact, from 1985 to 2012, only about
6,000 foreigners obtained the permanent work permit of the PRC. And from 2008 to
2014 only 1,306 foreign experts obtained China’s ‘green card’ (Liu, 2015). Today a
variety of terms such as visitors, sojourners, settlers, and expatriates are used to describe
the group (Kwon, 1997; Wakeman and Yeh, 1992; Wang and Kanungo, 2004).
In the first decade of the twenty-first century there has been a remarkable increase
in the number of international visitors travelling to China. According to figures
assembled by custom officials, the number of foreign visitors increased from about
10 million in 2000 to 27 million in 2012. Most of these visits are done for business,
tourism, or to meet with relatives and friends. A smaller proportion of the visitors
come to live in China. According to the Ministry of Police in 2009, the proportion of
people who came to work, study, or settle in China only accounted for about 4% of
the total number of visitors. Among those who came to spend six months or longer
in the country, in 1980 there were only 20,000, whereas in 2007 and 2011 these
figures had grown to about 540,000 and 600,000 (State Council of China, 2012).
Beginning in 2006 the Chinese government authorised work permits to foreigners.
There were 180,000 such permits in 2006 and this number rose to 240,000 in 2016
(Ministry of Human Resource and Social Security of the PRC, 2007, 2017).
456 Da Liu and Zhigang Li
During the last several decades a rule for the regulation of foreigners has ­gradually
been implemented in China. In 1986 the Chinese government established its national
regulations governing the entry and departure of foreigners. Since that time these
regulations have been revised several times. According to the policy ‘Regulations on
the Administration of Entry and Exit of Foreigners’, the Ministry of Police is pri-
marily responsible for the management of foreign visitors and immigration. In 2018
China established the NIA, led by the Ministry of Police, to manage all the issues
of international visiting and immigration. It is a system based on different levels
of government and there are lower-level NIAs set up at both provincial level and
large cities.
The NIA targets three types of international settlers: permanent residents,
long-term visitors (more than 180 days), and short-term visitors (less than 180
days). As in other countries, such as Canada, China’s immigration policies seek to
attract investors as well as talented or skilled elites. Both the central government and
local governments from cities such as Beijing and Shanghai set out a number of pol-
icies designed to attract international investors. Such policies favour the entry and
permanent residence of those people who intend to make investments of more than
half a million US dollars in the country. For long-term or short-term visitors, the NIA
issues different types of visas: F for academic exchanges and communications; Z for
those who apply to work in China; X1 and X2 for international students staying in
China; and some other visas, such as C for pilots or travel agencies, J1 for journal-
ists, L for tourists, M for business people, and R for talented or skilled professionals.
After 2017, for those who stay in China for more than one year (with visa Z or R),
such visitors must apply and hold residence permits (normally such permission does
not extend beyond five years). Most often these permits cover those who intend to
work and study in China, in addition to journalists.
For the first time in the history of China’s national survey, the sixth census (2010)
of China recorded information regarding international residents.3 According to
this census, in China there were about 600,000 ‘persons with foreign nationality’,
or foreign residents, in late 2010. By 2016, it is reported that about 900,000 for-
eigners were working in China (Huang and Yan, 2018). The predominant age range
of these foreigners is about 35–39 years old. Most international residents are male,
as the ratio of male to female is about 130 : 5. The age distribution of men and
women is identical. Moreover, most of them tend to be highly educated: 66% report
educational attainment as higher than college, a level much higher than that of the
native Chinese residents (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2010). As to their
employment, most international residents entered China to work or for business
purposes. Moreover, about six of every ten have lived in China for more than one
year and about 40% for more than two years. In terms of their national origins,
there are 19 nations from which the majority of visitors arrive. In particular, the larg-
est number of international residents in China come from South Korea, followed by
the United States and Japan, and then, third, from Burma and Vietnam. In fact, the

3
According to the criteria of this census, international residents refer to those who have
stayed in China for more than three months or who will stay for more than three months,
according to the registration at the customs.
 Migration and Migrants in Post-reform Chinese Cities  457
visitors from these five nations account for more than 50% of the total international
residents in China (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2010).
The international residents are primarily to be found in three sites. Shanghai
accounts for the largest number, followed next by Beijing, and then Guangdong
Province in the southeast. These three areas account for more than half of the total
number of international residents living in China. In 2018, it is estimated that the
international resident population of Shanghai is 170,000, with another 65,000 in
Beijing and 45,000 in Guangzhou (Zuo, 2018). There are a number of provinces
holding above 20,000 international residents, including Yunnan, Jiangsu, Shandong,
Fujian, Zhejiang, Liaoning, and Tianjin. The spatial distribution of China’s interna-
tional residents is marked by clustering in either coastal and prosperous regions and
cities or in some peripheral provinces and cities at the national borders.
There are also differences among the international residents in Beijing, Shanghai,
and Guangdong Province. Most foreigners in Beijing are either diplomatic officials
or business people; most in Shanghai are business people or white-collar workers
associated with transnational companies; while most in Guangdong Province are
traders and sellers, especially those from African countries. In Shanghai, for instance,
the number of long-term foreign residents increased from about 45,000 in 2000
to 160,000 in 2017 (Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau, 2001, 2018). In 2001
Shanghai Municipality began to implement its strategy of attracting ‘international
and skilled immigrants’, say skilled foreign experts. In 2015, Shanghai started to
undertake a massive effort to establish itself as a key global scientific and creative
centre. It adopted new policies to achieve the aim, including various ways to make
it easier for international experts to become residents and to qualify to work in the
city (Haugen, 2015).
In the last several years, the Chinese government also began to face the challenge
of illegal immigration, or the so-called three illegals (‘sanfei’ in Chinese): illegal enter,
illegal stay, and illegal work. In 2013 it was estimated that about 80,000 illegal
foreign labourers worked in China, among which 40,000 are long-term workers
(Liu, 2015). Moreover in China today there are also a number of less privileged
international residents, including some African traders in Guangzhou, Japanese call
centre workers in Dalian, Vietnamese brides in border provinces such as Yunnan,
and English teachers who are scattered across central and western cities (Haugen,
2019; Kawashima, 2017; Lehmann and Leonard, 2019; Stanley, 2012). China has
also witnessed an increase of refugees from the Middle East, such as Syria, and
North African nations (Center for China and Globalization, 2015).

The Impact and Future of Migration in Urban China

Migration is a major factor contributing to the enormous expansion of post-reform
China. According to the sixth national census of 2010, the rural to urban migrants in
Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou reached 7 million, 9 million, and 5 million respec-
tively. While labouring in the ‘world factory’ of China, two or three generations of
the rural migrants or the floating population have contributed more than their share
to China’s explosive growth. The relatively cheap price of Chinese goods has been
made possible by the poor living and consumption levels of those people who con-
stitute the floating population. China’s great success has been built in part on the
458 Da Liu and Zhigang Li
backs of these floating population: they are the ones who are struggling to survive by
working in the sweatshops, the factories, and the many construction projects found
across China today. To some extent the rural–urban floating population joined the
ongoing efforts by the Chinese government, its leaders, and elites in reviving the
country’s glorious past. Hundreds of millions of the floating population moved end-
lessly back and forth between rural areas and large cities. They constructed many new
skyscrapers and high-speed roads, thereby contributing to the rapid and widespread
construction of China’s new metropolises. To maintain China’s advantaged status
as the ‘world’s factory’, the various levels and branches of the Chinese government
cooperated with major market stakeholders such as major international companies
to achieve the nation’s rapid expansion – and they did so largely by exploiting the
floating population. This regime includes a number of institutional arrangements
such as welfare systems, urban memberships, and hukou system, it also includes the
governance system of migrant space such as urban villages, factory enclaves, and
other migrant settlements.
Today, the deep inequalities that once existed between urban and rural areas
have been largely transplanted to cities, leading to the rise of ‘dual cities’ in China:
on the one hand, formal, organised communities for urban hukou holders and, on
the other hand, informal and sometimes highly unstable migrant communities. As
a marginalised group, the floating population often cluster into factory enclaves,
urban villages, or low-rent affordable settlements. The concentration of the floating
population mainly appears in and near the suburbs, forming a circular pattern
around the city centre. Being confined to these areas makes it hard for the floating
population to relocate to the central city (Shen, 2017), a situation exacerbated by
the further transformation of the cities themselves. First, the accelerating rise in land,
housing, and labour force costs in the central cities have forced many factories, mar-
kets, and service industries to relocate to the suburbs. The process of suburban-
isation parallels that in North America: job opportunities available to the floating
population are relocating to the suburbs. Second, the redevelopment or gentrifica-
tion of central cities has not just increased the living costs of the central areas, it has
also forced the floating population to relocate to marginal locations such as suburbs
(Liu and Wong, 2018). Accordingly, urban villages and industrial clusters appear-
ing in and near suburbs have become the major living and working spaces for the
floating population.
These communities engender different attitudes or discourses. On the one hand,
policymakers and the media often identify the rural migrant communities such
as urban villages as the breeding ground for social problems and the obstacles to
modernisation (Zhang et al., 2003). On the other hand, some scholars assume an
alternative point of view, seeing these migrant communities as the grassroots, or
bottom-up urbanisation that enables the floating population to settle and integrate
into urban society (Chan et al., 2003; Lin et al., 2011; Song et al., 2008; Wang et al.,
2009, 2010; Zhang et al., 2003). Nevertheless, members of the floating population
seem to have mobilised their financial, social, and human resources, and effectively
negotiated their everyday lives even in the face of the many challenges that con-
front them.
The recent massive demolition of urban settlements has triggered debates
concerning the implications of urban villages (Li and Wu, 2013; Song et al., 2008;
 Migration and Migrants in Post-reform Chinese Cities  459
Wang et al., 2010, 2009; Wu et al., 2013). On the one hand, urban villages provide
affordable houses to the floating population and enable land-deprived peasants to
earn their livelihoods (Song et al., 2008; Wang et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2003).
On the other hand, the redevelopment of urban villages has jeopardised the stock
of migrant settlements (Hao et al., 2014). It has been argued that the urban village
redevelopment policy will not eliminate informality, but instead it will relocate the
informality to other areas of the metropolis (Wu et al., 2013).
After working in large cities for several years, many members of the floating
population confront a cultural challenge in terms of their identity: it is not only hard
to integrate into the city, but it is also hard to go back or adapt to their hometowns.
They live in a ‘liminal’ social space. During the last several years, a large number
of migrants have returned, sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily, to their
hometown. After the annual Spring Festival in China, there often are reports about
‘the shortage of migrant workers’ in coastal cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
For those migrants who return to their hometowns, however, it is by no means easy
for them to re-integrate into their villages. The experience of working and living
in large cities has left them with very different perspectives compared to other vil-
lagers. Thus, some may work as self-employed or entrepreneurs, whereas others may
go back to the factories in large cities. Nevertheless, for the floating population,
especially those who have stayed longer in the city, they may gradually assimilate
both spatially and socially with local urbanites. Recently, the welfare and affordable
housing systems of selected cities have been modified. In Shenzhen, for instance, the
local government has begun to allow the floating population – though only those
who hold some ‘talent’ or qualifications – to apply to live in public housing. Such
efforts may also be a pull factor and contribute to the further integration of the
floating population in large cities.
The increase and rise of international residents and communities, is particularly
pronounced in prospering coastal regions or cities. Although the increases in their
number will improve China’s economic and soft power, it will also challenge the
Chinese government’s governance capacity. In recent years China has begun to imple-
ment its internationalisation strategies (i.e. ‘One Belt One Road’, ‘Forum of China-
Africa Cooperation’) with the intention of enhancing its links with other countries,
and it is likely that this will result in further exchanges of business people, officials,
students, and traders. It has been estimated, for example, that by 2035 there will be
around 800,000 international residents in Shanghai.
Second, the spatial distribution of international residents may have a spillover
effect – in the future, they will not just be concentrated in large coastal cities such
as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong Province, but will also appear in other prov-
inces and cities that include Chengdu, Chongqing, and Wuhan. The relocation of
some manufacturing sectors from coastal to inland regions, to access cheaper land
and labour forces and lower related costs, has been accompanied by the reloca-
tion and mobility of international residents (State Administration of Foreign Experts
Affairs, 2015).
One of the main challenges for international residents in China will be their
adaptation or integration into the local society. It can be anticipated in advance that
this will be a long and lasting process whose outcome may be largely dependent
on local culture, history, and state agency. Local residents of coastal cities such as
460 Da Liu and Zhigang Li
Shanghai, which have a longer history of interactions with international residents,
may find it easier to adapt to the rise of communities of international residents.
However, it is also possible that xenophobia will be directed towards these groups.
Chinese residents of Guangzhou, for example, have expressed concerns about the
rise of the number of Africans in their city (Li et al., 2009). Their grievances have
been voiced in online forums. In recent years some national representatives even
submitted proposals to the central government that called for stricter control of
illegal African ‘immigration’ in China. The issue of ‘three illegals’ is also a large
concern of the Chinese government. In response, China established NIA, a new
institution, in 2018 with the intention of reorganising the fragmented regime that
it uses to manage international residents. The governance of international residents
in China has been re-centralised, which indicates the central government’s intention
to further enhance the controls that it exerts over international residents in China.
Thereby the state will play a key role in determining the future of these residents
and their communities.

The Variegated Landscapes of Migrant Communities

In this section, we will shed light on three types of migrant communities, specifi-
cally urban villages, factory enclaves, and communities of international residents.
We will examine the variegated landscapes of migrant communities, as well as the
negotiation of various types of migrants or immigrants against scalar contexts. We
will target various economic, political, and sociocultural milieus and articulate the
subjectivity of entrepreneurial migrants.

Urban Villages
Urban villages are former rural villages that have been encroached on by rapid urban
expansion (Wu, 2009). The inhabitants mainly include residents relocated from other
urban places, the rural–urban floating population, and villagers. Rural migrants or
the floating population are the predominant groups in urban villages. They work
in the cities, especially in the service sectors, but their income is not sufficient to
rent private commodity houses. In Guangzhou, it has been reported that 277 urban
villages have seen floating population influx (Zhang et al., 2003). In Guangzhou’s
Sanyuanli village, a typical urban village, the local population is only 8,985, but
there is a floating population of 40,000. Poor housing and living conditions have
resulted in urban villages often being labelled as ‘Chinese slums’. Unlike informal
settlements in other developing countries, however, these villages are not constructed
by the floating population but rather by local villagers. Houses in urban villages
are by no means ‘self-help housing’, and can be more appropriately categorised as
informal, private, and rental housing. Urban villages across China are now threat-
ened by wholesale demolitions, as the ‘redevelopment’ or ‘renewal’ of urban villages
in a number of large cities (including Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and
Wuhan) demonstrates (Hao et al., 2011; Li and Li, 2011).
Previous studies provide insights into various features of urban villages, includ-
ing their development mechanisms, housing, land use, and physical characteristics
 Migration and Migrants in Post-reform Chinese Cities  461
(Li and Li, 2011; Siu, 2007; Song et al., 2008; Tian, 2008; Wang et al., 2009; Zhang,
2011). The housing and living conditions of urban villages are highly informal, as
private houses in urban villages were not developed in accordance with formal res-
idential plans. Because they could not be sold in the formal urban housing market,
they therefore remained as rental housing. In the cities of southern China, such as
Foshan City, the village-controlled collective land (Ji ti yong di) is usually rented
out to factories and urban markets. Villagers’ housing plots (Zhai ji di), meanwhile,
are allocated for housing constructions. In order to maximise rental income, new
construction is built intensively up to plot boundaries. In Guangzhou, rental housing
can be up to ten floors, which exceeds the limit of 4.5 floors put in place by the local
governments’ regulations. Residential buildings are also subdivided into apartments
smaller than the general size of commodity housing. In Beijing, even underground
space is sometimes used for this purpose.
Second, the lack of municipal funding in urban villages is another reason for
inadequate infrastructure. This shortfall arises from the Chinese system of dual land
ownership, in which these villages are collectively owned, rather than state owned.
While some ‘urban’ facilities, such as self-used kitchens, gas, and Internet, can be
found in urban villages, they tend to be low quality or inadequate. Village com-
mittees or shareholder companies are responsible for providing basic services and
infrastructure in urban villages. However, because these villages are scheduled to
be demolished, both village cadres and villagers are reluctant to invest, and this has
resulted in a lack of proper infrastructure and facilities.
Although the infrastructure in urban villages is inadequate, urban villages provide
relatively cheap rental housing, which the floating population can afford. The rent is
cheaper and the floor space are much smaller than nearby commodity housing units
(Zheng et al., 2009). However, very few urban villages have sewage or collection
systems or even rubbish bins, and this means the waste produced by the growing
population has to be dumped in open spaces. Electric cables are available but mostly
connected over buildings instead of being embedded in underground cable pipes,
which increases the risk of fire and electric shocks. But urban villages are convenient
places to live. Mixed land use and flexible modes of development mean that many
facilities, including barbers, food markets, nurseries, pharmacies, restaurants, and
small shops are nearby. These facilities are within walking distance, which offers a
welcome contrast to the long distances that must be travelled in urban areas. These
small shops are cheaper than supermarkets and provide the floating population with
cheaper products.
Urban villages do not just provide the floating population with necessary afford-
able housing, but also enable its members to construct social networks, accumulate
social capital, and improve their residential satisfaction, psychological attachments,
and overall well-beings. Although largely being marginalised, they actively engage
with urban environments and tend to congregate with friends, relatives, and others
from their home region when they live in urban villages. For example, Zhejiangcun
(‘Zhejiang village’) in Beijing has incorporated thousands of members of Wenzhou’s
floating population in the last few decades and is renowned for its strong reciprocal
relationships, sense of local identity, and intra-group social ties (Ma and Xiang,
1998). In Guangzhou, the new generation floating population, who were born after
1980, are more likely to draw on cross-class, non-kin, and non-territorial networks
462 Da Liu and Zhigang Li
when seeking social supports. Nevertheless, hometown bonds remain central to their
social networks (Liu et al., 2012). They construct numerous collegial ties that tran-
scend the boundaries of urban villages.
Xiaohubei (‘Little Hubei’, an enclave of rural migrants from Hubei Province,
central China) is a typical urban village in Guangzhou’s Haizhu District (Liu et al.,
2015). Here the floating population have emerged as active agents and have devel-
oped a vibrant garment manufacturing cluster. They have embedded their business
in the community and maintain a nationwide ‘trans-local’ network which enables its
members to achieve social mobility and negotiate with the local society. Migrants who
endure low-cost living and poor working conditions in cities therefore negotiate with
the local society in the expectation that this will enable them to earn higher income,
meet family needs, generate new skills, and accumulate technologies. It should be
noted that not all migrant enclaves are necessarily conducive to the formation of
migrant-owned business and the emergence of migrant entrepreneurs. Indeed, some
migrant enclaves are merely places where their inhabitants live. In contrast, enclaves
that have abundant native place-based resources, tight-knit kinship, laoxiang net-
works, and vibrant export-orientated sectors (e.g. garment production) are more
likely to promote economic advancement and social mobility (Ma and Xiang, 1998;
Zhang and Xie, 2013). They are clearly better placed to overcome the segregation of
the floating population. The shanty-like appearance, high density, and chaotic land
uses of urban villages may initially create the impression that they are desperate slums
(Liu et al., 2010; Zheng et al., 2009). However, closer examination shows the delicate
relations between the floating population and their living environments (Du and Li,
2010). The residential satisfaction of village dwellers is not necessarily very low, and
the floating population are not noticeably unhappier than locals.
The sharing of a house may negatively impact residential satisfaction and may
be reflected in the hukou factor. In the urban villages of Shanghai, for instance, one
village house may be subdivided to provide rooms for over 20 households. While
house size matters, neighbourhood attachment is the most important factor (Li and
Wu, 2013). Exclusion from the mainstream local society or a lack of neighbourhood
attachment can significantly reduce residential satisfaction. It is inappropriate to
apply the word ‘slums’ directly to urban villages (Li and Wu, 2013). Instead they
should, in both economic and social terms, be seen as prosperous spaces of pro-
duction and consumption. Most of the floating population there are small entre-
preneurs. Some will achieve social mobility and integration and this becomes more
likely when there is increased interaction between the floating population and out-
siders. This is reflected when the social networks of the ‘new generation’ floating
population expand beyond the village’s territory. But the negative image of urban
villages, which renders them as ‘dirty, chaotic, and dangerous’ places, will inevitably
cause policymakers to orientate towards demolition policies. Some local govern-
ments have already made decision to demolish urban villages. In contrast, the local
governments of Shenzhen have recently changed their attitudes to urban villages and
have instead sought to preserve them. Investors or local entrepreneurs, such as China
Vanke, have begun to invest into and gradually improve the buildings and facilities
of urban villages. These efforts are part of more inclusive and creative approaches to
urban village upgrading and improvement, and appear as an integrated component
of China’s future urbanisation.
 Migration and Migrants in Post-reform Chinese Cities  463
Factory Enclaves
Factory enclaves refer to the development zones or new towns where the floating
population are concentrated, which are mostly located in the suburbs of large Chinese
cities. Extensive industrialisation in recent decades has resulted in these enclaves
emerging as the primary destination for the floating population, and this is why fac-
tories, specifically large factories that provide worker dormitories, are concentrated
within them. For example, in the Economic and Technological Development Zone
of Hangzhou, in Zhejiang Province, the total population is about 420,000 of whom
only about 100,000 (or 23%) are local hukou holders (National Bureau of Statistics
of china, 2016). These developments and new cities, which are the hub of China’s
export-orientated economy, therefore accumulate a great deal of floating population
and also attract investment, products, and skills.
In Shenzhen, the social space is marked by a division of inner city and suburban
districts: the former appears as a cluster of local hukou holders, while the suburbs
concentrate the floating population, short-term migrants, and service or industrial
workers, who are particularly prominent in industrial parks or clusters. Foxconn,
Longhua District of Shenzhen City, is one of the largest worker enclaves in Shen-
zhen (Chan et al., 2013). The Foxconn Group, which is its mother company, was
established in 1988 by Terry Guo, the famous Taiwanese tycoon. After three decades
of rapid growth, it became the largest original equipment manufacturer (OEM)
company in the world. Its operations are sustained by more than 30 industrial
parks and clusters across China, more than 200 sub-branches and approximately
one million staff, most the floating population (Chan et al., 2013). Shenzhen’s Fox-
conn encompasses an area of approximately 2.3 square kilometres, and roughly
430,000 workers live and work on its campus. Like the danwei system in pre-
reform China, this enclave is not just factories and warehouses, but also includes
banks, basketball courts, bookstores, cyber theatres, dormitories, an educational
institute, hospitals, a library, a post office, restaurants, soccer fields, and swimming
pools. In vivid contrast to its clients, such as Apple, who invoke a culture of crea-
tivity, Foxconn’s operation is depressingly mundane and is characterised by assem-
bly lines, mechanical repetition of simple movements, and strict implementations.
Within the enclave, every building and dormitory have security checkpoints where
guards are on duty for 24 hours every day, which leads migrant settlers to feel like
they are in a prison. Line leaders, who are subject to high levels of pressure, treat
workers harshly because they believe this will help to achieve their productivity
goals. Migrant workers feel they are below machines in the status hierarchy – one
interviewee claimed that ‘even the air conditioning is set for the machines, not for
us’ (Interview, 10 April 2014).
The campus-like living space is a mere extension of the workshop and its goal
is to replenish its workers’ physical strength at the lowest cost and with minimal
investments of time. Dormitory assignments, for instance, are deliberately random
and are not intended to support residents’ social relations and social lives (Pun and
Chan, 2013). Exhausting workloads, a boring everyday life, and the strict control
of time and space exert great pressure on young migrant workers and cause them to
feel frustrated. Modernism, Taylorism, and the ‘governmentality’ of time, space, and
other control practices further exacerbate their daily lives.
464 Da Liu and Zhigang Li
In 2010, 18 Foxconn employees committed suicide, and this led to a considerable
upsurge in public attention and concern (Pun and Chan, 2012). This case shows that
the segregation of the floating population is closely linked to the status of Shenzhen
and China’s more general claim to be the ‘factory of the world’ (Vlassenrood, 2016).
While urban villages have been observed to have some positive psychological effects,
worker enclaves are more frequently rendered as socio-spatial regimes that control
or even damage the lives of the floating population. Having been built by factories
or companies, these enclaves offer a different living experience to the one provided
by urban villages.
Most factory workers are stuck in industrial clusters located in suburbs, which
makes it difficult for them to achieve socio-spatial mobility. There is a limited
likelihood of promotion for these workers, thus it is very difficult for them to achieve
vertical social mobility. Promotion of Foxconn staff occurs twice a year, when pro-
duction is expanded or a new position becomes available. The working style of the
assembly line also makes it difficult for migrant workers to master new technol-
ogy, obtain knowledge, or accumulate capital. Moreover, entrepreneurship is not
an easy route to success. Migrant workers will inevitably be hungry for success, but
their shortage of experience and savings are likely to be major barriers. Most mem-
bers of the floating population stay on the lower steps of the labour market ladder,
where they endure low income and unstable employment and struggle to achieve
promotion. Their income is also strongly dependent only on salaries, which limit
their flexibility and ability to negotiate their terms of employment. Loans are par-
ticularly important in this regard, although reductions in state financial supports
have reduced the potential sources of income. Social networks are mostly based on
kinships or workmates, while access to market opportunities is normally limited.
These factors mean that most migrant workers have no other options but work
for Foxconn.

International Resident Communities

During the last several decades, grassroots cross-border activities have generated a
new wave of ‘globalisation from below’ (Guarnizo and Smith, 1998; Portes, 1997;
Schiller and Fouron, 1998) and this has resulted in China becoming established as a
new destination for immigrants, with large (such as Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shang-
hai) and border (such as Yanbian) cities appearing as the most popular destinations.
The number of transnational staff from overseas countries has now risen to unprece-
dented levels both in the redeveloped central area of Shanghai and its suburbs such as
Pudong. International residents often accumulate in selected locations and establish
so-called international resident communities. In 2015, 16,262 foreigners were resi-
dent in Gubei, a community in Shanghai, accounting for almost half of its residents;
Japan and South Korea account for more than 70% of these international residents.
In Beijing, the newly established commodity housing sector, which is mainly clus-
tered in the city’s north-east, provides privileged housing for foreigners (Wu and
Webber, 2004). In contrast to traditional studies that concentrate on the marginali-
sation of unskilled or semiskilled manual immigrants, recent contributions instead
analyse the international flows of highly skilled or managerial level entrepreneurs,
personnel, and professionals (Lin and Tse, 2005; Miera, 2008). This reflects the
 Migration and Migrants in Post-reform Chinese Cities  465
broader impacts of globalisation, as embodied in the increased mobility of capital
and population, the rise of the global city as a nexus of flexible capital accumulation,
and the involvement or participation of diversified groups (Sassen, 1994).
Guangzhou is a unique case, as the presence of Africans and their communities
have been widely observed, both by the general public and academics. The African
community, and specifically Xiaobei, is not only a gateway for bourgeoning Sino-Af-
rica economic linkages but is also a sojourning place where African traders struggle
to survive. In the late 1990s, buildings at the core of Xiaobei, such as Guolong,
Taochi, Tianxiu, and Xiushan, were among the first groups to be internationalised.
Large numbers of African traders reside in high-rise apartments there, where reli-
gious traditions are particularly important in helping to construct connections bet-
ween them. According to our survey in 2010, Nigeria is the most important source
of migrants (52% of respondents in the 2010 survey). Most African migrants (85%)
are men aged 25–45 and almost all (91%) work as tradesmen and salesmen.
Africans in Xiaobei are a distinct group of cross-border traders and most of them
travel frequently between Guangzhou and Africa. Most Africans moved to Guang-
zhou after 1998 and more than half have not lived in the city for longer than one
year. The majority of traders make short repeat visits to restock (these visits usually
last approximately one week if the trader is only buying, and can last up to three
weeks if he/she stays to supervise the shipping). Goods purchased in Guangzhou are
normally shipped back to the ‘home’ country or surrounding areas and are then sold
through a network of local traders. It is through these traders that mobile phones,
clothes, and computers (as well as nearly all products made in China’s ‘world fac-
tories’) are sold in Africa. As such, the rise of Guangzhou’s transnational ethnic
enclave is largely attributed to the ‘world factory’ status of the Pearl River Delta
(PRD) and mainland China.
Before 1990, Xiaobei was mainly composed of work-unit housing or deteriorat-
ing housing that investors had no interest in sustaining or developing. The underde-
velopment of this area was further reiterated by the 2000 fifth China Census, which
demonstrated that almost half of Xiaobei residents (46%) had only been educated to
junior high school level. However, the influx of African traders revitalised the whole
area. The interests of local market agencies, including real estate agencies, property
managers, and village committees, helped to generate business opportunities that
in turn stimulated the transformation of Xiaobei and enabled it to become increas-
ingly globalised. In order to construct a platform that would attract international
trading, multi-language posters and directories were produced, English and French-
speaking agents were hired, and African-styled food was prepared. A wide range of
services, including goods packaging, international calling, ticket booking, visa appli-
cations, and even medical services were supplied by local shops that sought to cater
to this growing international community. Accordingly, an internationalised milieu
was constructed.
However, the modalities of Guangzhou’s African community have long been dis-
puted. Bertoncello and Bredeloup (2007), for example, engage with both Chunking
Mansion in Hong Kong and Xiaobei in Guangzhou. They suggest that African traders
are at the forefront of a migration wave and can therefore be defined, in spatial
terms, as ‘outposts’. Bodomo (2010) instead draws on a ‘bridge theory’ to analyse
links between Africa and China and suggests that Guangzhou’s African ­communities
466 Da Liu and Zhigang Li
should be interpreted as a cultural and social bridge, and thereby refutes the prior
claim of an ‘enclave’. Rennie (2009) claims that relations between local Chinese and
Africans in Guangzhou are deteriorating and observes how rising racism and police
harassment, in addition to other factors, have made life difficult even for the most
successful Africans. The concentration of Africans in Xiaobei is gradually coming
to be regarded as ‘problematic’, especially by Guangzhou’s local governments. In
an interview, one Nigerian community member complains that ‘before 2003, local
people respect Africans, now they don’t’. In Guangzhou, African residents are often
viewed as a problem and are sometimes accused of engaging in criminal activity.
On 13 December 2007, the Guangzhou Daily, a state-operated newspaper, issued
a report entitled ‘The Full Record of Guangzhou’s Black Tribe’, which noted that
this ‘tribe’ was associated with the sale of low-end products and also openly linked
Africans to AIDS, drugs, illegal immigrations, and other social ills. Other media net-
works reproduced these representations with the consequence that negative percep-
tions of Africans spread and consolidated.
The intervention of the local state, in the form of checks that were introduced
before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, sharply reduced the number of African
tradesmen and salesmen in Guangzhou, and this trend further strengthened after the
global financial crisis broke out in 2009. African migrants then began to gravitate
towards Foshan – over one-third (37.8%) of the Africans that we surveyed in 2010
said they had initially lived in Guangzhou before relocating to Foshan. These two
cities are not just contiguous, but are – at certain points – actually conjoined. Foshan
is a smaller and lower-level city than Guangzhou, and therefore is not a priority for
the central government, as is shown by the fact that its administrative and regulatory
arrangements are not as strict.
Ethnicity, economic transitions, and local place-making are interrelated in com-
plex ways and they combine with Guangzhou’s commercial milieus, religious tra-
ditions, and trading networks to influence the accumulation of African traders. In
the absence of formal organisations, Xiaobei’s local entrepreneurs have created an
international enclave that can be identified by African traders. But in the absence of
the support or facilitation of local governments, non-state spaces will be difficult
to survive in China. The state is still the decisive factor in the development of any
types of China’s communities. Xiaobei has been stigmatised by local media and an
invisible wall is being constructed between local residents and Africans. In this vein,
globalisation has added a new dimension, say ethnicity, to the socio-spatial segrega-
tion of post-reform Chinese cities.

Discussions and Conclusions

In this study we examine the profiles, modalities, and effects of both domestic and
international migrants in post-reform China. There are three points that we want to
emphasise. First, history and geography matter, as is clearly illustrated by the differ-
entiated landscapes of floating population and international residents who are spread
across different regions and cities. The case of China, however, also indicates the sig-
nificance of the state, at both national and local levels. Over the last few decades
the changes in government policy have opened up new spaces and ­opportunities for
 Migration and Migrants in Post-reform Chinese Cities  467
migration. Second, our cases provide insights into the new features of contempo-
rary migrants. Both the floating population and international residents of Chinese
cities are not necessarily going to settle down in the destinations; rather, their migra-
tions are mainly characterised by instability, mobility, and transience. Third, we also
articulate the subjectivities of entrepreneurial migrants, which are actively negoti-
ated with the structural factors such as the state and social environment, during the
transition of global and local contexts.
The floating population has been sifted and sorted into various marginal commu-
nities and spatially differentiated, and this has caused social disparities to crystalise.
The word ‘floating’ denotes a feature of this group’s unstable life (Wu, 2006; Wu et
al., 2013): few members of the floating population own houses in cities and most
live in rental houses or self-built houses in urban or suburban villages. Others reside
in the collective dormitories that their factories or institutions provide. The informal
settlements of urban villages are often portrayed as ‘chaotic, dirty, and dangerous’,
and it is certainly the case that inadequate facilities are a problem. But the floating
population’s assessments of urban villages were by no means entirely negative. The
main causes of their dissatisfaction are the exclusion and their state of ‘rootless-
ness’. Although the lack of neighbourhood attachment originates in a lack of de
jure citizenship, it is actually deeply embedded in social and cultural practices of
‘community building’. If this population is to feel a sense of attachment to the city,
it will need to be culturally and socially integrated into local communities. Despite
their social and spatial marginalisation, this population seeks to improve its future in
cities through ‘bricolage’ – that is, through the use of any and all available materials
(Roy and Ong, 2011).
The social and spatial effects of migrant enclaves are always controversial. When
the negative features of ethnic enclaves are accentuated, it appears as a place of
social isolation that may lock the floating population into poor economic situations.
Although Foxconn is formally managed and organised, it is a de facto gated camp
that is detached from the urban society. Its militarily governed spatial regime has
inflicted social crisis and severe psychological problems on its migrant workers. Fox-
conn exemplifies the dark aspects of floating population segregation or congrega-
tion. When attention instead turns to their positive attributes, migrant enclaves are
seen to have a number of advantages that include social capital, informal jobs, and
high productivity. Urban villages, which are informal settlements, do not just provide
necessary affordable housing to the floating population, but also help migrant resi-
dents to construct social networks, accumulate social capital, and even improve their
subjective well-being. Urban villages have become an incubator, which enables the
floating population to integrate into China’s urban society. While urban villages are
informal and lack tidiness and cleanliness, they are prosperous social, economic, and
cultural enclaves from which the floating population can run their start-up businesses.
International residents in post-reform China are a distinctive group of cross-
border expatriates, sojourners, and traders. It is through them that a great deal of
products made in China can be sold around the world, and this will enable the lo-
calised social system to be further internationalised and inscribed with a cosmopoli-
tan character. The international resident communities are a vital, albeit unorthodox,
nexus that interrelates ethnicity, local place-making, and the transitional economy
in complex ways.
468 Da Liu and Zhigang Li
Against a highly mobilised, flexible, and unstable milieu of restructured economic,
political, and social contexts, the dynamic interrelation of global and local has
become transient, and this reflects the restlessness of socio-spatial transformation
across globalising cities. In this vein, we articulate complicated interconnections bet-
ween international resident communities, local states, and the (re)constitution of
local places. The geography of the African enclave in Guangzhou will not be the
same as classical ethnic enclaves, as the latter is often the major residential destina-
tion of ethnic immigrants. The instability of the international business ‘from below’
will mean that the city’s geography will become even more transient. China’s volatile
immigration regime is the driving force that reshapes the landscape of international
resident communities. China is characterised by its well-developed state apparatus
and has a long tradition of social controls, which means the state is deeply involved
in almost every aspect of urbanism. China’s immigration governance regime is by no
means fully developed and the gap between the pre- and post-reform eras is huge.
The new wave of international residents confronts Chinese governments, particu-
larly those at the local level, with unprecedented demands. It is clear that the future
of international residents and their communities deserve more academic attention.

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 22
Migration and Migrants in the
United States
The Case for a Fifth Immigration Phase
Christopher Levesque and Jack DeWaard

Introduction

In 2016, voters elected Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States,
in part because of the discourse that he espoused and the policies that he promised
on the issue of immigration. Resonating especially with US-born Whites, Trump’s
discourse and accompanying policies have, at different times and for different audi-
ences, painted immigrants as job takers, criminals, public charges, terrorists, disease
vectors, and more. Of course, these developments are not new, as the history of US
immigration over four phases – frontier expansion (1820–1860), industrialisation
(1880–1920), immigration pause (1920–1960), and post-1965 immigration (Martin
and Midgley, 2006: 9) – is itself a story of both symbolic and social exclusion (John-
son, 1998; Lee, 2006; Ngai, 1999). However, there is a growing sense in scholarly,
policy, and popular circles that something has fundamentally changed, and that the
fourth phase of immigration is over (American Immigration Lawyers Association
(AILA), 2018; Lautensach, 2017; Maxmen, 2017; McHugh, 2018; Pierce et al.,
2018; Waldinger, 2018).
The central argument of this chapter is that the United States has entered a new,
fifth phase of immigration characterised by a highly divisive discourse and rapidly-
changing policies of fear rooted in three key developments. First, a hallmark of the
fifth phase of immigration is the extremely pronounced resentment and backlash, e.g.
‘White backlash’ (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015), over fears of demographic change
in the face of [de]industrialisation. These fears, while not unlike other phases of
immigration, have percolated in the geographic dispersion of immigrant groups and
the emergence of new immigrant gateways. Second, drawing insights from Massey
et al. (2016: 1560), another hallmark of the fifth phase of immigration is a ‘politics

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
476 Christopher Levesque and Jack DeWaard
of fear’ and deservingness manifested in short, relentless, and often well-funded
soundbites that are increasingly divorced from historical memory, existing data, and
human empathy. Third, recognising the growing importance of legal status as ‘a new
axis of stratification’ (Menjívar and Abrego, 2012: 1383), the final hallmark of the
fifth phase of immigration is a fear of (among the US-born) and for (among the for-
eign-born) access to and the preservation of legal residence in the United States.
We unpack these three hallmarks over the four – and now five – phases of US
immigration, highlighting along the way the changing causes, characteristics, and
consequences of migration to and within the United States. We then discuss how
these three hallmarks began to coalesce in the past decade. This shift is well-situated
in the so-called Trump era; however, it also reflects a broader phenomenon of pro-
nounced changes in how migrants are received and perceived in the United States
today. We conclude this chapter by speculating on the sorts of discursive and policy
developments that might lie in store during the fifth phase of immigration.

What Has Changed?

Demographic Change and Backlash

Many Americans point to their forerunners’ immigration stories of hard work and
subsequent prosperity as confirmation of the ‘American Dream’ (Hauhart, 2016).
Take the English, Scots and Irish, Germans, and other northern and central European
immigrants to the United States during the first phase of immigration (1820–1860).
Many of these individuals moved west to the American Frontier to work in small-scale
household enterprises away from a labour-stretched industrialised Europe (Ferrie,
1999). Likewise, during the second phase of immigration (1880–1920) when close
to 24 million immigrants – most from southern and eastern Europe – flocked to
large industrial cities in mid-Atlantic and midwestern states in search of economic
opportunities. However, despite the common narrative of the American Dream, the
demographic profiles of immigrants during these phases differed, and provide a
comparative window into structural and racial processes of state-sanctioned border
formation. The first phase of immigration was dominated by ‘old immigrants’ from
Great Britain and north-western Europe. In contrast, immigrants from southern and
eastern Europe during the second phase of immigration were viewed and treated as
new, foreign, and ultimately more amenable to lower wages and harsher working
conditions (Zolberg, 2006). These two periods in American history have contributed
to the myth of the hard-working immigrant bootstrapper. This myth assumes that
institutional and co-ethnic support was never disproportionate between immigrant
groups. However, in reality, the country’s growing economy and claims of manifest
destiny privileged white immigrants from northern and central Europe above all
other groups.
Industrialisation was a key force that shaped demographic change during the
first and second immigration phases. Leading up to the 1880s, US society had rap-
idly transformed from a predominately rural agrarian economy to a metropoli-
tan industrial economy. As factories grew, so did the demand for unskilled labour,
with a net growth of 7.5 million workers in US manufacturing from 1880 to 1920
 Migration and Migrants in the United States 477
(Hirschman and Mogford, 2009). The foreign-born population also increased from
roughly 7 million to about 14 million (Gibson and Jung, 2006: 26). Many cities
experienced exponential population growth in the second phase of immigration due
to high birth rates among immigrants and native-born internal migrants from rural
areas. At the turn of the century, in New York and Chicago – the two largest US cities
at the time – about one-half of all male workers and a slightly lower proportion of
female workers were immigrants (Muller, 1994: 73). As the economic contributions
of immigration and immigrants grew, technological achievements soon followed.
Railroads connected New York, Chicago, Detroit, and other major urban immigrant
gateways. The United States became a ‘nation of immigrants’, an ideal popularised
in then US Senator John F. Kennedy’s (1964) book of the same name, and this phrase
has become part and parcel of a civic national identity still resonating with many
Americans today (Gerstle, 2017; Hirschman and Mogford, 2009; Martin and Midg-
ley, 2006).1
Despite this civic ideal, segmented ethnic communities began to form along class
lines in neighbourhoods and workplaces at the turn of the twentieth century (Lee,
2006; Lipset and Marks, 2001; Zunz, 1982). However, rather than being rooted
in neighbourhoods and workplaces, the seeds of this segmentation were planted
long ago at US ports of entry. US immigration policies ultimately extended into
and informed discourses of acculturation and assimilation within the country’s bor-
ders. The dark and troubled history of racialisation and exclusion in US immigra-
tion law is well documented (Boustan et al., 2010; Desmond and Emirbayer, 2009;
Lee, 2006; Lee and Yung, 2010). The Americanisation movement of the 1910s and
1920s, which sought to bring immigrants into the fold of national identity through
‘positive’ social reform rather than discrimination and exclusion, were frequently
paternalistic, condescending, and disciplinary (Ziegler-McPherson, 2010).
This came at a time when the United States began to imagine itself as a melting pot
of the world, where civic nationalism would assimilate recent immigrants towards
‘mainstream’ American culture. This placed a substantial burden on the shoulders of
immigrants themselves to adhere to perceived civic norms and societal values. Immi-
grants who were not perceived as assimilating experienced resentment and backlash
from the native-born. Not only did native-born persons think that immigrants were
taking their jobs, they saw the second phase immigration in fundamental conflict
with Anglo-Saxon traditions, as the national origins of new immigrants did not
match the racial and ethnic profiles of immigrants during the first phase (Bourne,
1916).2 These demographic changes informed the establishment of new immigration
policies specifying who could and could not migrate to the United States, restricting
immigration based on national origin, race, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender. This

1
Migration is not always a voluntary process. During the first and, to a lesser extent, sec-
ond phases of immigration, slaves and indentured servants were forced to migrate to the
United States and subsequently dispersed across cities and towns across the antebellum
South (Pargas, 2015).
2
Later on, some immigrant groups, especially Irish Catholics, were able to gain entry and
‘become’ white. This was a strategy that secured an advantageous position in society,
especially in terms of job mobility (see Ignatiev, 1995).
478 Christopher Levesque and Jack DeWaard
foreshadows similar developments seen during the fifth phase of immigration under
President Trump, which we return to later in this chapter.
During the third phase of immigration (1920–1960), the door was effectively
closed as the United States drifted towards nativism. As a result, the demographic
profile of the United States shifted from a nation of immigrants to a largely native-
born population. World War I had ended in Europe, temporarily halting migration
to the United States, and anti-immigrant sentiment during the Great Depression was
increasingly directed at immigrants already in the country (Boustan et al., 2010).
The National Origins Quota (or Johnson-Reed) Act of 1924 established a quota
system that racialised certain immigrant groups, creating a hierarchy of desirability
by national origin that privileged those with Anglo-Saxon and Nordic backgrounds
and restricted or barred migration from southern and eastern Europe and Asia (Des-
mond and Emirbayer, 2009; Lee, 2015). During World War II, the United States fell
well short of its potential as a refugee haven, as nativism and anti-Semitism in the
aftermath of the Great Depression helped to erect and maintain ‘paper walls’ that
denied entry to those fleeing persecution in Europe (Wyman, 1968).
However, immigration did not completely come to a halt. The Bracero programme,
which permitted millions of Mexicans to work legally in the United States, began
in the 1940s and was responsible for increases in migration from Mexico to replace
shrinking migrant labour from Europe and Asia (Lee, 2006). It was also during this
period when the great migration reached its peak, with millions of US southerners,
mostly Black, leaving rural areas in the South for cities in the Midwest and the north-
east (DeWaard et al., 2016; Frey, 2004; Tolnay, 2003; White et al., 2005; Wilker-
son, 2011). The exclusionary laws of this period only gave preference to non-quota
immigrants possessing either desirable occupational skills or immediate family mem-
bers already residing in the United States. These exceptions began with the Chinese
Exclusion Act decades earlier, but ramped up with the passage of the quota system
and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.
The fourth phase of immigration (1965–2016) marked the end of the quota sys-
tem and saw a sharp rise in undocumented immigration to the United States.3 The
1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, still the backbone of US immigration policy
today, opened up new possibilities for immigration to the country. Building on the
non-quota exceptions during the third phase of immigration, preference was given
to applicants who had US relatives who could sponsor their application or had skills
in demand by US employers. This fundamentally changed the risks and costs of
immigration. As immigrants’ social networks expanded with family reunification,
more and more people began to migrate to the United States in a process known as
cumulative causation (Fussell, 2011). The national origins of new immigrants also
began to shift from Europe to Asia and Latin America. With economic growth in Eu-
rope, migration from Europe to the United States had sharply fallen. The removal of
Asian quotas in 1965 in favour of a preference system based on family reunification
and occupational skills, as well as the US military’s involvement in South East Asia,

3 
We mark the end of the fourth phase at 2016 with the US presidential election of
Trump, when discourses of fear for and among immigrants begin to take a new shape.
 Migration and Migrants in the United States 479
led to a large increase in Asian immigration to the United States. Migration from
Latin America also increased substantially (Massey et al., 2016).
These policy changes represent the asymmetric expansion of labour and capital
in a globalising economy, which abandoned large blocks of the Rust Belt manufac-
turing sector and facilitated a rapid change in the demographic profile of US immi-
grants. Resentment towards immigrants – especially those migrating from Central
America – became a mechanism to push public opinion in a more xenophobic
direction, reflecting native-born attitudes towards the dissolution of manufacturing
and agriculture jobs.4 Massey et al. (1993) and Piore (1979) highlight how the Unit-
ed States had long relied on segmented labour markets as a means to cope with its
deindustrialisation, thereby creating a structural demand for low-skilled immigrant
labour. As a larger proportion of the native-born began seeking high-skilled jobs in
the 1970s and 1980s (which also conferred higher earnings and prestige), employers
sought to fill the variable and seasonal demand for cheap, substitutable labour with
low-skilled immigrants. In that same time period, the United States also began to
withdraw from the traditional manufacturing industries where trade unions were
strong in recruiting unskilled labourers (Lee, 2005). Therein lies the narrative of
resentment among those men and women who lost their jobs and pensions in that
time period, especially in Midwestern industrial states and cities, precisely where
deindustrialisation took root.
The passage of the 1965 act also helps explains the rise in undocumented migra-
tion from Mexico – another source of resentment and backlash. While it was orig-
inally conceived as a solution to bring Latino immigration levels down, as Massey
et al. (2016) have pointed out, agricultural employers in the United States began to
increasingly rely on undocumented Mexican labourers after the Bracero programme
ended in 1964 (Martin, 2003). In combination with the 1965 legislation, the ter-
mination of the Bracero programme created the undocumented ‘problem’, which
remains both politically polarising and materially consequential for the estimated 11
million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States.
Whereas the first two phases saw industrialisation on the rise, the fourth phase
of immigration began to see the effects of deindustrialisation, including (i) shrinking
employment in the traditionally highly unionised manufacturing sector (Lee, 2005),
(ii) growth in service economies and temporary worker programmes, which opened
up new opportunities and challenges for high- and low-skilled labour (Reubens,
1986; Waldinger, 1992), (iii) technological advancements (Baumol, 1967; Krugman,
1996), and (iv) free trade (Alderson, 1999; Wood, 1994). Manufacturing industries
also began moving operations out of urban areas, with newly-arrived immigrants
following them to other parts of the country (Fussell, 2011; Fussell and Massey,
2004; Massey et al., 1993; Phillips and Massey, 1999). With the contraction of man-
ufacturing in the Midwest and north-east, a ‘New Great Migration’ took place in the
US South, a region that experienced significant economic expansion during this time
(Adelman et al., 2000; DeWaard et al., 2016; Frey, 2004; Kasarda, 1995).

4 
Udani and Kimball (2018) add that immigrant resentment also reflects native-born atti-
tudes towards crime, deservingness, perceived threats to traditions, as well as fears over
losing political influence in the face of demographic change.
480 Christopher Levesque and Jack DeWaard
Nativist resentment and backlash towards undocumented migrants grew
c­ onsiderably during the 1980s when manufacturing jobs became even more scarce.
In response, the Reagan administration passed the bipartisan Immigration Reform
and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986 with the intent to prevent employers from hiring
undocumented immigrants, especially from Mexico, and to strengthen US border
controls. Pro-business Republicans and Democrats were eager to take advantage of
expanded flows of both high- and low-skilled labour from abroad, while also advo-
cating for policies that offered paths to citizenship for many undocumented immi-
grants (Blau and Mackie, 2017; Tichenor, 2002; Waldinger, 2018). This legislation
was meant to stem the flow of immigrant labour, and give the US-born workers a fair
shake for the future; however, IRCA’s passage came during a time when the forces of
deindustrialisation were already well underway.
The persistent remnants of immigrant exclusion that were so critical to shaping
historical demographic profiles in previous immigration phases re-emerged in dif-
ferent forms in the early 1990s, this time framed in the language of bipartisanship.
The creation of the US Diversity Visa programme maintained a strict selection pro-
cess which today favours educated, middle class, and high-skilled immigrants (Lee,
2015; Wardle, 2005). There was also the introduction of Temporary Protected Status
(TPS) in 1990, a form of protection offered to those fleeing specified countries fac-
ing natural disasters or violent conflicts. This programme granted some immigrants
the right to work in the United States without access to social benefits during their
limited stays, effectively tying their hands behind their backs (Massey et al., 2016).
Thus, while these policy developments have ostensibly justified attempts to diver-
sify the US immigration population since 1965, they have also exploited fears of
demographic change against the backdrop of market forces that foster liberalisation,
economic deregulation, and deindustrialisation (Imoagene, 2017; Lee, 2015).
These demographic and policy changes have led to the fifth phase of immigration,
where several key consequences of the fourth post-1965 phase have emerged. First,
with industrial restructuring and the changing locations and nature of work, immi-
grants have moved away from traditional gateways – including California, Illinois,
Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Texas – to other areas of the United States, espe-
cially the south-east and Pacific north-west (Leach and Bean, 2008; Trusts, 2014).
Former immigrant gateway cities located in the Rust Belt of the United States, such
as Cleveland and Milwaukee, had once attracted a large number of immigrants in
the early 1900s. However, those cities no longer fit that profile today (Singer, 2004).
For Milwaukee, a once-great factory town, decline began with deindustrialisation
in the 1930s, augmented by White flight in the 1950s (Orum, 1995). An intractable
political leadership also refused to acknowledge new immigrants’ roles in changing
labour markets. For those immigrants who did migrate to cities such as Milwaukee
and Cleveland during this time, suburbanisation contributed to growing segregation
between Whites, Blacks, and the foreign-born (Rodriguez, 2014). Frey (2005) notes
that many Rust Belt cities have been among the slowest-growing compared to other
US metropolitan areas, and that rural non-metropolitan areas in the Midwest have
seen staggering population decline.
Second, this geographic dispersion has led to immigrant incorporation in a num-
ber of places, e.g. on the coasts and in urban areas, with intermarriage between
the US non-Hispanic White population and immigrants growing significantly over
 Migration and Migrants in the United States 481
time (Waters and Pineau, 2015). Proponents of spatial assimilation theory argue
that immigrants’ experiences of upward mobility and acculturation have led to their
geographic dispersion throughout the United States into what are often older White
communities (Massey and Denton, 1985). Third, as the US-born population has
shrunk in the Midwest, migration beyond traditional gateway states and cities has
helped slow the region’s overall population decline (Donato et al., 2008; Jacoby
et al., 2013; Paral, 2014). Today, the immigrant population in the United States is
dispersing spatially more so than ever before. Suburban segregation has declined in
a number of metropolitan areas in the Midwest, though, as Winkler and Johnson
(2016) point out, regions in the south, south-west, and Appalachia are comparably
not as integrated as are other regions in the United States. However, the housing
bubble and ensuing mortgage crisis during the 2007–2009 Great Recession contrib-
uted to reductions in migration to suburban and exurban areas, and more gener-
ally impacted the future prospects of the US- and foreign-born (Frey, 2009; also see
Cromartie, 2017).
Since the Great Recession, the total number of undocumented immigrants arriv-
ing in the United States has hovered around net zero, with length of US residence
increasing (Massey et al., 2016; Passel et al., 2014). While President Trump and his
administration and supporters see border enforcement as a key policy concern, they
ignore the fact that undocumented immigration has stalled. Given that undocumented
immigrants are staying in the United States longer than before, new spatial configu-
rations of enforcement towards the interior of the country have emerged. Enhanced
border enforcement, with an eye particularly on the US-Mexico border, also disregards
the fact that Asian immigrants are the fastest-growing undocumented population in
the United States. In fact, in 2015, South East Asians and Pacific Islanders were being
deported at rates three times higher than other groups (Hong, 2015).
Such backlash is a reaction to the culmination of demographic and policy changes
over the four phases of immigration. In seeking to ‘make America great again’, those
who favour restrictive immigration policies invoke their forbearers’ stories of pursu-
ing the American Dream, while also feeling uneasy about allowing for similar trajec-
tories for new immigrants today. For example, Abrajano and Hajnal (2015) reported
that US-born Whites living in states with larger Latino populations are more likely
to favour restrictive immigration policies and ‘substantially more likely to favor the
Republican Party and Republican candidates’. As we saw in the previous four phases
of immigration, favouring restrictive policies is not a new phenomenon. However,
what is different in the fifth phase of immigration is that US industrial decline, cou-
pled with the lingering effects of the Great Recession, has in many ways set the stage
for nativist views that White America is under-represented in purportedly diverse,
urbanising, and liberal US society. As Alba and Foner (2017) recently put it, demo-
graphic change and economic stagnation have opened the floodgates of fear about
future demographic change and stoked the fires of resentment and backlash.
This is plainly seen in President Trump’s rhetoric and actions around the idea of a
US-Mexico border wall which, if built, would fulfil a campaign promise to his sup-
porters. The wall is ultimately a reflection of the underlying immigration discourse.
In one image, the wall is a manifestation of the resentment and backlash that has
vindicated Trump’s ‘silent majority’ of voters. Many of his supporters want to see
this campaign promise delivered in recognition of their fears by the highest office in
482 Christopher Levesque and Jack DeWaard
the United States. Those who support Trump have breathed new life into a politics
of fear, which necessarily involves perceptions and judgements about who deserves
to migrate to the United States in the first place.

A Politics of Fear and Deservingness

Fear, as with optimism, is a tool in the politician’s toolkit. Political discourse is used
to exploit feelings of victimhood, to channel feelings of resentment towards one or
more out-groups, and ultimately to draw boundaries between us and them. Massey
et al. (2016) termed this a ‘politics of fear’. One example is the so-called Latino
Threat Narrative that emerged during the fourth phase of immigration. US media
and political discourse often falsely blame undocumented immigrants for steal-
ing jobs, not assimilating into American society, and ‘pathologically’ high fertility
(Chavez, 2013). This narrative often pits itself against immigrants more generally
during economic downturns such as the Great Recession. Threat narratives are not
coming from politicians alone; they represent a larger discourse of fear in media rep-
resentations of immigrants. For example, Massey and Pren (2012) showed that US
newspapers’ strategic word choices (‘crisis’, ‘flood’, ‘invasion’, etc.) in their immigra-
tion coverage push their audiences in more xenophobic, nativist directions. Framing
migration in terms of crises provides the opportunity for some Americans to feel
vindicated in their belief that immigrants who do not look American threaten the
preservation of tradition, national identity, and culture (Waters and Pineau, 2015).
In the post-9/11 era, fearing the loss of Eurocentric cultures and traditions is also
rife with anti-Muslim xenophobia (IRDP, 2018; Nguyen, 2005). As recently seen with
President Trump’s Executive Order 13769, often referred to as the Muslim ban or
travel ban, this fear is conveniently distilled into and conflated with national security
concerns. The rise of undocumented migration has also seemingly become a national
security concern, as well as a timely opportunity for ‘bureaucrats, politicians, and
pundits’ to harness a politics of fear directed towards undocumented immigrants
and ­immigrants more generally (Massey et al., 2016). Immigrants are increasingly
characterised in sensationalist terms, e.g. as ‘criminals’, with less attention given to
humanitarian concerns (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015; Santa Ana, 2002). In fact, sen-
sationalised fears about national security have been stretched so wide as to include
undocumented minors in this realm of criminalisation (Boerma, 2014). Divorced
from both facts and empathy, these expressions have real policy implications, as seen
in 2018 with the family separation and zero tolerance policies implemented during
this new, fifth phase of immigration (Chishti and Bolter, 2018).
A politics of fear distorts and ignores facts in ways that compound over time.
Thus, myths about supposed national security threats posed by so-called illegal
immigrants are revised and expanded to encompass and emphasise the potential
burdens (demographic, economic, sociocultural, etc.) placed on American society.
These myths present a devil’s bargain, lumping immigrants into one of two groups:
deserving or undeserving (Desmond and Emirbayer, 2009). However, what exactly
makes a ‘good’, or deserving, immigrant? And how does one ‘deserve’ to migrate to
and remain in the United States? Engaging these types of questions requires taking
an historical perspective and recalling, for example, the myth of the independent
‘bootstrapper’ who, through choice, hard work, and sacrifice and determination,
 Migration and Migrants in the United States 483
achieved eventual success. This idea is tethered to American civic identity, and places
a premium on individual human capital characteristics such as job skills and hard
work as the determining factors for who deserves to come to and remain in the
United States. This creates expectations that all immigrants must somehow earn
their keep in order to deserve to stay.
The deservingness trope has its roots in American colonial history, drawing espe-
cially from harsh English poor laws which provided little to no social welfare for
those falling outside of the ‘worthy’ poor – African Americans and American Indians
especially (Iceland, 2013: 131). Upon the founding of American settler colonies,
immigration worked in tandem with colonisation and coercion to frame society as
a collection of equals and unequals or, following the nation’s independence, citizens
and non-citizens.5 The United States created its first naturalisation laws in 1790, lim-
iting citizenship privileges to those who were free and White, residing in the United
States for at least two years, and possessing ‘good moral character (GMC)’ (Cohn,
2015). To this day, the criterion of GMC is used to help determine who is and is not
‘worthy’ of citizenship status (USCIS, 2020). Importantly, these determinations are
implicitly bound to racial and ethnic (i.e. White European vs. ‘other’) identity. They
emerge as forms of racial domination in institutional and interpersonal contexts,
grouping people into categories wrongly conceived as ‘natural’, ‘unchangeable’, and
‘timeless’ based on their phenotype, ancestry, or both (Desmond and Emirbayer,
2009). Racial domination, therefore, is also a form of invention, especially in terms
of how legal boundaries are drawn: determinations of worth lead some to believe
that some immigrants are an inherent good to society and the heart of the American
civic ideal, while criteria are simultaneously invented to adjudicate others as illegal,
a process that expands or contracts Whiteness over time (Desmond and Emirbayer,
2009; Lee, 2015).
Many conservatives today advocate for enhanced border and worksite enforce-
ment, the deportation of immigrants that commit crimes (including those who cross
the border illegally), and the creation of citizenship pathways for legal immigrants
who neither take away American jobs nor pose threats to national security. How-
ever, the issue of assimilation has always been and remains a concern. Following his
election in 2016, President Trump proposed a solution for creating citizenship path-
ways for the so-called good immigrants coming from Mexico. Ambiguity around
what constitutes ‘good’ places the burden of assimilation on the immigrant and,
given the changing national origins of immigrants in the post-1965 era, dispropor-
tionately on immigrants of colour.
Romero (2008) hits the nail on the head in saying that ‘concern over immi-
gration to the United States is inseparable from stereotyping Mexicans as “illegal
aliens” and socially constructing Mexicans as criminal, foreign, and the other’. She
has also critiqued migration scholars – particularly those in the social sciences –
for being neither mindful nor reflexive in their constructions of immigrants, espe-
cially with respect to how assimilation is conceptualised in normative, racialised
terms. As the demographic profile of the United States shifted during the fourth

5 
See Donato and Gabaccia (2015) on the transatlantic slave trade and Hoxie (2001) on
the assimilation of indigenous peoples.
484 Christopher Levesque and Jack DeWaard
phase of i­mmigration, fears emerged that a mainstream White culture would decline
with rising ­immigration and that assimilation – popularly understood as a process
whereby immigrants gradually adopt US values and norms – would also decline.
This fear has subsequently been mapped onto perceptions of immigrants as crimi-
nals, welfare thieves, and public charges.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric framed in opposition to big government has also been
effective in altering and solidifying partisan identity among many US-born Whites,
converting many erstwhile Democrats into Republicans (Abrajano and Hajnal,
2015). Alba and Foner (2017) note that ‘the most virulent negative attitudes and
the most pronounced anti-diversity voting patterns are frequently found in places
with few immigrants and low ethnoracial diversity’. Take, for example, states like
Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that flipped from voting majority Democrat
in 2012 to majority Republican in 2016, and helped decide the 2016 election of
President Trump. Alba and Foner (2017) call this phenomenon the ‘geography of
polarization’ that is characterised by a fear of the stranger in areas with relatively
small immigrant populations. This relates more broadly to Allport’s (1954) contact
hypothesis, which states that interpersonal contact is effective in reducing inter-
group prejudice.
In the fifth phase of immigration, criminals are not the only ones who are viewed
as undeserving of US residence and associated benefits. Perceptions remain lodged
in the country’s public consciousness that it is the ‘lazy migrant’ who siphons the
majority of public benefits today. This perception has helped to galvanise those who
believe that undocumented and documented immigrants do not deserve to be in the
United States (Marchevsky and Theoharis, 2006; Viladrich, 2012). Concerns that
newly-arrived migrants would exploit public benefits was a major issue in the early
1990s, and policy measures such as California’s Proposition 187 were enacted in
1994 to deny undocumented immigrants access to non-emergency healthcare, public
schooling, and other public benefits (Park, 2011). The 1996 Personal Responsibil-
ity Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) – also known as the Welfare
Reform bill – also drew a sharp line between citizen and non-citizen benefit allo-
cation at the federal level, with the intention to promote the effortful immigrant –
idealised as hard-working and cost-saving to the American public – and deter those
supposedly undeserving of US reception and hospitality. Following the passage of
PRWORA, most immigrants who were in the United States legally became ineligible
for means-tested federal benefit programmes, including public health insurance and
cash assistance, for their first five years of US residence. Deservingness was there-
fore partially contingent on duration of residence in the United States. Thus, welfare
policy, like immigration policy, determines who stands inside or outside the law
(Bambra et al., 2005).
Limiting the use of social benefits also holds political consequences for immigrant
health. While some claim that health is a basic human right, in practice, the discourse
of deservingness leads to inadequate healthcare for many immigrants, disentitling
their access to medical services while having them instead cope with trying not to
get sick (Joseph and Marrow, 2017; Marrow, 2012). Even with legal permanent
residence or acquired US citizenship, many low-income, medically underserved and
uninsured immigrants in the United States face an uphill battle in ensuring positive
outcomes for their health and well-being. Following the passage of the Affordable
 Migration and Migrants in the United States 485
Care Act (ACA) in 2010, its provisions have been successful in making healthcare
­affordable and improving access to care for US citizens, but these measures have also
excluded non-citizens and undocumented immigrants (Capps et al., 2013; Chavez,
2012; Marrow and Joseph, 2015; Sanchez et al., 2017). Even though undocumented
immigrants are excluded from receiving ACA benefits, some safety net organisations
which serve undocumented immigrants (such as Federally Qualified Health Centers)
have received expanded funding from the ACA – though, with additional funding in
place, increased formalisation at these organisations has unintentionally led to more
barriers to care for these underserved immigrant groups (López-Sanders, 2017).
Large reforms such as the ACA have resultantly reinforced visible inequities for these
same immigrant populations, though such coverage gaps may continue to widen as
Republicans continue their attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare (Castañeda
and Mulligan, 2017). States that have resisted the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, such
as Florida, have already made unauthorised immigrants living there feel increasingly
unworthy, undeserving, and excluded as they are denied access to care (Calvo et al.,
2017). ‘This process’, Marrow and Joseph (2015) write, ‘makes unauthorized immi-
grants more visible among the remaining uninsured’.
These sorts of health policies have emerged, in part, from the well of political
discourse that creates and sustains normative distinctions about which immigrants
‘deserve’ care and which do not (Holmes, 2013; Light and Terrasse, 2017; Menjívar,
2006; Sargent, 2012; Willen, 2012). The threat of apprehension and deportation
has also prevented immigrants, including those who migrated to the United States
legally or were born in the country, from signing up for marketplace or expansion-
based health coverage (Carey, 2015; Ortega et al., 2015). In interviews with social
workers and healthcare providers in California, Park (2011: 18) reported that some
low-income immigrant mothers hold a ‘dual fear’ of the consequences of their nega-
tive immigration status. On the one hand, they worry that applying for health cover-
age will impact their ability to remain in the United States. On the other hand, they
worry about the cost of prenatal care without health insurance. This fear, which is
a reflection of exclusion, myth, and a politics of fear and deservingness, is expressed
in immigration status.

Fear of and for Legal Residence

Deservingness in the fifth phase of immigration means, first and foremost, that for
an immigrant to be good, they must also be legal. To approach the deservingness
question, one must therefore consider what Flores and Schachter (2018: 839) call
the legal and ‘social construction of illegality’. The issue of legal status has become a
flashpoint of fear among both the US- and foreign-born in the age of Trump. While
illegality is ultimately a construction (De Genova, 2002; Donato and Armenta, 2011),
it is important to recognise that it is legally and materially real in its consequences.
Legal status thus constitutes a new ‘axis of stratification’ that is similar to other axes
like race, class, and gender (Menjívar and Abrego, 2012: 1383; Iceland, 2009).
Previous administrations well before Trump have acted on fears of legal residence.
Under the Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, policies were enacted to promote
greater enforcement and deportations of undocumented immigrants at the US border,
with working-class Latinos often the targets of racially-motivated detentions and search-
486 Christopher Levesque and Jack DeWaard
es (Arriola, 1996; Benitez, 1994; Romero, 2008; Vargas, 2001). However, workplace
enforcement was not a key priority (Chishti et al., 2018). President Trump, by contrast,
has expanded the focus on border enforcement to the US interior during the fifth phase
of immigration, capitalising on myths like the so-called criminal immigrant. Along with
President Trump’s de facto family separation policy, these developments have resulted in
new spatial patterns of immigration enforcement across US regions and the rural–urban
continuum, as well as racial and ethnic profiling of those who look foreign as criminal
strangers based on perceived social traits like race, ethnicity, and even occupation.
Legal status has always been a social position located within a hierarchy of laws.
Legal status determines immigrants’ access to goods and services, while also shaping
their sense of identity and belonging in US society. Whether one possesses legal status
plays a critical role in a host of subsequent outcomes, including, for example, in the
areas of education, employment, home ownership, healthcare, and access to social ben-
efits (Bean et al., 2015; Castañeda and Melo, 2014; Gonzales, 2011; Hall et al., 2010;
Massey, 2014; Massey and Bartley, 2005; McConnell, 2013; Menjívar and Kanstroom,
2014; Van Hook and Balistreri, 2006). Legal status grants admission for some to immi-
grate and live life freely, while restricting the movement and entitlements of others
(Hao, 2007), thereby producing immigrants who are documented, undocumented, and
‘quasi-documented’ depending on how laws are implemented (Menjívar and Lakhani,
2016: 1834). Since his election, President Trump’s embrace of the ‘Latino threat narra-
tive’ has led to increased enforcement and deportation. As a result, legal status in the
fifth phase of immigration has become much more crucial in determining one’s life
chances as well as a source of fear for immigrants themselves.
With the rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
programme in 2017 (which the US Supreme Court later overturned in June 2020),
President Trump has attempted to make legal status increasingly more liminal in the
fifth phase of immigration. The threat of being apprehended and removed has been
expanded to include marginalised non-citizens who legally migrated to the United
States. Likewise, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has turned away
from its service-driven mission to join Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in
focusing on immigration enforcement. Though USCIS has historically filed a relatively
low number of Notices to Appear (NTAs) for immigration court proceedings, a recent
memorandum required USCIS to issue more NTAs, compelling those who reside
legally in the United States whose applications or petitions were denied – e.g. students,
families, professional workers, and others – to appear before an immigration court for
removal proceedings rather than permitting them to leave on their own by a certain
date, as is longstanding practice (Lawrence and Chen, 2018).
Not surprisingly, the dual fears felt among some immigrants regarding their ‘neg-
ative’ immigration status have expanded to other immigrant groups. One example is
those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The Trump administration announced
in 2017 that it would not extend TPS for immigrants from Haiti, Sudan, and Nica-
ragua, saying that those conditions in these countries had improved enough for the
roughly 65,000 TPS recipients to return home. Another example is President Trump’s
resurrection of the ‘public charge’ rule, in which visas and green cards would become
more difficult to obtain for immigrants already possessing legal status. Those dis-
qualified are considered to be a public charge. An archaic designation from the
1800s, a public charge can be defined as an immigrant primarily dependent on ser-
 Migration and Migrants in the United States 487
vices rendered by the government, such as the Medicare Part D low-income subsidy,
food stamps, or Section 8 public housing vouchers. Building on Clinton-era reforms
which denied welfare eligibility for poor immigrant children and families, President
Trump has sought to limit green cards for immigrants who not only depend on cash
benefits, but also rely on healthcare or other non-monetary sources of government
support. In the process, these actions are likely to redefine and reshape who is likely
to become a public charge in the future.
Legal status is also felt intergenerationally. The precariousness of a parent’s ability
to stay in the United States affects how future generations feel about their own legal-
ity, even if born in the United States (Bean et al., 2015). It also leads some immigrants
to reconsider using social benefits to which they are entitled, fearing that they may
be identified through government surveillance despite their legal status. This creates
new modes of immigrant and non-citizen vulnerability to abuse and discrimination
(Chacón, 2017). This dynamic also speaks to the chilling effect of what Menjívar and
Abrego (2012: 1381) call ‘legal violence’ – the ways in which laws exert influence and
control to obstruct and impede immigrants’ arrival and incorporation trajectories.
The legal violence that is being carried out in the fifth phase of immigration
phase has adversely affected refugees, as well. In September 2018, President Trump
announced plans to limit the annual number of refugees admitted into the United
States to 30,000 (compared to 110,000 the previous year). To put this change in
context, the United States has historically led the world in refugee resettlement (Con-
nor and Krogstad, 2018). Since 1980, the United States has accepted nearly three-
quarters of resettled refugees worldwide. In the fifth phase of immigration, President
Trump has lowered this bar dramatically for a programme that resettles foreigners
fleeing war, violence, and persecution. Policies of restriction like the travel ban and
the reduction in the refugee cap are meant to be, in the language of the Trump
administration, ‘deterrents’. In truth, these deterrents are simply new versions of
paper walls that are matters of life and death for those forced to leave their country
in order to escape conflict, persecution, or natural disaster.
Lastly, the expansion of presidential power under President Trump – such as his use
of executive orders and the transformation of US immigration courts – has impacted
immigrants more broadly (Alvarez, 2018). His administration has underfunded visa
adjudication, fast-tracked court hearings for the most vulnerable immigrant popula-
tions, and denied green card applications containing clerical errors. All of these are
unprecedented measures and undergird the transition to the fifth phase of immigra-
tion. There have also been calls for enhanced vetting techniques for those applying for
H-1B and other work-related visas. Proposals have included increasing the number
of interviews as the petition is adjudicated and requiring all green card applicants to
interview in-person even if evidence on the applicant’s case was not asked for previ-
ously. An additional proposal from the Department of Homeland Security calls for
ending spousal work authorisation for specific temporary skilled workers on H-1B
visas (Chishti et al., 2018). Taken together, even those who supposedly play by the
rules may be affected by President Trump’s immigration policies. Bureaucratic hurdles
and ‘paper walls’, as well as the executive branch’s largely unchecked restructuring of
the US immigration court system, is a potent reminder that legal status is an elastic
tool of subjugation and fear affecting a broad range of immigrants, both undocu-
mented and documented.
488 Christopher Levesque and Jack DeWaard
A Fifth Phase of US Immigration: Discussion and Conclusion

Much of what has led to this historical moment is similar to previous immigration
phases; yet, two key emphases – a highly divisive discourse and rapidly-changing
policies of fear – have taken hold in the fifth phase. Throughout the first four immi-
gration phases laid out by Martin and Midgely (2006), the United States has always
had a wellspring of nativism, exclusion, and white supremacist ideology at its dis-
posal. President Trump’s political success is due in large part to his ability to tap into
this wellspring; but the uniqueness of his rise to the presidency is not the defining
feature of the new phase of immigration. The fifth phase of immigration evokes
long-evolved iterations of fear that have coalesced in very new ways, including,
(i) US-born Whites’ fears of cultural decline in an age of demographic change and
deindustrialisation; (ii) a ‘politics of fear’ grounded in notions of deservingness and
accompanying ‘threat narratives’ espoused by politicians, the media, and the public;
and (iii) fears of (among the US-born) and for (among the foreign-born) access to
and the preservation of legal residence in the United States.
The discourse and actions of President Trump during the fifth phase of immi-
gration have led to polarising interpretations of what it means to be an American.
In a period of pronounced demographic and economic change, native-born resent-
ment and backlash specific to the fifth phase of immigration is tied to both the geo-
graphic diversification of immigrants and a dread of ‘mainstream’ cultural decline
that must be availed via nativist exclusion of immigrants, particularly immigrants of
colour. President Trump, like many people in the United States today, has harnessed
and weaponised these fears. In the process, he has moved the needle in ways that
have encouraged the proliferation of racialised myths of deservingness and illegality,
thereby affecting the future of immigration to and immigrants in the United States.
‘Make America Safe Again’, the tagline of the first night of the 2016 Republican
National Convention is but one reflection of these underlying currents.
The prospect of making America safe again ultimately helps to sustain a politics
of fear in this new phase of immigration. It also means criminalising immigrants as
a means to deter their entry into the country or restrict their access to social benefits
in the United States. The Trump administration has employed a ‘zero tolerance’ pol-
icy at the US border, vowing to prosecute those who enter the United States without
inspection and even separate parents from children in the process, including parents
seeking asylum, which is not illegal. Criminal prosecution of unlawful US border
crossings has expanded beyond Bush and Obama era policies, where those travelling
with minor children were detained, interviewed to determine the merit of their ‘cred-
ible fear’, released, and then expected to return to court at a later date to be judged
based on their interview. Today, what counts as ‘credible fear’ has fundamentally
changed. Historically, the fear of immigrants, rather than the fear felt by immigrants,
has always been more credible in the eyes of the law. Today, in the fifth phase of
immigration, legal status is increasingly a means to criminalise those ‘undeserving’
to migrate to the United States.
The precariousness and liminality of legal status today is likely to become the major
focus of immigration discourse and policy going forward. There are also growing
concerns that those who do possess legal status may see their ability to remain in
 Migration and Migrants in the United States 489
the United States rescinded (Lind, 2018). As the legal immigration apparatus shifts
its focus to devote more time and energy to denaturalisation in the fifth phase of
immigration, unprecedented (and highly symbolic) changes have already occurred
for agencies such as USCIS, whose mission statement in 2005 was to ‘secure Amer-
ica’s promise as a nation of immigrants’. In February 2018, the agency’s director
informed employees that the original statement had been revised to ‘guide us in the
years ahead’, thereby vanishing Kennedy’s original civic ideal (Jordan, 2018). As
bureaucratic institutions continue to shapeshift and align with the fears inherent in
the fifth phase of immigration, the residual effects of President Trump’s discourse
and policies will have even deeper implications for how legal status is constructed
and enforced in the future.
Finally, we would be remiss not to mention that the developments described in
this chapter have been met with resistance from many immigrants and US-born citi-
zens, immigrant community organisations, and those in positions of power who have
advocated for immigrant healthcare, legal defence funds, policy research institutes,
immigrant-led grassroots organisations, and more (Gleeson and Sampat, 2018; Hoff-
man, 2018). Local- and state-based groups are also expanding initiatives to promote
immigrants’ political participation and inclusion (De Graauw and Bloemraad, 2017;
Greene, 2017; Pottie-Sherman, 2018). We mention these developments because it is
important to recognise the multitude of responses to the highly divisive discourse,
emotions of resentment and concrete instances of backlash towards the immigrant
Other, rapidly-changing policies of fear in this new, fifth phase of immigration.

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 23
Segregation, Social Mix,
and Gentrification
Nexuses
Sandra Annunziata, Loretta Lees, and
Clara Rivas Alonso

Introduction

Spatial segregation, social mix, and gentrification are three topics related to a similar
problem. In this entry, we will explore their meanings and their interconnections.
Spatial segregation has existed since the beginnings of civilisation when cities were
settled. Today it is a feature in many metropolises around the world and is con-
sidered to be one of the most common problems in urban spaces. It describes the
concentration and residential separation of social groups within a wider population
either by ethnicity, income, or race. The issue of social groups and their spatial seg-
regation is central to human geography, sociology, anthropology, health, planning,
and policy studies, fields that have scrutinised different forms of spatial segrega-
tion and their formation, sometimes in different ways. Segregated is considered the
opposite of what a city should be: a place of interaction and encounters that happen
in a dynamic, diverse, and socially mixed urban environment that facilitates social
mobility and emancipation and, in so doing, roots social justice in space.
A specific field of urban studies, gentrification studies (see Lees et al., 2008), has
focused on the trajectories of change of low-income neighbourhoods turning into
areas of a higher socioeconomic status, in some cases into very wealthy enclaves,
with the consequent displacement of the original residents. Increasingly the causes of
gentrification processes have been state-led policies aimed at desegregating and de-
concentrating poverty, and at producing new ideals of urban living. Notwithstand-
ing their success in the public arena, in the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, the
Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Australia
policies of social mixing have been criticised for their unexpected displacement-
related effects and gentrification (Bridge et al., 2011). Despite their goal of targeting

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
498 Sandra Annunziata, Loretta Lees, and Clara Rivas Alonso
deprived areas and combating poverty, policies targeting segregated areas, known
as social-mix policies or mixed communities policies, have taken the form of urban
redevelopment and regeneration strategies, usually including tenurial diversifica-
tion to attract the middle classes into inner cities (once Black ghettos in the United
States), traditional working-class territories, and public neighbourhoods in deterio-
rating city centres or the metropolitan peripheries of European cities; and stabilising
informal settlements across much of Latin America and Turkey. These policies and
programmes have been supported by discourses on social stigma (territorial stigma-
tisation) about urban areas and their residents leading to moral and symbolic dis-
placements that anticipate direct and indirect displacements.
In this chapter we will explore the relationship between spatial segregation and
gentrification focusing, in particular on social-mix and anti-poverty programmes
that target ‘deprived’ and ‘poor’ areas in different cities and spaces worldwide,
for these have been criticised for being deliberately ambiguous in their effects and
for boosting a strategy of ‘positive’ gentrification. Of course, gentrification, as we
discuss, is also a form of segregation, but it describes the change from a low-
income area to an area of higher-income segregation. Exploring the nexus between
segregation and gentrification will help the reader to critically engage with and
problematise the way in which spatial segregation is framed as a problem and con-
sequently addressed in different policy contexts. The chapter concludes with notes
on the growing field of anti-gentrification policy measures that seek to prevent
and mitigate gentrification (as a form of segregation) and displacement in different
parts of the world.

Spatial Segregation: Meaning, Main Causes, and Spatial

Manifestations

The concept of segregation describes the separation, discrimination, and concentration

of social groups within a wider population either by ethnicity, (upper or lower)
income, or race. It means literally an act of separation and it is in its nature discrim-
inatory. However, it describes discrimination along different lines of differences that
resonate from different social stratification systems in different historical periods.
Its institutional roots date back to the period of European colonialism when spatial
division became a tool for the colonial settler to dominate indigenous populations
(Nightingale, 2012). It was originally used in the British colonies of Asia and, infa-
mously so, in South Africa. Segregation intensified in societies which were socially
and economically polarised, characterised by intense ethno-racial divisions and
immigration, and became more evident in cities during capitalist industrial urbanisa-
tion, with the commodification of land and the consolidation of the ‘working classes’
as a specific social group.
Among the causes of spatial segregation are root causes and structural causes.
The root causes are discriminatory practices related to race (externally imposed)
and to ethnicity (a collective ratified identity). As argued by Ruiz-Tagle (2018), in
order to understand the causes of segregation a consideration of voluntariness is
crucial. While race is an externally imposed category, it is difficult to think that a
racially discriminated group would voluntarily segregate itself, segregation is usu-
 Segregation, Social Mix, and Gentrification  499
ally an imposed isolation. But ethnicity is related to identity and it can be a form
of belonging, in this case people tend to semi-consciously segregate themselves for
protection and support. Alternatively, in socially exclusive neighbourhoods, wealthy
groups choose voluntarily to live side by side with people of the same socioeconomic
status. However, whether or not social groups voluntarily segregate themselves, the
focus of research on segregation has tended to be on concentrations of poverty as
opposed to concentrations of rich and super-rich people. The segregated isolation
and lack of interclass exchange of the rich have not been tended to be framed as
problematic in comparison to the prescriptions for the social segregation of the poor,
at least in policy.
In terms of structural causes, spatial segregation often happens in societies socially
and economically polarised and is considered a negative consequence of macrostruc-
tural factors such as poverty/lack of wealth distribution, income disparity, a weak or
absent welfare state; migration flows, people movements (such as white flight in the
United States, suburbanisation and dispersal urbanisation in European cities), and
postcolonial trends and related patterns of non-integration; housing policies and
land use regulations that facilitate the formation of exclusionary zones and spatially
segregated areas, and so on.
Spatial segregation assumes different spatial manifestations and connotations
in different contexts. If we consider segregation as it appeared in the twentieth
century, we have to recognise, for example, that in South African cities segregation
was perpetuated by state-led policies known as apartheid which resulted in one of
the largest mass displacements ever in urban areas for racial purposes. Apartheid
was politically sanctioned racial segregation. The spatial separation of races was
made law in South Africa in 1948 after the National Party assumed political con-
trol. Under the Population Registration Act, all South Africans were classified as
Black, White, Coloured, or Asian. The system worked at three spatial scales: the
personal scale (personal discrimination, for example, separate seats in restaurants,
on buses, and so on), the residential scale (under the Group Areas Act residential
space was allocated for the exclusive use of one racial class), and the national scale
(the homelands were designated for the occupation of the main Black/African tribal
groups) (see Robinson, 1995). The South African government argued that apart-
heid was a positive policy that protected a pluralistic society (see Mitchell, 2000:
250–255). Apartheid supporters saw segregation as a means of allowing for the full
development of each race – apartheid had a clear spatial strategy and used physical
and environmental barriers such as superhighways, rail-lines, rivers, empty tracts of
land, etc. to physically separate and police people (on the social and cultural impacts
of this see Western, 1996).
In the United States, segregationists imported the word ‘segregation’ from the
British colonies to describe Jim Crow laws, and in 1910 Whites in the city of Balti-
more passed a ‘segregation ordinance’ mandating separate Black and White urban
neighbourhoods. As such, in the United States the study of segregation has been
mainly dominated by studies on racial divisions (Black and White populations) and
related to the institutional formation of the Black inner-city ghetto by practices
of red lining, housing discrimination, and, indeed, public housing provision. The
American Black ghetto is an internally homogeneous enclave and inhabited mainly
by working-class Black Americans (Jargowsky, 1997; Massey and Denton, 1993).
500 Sandra Annunziata, Loretta Lees, and Clara Rivas Alonso
In time, the abandonment and disinvestment that followed deindustrialisation in US
cities resulted in the filtering down of inner residential areas and in the formation
of the ‘hyperghetto’, ‘characterized by double relegation on the basis of race and
class and reinforced by a state policy of welfare withdrawal and urban abandon-
ment’ (Wacquant, 2007a: 114). It is this segregated, Black inner-city ghetto that
became the focus of desegregation through HOPE VI policies in the United States
(see Hyra, 2008).
Due to the extreme social polarisation of Latin American cities, segregation there
is mainly described as a spatially constructed socioeconomic divide with spatial
manifestations, e.g. informal settlements such as favelas in Brazil and villas Miseria
in Argentina. Throughout most of the twentieth century, Latin American cities ex-
hibited a pattern of residential segregation similar to the European, pre-industrial,
compact city model, especially that of Paris. That is, higher-income/social groups
concentrated in the central area, containing the best quality housing construction
and architecture, with physical and social decay increasing towards the periphery.
But perhaps the most notable difference between the Latin American upper class
and their European counterparts is the faster pace at which they then deserted the
centre of their cities. In Latin American cities the areas inhabited by the very poor
are much more socially homogenous than the residential areas of the upper class.
The Latin American city reveals other forms of residential segregation in addition
to that of socioeconomic group. There are racial, ethnic, and age differences in cities
that have caused segregation, but these have been comparatively understudied (some
exceptions include Telles, 1992; Germain and Polèse, 1996; Hiernaux, 2000). More
recently, the gentrification of Latin American cities (see special issue of Urban Geog-
raphy, edited by López-Morales et al., 2016) has caused new segregation trends and
poorer groups are yet again being pushed out of the central areas of the cities.
In Europe in the 1990s scholars concerned about social polarisation in European
cities used analyses of segregation extensively to explore residential patterns, espe-
cially related to ethnicity and class (Musterd, 2006). European cities are generally
characterised by a more complex social segregation landscape and lower levels of
segregation compared to North American and Latin American cities. Different to
the twentieth-century horizontal segregation and suburbanisation in Latin American
and US cities, European cities saw vertical segregations, pockets of poverty, semi-
informal settlements, and ethnic enclaves (Maloutas and Fujita, 2012). Vertical seg-
regation, that is the social disparities between different floors of the same building,
is often presented as a typical feature of Mediterranean cities, indeed some have sug-
gested that this vertical complexity does not allow for gentrification (see Pfirsch and
Semi, 2016). Ethnic enclaves (such as Chinatown, Banglatown, Jewish quarters) are
ethnically constructed but more heterogeneous in class composition, with solid net-
works of opportunity such as ethnic entrepreneurship. And in some European cities
(e.g. London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, Madrid) public housing has resulted in the
formation of socially homogeneous (in term of tenure and income) enclaves which
in turn have been described as segregated areas. However, public housing neighbour-
hoods and declining banlieues (suburbs) in France (and in the majority of European
cities) are actually very mixed and have become more diverse in terms of ethnic
composition in the last decades (Wacquant, 2007a). For this reason, scholars warn
about assuming a possible global transatlantic convergence around the phenomenon
 Segregation, Social Mix, and Gentrification  501
of segregation in favour of deep historical, geographical, and sociopolitical analyses
that consider specific historical social stratification, migration flows, and postcolo-
nial fault lines in trying to understand the causes and variabilities of segregation to
avoid misleading conceptualisations and the risk of travelling concepts in the policy
field (Bacqué and Charmes, 2016; Bricoccoli and Cucca, 2014; Wacquant, 2007a).
No discussion of ethnic segregation should happen without reference to Boal’s
classic work on ethnonationalist segregation in Belfast, Northern Ireland (see Boal,
2008). He argued that ethnonational differentiation dating from the seventeenth-
century plantation had manifested itself in the high degree of residential segregation
and recurrent violence in the city of Belfast (Boal and Livingstone, 1984). Critically
he used the idea of the ‘frontier’ as an explanatory model to explain the decrease
in interaction and increase in hostilities between the Catholics (wedded to a united
Ireland) and Protestants (wedded to Great Britain). He said ‘future public policies
towards religiously segregated residential areas need careful examination. Should
such areas be allowed to continue in existence, even after redevelopment, or should
urban renewal be used as a desegregating technique?’ (Boal, 2008: 365). To date few
authors have questioned the active desegregation of neighbourhoods, but some have
asked policymakers to also think about the positives of segregation for low-income
communities (Lees, 2008).
Finally, gated communities worldwide now represent a form of voluntary segre-
gation, they are homogeneous in social class terms with a deliberate choice by the
upper-middle classes to isolate themselves in order to affirm their superiority, or for
fear of ‘others’, and in many cases with a specific desire regarding living standards
(Forrest et al., 2017). New studies on gated communities, the super-rich, and their
living patterns, have emerged with the objective of scrutinising how this kind of seg-
regation works in terms of local governance and management and what the implica-
tions are in terms of political engagement and participation in civil society (Atkinson
and Blandy, 2009). The super-rich invest their wealth in gated communities to avoid
participating in redistributive policies (Beaverstock et al., 2004). In the field of gen-
trification studies, cases of super-gentrification (Butler and Lees, 2006; Lees, 2003)
have been redocumented as further encroachment of urban upper-segregation with
consequent displacement pressures (Atkinson et al., 2016, 2017).
According to most scholars, segregation results in economic disadvantage, reduces
educational opportunities, impedes social mobility, and affects unemployment rates.
It also has a negative correlation with school dropout rates and crime (see Cutler
and Glaeser, 1997 on US cities). The relationship between a spatial phenomenon (the
concentration of the poor) and the social problems they have (and their pathologi-
sation) has produced a very powerful social construct, namely the ‘neighbourhood
effect’: the belief that the concentration of poor social groups has negative effects on
their life choices and opportunities. But this assumption – that people born or living
in areas of concentrated poverty have less opportunities to empower themselves than
if they were born in a more socially mixed environment – has been extensively criti-
cised both for the way it frames a complex problem as well as for the type of inter-
vention it justifies (Bridge et al., 2011). Indeed, the negative socioeconomic effects
found by Cutler and Glaeser (1997) have been criticised by authors such as Collins
and Margo (2000) who found no significant correlation between segregation and
the likelihood of employment or single motherhood between 1940 and 1970. This
502 Sandra Annunziata, Loretta Lees, and Clara Rivas Alonso
suggests that some of the negative effects of residential segregation in the United
States emerged primarily due to economic restructuring and the dramatic neighbour-
hood changes of the 1970s (Wilson, 1996). A key question remains as to whether,
and how, racial or ethnic segregation contributes to inequality?
Neighbourhood effect and the geography of opportunity have produced a very
publicly persuasive rhetoric and a system of belief that has nurtured fear and stigma
around the spatial concentration of poor social groups who, as a consequence, have
become the target of specific policies of social mixing. This has had a direct impact
on urban policymaking. Urban policies are strictly dependent on the narratives and
conceptualisations of an urban problem. Area-based policies that target poor neigh-
bourhoods have a long tradition and start from the assumption that public inter-
vention must target deprived areas to combat poverty (Bolt et al., 2010). Several
indicators, such as the Duncan segregation index (see Duncan and Duncan, 1955;
also Massey, 2012), are used to support the identification of poor areas. However,
the definition of a segregated area and the measurement of deprivation in them is
part of the problem and has been a matter of academic debate for decades (e.g. the
sociological debate on multidimensionality and the dissimilarity index in measuring
segregation and inequality). Assumptions about the unequivocally negative nature
of segregation have deeply impacted the targets and the objectives of urban policies
in ambiguous/perverse ways, this is especially the case with social mixing and anti-
poverty measures. In some cases, processes of segregation can produce unexpected
emancipatory outcomes (see Karaman and slam, 2011, on the subtleties between
border construction in a segregated Istanbul neighbourhood, where the fine line
between ‘ghetto effect’ and ‘safe space for the community’ is constantly being con-
structed). And current populist narratives and the rise of the far right in Europe
have made overtly segregating urban policies a reality: in Denmark, for example, the
government has declared certain minority areas to be ‘ghettos’ and enforced a set of
laws that stigmatise and criminalise this population further.

Social Mixing

One of the nexuses between segregation and gentrification is social mixing. The
opposite of segregation, the concept of social mix refers to social diversity in urban
areas (usually related to one, some, or all of social, economic, cultural, and ethnic/
racial diversity). The value of social diversity in cities has long been celebrated by
urbanists. Jane Jacobs (1961) celebrated diversity in the face of functionalist mod-
ernist planning and its consequent zoning practices that produced homogeneous
areas. More recently, Richard Florida has celebrated diversity and tolerance of it as
key factors in making cities successful and in attracting an emerging creative class
(Florida, 2002).
The idea of social mix conjures up the idea of a balanced society and (neighbour-
hood) space, it embraces societal values such as social integration and social equality.
Built upon these premises, the promotion of social-mix policies is a long-standing
planning and policy goal. Indeed, planners and urban designers have long asked
themselves how they might guarantee a diverse, vibrant, and just urban environ-
ment (Fainstein, 2005; Tallen, 2005). However, since the 1990s, work on segrega-
 Segregation, Social Mix, and Gentrification  503
tion, neighbourhood effects, and the pathologisation of poverty, coupled with new
fears about segregation and crime brought ideas of social mix to the fore, and social
mixing became a travelling concept that was incorporated into policy practices in
the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, France, Scandinavia, Italy, Australia,
Canada, and the United States. The main objective of social-mix policies in these
countries is said to be combating and overcoming social segregation and the tradi-
tion of mono tenure in public housing. But the publicly proclaimed goals of poverty
de-concentration and tenurial diversification have hidden a process that Bridge
et al. (2011) have called ‘gentrification by stealth’. Despite its success in policy cir-
cles, social mix remains a controversial issue in scientific debates (Bolt and Van Kem-
pen, 2013).
Social mixing has been seen as, and continues to be seen as, a cure for negative
neighbourhood effects (Manley et al., 2011). Practices of social mixing can assume
different forms in housing and land use practices: from strategies of slum improve-
ment and titling in order to stabilise slum and informal settlements, to the redevel-
opment/regeneration of existing traditional working-class neighbourhoods, in often
(but not always) deteriorating city centres or on the metropolitan peripheries of
cities, involving demolition as well as refurbishment. The latter can also include
strategies to deconcentrate poverty either by promoting tenurial diversification and
attracting the middle classes into the area, introducing mechanisms of quasi-market
social housing for the (lower-) middle classes either in the form of rent-to-buy, right
to buy options or fiscal mechanisms that facilitate homeownership. Although the
policies that aim to attract the middle classes into poor areas have been numer-
ous, the practice of inserting poor residents into upper-status neighbourhoods has
been much less frequent. In addition, inclusionary zoning, a form of urban regula-
tion and land use that concedes density bonuses in exchange for quotas of afford-
able housing, is a practice that has been experimented with in countries such as
the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. Developments that Helbrecht and
Dirksmeier (2012) have called ‘the new downtown’, such as HafenCity in Hamburg,
a large redevelopment project on a brownfield site, have tried very hard to construct
successful social mixing. In HafenCity the developer even went so far as to hire a
sociologist to help facilitate social mixing (see Bruns-Berentelg, 2011).
Despite the fact that a mixed-communities policy has been found to instigate
gentrification, in other words (re)creating a new form of social homogeneity, it con-
tinues to be justified by proclamations of the social benefits that living in a socially
mixed community creates. The positive attributes of social mixing are said to be:
(i) that contact among different social groups results in an increased inclination
and predisposition towards tolerance and acceptance of diversity; (ii) that social
networks and bonds in mixed communities ensure mutual help, social control, and
opportunity; and (iii) mixed communities afford better educated, middle-class, role
models for lower-income groups to learn better/higher-class social and moral norms.
Moreover, those in favour of social mixing believe that affluent residents increase the
local capacities for lobbying on local interests and enhance the geography of oppor-
tunity in terms of employment, social mobility, and wealth (Cheshire, 2007; Galster,
2013). The implication is that opportunity and social mobility are higher when the
wealthiest and the more powerful are concentrated together (and in this case with
poorer groups). The expectations of these types of policies are measured in terms
504 Sandra Annunziata, Loretta Lees, and Clara Rivas Alonso
of employment rates, opportunity, autonomy, self-empowerment, quality of life and
the built environment, interclass interaction, and social networks. Policymakers in
favour of social mixing refer to the positive effect it has in terms of diversity, the
promotion of social cohesion, of social and cultural capital, social mobility, and
integration (Bolt et al., 2010).
Despite the progressive and moral aspirations of the social mixing policy, urban
scholars have criticised it for both its conceptual foundation and its effects (Don-
zelot, 2012; Galster and Friedrichs, 2015; Lees, 2008; Van Kempen and Bolt, 2009).
It has been accused of being an ambiguous rhetorical construct, with its objectives
vaguely defined (Van Kempen and Bolt, 2009) and built upon normative ideas of
living that discredit people trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty (Wacquant, 2007a).
Pretty much like the ‘broken windows’ hypothesis, the relationship of social-mix
policies with neighbourhood effect does not take into consideration historical trajec-
tories of inequality and systemic institutional injustice, among other factors. Impor-
tantly, it deprives subjects of agency. Moreover, it has been accused of providing the
justification for market-oriented policies in line with neoliberal governance.
A comparison among European countries has pointed out that social-mix pol-
icies may produce negative effects by weakening and breaking community ties, and
that it adopts a one-sided, implicit normative and assimilationist idea by which the
lower classes have to embrace the values and norms of the middle classes (Bolt et al.,
2010); that fostering spatial proximity does not necessarily result in genuine encoun-
ters (Bridge et al., 2014); and that discursively emphasising social mixing often does
not imply policy reforms addressing the causes of poverty in the first place (Cheshire,
2011; Le Galès in Bridge et al., 2014). Furthermore, recent studies have proven that
social mixing policies have not been convincing in terms of deconcentrating and
reducing poverty or increasing social mobility. In Chicago, Pattillo (2007) showed
how lower-income indigenous residents had a difficult time mixing with the incom-
ing middle-income residents, and how particular conflicts developed. There were
battles between rich and poor, home owners and renters, in-movers and old timers,
revealing the kind of clashes that can occur due to gentrification. In London, Arbaci
and Rae (2013) found that social-mix policies did not do what was promised in terms
of social and economic mobility, indeed they displaced low-income groups. Similarly,
Hyra (2017) looks at the politics of race and class in the ‘gilded ghetto’ of Wash-
ington DC’s Shaw/U Street, as long-time Black residents are joined, and variously
displaced, by an influx of young, White, relatively wealthy, and/or gay professionals.
Indeed, gentrification scholars have argued that the rhetoric of ‘social mix’ hides an
explicit gentrification strategy with detrimental consequences (displacement) on pre-
existing low-income groups (Bridge et al., 2011; Fernández Arrigoita, 2018; Lees,
2008). As documented by studies that have specifically explored the nexus between
gentrification and social mixing in cities and countries around the world, social-mix
policies have been/are being used as tools to gentrify inner-city neighbourhoods and
exploit high value land (Bridge et al., 2011; Lees, 2008; Lees et al., 2016). In similar
vein, Uitermark (2014) has argued that a distinct integrationist regime for governing
marginality has emerged in western Europe, and he also speculates elsewhere where
various strategies are being used to re/gain control over deprived, often segregated,
territories and populations. Like others before him (e.g. Cheshire, 2007; Lees, 2008)
he asserts that this is about the state managing rather than remedying the situation.
 Segregation, Social Mix, and Gentrification  505
Gentrification

As we have argued, the concepts of segregation, social mix, and gentrification

overlap. However, they look at the same phenomena from different angles. A gentri-
fication lens looks at segregation patterns, social mixing, and displacement of low-
income groups; and gentrification scholars aspire to durable and stable tenure/access
of low-income groups to the city (especially the central city). The term ‘gentrification’
was coined in London, England, by sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe the
rehabilitation and tenurial transformation (from renting to owning) plus consequent
rises in property prices of Victorian houses in inner London. Critically, gentrification
caused displacement of working-class former occupiers by middle-class incomers.
The term and its subsequent theorisation in the Anglo-American world (see Lees
et al., 2008) had a clear critical focus on class (struggle) and housing, and this
remains a distinctive trait of gentrification studies.
The definition of gentrification has been a matter of long debate. In recent
years scholars exploring the growth and relevance of the process worldwide have
followed Smith and William’s assertion that ‘gentrification is a dynamic process
and it is not amenable to overly restrictive definitions’ (1986: 3) and have called
for the use of a broad and elastic definition of gentrification (e.g. Clark, 2005;
Davidson and Lees, 2005) that allows for recognition of the global regularities
of the process as well as the valuable politicisation of the term (Lees et al., 2008,
2016). Clark’s definition is that ‘gentrification is a process involving a change in
the population of land-users such that the new users are of a higher socioeconomic
status than the previous users, together with an associated change in the built
environment through a reinvestment in fixed capital’ (2005: 263). From this defi-
nition, we can easily recognise the core dimensions of the process and their nexus
with social mixing: (i) the reinvestment of capital in the built environment with
direct or indirect state intervention (such as in the form of social mixing policies)
and (ii) the social upgrading of an area by emerging new upper or middle classes
with consequent aesthetic changes to the built environment, as well as changes
to the retail and business offers. To these dimensions is added ‘the most serious
cost of the process’ (Slater, 2011), low-income (direct and indirect) displacement
which is not a concern of social mixing policies but is a serious concern of gentri-
fication scholars.
Since coinage of the term ‘gentrification’ the process has travelled extensively.
In 2002 Neil Smith proclaimed that gentrification had ‘gone global’. However,
in recent years gentrification scholars have argued that it did not go global in
the twenty-first century, it had been global for some time (Lees et al., 2016).
Those same scholars also recognised the limits of Anglo-American hegemony in
conceptualisations of gentrification when considering the process globally (see
Lees, 2012; Lees et al., 2015, 2016; Shin and López-Morales, 2018) and have
nurtured rich debate over the different geographies and practices of gentrifica-
tion around the world. Processes of gentrification have been discussed in detail
in places as distant as Latin America (Urban Geography, 2016) and East Asia
(Urban Studies, 2016).
We should not and cannot rely on Anglo-American theories of gentrification
when investigating the process elsewhere. Lees (2014) suggests that gentrifica-
506 Sandra Annunziata, Loretta Lees, and Clara Rivas Alonso
tion scholars need to connect urban studies better with debates in development
studies and vice versa. For example, Lemanski (2014) discusses the concept of
downward raiding from development studies as an example of gentrification in
South Africa; from the field of development studies scholars are arguing that dis-
placement by and for development has embraced gentrification (e.g. Penz et al.,
2011), and that new geographies of gentrification (in relation to public policies)
are entangled with slum improvements, particularly in ‘southern’ contexts (see
Betancur, 2014; Janoschka and Sequera, 2016, for Latin America; and Ascensao,
2015, for Portugal).
The nexus between social mixing and gentrification can be traced theoretically
in the key explanatory causal models of gentrification theory and their interconnec-
tions: the consumption thesis focused on the cultural dispositions of an emergent
new middle class (and the related emancipatory aspects, see Lees, 2000) and the pro-
duction thesis as related to the rent gap thesis (see Lees et al., 2008), especially at its
intersection with state-led interventions that facilitate ground rent extraction. These
two theses are interdependent and, as pointed out by Slater (2011) (in a reworking
of Ley, 1996), ‘a solid explanation of gentrification in any context must recognise the
importance of production and consumption factors, and how they work together to
result in neighbourhood expressions of class inequality’ (Slater, 2011: 575). How-
ever, both production and consumption factors dovetail with the rhetoric of social
mixing and for this reason we will explore each of them.
In the long-standing cultural explanations of gentrification, the process (espe-
cially classic gentrification) is attributed to the desires of the liberal middle clas-
ses and their location choices which play a crucial role in boosting gentrification.
Studies of first-wave or classic gentrification have argued that the process led to
social mixing as middle-class people moved into working class neighbourhoods, this
social mixing was often seen as emancipatory, as a liberal desire for living with/in
diversity and difference (see Lees, 2000). Lees (2008) talks about how this liberal
desire for diversity was later (re)articulated in social-mix policy. The key here is
agency, the agency of the liberal middle classes and their choosing to live in low-
er-class areas (Ley, 1996).
Discussions of spatial segregation and social mixing usually promote middle-/
upper-class/income groups as desirable, and lower-class/-income groups/the poor as
a problem. The stigmatisation of lower-income groups (Slater, 2018a; Wacquant et
al., 2014) produces justification for the area-based interventions that target deprived
areas (see Paton, 2014) with the final goal of attracting the upper/middle classes. The
class dimension is the most important nexus between gentrification and social mix-
ing, however, gentrification scholars see the in-movement of the middle/upper classes
into working class/poor neighbourhoods as deeply problematic, while policymakers
promoting social mixing see it as a wholly positive thing.
Long before the implementation of policies of social mix, gentrification scholars
questioned whether the interaction/proximity/cohabitation of the middle class
(moving and settling in former working-class neighbourhoods) with pre-existing
low-income communities could be beneficial for both, and more importantly for the
latter. Similarly, the assumption beyond social mixing, in relation to the practices of
neoliberalism in cities that embrace neoliberal ideology, is that the effect of living in a
socially mixed environment, where the lower classes live side by side with the upper/
 Segregation, Social Mix, and Gentrification  507
middle classes, will result in social, economic, and even cultural ‘trickle’ down to the
lower classes improving their life chances.
However, as discussed in the previous section, gentrification scholars have
also documented how mixed-community policies have led to displacement of the
very groups that are supposed to benefit – displacement of working class/indige-
nous/pre-existing low-income groups. The result being displacement of one form
of social homogeneity (segregation) for another. Social-mix policies espouse and
indeed rely on the liberal value of social/ethnic diversity (cosmopolitanism) and
try to socially engineer diversity. The idea of social mixing is of course hard to
argue against, but when it is used politically to sell programmes of gentrification
it is deeply problematic. For instance, in London the regeneration/renewal of
council estates is sold through the guise of mixed communities policy – coun-
cil estates, seen as socially homogeneous areas of poverty are demolished and
rebuilt as new mixed communities (Lees, 2014). The reality, however, in London
and many other places, is that the original working class/poor residents do not
get to return and are relocated and displaced in suboptimal residential locations
out of central London and even out of London altogether; or if they are lucky
enough to get to move back, are forced to live in a totally different community
to what they had before (experiencing phenomenological displacement) (Arbaci
and Rae, 2013).
The nexus between gentrification and social mixing can also be traced in the
production factors of gentrification. Production theorists attribute a key role to
real estate and developer’s investments in the redevelopment and rehabilitation
of abandoned and/or deprived areas as a way to extract profit from the rent gap
that has been produced in the area after a period of disinvestment. The opportu-
nity for profitable investment is explained by Neil Smith’s (1979) rent gap theory
(see Slater, 2018b, for a more recent discussion of the influence of rent gap theory
globally).
For Smith, gentrification processes could be explained by the search for capital for
profit maximisation and financial investment, which he described as ‘the preference
for profit, or, more accurately, a sound financial investment’ (1979: 540), in areas
characterised by disinvestment and abandonment. As disinvestment in a particular
district intensifies, it creates lucrative profit opportunities for developers, investors,
homebuyers, and local government as they seek to take advantage of the gap bet-
ween the current low value and the almost certainly higher future value. Crucial to
Smith’s argument was the ever-fluctuating phenomenon of ground rent: simply the
charge that landlords are able to demand (via private property rights) for the right to
use land and its appurtenances (the buildings placed on it and the resources embed-
ded within it), usually received as a stream of payments from tenants but also via any
asset appreciation captured at resale. For Smith (1979) ‘capital depreciation in the
inner city’ (p. 543), very much like in low-income segregated areas, meant that there
was likely to be an increasing divergence between capitalised ground rent (the actual
quantity of ground rent that is appropriated by the landowner, given the present land
use) and potential ground rent (the maximum that could be appropriated under the
land’s ‘highest and best use’). When the gap between the two was at its highest, it
was the best time to invest and was usually the turning point from disinvestment to
reinvestment and gentrification.
508 Sandra Annunziata, Loretta Lees, and Clara Rivas Alonso
Slater (2018b) in his analysis of rent gaps, argues that the usefulness of rent gap
theory in contemporary gentrification sits along three lines. First, rent gap theory is a
theory of the state’s role in creating the economic conditions for gentrification in ‘an
epoch of vicious state-led accumulation strategies, and the ever-sophisticated muta-
tion of neoliberal urbanism’ (Brenner et al., 2010). In the production of rent gaps,
the state plays a crucial role because it provides laws, tools, and regulations that
facilitate and boost private investment in the development sector. The state has both
a political role and an active economic role up to the point that the rent gap would
not be closed in many cases without state interventions. As Lees et al. (2016) have as-
serted in their exploration of gentrification globally, ‘the key actor in planetary gen-
trification is the state – neoliberal or authoritarian’. (p. 109); furthermore, the state
allied with private capital (or directly functioning as a corporation) has the ability
to amend legal, political, and social frameworks in order to impose privatisation of
(normally already stigmatised) urban spaces.
Second, rent gap theory helps us to understand land speculation, that is how and
why more and more capital is being invested in search of rents and future interest
gains, rather than investing in productive activities. Speculation testifies to a parasitic
economy characterised by ground rent dispossession which occurs via land grabbing,
evictions, and displacements and which is the hallmark of contemporary urbanisa-
tion and shows little sign of retreating on a global scale. Third, the formation of rent
gap opportunities by state sponsored private investment (state-led gentrification) is
related to the production of territorial stigmatisation. Territorial stigma works as
discursive and symbolic practices that negatively label neighbourhoods and their
inhabitants with the purpose of providing justification for public interventions that
stimulate and help economic investment and profit making (Kallin and Slater, 2014).
Stigmatisation also works as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as explored by authors such
as Van Kempen and Şule Özüekren (1998) who showed how segregated neighbour-
hoods that had been stigmatised as ‘urban hellholes’ (Wacquant, 2007b: 67) became
the focus of multifaceted attacks which tried to make them disappear physically or
symbolically.
Segregation then even acts as a pulling factor when cities attempt to pull investment
in after decades of disinvestment, facilitating speculative behaviours in real estate.
Gentrification scholars have thus argued that policymakers and local and national
governments have utilised negative discourses around the issues of social exclusion
and segregation to sell and indeed neutralise (hide) what are actually pro-gentri-
fication policies. In other terms, policies of ‘social mix’ and ‘mixed communities’
have been boosted using the rhetorics of social inclusion and social uplift with the
goal of activating state intervention and public policies in traditional working-class
areas of deteriorating city centres or on the metropolitan periphery in Europe and
North America, and stabilising shanty-towns and informal settlements across much
of Latin America, Turkey, and even Africa.
Gentrification scholars have questioned policies of social mix along several lines.
First, they reveal that social-mix policies have created processes of displacement, in
cases of demolition, tenure conversion, etc. Second, the overall reduction of social
housing stock further limits the opportunity for low-income groups to access housing
resulting in concentrations of poverty elsewhere. Third, displacement and its conse-
quent socio-physical distress is worsened by moralistic assumptions that the lower
 Segregation, Social Mix, and Gentrification  509
classes have to assimilate with the middle/upper classes to fit the new social order.
In this respect, policies of social mix have, as said earlier, been criticised for produc-
ing ‘gentrification by stealth’ (Bridge et al., 2011) and new forms of segregation.
Social-mix policymakers present a narrative of positive and genuine cohabitation
of different social classes, one that hides the conflictual dimensions of urban change
as it seeks to accommodate the desires of residents and users of a higher socioeco-
nomic status.
Displacement as a key identifier of gentrification has come under increased
focus regarding its definition, measurement, and importance in gentrifying con-
texts. Those who discredit displacement also dismiss concerns about the neoliberal
shift in housing policies with the introduction of a wide range of market-oriented
policies of privatisation, homeownership conversion and social mixing (Newman
and Wyly, 2006). Over the past decade, despite the global (financial) economic
crisis, critical urban scholars have shown how the expanding geographies of
gentrification have resulted in a magnitude and multiplicity of forms of displace-
ment, and how this has been particularly severe in the Global South, but is also
escalating in Western cities (Lees et al., 2016), creating new instances of urban
segregation.
Countless numbers of people in different parts of the world are experiencing gen-
trification and therein multiple forms of displacement at the same time. They live
under the pressure of displacement due to top down, large, redevelopment projects;
they are directly and indirectly displaced, priced out, and dispossessed of their (fi-
nancialised) homes; discursively excluded by mainstream urban narratives and/or
further stigmatised as the urban underclass as a way to symbolically and morally
erase them from urban public spaces. The symbolic and discursive apparatus that
supports displacement globally has gained attention in academic studies in recent
years. For instance, in Turkey stigmatisation legitimises state intervention, spatial
securisation, and, consequently, gentrification in segregated neighbourhoods (Gönen
and Yonucu, 2012).
Furthermore, recent research on displacement underlines the different lines of vio-
lence and dispossession involved in the process of gentrification – such as ‘unhoming’
(Atkinson, 2015), ‘displacement’ (Davidson, 2009), ‘dispossession by displacement’
(Janoschka and Sequera, 2016), and eviction as an underexplored mechanism of the
reproduction of social marginality (Desmond, 2015). These studies also document
the growing variety of vulnerable groups impacted by displacement or at risk of
being displaced: the urban poor, single, elderly, members of minority groups, young
precarious workers, low-income families, etc. (at the intersection with class, race,
gender, and so on).
Considering that eviction and displacement are mechanisms that produce segre-
gation, social-mix policies create a paradox: in the attempt to desegregate they pro-
duce displacement and further segregation. Part of the critique of these policies of
desegregation and social mixing is that apparently only poor neighbourhoods have
to be desegregated, while upper-class enclaves do not. As Blomley (2004) states:
‘the problem with “social mix”, however, is that it promises equality in the face of
hierarchy. First, as often noted, it is socially one-sided. If social mix is good, argue
local activists, then why not make it possible for the poor to live in rich neighbour-
hoods?’ (p. 99).
510 Sandra Annunziata, Loretta Lees, and Clara Rivas Alonso
Conclusion

Studies of spatial segregation, including the segregation of upper income groups, aim to
explain the social effects of the concentration of social groups (by income, class, race,
ethnicity, etc.). Countering segregation, policies of social mixing are actually rather
ambiguous rhetorical constructs built upon a positive narrative – the aim of a balanced,
mixed community – that is often contrasted with the decline and stigmatisation of a spa-
tially concentrated working class/low-income area. Policies of social mixing sell public
intervention as the combating of poverty but they do not address the structural causes
that produce marginalisation and inequalities in the first place (Cheshire, 2009). In this
respect gentrification scholars offer a useful, critical approach to social-mix policies and
make important arguments for a more just and equitable policy agenda.
That said, as a way to counterbalance the side effects of social mixing policies,
more research is needed on the epistemology and empirical validation of practices
and policies causing displacement and territorial stigmatisation. Knowledge on dis-
placement and people impacted by it is still limited and superficial in the face of the
acuteness assumed by the problem. Solutions are mainly related to relocation and/
or out-migration of residents from one to another neighbourhood (with consequent
filtering down and reinforcement of new patterns of spatial injustice), far-too-limited
compensation schemes, or, more often, by shifting the issue of displacement towards
a new demand for social housing. In policy terms these solutions downgrade the
scope and impact of urban policies. However, public housing estates, built before
and after World War II and nowadays sitting in central areas (in many European
cities but also elsewhere) constitute fundamental public assets for a ‘very social’
housing policy agenda. Grassroots movements around the world are struggling to
preserve these ‘public’ neighbourhoods from privatisation and financialisation (for
instance, in Madrid, Paris, London, Barcelona, Berlin, and Rome) and are reworking
collective imaginations to build a different narrative, one that is based on a more
equitable city. Research is also emerging in the field of progressive housing policies
with a focus on housing struggles and durable tenancy in Madrid, Barcelona, New
York City, Sao Paulo, and beyond.
Indeed, our readers could learn from the re-emerging field of gentrification resis-
tance and scholarship on it. Recent research has shown, moving beyond the self-ful-
filling prophecy of stigma and the fear of displacement, that residents respond to the
threat of gentrification in a myriad of ways: they might live up to the neighbour-
hood reputation, resist it, take pride in it, transform it, or even all of these together
(see Annunziata and Rivas Alonso, 2018; Lees et al., 2018, for a review of everyday
resistances in gentrification studies). In recent years, the pathways of gentrification
and displacement have been disrupted by emerging anti-gentrification policies at the
municipal level (such as in San Francisco, New York City, Portland Oregon, Berlin,
Barcelona, and Vancouver). There are new emerging trends in the relationship bet-
ween policy and gentrification-induced displacement (for example, in the field of
tourism mitigation, the protection of traditional retail, community planning, and
housing policies such as rent caps). Work that explores policy alternatives to gen-
trification and displacement are also on the rise in community planning studies and
urban studies more widely, and these represent a fertile terrain for policy innovation
and a more equitable attempt to protect the poor and marginalised from exile.
 Segregation, Social Mix, and Gentrification  511
But in addition, and as a result of looking at the nexuses of segregation, social
mix, and gentrification in this chapter, we would urge social scientists to look
again at the issue of ‘neighbourhood effects’. Of course, the notion of ‘neighbour-
hood effects’, the idea that neighbourhoods have either direct or indirect effects
on individual behaviours (e.g. living in a poor neighbourhood affects a wide range
of individual outcomes, from employment to health) has had a big influence on
social-mix (gentrification) policies; yet the issue remains hotly debated. Indeed, in
the Moving to Opportunity experiment in the United States, where poor people,
mostly Black and Latino, were moved out of their high-poverty (segregated) areas
and moved into higher-income neighbourhoods, the key findings were disappoint-
ing – for the most part it did not raise employment rates or educational attainment,
indeed the loss of being with people like themselves was also highlighted (see Bridge
et al., 2011). To conclude, further and deeper research is needed on ‘neighbourhood
effects’ and social scientists need to feed their results through to policymakers so as
to inform the creation of policies that create socially just neighbourhoods and cities,
not gentrification.

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 Part V
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
PROBLEMS IN TWENTY-FIRST-
CENTURY CITIES
 24
Urban Citizenship and Governance
Annika Hinze

There are many layers of complexity to the topic of urban citizenship and gover-
nance. This chapter aims to focus on the theoretical and conceptual definitions of
urban citizenship and governance, as well as on their practical applicability in the
United States and beyond.
Urban citizenship in particular is a concept that requires unpacking. While it is
popular with scholars and activists alike to speak of a new phenomenon of ‘urban
citizenship’ in terms of social activism, even identity, the concept, in reality, appears
to be elusive at best. As Garcia (2006) has noted,

‘urban citizenship’ lacks institutional grounding because it loses the connection bet-
ween the citizens’ objectives … and the institutions which have the power to grant those
rights on a stable basis. (2006: 753)

Perhaps most importantly, as a general rule, municipal, urban, metropolitan,

regional, and state jurisdictions below the national level do not possess the legal
authority to grant citizenship. Instead, they may be able to grant local voting rights
for some non-citizens, and they are in a position to create institutional bases to
grant social services, to protect (to a certain extent) the rights of vulnerable groups,
such as undocumented immigrants. Such immigrants seek refuge in ‘sanctuary cities’,
when they lack documentation that grants them the legal right to remain within the
borders of the state. In the United States and Canada, for instance, urban govern-
ments in such sanctuary cities often step in to provide important social services to
poor and disempowered undocumented communities, where the state does not or
explicitly refuses. Cities also serve as important sources of identity. In terms of iden-
tity, immigrant communities, especially the second generation, often find themselves

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
520 Annika Hinze
identifying with cities and neighbourhoods over nation-states (Hinze, 2013; Kasinitz
et al., 2008). Benjamin Barber, in his famous book, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dys-
functional Nations, Rising Cities (2013), argued that nation-states are growing too
democratically dysfunctional to tackle the world’s most important problems, such
as international terrorism, climate change, poverty, and the displacement of large
groups of people through war, ethnic conflict, and lack of economic opportunity.
Instead, Barber suggested, mayors would be much better positioned and equipped to
deal with these challenges. Yet, most cities lack the legal foundation and authority to
take over the functions of the nation-state. As mentioned above, cities cannot pro-
vide legal status to immigrants; important decisions regarding the world economy
are made among nation-states, the G-7, the G-20, the World Bank, and the IMF have
nation-states as their members, but they provide their cities with little to no input in
such rounds of negotiations.
Does this mean that the concept of urban citizenship does not, in fact, exist? This
chapter will examine urban citizenship from a legal (i.e. citizenship-granting), social
(i.e. provision welfare regimes), economic (i.e. global cities as economic powerhouses
beyond the state), and identity perspective, and evaluate the theoretical and practi-
cal merits and potential shortcomings of the concept itself. It will then draw some
conclusions, which might help to bring theory, identity, and practice closer together.
Urban institutions of governance tend to appear powerless compared to the ever-
powerful state. Even in federalist systems, such as Canada, the United States, or
Germany where local jurisdictions have certain amounts of freedom to determine
their own fate, their decision-making powers are in fact quite limited. This severely
restricts the number of issues on which local jurisdictions can make truly autono-
mous decisions. It also limits any definition of urban citizenship, as mentioned above.
Furthermore, in federalist democracies, like the United States or Germany, states or
provinces generally dominate the fate of cities, as well as their range of autonomous
decision-making. In fact, cities in the United States lack ‘constitutional legitimacy’:

Given their subordinate status and lack of federal ‘constitutional legitimacy’, American
municipalities’ existence and authority springs from their state constitution or state leg-
islature. In the absence of a state provision for home rule, local governments are subject
to state legislative control. (Nickels, 2017: 3)

A majority of states across the United States offer some protections for cities’ home
rule. However, those pertain only to issues that are considered ‘purely local in na-
ture’ (Frug, 1999: 17). The most important authority of municipal governments in
the United States is the power to impose taxes (income, property, corporate). States
retain fiscal oversight over cities and municipalities and can therefore seize control if
they deem necessary (Nickels, 2017). States also have key decision-making authority
over cities when it comes to other matters, such as, for instance, in education policy,
matters of regionalism, as well as economic and infrastructure development.
Similarly, the German constitution (Grundgesetz) only mentions state (Länder)
and federal government authority. Local government authority springs from the
German Länder constitutions, which determine the structure of such authority
(Vetter, 2013). The German federal system exhibits a decision-making hierarchy,
which provides the federal government with the broadest legislative and political
 Urban Citizenship and Governance 521
decision-making authorities, whereas states are tasked instead with policy implemen-
tation and administration (Vetter, 2013). German states then delegate some of their
implementation powers to local governments. This system generally creates more
coherence between state and local governments than in the United States: since local
authorities often act on the behalf and with the authorisation of state governments,
they rebel less against them. However, Germany also exhibits an anomaly: Of the 16
Länder that make up the Germany federal system, three (Berlin, Bremen, and Ham-
burg) are city-states, which fuse the characteristics of urban and state government
into one unit, and ultimately free these three cities from the restraints of state author-
ity. However, in terms of such matters where decision-making authority lies with the
Länder in Germany, such as education policy or economic development, the city-states
have not exhibited any visible discrepancies from any of the remaining 13 Länder.
In other, more centralised systems, such as Turkey, for instance, urban planning
and renewal are carried out mostly through powerful, national-level authorities, such
as the Ministry of Environment and Urban Planning, and its Housing Development
Administration. Together, these authorities have been the architects of major urban
renewal projects, often against the needs and desires of local populations and in
disregard of historical preservation laws (Balaban, 2010; Hinze, 2016; Kuyucu and
Ünsal, 2010; Pierini, 2013). These have included the destruction (and subsequent
‘renewal’) of low-income and working-class neighbourhoods in Istanbul, as well as
the implementation of mega-projects, such as the construction of a brand-new Istan-
bul Airport, completed in 2018. Development strategies in Turkey have been heavily
top-down, but under the guise of increasing local authority. The AKP-controlled
national government passed a slew of laws between 2005 and the mid-2010s, which
provided municipalities with great powers to implement renewal projects of various
natures, justified by ‘natural disaster protection’, since large parts of the country are
considered major earthquake zones.
But it is not only national governments, or the states and provinces, that are
heavily involved in urban governance and urban development. Increasingly, the
private sector has a hand in decision-making, leading to new institutional constructs
in decision-making, especially when it comes to urban planning and development.
Smith (2010) describes the new institutional arrangements in American local gover-
nance around urban development projects, which he refers to as ‘triads’, composed
of city, state, and special purpose authorities: ‘The intergovernmental triad, then, is
an institutional arrangement by which the various interests of urban development
come together with the institutional capacity, autonomy, and fiscal powers to carry
out large development projects’ (Smith, 2010: 429). These development projects
are often carried out in particular urban neighbourhoods, yet the decision-making
takes place across levels of (state and local) government, as well as within the spe-
cial purpose authority whose board is composed of representatives from the private
sector, appointed by state and local government officials (Smith, 2010). This, in
turn, has implications for democratic transparency, as residents directly affected
by development projects in their neighbourhoods have no electoral recourse. The
decision-making process is twice removed from their votes, and only state and local
government representatives of the triad are elected officials in the first place, since
the board of the special purpose authority is appointed. This example demonstrates
that cities are not just dependent on federal and state governments in governance
522 Annika Hinze
and decision-making matters, but that the private sector is playing an increasingly
important role in urban governance, leading to new, often unconventional, institu-
tional arrangements.
The private sector, as laid out above, is gaining more access to functions of gover-
nance and political polarisation is causing more intense ideological clashes between
different levels of government, challenging cities to push their institutional limits
and find new avenues to assert themselves, and their urban constituency, politically.
But can they actually cause lasting institutional change? In exploring these questions
and challenges to urban citizenship and governance, this chapter will first explore
the concept of urban citizenship, and then move on questions of governance, before
drawing some conclusion about their current (and future) state.

Urban Citizenship: Seeing Like a State?

In order to explore urban citizenship, it is useful to revisit the general concept

of citizenship. Linda Bosniak (2006: 19) identifies four different dimensions of
citizenship, which define (i) legal status, (ii) rights and privileges, (ii) social and
political engagement, and (iv) a collective identity. The legal status of citizenship
endows individuals with certain membership rights and privileges, but also with
obligations, such as paying taxes, for instance, or military service. The second
dimension of citizenship refers explicitly to the political, social, even economic priv-
ileges that citizens may enjoy. They may also have these rights and entitlements pro-
tected by a constitution, differentiating them from non-citizens. The third dimension
of citizenship refers directly to the democratic process, and a citizen’s right to partic-
ipate in it. The fourth dimension, finally, refers to what Anderson (1983) has called
the ‘imagined community’, the feeling of belonging to a larger community, sharing
in its rites, myths, and customs. Together, these four dimensions compose our under-
standing of modern citizenship today, and they are present, in one way or another,
in urban dimensions of citizenship as well. It is important to note, however, that the
existence of aspects of these four dimensions of citizenship at the local level, are con-
tingent, in one way or another, on their existence at the national level.
Especially in Western democracies, the second dimension, the social welfarist
contract, which was based on institutions, such as taxation, public education, civil
society, and a social safety net, is increasingly declining (Turner, 2016). In other
words, the institutional basis for what T.H. Marshall (1950) called ‘full citizenship’,
namely, the universal availability of healthcare, education, and welfare benefits, is rap-
idly dwindling. Today, these institutions, which could be taken for granted in many
Western democracies throughout the second half of the twentieth century, are increas-
ingly absorbed by the private sector. This has disrupted one of the central tenets of
membership of the modern nation-state besides identity. The corresponding institu-
tions upheld a kind of social citizenship, which allowed citizens to claim certain enti-
tlements as members of the state-based community. Their membership claims were a
function of the social contributions by all citizens to their society through their taxes,
labour, reproduction, and military service (Isin and Turner, 2007; Turner, 2016). The
nation-state, and the nation-state only, has so far had the administrative capability
to actually manage citizens’ social duties and contributions, as well as their claims.
 Urban Citizenship and Governance 523
The decline of this binding social institutional fabric of the state has led to a
fragmentation of the definitions of citizenship, as well as a fragmentation of citizens’
claims. In combination with globalisation and the emergence of local, regional, and
supranational identities, there has also been an observable scalar fragmentation or re-
territorialisation of citizenship. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty, for instance, established
European citizenship as an additional layer of identity, above the national level.
Simultaneously, it also strengthened local citizenship rights for European Union citi-
zens, establishing universal municipal voting rights for all EU citizens registered with
local authorities, regardless of their national citizenship.

‘Glocalisation’ and Urban Citizenship

Municipal, local, or urban citizenship has gained increasing relevancy in the context
of social services and welfare institutions, as well as capital exchange. Within the
context of globalisation, scholars have coined concepts like ‘glocalisation’ (Swynge-
douw, 1997), in order to address the dwindling role of the nation-state in the capital
market and capital exchange. Global cities, for instance, as described by Saskia Sas-
sen, embody the ‘territorialized technological, institutional, and social infrastructure’
(Brenner, 1998: 6) of the global economy. Brenner argues further that globalisation
has led to a spatial reconfiguration of global cities themselves, turning them from ‘cit-
ies’ into sprawling megalopolises, encompassing much larger, polycentric territories.
It is in this context that urban scholars now speak of the American ‘Northeast Meg-
alopolis’ (Gottmann, 1961), an urban and metro region stretching from Boston to
Washington, DC, encompassing five major cities (Baltimore, Boston, New York City,
Philadelphia, and Washington, DC), 12 states (Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Mary-
land, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode
Island, Virginia, West Virginia), as well as the federal District of Columbia, and con-
taining over 50 million people. Lang and Knox (2009) have suggested that this new
‘trans-metropolitan urban structure’ could eventually replace the fragmented metrop-
olis as a unit of analysis for transportation and connectivity. Vicino et al. (2007) find
that, 50 years on, the megalopolitan concept is still highly salient, and they introduce
distinct types of megalopolises across the United States. Indeed, the Northeast Mega-
lopolis remains a major economic and political powerhouse. Most importantly, cities
have, within the context of the global economy, bypassed the structures of the fed-
eral nation-state, to become mostly independent players in the global flow of goods,
capital, and, to a certain extent, labour (Brenner, 1998; Friedmann, 1995).
Garcia (2006) argues that these very global forces significantly contribute to the
challenge of national citizenship, as increased economic competition leads to an
increasing number of denizens – those exploited by an increasingly unregulated glob-
al economy and competition, as well as immigrants without legal status in search of
better opportunities. There is often considerable overlap between both groups. This
segmented kind of citizenship, Garcia argues, creates changes in collective definitions
of social justice as it creates different classes of citizens who do not share the same
access to rights and liberties.
The concept of urban citizenship has been re-invigorated among scholars and
activists in the face of such increasing economic and civic inequality. As a microcosm
524 Annika Hinze
of social interaction, and a political and institutional context much closer to resi-
dents and activists, the city has become a new important space for social, socioeco-
nomic, and political claims-making (Beauregard and Bounds, 2000; Garcia, 2006;
Isin, 2000). Cities, especially global cities, which exhibit a large degree of ethnic,
racial, national, social, and economic diversity, have become important sites of pro-
test. In response, local governments have provided a variety of different services, such
as social and welfare services, access, albeit limited, to healthcare. In some cases, they
have also implemented limited municipal voting rights for non-citizens, as well as
limited protections and access to services for undocumented immigrants. Cities are
important actors in the struggle for protection against minority and marginalised
groups by providing sanctuary to individuals without legal claims to citizenship and
by addressing social, ethnic, and racial diversity in ways that less dense and diverse
regions cannot. Conversely, however, ‘urban citizenship’ can also turn into a mosaic
of particularised group claims, which stands in opposition to the fundamentally uni-
versalist notion of citizenship.

Fragmentation of Claims

As the most prominent sites of social conflict and struggle, cities have also become
sites of competition over rights and rights claims. Blokland et al. (2015) note that
struggles and claims to rights are increasingly fragmented – outgrowths of partic-
ularist group identities, instead of universal claims. This is important, because it
fundamentally questions the nature of urban democracy on a neighbourhood-level,
which has been hailed by many as a way to create space for a variety of different
identities (Hinze, 2013). For instance, Bauboeck (2003) has argued that the ‘internal
segregation’ of urban space can create the basis for better representation of margin-
alized residential communities in urban decision-making, if particular communities
are spatially concentrated and represented as such in urban government, such as city
councils. While these arguments are important, especially when it comes to improv-
ing the representation for minority groups, a variety of different, particularised
group claims do not necessarily produce a more inclusive citizenship. Blokland et al.
see this as especially problematic within the context of what they call ‘urban neolib-
eral restructuring’ (2015: 658). This refers to the growing global interurban compe-
tition for structural and capital investment, which leads urban government to make
economic development a priority and implement policies to strengthen investment,
which often come at the expense of social policies. ‘Neoliberal urban restructuring’
also includes what Blokland et al. refer to as ‘soft neoliberalism’ (2015: 658), or
‘governing through community’ (Rose, 1996, quoted in Blokland et al., 2015: 658).
In essence, these terms refer to the more aggressive incorporation of actors with par-
ticularist interests into local politics, such as ‘third sector organisations’ – any orga-
nisations independent of government, representatives of civil society organisations,
as well as local communities. Blokland et al. note that

We see a trend towards a diversification of interests, a weakening of movements and even

a competition over rights and resources rather than a development of mutual support
and solidarities among various groups on the pathway to a livable city. (2015: 658)
 Urban Citizenship and Governance 525
This concern is important, and it should lead one to question not only the bene-
fits of group- and identity-based claims, but also the merits of urban citizenship –
both of which have been hailed as important (and more democratic) alternatives to
national identity.
In essence, Blokland et al. (2015) identify an important tension in the democratic
value of urban citizenship. On the one hand, urban politics, by nature, has a closer
proximity to the citizenry, which stimulates and enhances the participatory aspect
of citizenship, allowing individuals and groups to make more of an immediate
difference, based on their claims and identity. On the other hand, this very proximity
and open invitation for proactive involvement in politics opens the door to what
Blokland et al. (2015) have referred to as a ‘fragmentation of claims’. Therefore,
while citizenship, in and of itself also an exclusive concept, which clearly defines
members (citizens) and non-members (foreigners, ‘aliens’), emphasised some level of
commonalty and homogeneity among the members of a national community, urban
citizenship in practice seems to negate commonality and emphasise, based on differ-
entiated rights claims, particularity and fragmentation.

Filling a Void?

Yet, the claims-making at the local level also has important implications for the
national discourse as it can address issues that are not, or not sufficiently, addressed
at the national level, or that may be so polarising at the national level that localities
attempt to go their own way on them.
The immigration debate in the United States is indicative of this gap with regard
to the legal dimension of citizenship, the first dimension outlined by Bosniak (2006).
Since the mid-2000s, immigration has been among the top policy issues on the
national policy agenda, as well as among voters on both sides of the political spec-
trum. In the United States, the need for some kind of immigration reform is univer-
sally acknowledged as pressing, but the direction any such reform should go in is
controversial at best and extremely polarising at worst. Despite the fact that only
the federal government has an official mandate to determine and in the long-term
change immigration policy, many localities have attempted to take the matter into
their own hands. For instance, the sanctuary city movement experienced a revival1 in
the 2000s with the dramatic increase of the number of undocumented immigrants in

1 
The sanctuary movement originated in the early 1980s, when during civil wars in
Central America, most prominently Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, migrants
crossing the borders from El Salvador and Guatemala were fleeing government-induced
violence in those countries, while those countries’ government forces received funds,
weapons, and training from the United States. Admitting individuals fleeing violence in
those countries as refugees would have barred the United States from providing any more
backing for those countries’ governments. The Reagan administration framed them as
‘economic migrants’ instead. In response, churches along the US–Mexico border started
declaring themselves sanctuaries for refugees from Central America. Many cities started
following suit, spearheaded by the City of San Francisco, which declared itself a City of
Refuge in 1985.
526 Annika Hinze
the country to more than 11 million. Sanctuary jurisdictions protect undocumented
immigrants from federal immigration enforcement by prohibiting local law enforce-
ment to share information regarding individuals’ immigration statuses with federal
law enforcement. They also often provide basic health and social services and local
identification cards without inquiring about immigration status. In 2018, there were
estimated to be more than 500 sanctuary jurisdictions in the United States (Dinan,
2018). In 2017, the California governor, Jerry Brown, signed a law declaring the
State of California the nation’s first sanctuary state. On the other hand, sanctuary
cities in the United States have also experienced a serious backlash at the state level.
Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and
Texas passed laws banning sanctuary cities, and 20 other states have pending mea-
sures or are discussing such legislation (Shoichet, 2017). The controversial Senate
Bill 1070, which was passed in 2010 in the State of Arizona, introduced additional
measures for state and local law enforcement to determine individuals’ immigration
status. This underscores the fact that policy clashes in the United States do not only
exist between the local and the federal level, but often involve the states as well.
Can sanctuary cities grant ‘local citizenship’, and lend another, legal dimension
to urban citizenship? One could argue that sanctuary cities, perhaps by the indirect
suspension of the relevance of national citizenship, are an attempt to create a new
layer of citizenship and belonging at the local level. However, as mentioned above,
the role of sanctuary cities is complicated, because they can only engage in the passive
suspension of their cooperation with federal law enforcement as well as provide
access to social services to individuals independent of their legal immigration status.
They cannot, on the other hand, grant legal citizenship status to anyone. Villazor
(2010) notes that local ID cards are a way of recognising undocumented immigrants
as ‘local citizens’ (2010: 757). She further argues, however, that this creates a serious
tension between concepts of national and local membership:

Acknowledging either the intent or effect of the sanctuary policy to confer local citizenship
on undocumented immigrants highlights the ways in which the local citizenship collides
with the federal government’s authority to determine who may belong in the United
States. In particular, from the federal government’s view, the grant of the functional or
citizenship-like status is incompatible with the national government’s conception of who
should be a proper member of the United States. (Villazor, 2010: 579)

The federal government, depending on the views on (undocumented) immigration

by the current administration, has had different ways of handling sanctuary cities
in the past. The Obama administration during its first term, was generally tough on
undocumented immigration, and chose to, for instance, continue the controversial
Secure Communities2 programme until 2014. Generally, sanctuary jurisdictions are

2 
Secure Communities was introduced by the Bush administration and required local law
enforcement to share biometric data on any arrested offender with federal law enforce-
ment, among them ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which can help iden-
tify an individual’s non-immigration status. The Obama administration decided in 2014
to discontinue Secure Communities, but the programme was re-installed by the Trump
administration in 2017.
 Urban Citizenship and Governance 527
identified by the federal government not by their self-designation, but by their non-
compliance with the Federal Statute 8 USC § 1373,3 which ‘bars state or local pol-
icies that prohibit entities or officials from sharing immigration status or citizenship
information with ICE’ (Chishti and Bolter, 2018). The Obama administration was
also the first administration to implemented punishments against sanctuary cities for
non-compliance with federal immigration authorities by restricting ‘sanctuary juris-
dictions’ from accessing certain federal grants. However, the Obama administration
never actually went on to enforce such threats.
After entering office in early 2017, the Trump administration not only reinstated
Secure Communities, but also attempted to vastly expand the reach of Section 1373.
Only days after his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order, which
mandated that federal grant money generally be withheld from non-compliant
sanctuary jurisdictions under Section 1373. However, that same year, the executive
order was blocked by several federal courts in Chicago, northern California, and
Philadelphia, which deemed it unlawful to make all federal grant money contin-
gent on compliance with Section 1373, beyond the ones already identified by the
Obama administration4 (Chishti and Bolter, 2018). Nevertheless, the administration
has issued letters to more than twenty jurisdictions to be found in non-compliance,
asking them to prove that their policies are not in violation of Section 1373. If they
do not respond, they can be subpoenaed. Several attorneys general filed a brief in
response stating that the Justice Department is overstepping its authority.
With or without the intervention of the courts, the tension between national and
urban citizenship in the United States at a time of strongly contested national iden-
tity is clear.
In other countries with heavy streams of documented and undocumented immi-
gration, such as Germany, on the other hand, sanctuary cities have not proliferated as
they have in the United States (Kaste, 2018). Furthermore, while citizenship is granted
at the federal level, and a federal police force (Bundespolizei/Bundesgrenzschutz) are
responsible for immigration enforcement along Germany’s external borders, internal
immigration enforcement is delegated to the states and their Landespolizei (state police
force). This is unlike the United States, for instance, where Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), a federal authority, is responsible for internal immigration enforce-
ment. In addition, unlike in the United States, local communities have no independent
police force to enforce any sanctuary policies (Bauder and Gonzalez, 2018). The

3 
Section 1373 was introduced with the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and
Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996. Until the Obama administration came
into office, Section 1373 was either interpreted quite literally or remained completely
unenforced (Chishti and Bolter, 2018). In addition, ‘case law established that the provi-
sion does not obligate jurisdictions to collect any information on immigration status or
to share with federal officials any information they do not already have’ (Chishti and
Bolter, 2018). The Obama administration then pioneered a stricter and wider interpre-
tation of Section 1373, suggesting that Section 1373 also mandated that inmate release
dates from prisons should be shared with ICE.
4 
This includes the Byrne Justice Assistance Grants (Byrne JAG), the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services grants (COPS), and the State Criminal Alien Assistance
Program (SCAAP).
528 Annika Hinze
requirement to register (for any residents, citizens, and non-citizens alike) with local
authorities is coupled with the requirement for local and state authorities in Germany
to report all registered residents to federal authorities (Übermittlungspflicht) (Bauder
and Gonzalez, 2018). Non-citizen residents are automatically reported to the federal
‘foreigner’s office’ (Ausländeramt). There are no ways around this kind of informa-
tion-sharing between local, state, and federal authorities in Germany, which provides
cities with very limited legal opportunity to implement sanctuary policies by refusing
or limiting cooperation with federal-level authorities, as American sanctuary cities do.
However, as Bauder and Gonzalez (2018) find, there is a broad context of civic insti-
tutions across German cities, which provide refuge in the form of ‘safe spaces’ (mostly
faith-based), and medical care through volunteer doctors and nurses. In sum, while
German cities are institutionally limited to provide a sanctuary for undocumented
immigrants, civic and faith-based organisations nevertheless attempt to provide pro-
tections and services for irregular migrants in cities across the country.
The European Union adds an additional layer of complication. Border enforce-
ment along the lines of European citizenship on the outside borders of the European
Union is a familiar phenomenon. However, scholars argue that EU border enforce-
ment is growing internally as well – through means of institutional data sharing and
reporting at different levels of government – from nation-states to municipalities
(Lebuhn, 2013; Graham, 2010). In addition, EU member states extend municipal
voting rights for non-citizen residents from a different EU member state. The same
privilege, however, does not hold for non-citizen residents from outside the European
Union. Therefore, urban citizenship for immigrants is not only restricted on the bases
of federal or nation-state legislation, but also through supranational EU citizenship.
It becomes clear that of Bosniak’s four dimensions of citizenship, the legal one is
the most powerful and contested one. And we must likely concede that the bulk of
the decision-making power over this legal dimension of citizenship remains with the
nation-state. However, as Villazor (2010) notes, the other dimensions of citizenship
can and often do extend to the city level, as urban jurisdictions can and do grant social
entitlements, sanctuary cities grant certain protections to undocumented immigrants
by not inquiring about their immigration status, and the shorter distance between
government and the governed at the local level provides a broader base for citizens
and non-citizens to become involved in the political process through activism and
public engagement. Urban jurisdictions also remain a powerful source of identity
for immigrants who may not feel full membership or belonging to the nation-state.

Urban Governance

So far, this chapter has focused on the different aspects and dimensions of urban
citizenship. But what about the institutions of governance, their reach and effective-
ness? What makes urban jurisdictions powerful and where do they lack influence?
While many urban jurisdictions face similar problems of underfunding and over-
crowding, their systems of government and their embeddedness in the nation-state
system may differ, as may their democratic institutions. Again, the nation-state plays
a strong determining role over the democratic qualities of urban jurisdictions. If the
national level is not democratic, it is unlikely that any urban jurisdiction can uphold
 Urban Citizenship and Governance 529
democratic institutions on its own. Institutions inside and beyond the city matter.
Theda Skocpol writes of the importance of organizational context, not just institu-
tionally, but socially, economically, and culturally:

states matter not simply because their organizational configurations, along with their
overall patterns of activity, affect political culture, encourage some kinds of group
formation and collective political actions (but not others), and make possible the raising
of certain political issues (but not others). (1985: 21)

Cities and urban government structures are embedded in this dynamic as well, and
their politics are under considerable influence of the political culture, social move-
ments, political institutions, and other societal actors.
While urban jurisdictions are strongly impacted by the state, its institutional
structure and political culture, they can still vary widely in their institutional orga-
nisation. Urban jurisdictions operate on different types of government, which were
born out of different moments in history: for instance, most large, diverse, formerly
industrial American cities are run by mayor-council governments, mostly with a
strong mayor. City manager, or manager-council governments are found mostly in
the Sunbelt, and in mid-sized cities, where reformers in the early twentieth century
were able to implement their aims of fighting corruption by removing politics from
urban governance and run cities like businesses. The same reform desire also gave
birth to the commission government, where a small group of elected commissioners
runs the city, fusing the executive and legislative branches. These different institu-
tional arrangements have important impacts on how urban residents and citizens
are represented. While manager and commission-style governments may function
more smoothly and less politically, they may be less responsive to a diversity of
interests than a mayor-council government. Especially with the ascent of an increas-
ing number of minority mayors, the mayor-council variant of city government has
strengthened minority representation in such cities, because mayors have consider-
able singular decision-making and administrative authority (Kerr and Mladenka,
1994; Marschall and Ruhil, 2007).
Other institutional arrangements are equally important for urban governance,
such as partisan or non-partisan elections, as well as the length of time that polls
remain open, which affects turnout (Garmann, 2017). The Center for American
Progress noted that

Although most states have rules in place allowing employees to take time away from
work in order to vote on Election Day, many eligible voters still are unable to do so
one Tuesday in November. The same is true for Americans with family obligations. …
However, this can be especially difficult if designated polling places are located far away
or if polling place lines are long. … In 2012, voting lines were estimated to have cost
Americans $544 million in lost productivity and wages. These burdens often fall dis-
proportionately on communities of color and low-income Americans. (Root and Ken-
nedy, 2018)

Besides the convenience of polling hours and locations on an election day, other
institutional arrangements have tremendous impact on voter turnout as well. Wood
530 Annika Hinze
(2002), in a survey of 57 cities, finds that form of government plays a crucial role
in voter turnout. He concludes that ‘political cities’, cities run by directly elected,
strong mayor governments, garner higher voter turnout than ‘administrative cities’,
which are governed weak-mayor systems, where city councils are elected at-large
and mayors are elected by councils. Strong mayor cities, therefore, appear to attract
higher voter turnout. Wood theorises that since an empowered mayor may provoke
more tension among elected officials of the executive and legislative branches, such
institutional arrangements also push elected officials towards coalition and compro-
mise building. Citizens also seem to favour the visibility of the mayor, as well as of
their elected officials. Hajnal and Lewis (2003) argue that more direct democracy
mechanisms and initiatives as well as increased control for elected officials vis-à-vis
administrators help to increase voter turnout.
Furthermore, non-partisan elections have been found to have a negative effect on
voter turnout in local elections. Schaffner et al. (2001) find that when partisan iden-
tifiers are removed as election cues, voters will instead focus on incumbency or name
recognition as a cue, but generally turnout will decrease.
Other institutions, such as police departments (Bridges, 2016), for instance, and
their relationship with the local electorate, will also impact urban governance, local
activism, as well as local culture in cities and cause variance across cities, even in the
same country.

Urban Governance and Structural Change

Urban institutions not only shape local political and activist behaviour and trust, but
they also mediate the influence of change in different ways. In a comparative study
of urban governance in four different countries, the United States, Great Britain,
Germany, and France, DiGaetano and Strom (2003) found that while institutions
grow out of national and local culture, and their growing process and context is,
in turn, shaped by the political leaders that surround them, it is most importantly
urban institutions which shape different responses to structural forces of change. In
particular, the authors focus on globalisation and economic restructuring, and the
variety of institutional responses to both of these interrelated phenomena.
To be sure, the general context for urban governance has fundamentally changed.
Businesses that were deeply embedded in the local context are now increasingly
globally mobile, leading cities around the world to compete for their attention and
investment. This means that urban administrations cannot expect local businesses
to be engaged in the local context in the same way that they used to be during the
mid-twentieth century, when long-term regimes or partnerships between the pub-
lic and private sectors became effective ways to channel urban development and
social policy (Stone, 1989). Furthermore, there now is a fundamental disconnect in
how private and public sectors think about urban development. Private developers
are increasingly interested in the metropolitan region beyond the urban core (Rast,
2015), but, in the United States, the reach of most urban administrations does not
include the suburbs. This new, changed environment calls for new theories of urban
governance. Stone (2015) himself has made calls for a new theoretical framework,
introducing the urban political order as a way of understanding the key changes in
 Urban Citizenship and Governance 531
the urban economic system. However, a theoretical framework which can compare
to the comprehensiveness and straight-forward nature with which regime theory
explained urban development in the mid-twentieth century still has to be devel-
oped. Today, development coalitions, which Stone (1989) described as long-term
alliances, are increasingly fluid and short term (Rast, 2015), focusing on single issues
or development projects, and then dissolving.
Frameworks of urban development are also increasingly challenged by their
Western-centric nature. Regime theory, for instance, is solidly rooted in the Anglo-
American sociopolitical context, as are most other conceptual frameworks that dis-
cuss the retreat of the welfare state, and the growth of public–private partnership in
a neoliberal urban development setting. But how can we reconcile these frameworks
with local contexts that have no prior experience with welfare regimes or capitalist
conceptions of property?
The Turkish Gecekondu movement provides an instructive example because of
its different underlying conception of private property. Gecekondu (which liter-
ally means ‘built overnight’) housing proliferated as a result of a wave of rural–
urban migration that swept Turkey during the second half of the twentieth century.
Gecekondu settlements are marked by their informal character – as the name of the
settlement implied – if housing on settled land was built in the dark of the night, it
could remain, even if its inhabitants had no formal deed proving their ownership
of the property. These kinds of settlement practices were in part tolerated by the
state, because they provided quick housing for a much-needed workforce on cheap
land, mostly located at the undesirable outskirts of cities. Keyder (2005) notes that
gecekondu settlements are also symbolic of the Ottoman conception of land own-
ership, where land was mostly considered to be publicly owned, and the state had
no or limited rights to define or legitimise ownership. Owing to this fundamentally
different conception of land ownership, according to Keyder, property relations re-
mained without formal resolution and, in many cases, deeds did not exist. To resolve
and formalise property ownership, the Turkish government granted ‘land amnesties’
in 1949, 1953, 1963, 1966, 1967, 1983, 1984, and 1986. Increasingly, the formali-
sation of land ownership also led to the commodification of (urban) land (Bala-
ban, 2010). Along with the neoliberal, market-based approach of the Justice and
Development Party (AKP), which took over leadership of the Turkish government
in 2002, gecekondu policy changed dramatically and capitalist conceptions of land
ownership consolidated. The Turkish government started to re-annex gecekondu
land in now desirable urban areas and selling it to private developers for ‘urban
transformation projects’. Because land ownership remained unresolved or unfor-
malised in many gecekondu settlements, residents were suddenly vulnerable to land
annexation by the state (Kuyucu and Ünsal, 2010, Keyder, 2005), leading to the
disappearance of entire gecekondu settlements and the displacement of tens of thou-
sands of urban residents.
Housing and urban development is not the only arena in which the state is
actively inviting the private sector into key roles of governance and control. With the
growing retreat of government from the provision of social and infrastructure ser-
vices, and fundamental reforms in communication and computer technology, ‘smart
city technology’ is increasingly sought after by urban administrations and generally
sponsored and provided by the private sector. Kitchin (2014) argues that ‘the pro-
532 Annika Hinze
duction of sophisticated data analytics for understanding, monitoring, regulating,
and planning the city’ is a key aspect of the ‘Smart City’ (2012: 12). He notes that
such technology holds significant advantages for citizens, local governments, and the
private sector. It can support citizens in making long-term and short-term decisions
by providing better and more reliable information. Smart city technology can also
enable local governments to operate and manage cities more effectively and provide
the private sector with a pole position in local governance as well as with new mar-
ket opportunities. However, Kitchin cautions that some critical interrogations into
the use of smart technology and the smart city concept as such are necessary. Among
the key concerns, according to Kitchin are:

technocratic governance, the corporatization and further neoliberalisation of city

management, the possibilities of a technological lock-in, system vulnerabilities, ethical
issues with respect to surveillance, dataveillance and control, as well as other concerns
relating to data quality, fidelity, security, the validity of analytics that utilize data dredg-
ing techniques, and how data are interpreted and acted upon. (Kitchin, 2014: 12)

Smart city technology appears to be a great opportunity for urban administrations

at first sight, but it may, over the long run, cause serious issues of privacy and power.
Private interests may lose interest in technologies as they become less interesting
or profitable and opt out. Private citizen data are vulnerable to being exploited by
a hard-to-control private sector and a sophisticated technology that is difficult to
understand. It is one of the many challenges that comes with the increasing retreat of
the private sector and the rise of difficult-to-regulate technology.
The private sector is increasingly thinking in economic ‘clusters’ (Porter, 2000),
looking at entire metropolitan regions as cohesive units, instead of at cities alone.
Metro areas, however, only exist in census terms (as MSA – metropolitan statistical
area), in economic considerations, and in terms of finding solutions to socioeco-
nomic issues. In policy terms, metro areas practically do no not exist, because they
are, at least in the United States, made up of hundreds of independent municipal
jurisdictions, such as cities, counties, and school districts. The total number of local
governments in the State of New York is estimated to hover in the five-digit-range
(Katz, 2010). Therefore, metro areas are actually not unified administrative and gov-
ernmental units, but instead suffer from high levels of fragmentation.

Metropolitan Governance and Fragmentation

In many ways, the lack of coherence and unity in metropolitan governance can
be seen as, what Jessop (2000) has described, ‘governance failure’ – an absence of
effective governance procedures. Brenner (2000) introduces several different per-
spectives of metro governance, and cautions that most of them are targeted only
at improving the economic efficiency of metropolitan regions, instead of actually
improving the socioeconomic and environmental issues that go along with a frag-
mented status of urban governance, such as urban sprawl, the growing spatial
concentration, and segregation of minorities, particularly of low-income groups,
or what Paul Jargowsky (2015) has described as pockets of high poverty, with a
 Urban Citizenship and Governance 533
growing percentage of concentrated poverty now located in the suburbs (Knee-
bone and Berube, 2014). What is more, while poverty seemed to be declining
between 1990 and 2000, dropping by 26.5%, pockets of concentrated poverty
have been deepening in urban, suburban, and rural areas since 2000, increasing
by a staggering 50% (Jargowsky, 2015: 2).
Kneebone (2016) notes, for instance, that the poor population located in American
suburbs grew by 65% between 2000 and 2014, making suburbia a central location
for poor populations. This is due to the fact that much of the job growth in lower-
tier service industries is now in the suburbs. Simultaneously, as inner-city housing
prices are climbing, the poor, as well as low-income groups are seeking out the sub-
urbs in search of more affordable housing. Suburbanisation does not make things
easier on poor people. Many suburbs are not well equipped to handle growing poor
populations, with a notable absence of institutional infrastructure, which caters to
the poor – from the distribution of food stamps to the availability of extensive pub-
lic transit networks. Since residential income levels affect communities’ tax bases,
and with them the quality of local infrastructure and education, the concentration
of poverty in certain urban and suburban municipalities leads to great divergences
in the quality of life within metro areas, rendering metro areas not only into govern-
mental, but also socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic mosaics.
Myron Orfield, law professor and a former state representative in the Minnesota
legislature, has been one of the most famous champions of metropolitan governance
reform – primarily in regards to tax-sharing in order to remedy the effects of the
deepening pockets of poverty throughout metros, but also in order to eliminate inter-
urban competition inside metro areas and to help develop more effective cost-sharing
of infrastructure development (Orfield and Wallace, 2007). On the whole, efforts at
metro governance have encountered more resistance than support, especially in the
wealthier, White suburbs (Brenner, 2000). However, during his time in the Minnesota
legislature, Orfield was able to help implement ‘fiscal equalisation’ throughout the
Minneapolis/St. Paul metro region. The plan, implemented in the early 1970s, requires
all local governments in the Twin Cities metro region to contribute roughly 50% of
their income from commercial tax revenues to a metro-wide pool. Money from this
pool is then redistributed to municipalities with low tax revenues (Thompson, 2015).
In spite of the relative success of ‘fiscal equalisation’ in the Twin Cities metro, resis-
tance to metropolitan governance has so far prevailed in most metros.
In the European context, sprawling suburbs of the North American variant are
less common. Therefore, discussions about metropolitan fragmentation have mostly
focused on the internal administration of cities. Actual metro regions, such as, for
instance, the Frankfurt-Rhine-Main metropolis in Germany, tend to encompass clus-
ters of cities and municipalities. Frankfurt-Rhine-Main was officially designated as
a European metropolitan region by Eurostat, which provides these designations for
the European Union and the European Free Trade Association (Cox, 2013). It is
highly polycentric and spans three states (Bavaria, Hesse, and Rhineland-Palatinate)
and six cities (Frankfurt am Main, Aschaffenburg, Darmstadt, Mainz, Offenbach,
and Wiesbaden) and bears witness to the fact that European metro regions, for the
most part are highly fragmented, similar to their North American counterparts.
Monocentric metro regions in the European framework vary widely in terms
of their administrative approaches. The Paris, London, and Berlin metro areas hail
534 Annika Hinze
among the top five largest metro areas in the European Union. Yet, their gover-
nance structures differ widely, mirroring the national-level systems of governments
they are embedded in: Paris, as the capital of a centralist, unitary state; Berlin, as
the formerly divided capital of a highly federalised national state, and London, the
capital of a traditionally unitary state, which exhibits some decidedly federalist ele-
ments (Laffin and Thomas, 1999). Röber and Schröter (2004) characterise the cities
as path-dependent products of their respective institutional contexts and national
cultures, with Berlin as the most decentralised, and Paris as the most centralised
municipal structure, but find a decisive tendency towards decentralisation in all
three cities, to accommodate global phenomena such as increasing suburbanisation
and globalisation. Based on the US examples of the challenges to metro governance,
and the lack of political capital to implement metro reform, it is questionable as to
whether increasing institutional decentralisation will be the answer to the challenges
of inequality and social polarisation. Mosaics of tremendous wealth and deepening
poverty in metro areas without an institutionalised metro government suggest that
only a cohesive metro governance that enforces shared resources can provide some
level of equalisation.

Conclusions

It is still not the era of urban citizenship and governance. Both institutional con-
texts are severely restricted by other levels of (state and local) government. Urban
citizenship has different dimensions, which are realisable to different extents. For
instance, legal citizenship cannot be implemented by municipal jurisdictions to an
extent greater than a lack of cooperation with and reporting to federal or even
supranational authorities. In its place, many municipal governments in the United
States, which have declared themselves sanctuary jurisdictions, have embraced
individuals who lack citizenship or legal status by opening up other dimensions of
citizenship. This often involves what Bosniak (2006) has described as the second
dimension of citizenship, referring to rights and privileges that citizenship lends.
However, the extent of this strongly depends on national contexts and restric-
tions. For instance, while jurisdiction in some countries (like the United States or
Canada) can make social services and benefits accessible to individuals who lack
citizenship and/or legal status, municipalities in other federalised national con-
texts (such as Germany, for instance) may be barred from making such benefits
accessible to irregular migrants, and have to rely on volunteers and the civic sector
to be able to provide such benefits. The additional two dimensions that Bosniak
describes, social and political engagement and collective identity, certainly can and
often do involve individuals who lack citizenship status on paper, but are consid-
ered members of the community by their neighbours and consider themselves as
such as well. This does not mean that cities across the world have not been chal-
lenged by other levels of government (sometimes state, and almost always federal/
national) when opening up any realm of citizenship to members who lack legal
citizenship and status. In the United States, this happens mostly by implementing
fiscal punishments, as mentioned above. The legal battle surrounding such fiscal
punishments is ongoing in the United States.
 Urban Citizenship and Governance 535
When it comes to political engagement, a new institutional context, with a rollback of
the public sector, and an increasing influx of private and particularist interests has led to
a severe fragmentation of citizenship claims. It can be argued that a comprehensive pub-
lic sector from which a variety of people can benefit fosters a more inclusive definition of
citizenship. Its growing withdrawal in some parts of the world and its complete absence
in others leaves a gap which is filled by special interests lobbying for their own defini-
tions of citizenship needs and entitlements. The expression of a variety of citizenship
claims may be a positive development as it can challenge policymakers to broaden their
perspectives on citizenship and gives voice to previously marginalised groups. On the
other hand, a fragmentation of claims can also severely weaken social movements and
take away their collective and numerical authority, as Blokland et al. (2015) caution.
This fragmentation is also reflected in the institutional arrangements which set the
stage for urban governance. The withdrawal or absence of the public sector from gov-
ernance has invited a variety of different interests to insert (or at least attempt to insert)
themselves into urban governance, from private corporate interests to community
groups. A growing diversity of players, who seek involvement in the local decision-mak-
ing process, makes it increasingly more difficult to streamline urban governance into
compromises that serve a broad spectrum of (common) interests inside the metropolis.
Furthermore, ‘metropolitan governance’, as in one governance approach across the
metropolitan area, exists, with few exceptions, in name only. Governance across metro
regions is just as fragmented as the interests that govern it, and the citizenship claims that
accompany it. We are, however, witnessing an era of profound change. Globalisation has
elevated the significance of the global city, economically, vis-à-vis the state. The diverse
communities, which call our cities home, tend to identify not always as members of a
particular state, but as citizens of the very city they live in. So, while cities are sites of
internal and external fragmentation of citizenship and governance, they can be unifying
in identity. A stronger institutional push towards unity, through a stronger public sector,
could help create internal unity of urban citizenship claims and governance, as well as
unity across metropolitan regions. However, in an age of privatisation, it is questionable
whether the public sector will make a strong return in the near or far future. Perhaps
new forms of unified governance and more democratically accountable public–private
partnerships would be a start in the direction of more institutional unity.
Cities are not yet the building blocks of world politics or legal sponsors or guarantors
of citizenship, and it is somewhat doubtful that they will ever become that, independent
of the state, in the future. Yet, they are important contributors, examples, and even
experimental laboratories for both citizenship and governance.

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 25
Policies and Policy
Approaches in Cities
Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza

Introduction

Policymakers have been addressing local as well as regional and national challenges.
Housing needs and the negative effects of gentrification, unemployment and job
precariousness, poverty and social exclusion, energy poverty, and the externalities
of various modes of transport are part of the daily urban policy challenges with
which policymakers have to deal. Many of these policy areas stretch beyond pol-
icy decisions taken at the local level. Policies on employment and, to some extent,
housing and welfare are often shared by multiple government bodies and subject to
legislating at regional and national levels. From a financial perspective, the delimita-
tions are also complex since distribution of fiscal resources in each country corre-
sponds to several models of multilevel governance in which decisions concerning
allocation of taxpayer money that affect cities are taken regionally or nationally. In
order to circumscribe the policy and policy approaches in cities we have opted to
prioritise those policies that are designed and or implemented at the local level by
local institutions even if the financing in support of those policies involves several
levels of government.
Addressing the policies and policy approaches in cities requires a summary of pol-
icy trends in different parts of the world at the end of the twentieth century and the
beginning of the twenty-first century. Many policy approaches that were pioneered
in the United States have influenced much of the rest of the American continent as
well as cities in Europe and other parts of the Western world. Asian cities have expe-
rienced different dynamics. Conversely, the Arab world – including the outliers of the
new Arab urban, i.e. Gulf cities – and Africa have followed their own paths (Molotch
and Ponzini, 2019).

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
540 Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza
Policy Approaches in Different World Regions

Northern American Cities

In the United States the business community has been a major actor in setting
urban policies from the late nineteenth century onwards. The constitution of urban
machines happened in the larger cities where the world of business combined big
plans that included beautiful public gardens and spaces with the proliferation of
segregated spaces. In the diverse neighbourhoods of cities waves of immigrants
created places with distinctive cultural profiles and housing types. In some cities
machine politics involved corrupt practices and clientelism which interacted with
the inequalities existing in the housing and labour market. The corrective effects
that federal investment and federal policies aimed for in cities held sway mainly in
just a few decades (1930s–1960s). Social housing was implemented by local gov-
ernments in many large cities with important differences in scope. Urban housing
programmes implemented by city councils were part of urban renewal programmes
of poor neighbourhoods in the central areas of cities. It could be that these policies
were related to the large suburbanisation experienced by cities as part of the Ford-
ist mode of regulation in the United States (Painter, 2011: 29–30). Moreover, the
1956 Highway Act promoted the shift of the middle classes to the suburbs where
mass consumption reinforced the Fordist system, but, at the same time, caused dis-
investment in central city neighbourhoods. Only by introducing social housing and
public amenities were the needs of the low-income populations addressed. This had
the unintended consequence of more segregated concentration of recipients of social
housing and of social policies, and of their stigmatisation. There were exceptions,
such as New York, where social housing and subsidised housing was distributed in
a larger proportion of neighbourhoods. This policy enjoyed wide political popular
support until the mid-1960s when the occupants became mostly black and Hispanic
(Fainstein, 2010: 89–90).
Federal urban support came to an end just when economic restructuring and
deindustrialisation took hold as a result of globalisation. The combined result was
particularly felt in the cities and regions that concentrated industrial activity. Cities
were left to themselves financially to devise strategies to cope with restructuring; this
resulted in an interurban competition for investments. Policies oriented to attract
corporate money and services of high added value generated rankings of ‘success’
stories in which only a few global and globalised cities concentrated those services
while less ‘successful’ cities compensated their limitations by developing the tourist
economy with mainly unskilled jobs and low salaries (García and Judd, 2012).
In their comparative study Hank Savitch and Paul Kantor (2004) made a dis-
tinction between social-centred and market-centred policies. On the one hand, so-
cial-centred policies rely heavily on formal planning and impose requirements and
restrictions on investors, such as the provision of public amenities. These approaches
incorporate labour and social welfare policies that are meant to spread the social
benefits of urban regeneration. Market-centred strategies, on the other hand, attempt
to induce investment through low taxes, public subsidies in the form of land, relaxed
regulation, and infrastructure financed with public funds. Generally, unionised
labour and generous social programmes are seen as hindrances to investment.
 Policies and Policy Approaches in Cities 541
The market-based approach has been predominant in the United States these
last few decades. Central neighbourhoods of cities like New York, Washington,
Boston, and Chicago (to mention a few) have experienced systematic gentrifi-
cation with the integration of highly qualified service employees and with the
refurbishing of old buildings to accommodate corporate management, supported
in this by city mayors. As a result, long-established communities have experienced
a process of expulsion of some of their members and the breaking up of social
and community networks. In their efforts to defend the preservation of their
neighbourhoods, citizens’ organisations find themselves competing for spaces.
The economic interests are more prominently represented in local newspapers
and in the media in general.
Urban tensions are not only associated with crime, as the press often likes to
portray it. Policy issues, such as public education and affordable housing, are at the
core of urban conflict. There have been systematic efforts by citizen organisations to
counteract privatising trends in education and housing. As a result, there have been
some advances in the institutionalisation of local policies for the stabilisation of
neighbourhoods in cities. Such stabilisation means maintaining the profile of com-
munities with low-income populations. One example is the protective measures to
ensure that elderly residents can remain in the neighbourhood with local regula-
tions forcing developers to contribute directly or indirectly to the preservation of
affordable housing. Social pressure from activists in recent years has contributed
to the implementation of policies of mixed neighbourhoods seeking some balance
in terms of accessibility to housing for various income groups. Chicago is one such
city where organisations of housing activists tried to force the implementation of
this principle with limited results: during the 1990s the Chicago Housing Authority
closed over 7,400 units of public housing. Residents in the affected buildings were
offered housing vouchers to move to private housing anywhere in the metropolitan
area. The conditions were less favourable than the original Moving-To-Opportunity
(MTO) programme as families in Chicago received considerable fewer support ser-
vices than families in the MTO programme (Jacob, 2003: 3–14). One negative out-
come has been the lack of improvement of school performance of children forced
to move with their families in Chicago in contrast with the outcomes found among
children in the voluntary MTO programme.
After the 2008 economic and financial crisis progressive aldermen in cities with
high levels of citizen mobilisation negotiated economic deals with developers to
include affordable housing. Some of these programmes were related to the effect of
the financial crisis of 2007/2008 when thousands of residents lost their homes. A
neighbourhood stabilisation programme was launched in three rounds (2008, 2009,
and 2010) by which the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
provided financial assistance to states and cities to support the implementation of
policies to remedy emergencies for residents who lost their homes.
Since property rights are at the core of the local government legal framework
in the United States of America, this has created a political culture that informs
urban policy approaches. In the United States the public sphere is clearly differen-
tiated from the private sphere. In the neighbouring country – Canada – the (local)
government has the obligation to listen to the will of citizens, which means that
policy legislation needs the consent of constituencies. This has created a culture of
542 Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza
claims legitimation in favour of policy initiatives proposed by social movements
(Boudreau, 2003: 801–803). Despite this participatory culture social segregation
has emerged in the largest cities in this country. One of the policy approaches has
been the introduction of mixed housing developments where higher-income groups
share neighbourhoods with lower-income groups within the strategy to restructure
public housing. The US implementation of the HOPEVI programme (a national
action plan to revitalise distressed public housing projects introducing mixed devel-
opments) was emulated in Canada, also with mixed results. According to some
analysts, in these mixed-income neighbourhoods, conflict has emerged as mid-
dle-class residents often exhibit more power to define priorities and the aesthetic
characteristics in the public space. Thus, managing social mixing proved to be far
from simple in Toronto (August, 2014).
For the three largest metropolitan cities – Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver –
one of the main policy challenges has been the integration of foreign migrants from
different parts of the world. In these cities the concentration of same-origin migrants
has spurred debates on multiculturalism and citizenship. The management of diver-
sity has been a fundamental aspect of urban policy, addressing issues of social segre-
gation, cultural rights, and redistribution. Since the 1970’s introduction of the federal
government’s multiculturalism policy and the advent of the Charter on Fundamental
Rights and Freedoms in 1982, the content of diversity policies has broadened trick-
ling down to municipalities that then receive federal money to deal with diversity
(Graham and Phillips, 2007: 170–171). Canada’s multicultural policies reflect a com-
mitment to cultural equality and are marked by four approaches guiding diversity
policy: anti-discrimination legislation, official multiculturalism, employment equity,
and language and cultural education (Eisenberg, 1999: 73). From the 1995 cuts in
federal spending a shift occurred from direct investment in the myriad voluntary and
non-profit organisations to managed competition and short-term project funding. As
a result, there is a greater demand for policies that address the intersecting issues of
diversity and poverty (Graham and Phillips, 2007: 167).
Three policy approaches have been employed by municipalities in Canada’s larg-
est cities where foreign workers are concentrated: (i) the creation of participatory
mechanisms for consultation on community services and distributing resources to
answer bottom-up demands from the different cultural groups; (ii) policies aimed
at international competitiveness through attracting investments and companies;
and (iii) the institutionalisation of multiculturalism. The issues that have prompted
debates and policy changes are often related to the use of public and private space.
This has put pressure on the planning profession as well as on municipal leaders to
be more receptive towards the presence of the different ethnic and cultural groups in
the public space (Graham and Phillips, 2007: 187–189).
Struggles over space but also over community services have been among the most
recurring conflicts between immigrants and local governments in the Toronto area
(Isin and Siemiatycki, 1999: 11). Issues of land use and zoning have caused com-
munities and municipalities to clash because these communities have demanded
collective services that have not been incorporated in the planning regulations and
the functional distribution of urban space. Members of these communities, including
women, gays, lesbians, the disabled, and the elderly, have not been included in the
planning process at the stages in which they could have had some influence in the
 Policies and Policy Approaches in Cities 543
design of urban space. Since the members of these collectives are taxpayers they have
organised to claim their urban rights and have given content to the concept of urban
citizenship. This conceptual innovation of the principle of citizenship has provided
not only a fruitful new approach to a more classical understanding of citizenship,
but has also stimulated a rich comparative literature in other parts of the world
(Blokland et al., 2015; García, 2006; Isin, 2000).

Latin American Cities

The rate of urbanisation in Latin America has varied historically from country
to country: while Buenos Aires had 29.7% of the total population in 1950, Bo-
gota only had 6.2% of Colombia’s population. The modern urbanisation process
took place in the absence of industrialisation, but with an accelerated population
growth through high birth rates and with high migration rates to cities. Among the
different interpretations of the Latin American ‘urbanisation dependency theory’
in the late 1960s was that the regions’ subordination condemned them to remain
peripheral in the capitalist development. This ‘dependent urbanisation’ manifested
itself mainly in port cities that exported raw materials and concentrated internal
migration with high levels of urban marginalisation. The ‘slum’ developed as the
main mechanism to satisfy the demand for housing. A counter movement to this
process was for formation of neighbourhood associations and urban social move-
ments, such as the Chilean pobladores in the 1970s (Jajamovich and Cortés, 2019:
1093–1094).
In Latin American cities a major shift in policy took shape from the 1980s
onwards when a path developed from import substitution to export-oriented econ-
omies, a shift accompanied by a deep debt crisis and an increasing dependence
on the policy recommendations of international organisations (Roberts, 2001: 4).
Governments were impelled to privatise state industries and to make their admin-
istrations more efficient. To facilitate the continuity of policies, civic and private
organisations were encouraged to assume part of the weight of policy implemen-
tation. There was an increasing presence of local and international non-govern-
mental organisations (NGOs) in cities (Roberts, 1996: 56). These organisations
(also present in other parts of the developing world) helped in the organising of
community self-help and channelled humanitarian aid arriving from outside. Many
of these organisations had been subcontracted by governments. In Brazil alone
there were over 1.1 million of these third-sector employees between 1991 and
1995 (Roberts, 2001: 4).
By the beginning of the 1990s cities of the subcontinent were mature in urban-
isation terms as the large waves of rural–urban migrations had mostly come to
an end and were increasingly being substituted by intra-city migration (Roberts,
1996: 55). This meant that informal housing and the self-construction of ame-
nities entered the phase of consolidation and improvement of neighbourhoods.
In earlier decades community bottom-up organisations had been particularly
active in providing basic urban services in the peripheries of cities. These forma-
tions expanded in sharp contrast with the colonial city centres characterised by
beautiful buildings and urbanised infrastructures. Latin American cities were char-
acterised by distinguished centres surrounded by concentrations of poor commu-
544 Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza
nities whose members – employed in the urban economy – suffered from deficient
infrastructures and transport services. The concentration of poverty in large cities
and the authoritarian character of many of their countries’ governments prompted
the proliferation of insurgent organised groups in defence of social and political
rights or, in some contexts, radical organisations that opted for guerrilla tactics
such as the Zapatistas in Mexico.
From the 1990s urban policies have concentrated on selective investment in
public works in cities and the introduction of new legislation in order to imple-
ment urban renewal projects with special emphasis on the beautification of colo-
nial centres and new corporate management of new urban centres. Incentives to
developers have been effective in providing the new environment for completely
refurbished old neighbourhoods in which new entrepreneurs and young upper
classes have established their residence creating an atmosphere of consumption of
goods and art. These renewed spaces have often been the outcome of a process of
gentrification. Outbursts of community resistance have been unable to counteract
the neoliberal turn in Latin American cities. Gentrification has also spread to the
suburbs; in some large cities, like Sao Paulo, newly built luxurious neighbourhoods
have taken over spaces from shanty-town constructions. These urban renewal pro-
jects in old and new consumption centres represent selective investment projects
which benefit a very small proportion of the city dwellers. These projects have
been accompanied by changes in land regulation, improvement in infrastructures,
and more efficient security surveillance. San Telmo and Puerto Madero in Buenos
Aires, Lapa in Rio de Janeiro, and Miraflores in Lima are examples among many
others (Brites, 2017).
With globalisation Latin American cities have been seen in the twenty-first
century as examples of the ‘planetary gentrification process’. Cities like Santiago,
Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City show gentrification as manifestations of political
conflict involving the state (Jajamovich and Cortés, 2019: 1095). The intervention
of the state is found in big urban regeneration projects, often with the participa-
tion of large international companies reinforcing corporate developments (Inzulza-
Conardo, 2019: 1097–1099). Gentrification is seen, in this sense, as a manifestation
of neoliberal policies throughout the region in spite of the occasional political resis-
tance in a few countries (e.g. Bolivia).
Since the end of the past century Latin American cities have been the beneficiaries
of two parallel processes: democratisation and decentralisation of decision-making
processes in favour of municipalities. In 1980 only six out of eighteen countries were
celebrating regular elections. By the 1990s municipal elections had been introduced
in most countries as part of the process of democratisation. Citizens could directly
elect their mayors and councillors who, in partnership with the new local actors –
widely representative of the third sector – envisaged new policies and programmes
in the context of more political autonomy. As for funding in this decentralised envi-
ronment public–private partnerships were encouraged given the fact that only an
average of 10% of state financial resources is destined to municipalities. Brazil, Co-
lombia, and Ecuador are the three countries with higher percentages of decentralised
public finance followed by Chile, Uruguay, and Guatemala. Cities such as Curitiba
and Porto Alegre are often cited for their efficient urban planning and their innova-
tive experiences and policies (Lindert and Verkoren, 2010: 1–22).
 Policies and Policy Approaches in Cities 545
The combination of these two trajectories – democratisation and decentralisa-
tion – also helped to organise policies to address the high concentration of urban
poverty characteristic of Latin American cities. Programmes of education, housing,
and income support were designed and implemented to lift thousands of citizens
out of poverty. The parallel process of municipalisation created important expecta-
tions to improve efficacy in the distribution of resources to reach the most needed
communities and individuals. Latin American observers, in particular, valued the
direct subsidies to basic housing and the improvement of poor neighbourhoods in
the 1990s (Arriagada, 2000). These policies were implemented to have some impact
on the sharp social inequalities and high concentration of urban poverty and re-
sulted in moderately successful outcomes. There are outstanding experiences like
Medellin where publicly induced ‘social urbanism’ has been portrayed as an example
of innovative urban policies. This city has improved neighbourhood connectivity
by developing aerial cable-car public transport between low-income distant neigh-
bourhoods and the city centre to facilitate daily mobility and access to employment
and has built cultural services for the low-income population, dignifying peripheral
neighbourhoods.
Moreover, with the return of more ‘progressive’ governments at the national
and municipal levels new mechanisms of citizen participation in some of these pro-
grammes opened up. It is not surprising that participatory budgets emerged in this
new context, first in Brazil and then in other countries. Porto Alegre’s successful
innovative local governance of participatory budgeting created confidence between
citizens and institutions and proved to be the basis for innovative local development
plans. In this respect, local decision-making and policy approaches work to rein-
force each other as citizens see themselves as social and political actors of local
democracy and welfare. The theoretical and practical contribution of these experi-
ences has been emulated in other parts of the world, including North America and
Europe. A more sceptical interpretation would be that it was a matter of necessity
since state financing was shrinking in Latin American countries and the new neo-
liberal credo stimulated the cooperation of the private and the third sector in local
development.
The wide impact of participatory budgets as an innovative practice of democra-
tisation in Latin American cities deserves a more detailed consideration. The foun-
dations of the innovative policy approach were the neighbourhoods (particularly in
Brazil) that claimed that government should improve their living conditions while
challenging the dictatorial governance. These mobilisations did not originate in the
middle classes but came from among those sectors of the population that experi-
enced the lack of public facilities. Public meetings attracted increasing numbers of
citizens who wanted to participate in how services were designed and implemented,
but also how investments were prioritised. This was how the budgetary proposals
emerged. More than 1,500 participants in 1989 and some 18,500 citizens in 2000 got
involved in the discussion concerning budget allocation (Novy and Leubolt, 2005:
2027). The sharp contrast between traditional clientelism and citizen participation
meant that the new policy approach was directed towards the neighbourhoods that
presented more acute needs such as improving the provisions to support the edu-
cation of children and the connection of peripheral neighbourhoods to the city’s
transport system. The close relationship between decision-making participation and
546 Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza
a more redistributive approach to urban policies became clear. A further step was the
institutionalisation of participatory budgets with the support of local government
and the acceptance of the national government. The approach was consolidated dur-
ing the 14 years in which the Workers Party held power in Porto Alegre (Novy and
Leubolt, 2005: 2029–2033).

European Cities
Across the Atlantic in European cities, local policy and policy approaches are embed-
ded in contexts with the strong presence of the public sector in urban land own-
ership, bureaucratic authority, and planning regulations. Following Kantor and
Savitch (2004) European social-centred policies rely heavily on formal planning,
which means that investors are subject to requirements and restrictions, such as the
provision of public amenities. Whereas in the American cities the entrepreneurial
coalitions have considerable legitimation to initiate and develop planning rules and
capture local state resources, in European cities private developers often have to
enter into public–private partnerships subject to strong state regulations. Moreover,
European cities are embedded in a multiscale institutional framework. For example,
European Union (EU) funding through structural funds has been a major stimulus to
all types of partnerships (public–public and public–private) to improve the competi-
tive capacity of cities. Many European regulations and funded programmes connect
European and state institutions to urban regulations and policies, creating a complex
policy picture (Kazepov, 2005, 2010).
Cities in Europe have experienced processes of deindustrialisation similar to those
in American cities since the 1970s and 1980s. Extensive policy programmes of social
housing and welfare services have slowly but noticeably made way for privatisation
and new private developments in central neighbourhoods opening up spaces in an
attempt at urban renaissance that has often led to gentrification. The high quality
of architectural heritage in city centres in Europe has provided a significant monop-
oly value for marketing individual cities in the global competitive market. Local
authorities have assumed greater responsibility for the promotion of their cities to
attract international investment and tourists in different national contexts. The pro-
active role of city councils in marketing is reflected in the promotion of cultural
diversity and difference while providing some standardised services. This strategy
often serves the purpose of economic regeneration in those cities where industrial
jobs have declined (e.g. Barcelona, Bilbao, Manchester, Hamburg, Genoa, Antwerp)
(Body-Gendrot et al., 2012).
European policies and policy approaches have counteracted - a great deal more
than in other parts of the world – the consequences of urban restructuring under the
influence of generalised neoliberal thinking. However, the competitive city drift has
affected the policy priorities of city leaders. City councils have given a stronger role
to their economic departments with the objective to attract national and interna-
tional investment to promote the local economy. The United Kingdom is the country
that has pushed furthest the logic of competition, but other European countries
have followed this lead (Le Galès, 2002: 204). The entrepreneurial tendency of city
leaders has been complemented by the promotion of partnerships between the public
and the private sectors and by the incorporation of highly qualified professionals in
 Policies and Policy Approaches in Cities 547
city councils’ bodies to ensure the competitive advantage of cities (Le Galès, 2002:
204–205). Large cities have fuelled and consolidated strategic planning strategies
with a variety of successful outcomes all over Europe (from Barcelona to Helsinki,
Budapest, and Milan) becoming centres of knowledge and innovation (Le Galès,
2018: 219).
In the European multilevel governance context cities offer the overall picture of
a relatively high quality of infrastructures and public space not only in large glo-
balised cities but also in midsized cities, where social inequality is less pronounced
and which enjoy strong social cohesion. Even after the 2008 crisis social inequality
in cities has increased unevenly, mainly in Spain and Greece and in lesser proportion
in Slovenia and in Sweden. But there is more stability and even a slight decrease of
social inequality in the cities of most European countries. Nonetheless, austerity
measures have negatively affected the welfare of citizens in the United Kingdom,
in the southern European countries, and in the Baltic states. Urban poverty is also
uneven across European territory, while less pronounced than rural poverty, it has
increased in some European cities but fallen in others. In any case, the percentages
shrink when social transfers are taken into account (Le Galès, 2018: 224–227).
Despite common features such as the new predominance of the service economy
and the corporate presence in city centres and in new global metropolitan nodes,
European cities keep the national characteristics associated with their welfare
regimes. Cities in Scandinavian countries and in the Netherlands offset the negative
effects of economic restructuring with high state protection and the extension of
public care services. Although in recent years these countries have also incorporated
the third sector and promoted more public–private cooperation, they continue to
create more equal education and professional training opportunities (Body-Gendrot
et al., 2012; Martinelli et al., 2017). The employment-oriented policies of these
countries have benefited the cohesiveness of cities. High levels of female partici-
pation in the labour market have favoured the universalisation of state-provided
childcare since birth.
The large arrival of immigrants and refugees in some cities, during the years
2013–2016, has fed policy debates on immigration and the use by migrants of wel-
fare services. One outcome has been the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties,
which emphasises the challenge to the universalistic welfare culture of the Nordic
societies by the presence of immigrants. Similar tensions became manifest in cities
associated with corporatist welfare regimes (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany)
where the labour markets experienced higher levels of unemployment among the
young population than in the Nordic countries, mainly affecting the second- and
third-generation migrants. As slower growth in job opportunities in comparison
with the golden years of the post-war period led to unemployment among young
people in the early 1990s and during the 2008–2012 crisis, the social welfare systems
were put under stronger pressure (Body-Gendrot et al., 2012).
Some cities, such as Paris, witnessed periods of urban violence, for example, the
2005 riots in Paris and the French banlieues or, more recently, the 2018 ‘yellow vest’
demonstrations in Paris and in other parts of France. Locally as well as nationally
governments have to engineer policy programmes tailored to discontented citizens.
Some of these programmes (such as job activation and education) have concen-
trated on conflictive neighbourhoods and towns. In Germany, the proliferation of a
548 Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza
‘mini-job’ category has facilitated the incorporation of the younger generation while
creating a dualisation of the labour market, although at the same time there is a
variety of programmes on offer that support access to housing and educational ser-
vices to ensure social cohesion in cities.
In cities of the southern European welfare regime the economic effects of tertia-
risation and flexibilisation have made male careers more precarious, while educated
female cohorts have great difficulty combining work with the excessive burden of
responsibility as carers. Social inequality has increased, particularly after the 2008
crisis and the following years during which austerity policies involved cutting wel-
fare services. Even if in the cities of these societies spatial inequalities are less pro-
nounced because of extensive solidarity networks, formed by the combination of the
family, community, and voluntary sectors, the social and economic distance between
high and low-income groups has widened after 2008. Partly related to this unfavour-
able environment, urban social discontent has manifested itself in streets and plazas
creating urban social organisations and new radical political parties with a strong
youth presence (Della Porta, 2015). In the 2015 Spanish local elections emerging
platforms and parties gained access to the leadership of city councils with the aim to
innovate local policies and direct them towards more redistribution and a less com-
petitive orientation. Emerging local leaders in the large cities, such as Barcelona and
Madrid, have made efforts to reorientate housing policies towards housing afford-
ability and to moderate gentrification processes (García, 2018).
The role of the European Union in framing multilevel governance and policy
approaches in cities needs to be highlighted. Multilevel governance embodies the
strong ties that connect the European Union level with that of state institutions
and regulations and with urban regulations and policies. The consistent investment
in social cohesion policies in cities is a distinguishing feature of European cities.
This has been translated in the relatively high quality of the local spaces. Even if
social segregation has increased in large European cities, especially where young
members of minorities have a strong presence, the indexes of segregation are consis-
tently lower than in other regions of the world. This is because public policies have
played an important role in finding ways to include these disadvantaged groups
in urban societies (Cucca and Ranci, 2017; Préteceille, 2006). It is central funding
that remains the main source of social cohesion policies implemented in cities. The
many European regulations and financial programmes that channel resources to cit-
ies from European institutions should not be analytically neglected (Kazepov, 2010).
At the end of the twentieth century the European Union applied the ‘open method
of coordination’ in the social-policy field. This method leaves effective policy choices
to the national authorities, but tries to improve such choices through promoting
common objectives and common indicators, and through comparative evaluations
of national policy performance. Examples are common rights and standards, equal
treatment, activation policies in employment, and social assistance. In addition, the
EU encourages non-profit organisations to develop innovative forms of support for
socially excluded groups.
One distinctive European policy approach is the emphasis on social cohesion. This
concept has been the subject of wide academic discussion, which does not require a
detailed explanation in this chapter. Official discourse on this topic, emanating from
EU institutions, first appeared in the 1990s. In the report ‘Urban Social Development’
 Policies and Policy Approaches in Cities 549
(Jacquier, 1992) cohesion was presented as an approach to correct market failure.
Social cohesion policies were to be introduced, then, to correct uneven employment
opportunities and income disparities. This perspective was enshrined in the Lisbon
2000 Policy Agenda. As cities were encouraged to be competitive in the international
market, urban cohesion policies were intended to make the necessary corrections
at the local level. This orientation enjoyed continuity as the document The Urban
Dimension in European Union Policies 2010 (European Commission: Inter-Service
Group on Urban Development, 2010) shows that cities and metropolitan areas
(south-east England, northern Scandinavian region, north-east of Spain, northern
Italy, and the Austrian-Slovenia axis), ‘the engines of economic development’, must
tackle ‘obstacles to growth and employment, such as social exclusion and environ-
mental degradation’ (Novy et al., 2012: 1875–1877).
More specifically, programmes were designed for vulnerable sectors of the
population, concentrated in some neighbourhoods in cities, combined with activation
programmes in the labour market with the purpose to counteract tendencies of social
segregation. For example, in Belgian, German, and Dutch cities there have been three
types of policies related to three types of intervention: (i) Creating economic partici-
pation programmes or improving transport and communication between areas with
unemployment and areas with job opportunities; (ii) attracting higher-income fam-
ilies to lower-income neighbourhoods, and vice versa, to increase social mixing; and
(iii) more encompassing programmes that target specific areas to reincorporate them
in the overall economic fabric (Cassiers and Kesteloot, 2012: 1915).

Asian Cities
In contrast to Europe and the United States, Asia is experiencing a sharp increase
of urbanisation. Despite still being far from reaching the proportion of urban
population of America and Europe, the continent is now the main contributor to the
global growth of urban populations (Kamal-Chaoui et al., 2009). Japan opened the
path of urbanisation linked to liberalism with the growing relevance of Tokyo, espe-
cially after 1945, resulting in the large metropolitan region of Tokyo, with more than
30 million inhabitants (Jacobs, 2019). But the acceleration of urbanisation processes
is explained mainly by liberalisation processes occurring in many Asian countries
as these reforms brought into play a number of interrelated phenomena: increas-
ing urban private investments, industrialisation, migration, and urban growth. This
transformation does not only involve the makeover of socialist countries (China,
Vietnam, Laos) but also the demise of modernising state-led development projects in
countries like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In these countries the role of the state
diminishes in favour of market liberalisation. Market reforms have had an impact
on the urban system in these countries, because they have changed the state-led
development for urban development (Logan, 2018; Shatkin, 2014; Yep et al., 2019).
These reforms have also brought a greater role for local administrations to develop
policies, although without a clear decline in the role of central government.
The complex process of market reforms in China has resulted in an unprec-
edented process of urbanisation which has reinforced the transition towards a
market society, increasing mobility and territorial fragmentation (He, 2019). The
national government has played a central role by providing the conditions for
550 Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza
urban growth and by allowing and encouraging foreign investment. It gave auton-
omy to state-led companies and created infrastructure and transport facilities (Lo-
gan, 2002). The government also allowed the growth of some peripheral cities to
the detriment of others, trying to distribute population growth between centre
and suburbs (Kamal-Chaoui et al., 2009). Nevertheless, local administrations also
played a role in this process due to a certain degree of decentralisation. Two suc-
cessive fiscal reforms in the 1980s and the 1990s led to relative fiscal independence
of local governments paired with increasing autonomy in revenue generation and
allocation for local public infrastructure provision (Wong, 2015: 912). The central
government has tolerated local innovations and experiments in terms of policies,
while maintaining control over personnel management and resource allocation,
which entails the possibility of easily reversing local policies (Yep et al., 2019:
9). In this framework, Chinese cities have developed local policies for growth by
trying to compete for revenue generation and through the attraction of public
and private investment flows. Local governments have adopted strong develop-
mentalist policies: constructing industrial parks; investing in infrastructures; pro-
moting residential and commercial properties; and building large infrastructures,
landmark architecture, and skyscrapers, all with the objective of generating GDP
growth (Wong, 2015; Yep et al., 2019). Large cities like Beijing and Shanghai have
developed large urban renewal programmes of their inner-city centres since the
1990s, which has also meant the displacement of millions of households and the
generation of social unrest in the transition towards cities based on private own-
ership (Shin, 2010). In China, as in many other Asian countries, cities have suf-
fered processes of mega-displacement and the production of tabula rasa conditions
of development through state-led development (Shin, 2019). Nevertheless, path
dependency and local trajectories have affected urban transformation. Shanghai
is a case in point as the city has recovered its position as the economic centre of
China which it occupied a century ago (Chen, 2019).
In India, in parallel with the liberalisation of the economy in 1991, there was a
constitutional reform in 1992 which defined urban local bodies, devolved powers,
responsibilities, and sources of revenue to them and created a democratic and de-
centralised governance framework for the operation of local governments (Shatkin,
2014). Liberalisation has meant the growth of private actors in urban development
as well as the competition of cities to be nodes of international production flows.
This led to the growth of industrial production and certain knowledge-intensive
activities, but also to the acceleration of migration flows that brought intensified and
unplanned urban growth.
This new setup stimulated new housing policies oriented towards a greater role
of the market in housing provision, the construction of new real estate and slum
clearances with the aim to modernise cities and to make investing more attractive.
Paradoxically, the economic transformation of large cities like Mumbai has meant a
growth of population being concentrated mainly in slums. Nowadays, half of Mum-
bai’s population lives in 2,000 slums distributed all over the city and accounting for
8% of the total land (Jagtap, 2010). This reality has led to policies in two appar-
ently opposing directions. The first and most obvious response is slum clearance in
favour of planned and legal urban development in which private actors play a role.
Slum dwellers lack entitlement as they are illegal settlers and they are not consid-
 Policies and Policy Approaches in Cities 551
ered proper citizens. Moreover, they threaten the legal structure of property rights.
This prompts the removal of slums, especially those close to the globalised areas of
the city centre, as is the case of Mumbai, along with the creation of transport infra-
structures connecting the global parts of the city to the airport and other facilities
(Harris, 2008).
In spite of this, as McFarlane (2008) points out, local administrations have dif-
ferent reasons to develop policies to improve living conditions in slums, such as
sanitation projects or settlement upgrading. Some of these reasons relate to the need
to maintain the availability of low-cost labour and to direct electoral support from
the poor to some specific candidates. Indeed, one key feature of India, shared with
some other countries in the area, is the democratic framework that affords opportu-
nities for collective organisation and protest by the poor, who can organise collective
demands, even though they are not treated as full citizens, being illegal residents. As
a consequence, sanitation policies are carried out apart from regular services provi-
sion to the formal city and take the form of ad hoc interventions in the slums with-
out linking these interventions to citizenship rights.
The development of these policies for sanitation and upgrading happens through
complex governance arrangements in which supranational institutions, different
government levels, and private and societal actors are involved. NGOs and suprana-
tional institutions play a part in funding and developing programmes for the sani-
tation of slums under the leadership of local authorities and often through national
programmes. Some of these programmes seek the involvement of the community in
the maintenance of facilities and infrastructures, looking for the participation of civil
society actors. These programmes foresee the creation of toilets, sewage systems,
water provision, and electricity, among others. One example is the development of
the slum sanitation programme in Mumbai, funded by the World Bank and devel-
oped by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai together with NGOs and
the involvement of the community (McFarlane, 2008).
The conceptual framework described above of (i) greater liberalisation and (ii)
the decline of state-led modernisation combined with (iii) the growing relevance of
the non-formal role of the poor can also be used when looking at many cities and
urban systems in the Middle East. These countries suffered similar processes of
liberalisation in the 1990s when state-led modernisation projects were abandoned;
this, in turn, affected the urban form. Withdrawal of the state was accompanied
by the growth of NGOs as actors providing urban social services at the local level,
especially were the state was absent or unable to provide social policies (Bayat,
2013: 76). As in many Asian cities, growth of urban population has meant the
growth of slums, which has generated reactions in terms of demolition and dis-
placement of the poor. Slums have already existed since modernisation projects
in the 1950s, but they have seen a significant growth. Thus, as in India, Middle
East cities have seen the demands of the urban poor for services and improving
living standards. When these demands cannot be met from above, we see the emer-
gence of informal practices that bring new forms of survival for the poor and that
question established power relations, often consolidating de facto rights. These
practices of quiet encroachment (Bayat, 2013) are especially strong in contexts of
limited capacity of organisation of civil society and non-democratic states, such as
Iran and Egypt.
552 Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza
African Cities
Africa remains the least urbanised continent in the world and yet sub-Saharan Africa
has the highest growth rate in the world. The urban transition gathered speed only
in the late colonial period and during the subsequent liberalisation in the second half
of the twentieth century (Rasmussen, 2019: 251–252). Urbanisation in Africa stood
at an average of 34% in 1995 and 36% in 2010. There are differences between the
most urbanised northern and southern African countries (48% in 1995) and the
eastern African countries with an average of 22%. Modern urban growth in Africa
is related to, first, when countries became independent and, second, to their birth
rates and population growth. Up to 1990 only 25 cities in Africa had more than one
million inhabitants, including the megacities. The most populated cities are situated
in North Africa (Cairo, Alexandria, Algiers, Casablanca) (Ali, 2019). In the south of
the continent, South Africa emerged as another focus of highly relevant urbanisation
(Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg) (Tostensen et al., 2001: 9).
There is a view that national governments in African countries have shied away
from formulating comprehensive policies to address the consequences of urbanisa-
tion as they have seen the concentration of population in cities as problematic rather
than as an opportunity for modernisation. With Africa being the least urbanised
region of the world, this governmental inhibition explains in part why these govern-
ments have welcomed international organisations and foreign donors to deal with
urban problems (Tostensen et al., 2001: 7). There are several explanations, however,
that help us to understand the slow development of African (mainly sub-Saharan)
cities. There is the difficulty that these cities have in realising agglomeration econ-
omies: this keeps the urban markets disproportionally local with higher costs of food
and services for the inhabitants. Also, low economic density inhibits the reduction
of transportation costs and reduces the capacity for sharing information among
workers and in the business community. Inadequate infrastructure of cities deters
foreign investment which in turn inhibits their development.
A feature of Africa’s urbanisation is the expansion of urban slums around cit-
ies with a disproportionate share of the city population. Urbanisation and urban
growth have become linked to poverty and segregation. Again, whereas the share
of people living in slums in Zimbabwe is 17.9%, in Niger that number is 81.9%
(Chenal, 2016: 71). These slum spaces have a pronounced scarcity of infrastructures
and services while most of the housing consists of informal construction. The gener-
alisation of poverty, even in fragmented conditions, means high unemployment and
sometimes low school attendance by children. Women are often breadwinners with
very low wages unable to provide adequate diet for themselves and for their children
(Tostensen et al., 2001: 10).
There is a path dependency explanation. In Africa, colonial investments in urban
infrastructure, housing, and economic diversification were limited, and the systems
of urban governance that were established were highly centralised and ad hoc. Towns
and cities were essentially designed to facilitate the extraction of primary commod-
ities and protect the interests and lifestyles of a European minority. The proliferation
of ‘slums’, ‘township’ settlements, in Africa is evidence of persistent government fail-
ure to invest in urban development and to cultivate effective institutions for urban
management. Slum population in sub-Saharan Africa was 61.7% in 2010, twice
 Policies and Policy Approaches in Cities 553
as much as the average in developing regions (Fox, 2014: 192). It has been argued
that the ad hoc governance arrangements and infrastructure deficiencies bequeathed
by colonial administrations created opportunities for postcolonial political and
economic entrepreneurs to follow instrumental patron–client networks and exploit
rent-seeking opportunities giving rise to a constellation of ‘status quo’ interest groups
in the region that had gained politically and economically from urban underdevelop-
ment in African cities (Fox, 2014: 191–192). In other words, postcolonial leaders
found themselves in a position to exploit the existing rules to their advantage. These
leaders have exhibited a ‘political will’ deficit to incorporate and manage urban
development in a context of rapid population growth. International donors and
agencies such as the World Bank have pointed out the governance challenges that
African countries face in dealing with the growth of cities and the quality of life of
their inhabitants. One of the challenges is the development of formal planning to
improve housing construction and transport infrastructure to strengthen the core of
cities. Instead, African cities have had the tendency to grow with disconnected and
informally built neighbourhoods and so push boundaries outwards thereby creat-
ing highly fragmented urban territories and disconnected communities. The overall
picture is of crowded rather than economically dense cities where living costs are
high. This deters investors and impedes the improvement of life chances for the
inhabitants (Lall et al., 2017: 19–28). Just one example: the quality of employment
limits the tax base needed to finance collective services which would change the
picture we have seen so far. Until quite recently, as much as 61% of employment
in African cities was concentrated in the low-income and unstable informal sector.
This has created a strong reliance on pirate operators, such as mobile water vendors,
and on widespread illegal electricity connections in the absence of state engagement
(Resnick, 2014: S4).
Since the 1990s processes of governmental decentralisation have occurred in
many African countries although the regulative frameworks which would allow
local financing of services are not well developed or efficient. Improvement in ser-
vice delivery is one of the reasons given for a push towards decentralisation of state
administration and policy implementation in African cities. But outcomes have not
always been as expected. It is true that, after a couple of decades of decentralisation
processes, Cape Town had sufficient revenues to make good on policies of service
delivery (Resnick, 2014: S7). But this example cannot be generalised. Often, the
political competition between the priorities of local and national parties acts against
the required political consensus to implement policy. But there are also structural
factors such as weak municipal governance structures incapable to deal with the
needs of the growing urban population (Rasmussen, 2019: 255). In South Africa it
was the strength of the ruling African National Congress that allowed for consensus.
The emphasis on administrative decentralisation in the region was also encour-
aged by international agencies and donors, such as the World Bank. Some critical
views have argued against this emphasis as being part of the trend to promote the
competitive city approach to urban development (Robinson, 2002). Others argue
that decentralisation, although in principle it allows urban governments more
political manoeuvrability, this may be more fictitious than real given the shortage
of financial resources transferred from the central state. ‘Genuine devolution has
been rare due to the unwillingness of central governments to cede authority over key
554 Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza
functions (such as taxation, planning, and infrastructure development) to lower tiers
of government’ (Fox, 2014: 197). As a way to overcome this limitation African cities
are experiencing a proliferation of initiatives from religious, civic, social economic,
and cultural organisations. However, they do not necessarily cooperate or reinforce
each other in their common objective to address poverty or in addressing specific
social needs (Simone, 2001: 48).
A good case to consider is the African NGO, Habitat Caucus, a platform made
up of urban development NGOs operating in 15 major African cities. This platform
not only stimulates networking among organisations, it also establishes connections
between community organisations and municipalities. Moreover, it is instrumental
in the building of partnerships in planning schemes and in the delivery of services.
This platform has in the process supported the participation of civil society organi-
sations in the management of municipal programmes and has contributed indirectly
to decision-making processes. What seems to be missing is the necessary institution-
alisation of these participatory practices in order to create more stable governance
mechanisms (Simone, 1999: 88–94). It would appear that informalisation and defi-
cient institution building constantly re-emerge as a hindrance to the consolidation
of policy approaches.
A more positive approach has been contemplated focusing on the organic
responses to neoliberal interventions. This approach sees partnerships between non-
state actors and grassroots organisations, on the one hand, and government agencies,
NGOs, and international donors, on the other, as a hybrid governance that can pro-
vide alternative answers to the needs of the population (Rasmussen, 2019: 259).
Improving the role of local government in African cities constitutes a major area
of innovation that requires further research and policy focus. One urgent innovation
is to have a census of all residents living in cities and their access to land, another is
to evaluate the real needs of the total population. ‘The fundamental assumptions of
how governments operate institutionally has [sic] to be challenged’ so that rich and
poor residents are equally visible to the state (Parnell and Pieterse, 2010). Another
challenge is formulating appropriate policies for African cities which involves a
critical assessment of the theoretical fundamentals that emerge from the study of
cities in other parts of the world. According to African analysts, appropriate pol-
icies require understanding of the embedded everyday practices in these cities with
multiple identities (religious, economic, social) and intersections. Being aware of
these social processes can help to integrate the endogenous creativity and innovative
capacity of these societies (Robinson, 2002). African cities need more effective state
regulatory frameworks and resilient democratic institutions in order to enhance
people’s well-being, particularly of the poor, and this can be done by engaging the
innovative capacity of its own population.

Policy Approaches to Tackle the Environmental Challenge

One key issue that has entered unevenly in local policy agendas is the fight against
the effects of reaching planetary boundaries (World Bank, 2010). Since the 1990s,
many Western cities and regions are undertaking action to mitigate climate change
and to face other environmental issues, such as the reduction of biodiversity, the
 Policies and Policy Approaches in Cities 555
growth of air, light, and noise pollution, the improvement of waste management,
and the transformation of urban energy systems through renewable energy and
efficiency. A first measure was the development of indicators and monitoring of the
environment, such as air and water quality. Later, in many Western cities, came re-
cycling, improving public transport, and the greening of cities. When climate change
came to be perceived as a real and present threat these measures gained prominence
in urban agendas. Continued urban growth has made cities into some of the main
actors in facing the challenges posed by climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and
other forms of broaching planetary limits. In the United States, despite the central
government’s inaction in the face of climate change, it is cities that have developed
local agendas and have adopted the commitments enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol.
Urban centres are at the same time the main drivers of climate change and one
of the most vulnerable geographical sites exposed to its effects. This has caused
growing concerns to those cities directly affected, for instance, coastal cities or cit-
ies that suffer worsening weather conditions. Nevertheless, other cities continue
focusing on social inclusion and competitiveness without significant attention to
the environment (While and Whitehead, 2013). Cities are responsible for 70% of
greenhouse emissions, even though we find strong differences among them. Western
cities are the main contributors to these emissions due to patterns of consumption,
whereas cities in developing countries contribute less and mainly as a result of the
use of coal as an energy source and industrial production (United Nations Human
Settlements Programme, 2011). Again, we find striking differences within developed
countries, depending on the pattern of urbanisation of cities. Compact cities account
for less impact in terms of emissions than largely suburbanised cities, which has
affected policies in terms of urbanism (World Bank, 2010).
Sustainability is now part of discussions and policy approaches in cities in a range
of policy domains. Debates on urbanism and transport infrastructures are closely
linked to environmental issues as well as questions regarding social inclusion. The
question of sustainability also arises in the discussions on economic development
and local models for competitiveness. The attractiveness of cities for investments
and their allure to visitors is strongly affected by pollution and other environmental
problems. On the minus side, climate change is increasing the vulnerability of many
cities, affecting especially cities with informal growth and poor neighbourhoods.
Coastal cities are especially exposed to floods and the rise of sea levels. All this
has stimulated the adoption of environmental perspectives in local policies. This is
affecting urbanism and infrastructures, waste collection, the regulation of sustain-
able production methods, and many other areas.
As mentioned earlier, in many developing countries fast urbanisation is linked
to economic growth and industrialisation. National policies that foster modernisa-
tion and urban expansion often treat sustainability as a secondary priority if they
do not neglect it altogether. Nevertheless, cities in developing countries have been
involved in networks and discussions on environmental policies, developing their
own agendas to challenge the effects of climate change (Kumar, 2013). In Indian and
Chinese cities, the question of pollution is gaining relevance due to problems of pub-
lic health and its impact on daily life. Urban growth and liberalisation have brought
growth of contaminating economic activities and have weakened regulation. This
has increased problems of contamination that have affected especially the poor in
556 Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza
Indian cities –developed largely without planning during the second half of the twen-
tieth century through the development of informal settlements. These poor commu-
nities are now coping with the environmental challenges, again through informal
organisation. In Delhi, practices based on informal waste collection and better use
of water resources are being developed. Nevertheless, these initiatives receive scarce
attention from local governments, which do not integrate them into the formal pol-
icies for environmental change (Kumar, 2013: 1465). This is also the case of many
Latin American cities, even though there have been efforts in some countries such as
Colombia and Argentina to recognise and formalise informal garbage collection in
order to integrate it in the formal system of waste management.
As a result of climate change, many cities need to face the growing risk of natural
disasters. Many Asian cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Manila, among
others, are affected by the possibilities of floods and hurricanes and are also directly
affected by the rise of sea levels (World Bank, 2010). Megacities in Asia and, to a
lesser extent, Latin America are especially vulnerable to rising sea levels and storm
surges, affecting especially the urban poor (World Bank, 2010). In developing cit-
ies, unplanned urban growth and the creation of informal settlements has brought
greater vulnerability to some areas of the city, as informal settlements and poor
neighbourhoods are often more exposed. In many cases this is a consequence of
colonial patterns of urbanisation which reserved the safest areas of the city for
the elite.
There are examples around the world in which socially innovative actions have
become institutionally embedded and territorially reproduced. This applies to pol-
icy debates on sustainability. Conventional sustainable development discourses have
neglected the social pillar for a long time. It was through the implementation of
Local Agenda 21 (LA21), together with other planning instruments, that sustain-
able development gradually reached the local level and moved towards more ter-
ritorialised/grounded strategies. Adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit, LA21 entails a
societal search for alternative ways to mobilise local resources to achieve sustainable
development1 (Mehmood and Parra, 2013: 53–62). These agendas have often been
implemented at the local level with the collaboration of municipalities. Local author-
ities have been made responsible because the problems to be addressed concerning
social and environmental infrastructures are locally defined and require policies that
are better implemented locally. This factor does not preclude the governance respon-
sibility of national governments. National governments and parliaments are often
responsible for introducing effective legislation to support local policy approaches.
Plans to address the challenges of urban sustainability require ambition, resources,
and coordinated political will at the national level as well as supranational organisa-
tions. Environmental justice movements can exercise pressure from below to deliver,
but governments need to respond.

1
The full text of Agenda 21 was made public at the UN Conference on Environment
and Development (Earth Summit) held in Rio de Janeiro on 13 June 1992, where 178
governments voted to adopt the programme. In Section I on “Social and Economic
Dimensions” the objectives include combating poverty, promoting health, and achieving
a more sustainable population.
 Policies and Policy Approaches in Cities 557
Conclusion

We have described some common traits in this chapter without contradicting the
specific path dependencies that each geographical part of the world has revealed.
Despite generalisations on the impact of globalisation in cities and the development
of policy approaches based on spreading neoliberalism, looking at the development
of local policies throughout the world shows us the relevance of path-dependent
trajectories and particular policy approaches linked to institutional factors. We find
local innovations in terms of policies that are often copied and implemented in other
local contexts. In this regard, supranational associations of cities and supranational
institutions (the most salient example being UN-Habitat) play a role in the exchange
of information and setting agendas for urban policies. The New Urban Agenda pro-
moted by the European Union can be a resource for the development of local policies
and legitimation for local governments in different contexts.
Cities have developed a battery of responses to the financial crisis and the chal-
lenges of climate change, even though they have had to combine these efforts with
seeking competitiveness and growth. Civil society and social movements, more or
less formally organised depending on the context, have contributed to the genera-
tion of local responses in many places, pushing for local policies for inclusion and
sustainability. Tackling environmental issues, regulating financial activities, and pro-
moting inclusion through new forms of redistribution are part of these local policy
agendas in many cities. In many places we find innovative approaches to policymak-
ing from civil society and local administration generating new forms of collabo-
ration in the provision of services, making room for bottom-linked initiatives and
policies (Eizaguirre et al., 2012; Pradel Miquel and García Cabeza, 2018). How
these policies have combined with growth agendas and the role of private actors in
this development differs between contexts.
In some cities we also find new regulatory practices to limit the capacity of so-called
platform economies (controlling the activity of Airbnb or Uber, for instance), to re-
municipalise some services like water provision (as Paris has done), or to limit the
capacity of financial actors to speculate with local assets. At the same time, many cit-
ies are opposing national policies directed at protectionism and closing borders, espe-
cially in relation to migrants and refugees: the development of sanctuary cities in the
United States or the movement for a greater involvement of cities in the management
of the refugee crisis in Europe are examples of this. Thus, the development of many
of these local policies can also be read as an alternative response to nationalism when
confronted with the financial crisis and the challenges of globalisation.

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 26
Financialisation and Real Estate
Anne Haila

Introduction

In the early 1980s, urban scholars saw cities as restructuring, and towards the end
of that decade the city became postmodern, globalised in the 1990s, and after that
began the era of neoliberalism. The buzzword of the 2010s is financialisation (Chris-
tophers, 2015). We can read studies on the financialisation of housing associations
and subsidised rental housing (Aalbers, 2016), housing production (Romainville,
2017), homeownership and housing rights (Rolnik, 2013), public land (Christophers,
2017), commercial real estate (Guironnet et al., 2016), business property (Halbert
et al., 2014), social projects (Forrest and Hirayama, 2015), municipal entrepreneur-
ialism (Beswick and Penny, 2018), urban entrepreneurialism (Anguelov et al., 2018),
infrastructure (Loftus and March, 2016), space (French et al., 2011), urban space
(Fields, 2015), built environment (Byrne, 2016), daily life (Martin, 2002), economy
(Krippner, 2005), capitalism (Lapavitsas, 2009), financialised global capitalism
(Walks, 2013), and era of financialisation (Aveline-Dubach, 2016).
Not only the extension of the category of financialisation is stretched; but its
meaning is indeterminate. Financialisation is defined by referring to the increasing
role of finance markets, institutions, actors, and motives (Epstein, 2005); economic
activity that has become subject to the logic and imperatives of interest-bearing capital
(Fine, 2010); and the growing and systemic power of finance (Blackburn, 2006).
Such open-ended definitions combined with the stretched extension of the concept
of financialisation characterise the multidisciplinary literature on financialisation.
The origin of the broad interest in financialisation among economists and non-
economists alike was the 2008 financial crisis. The extensive literature that followed
gave an impression that financialisation was a new phenomenon, connected to neo-

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
 Financialisation and Real Estate 563
liberalism (Walks, 2014; Ward and Swyngedouw, 2018). Financial crises and criti-
cism against financial speculation, however, have a long history. Historian Jerry Muller
(2002) dates the ‘financial revolution’ to the establishment of the Bank of England in
1694. Soon after, in 1720, one of the first speculation bubbles, the South Sea Bubble,
burst, and already back then landowners decried ‘the “monied interests”, whose wealth
was held to rest upon “fantasy” rather than the solid basis of land’ (Muller, 2002: 33).
The historical perspective in the contemporary literature is shorter. Several authors,
from different political perspectives, agree that a significant change took place around
the 1980s. Anthony Downs (1985), from the Brookings Institution, dates ‘revolution
in real estate finance and institutions’ in the 1970s when financial markets were de-
regulated, ceilings on interest rates were abandoned, and new types of mortgage and
financial instruments were introduced. Neil Fligstein (2001: 155) refers to the 1980s
when finance executives were given an important role in evaluating the assets of firms.
For David Harvey (2005: 161), the strong wave of financialisation since the
1980s ‘has been marked by its speculative and predatory style’. Productivity did not
increase, but capital was accumulated by dispossession, that is, through changes of
ownership and redistribution of wealth. For Saskia Sassen (2014), the 1980s was the
decade when finance became a major force. She conceives finance as capability, not
in the positive sense like Amartya Sen or Martha Nussbaum, but as the dangerous
capability of financial firms to sell something that they do not have and to build long
chains of speculative instruments. Jane Collins (2017) refers to the introduction of
the shareholder value doctrine and the leveraged buyouts in the 1980s, and to the
2000s as the decade of private equity firms.
It is understandable that labelling such ubiquitous transformative forces simply
as ‘financialisation’, that not even the professionals of financial trading understand
(Lewis, 2014), has been criticised. For Brett Christophers (2015) the flaw is the lack
of any theory of financialisation. He particularly criticises the conceptualisations of
the financialisation of property;

property per se … or, alternatively, in terms of land … home … or urban redevelop-

ment processes … what the authors identify and conceptualize as financialisation is,
in large measure, the selfsame process that David Harvey (1982: 347), three decades
earlier, described as ‘the increasing tendency to treat the land as a pure financial asset’.
(Christophers, 2015: 188)

In the following, I focus on these two questions: financialisation of land and prop-
erty, and the ‘increasing tendency to treat the land as a pure financial asset’ (Harvey,
1982). I begin with a brief discussion on how finance and real estate have been con-
ceptualised. After that, I introduce new economic ideas and their applications in the
financial and real estate markets.

FIRE and Asset Prices

Statistics aggregate finance, insurance, and real estate into one sector called the
FIRE. Economists lump together prices of real estate, stocks, and bonds into the cat-
egory of ‘assets’, and explain financial crises referring to ‘asset price bubbles’. Such
564 Anne Haila
bracketing of real estate has impeded the analysis of the dynamics in the real estate
sector and the impact of real estate on economic growth and crises. One example, as
Smart and Lee (2003) noted, is Robert Boyer’s (2000) model of a finance-led growth
regime that neglects real estate.
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers forced economists, at least for a while, to
notice the importance of real estate. In the Financial Times, Sender et al. (2008)
wrote about ‘a bank that survived the Great Depression’ but ‘was finally felled by
poor property investments and a small capital base’. Plender (2011), also writing
in the Financial Times, regarded the 2008 crisis ‘simply the biggest in a long line of
property-related banking crises. It shows once again that land, bricks and mortar are
the Achilles heel of the financial system’. The new edition of Charles Kindleberger’s
(1989) Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crisis includes new
chapters discussing ‘the 1980s real estate bubble in Japan so massive that by the end
of the decade, the chatter in Tokyo was that the market value of the land under the
Imperial Palace was greater than the market value of all the real estate in California’
(Kindleberger and Aliber, 2005: 173). Despite this interest in the land, real estate
bubbles were still interpreted as asset price bubbles.
Unlike economists, urban scholars of the built environment and urban
development have not ignored real estate issues in their studies. One origin of their
interest in real estate is Henri Lefebvre (2003: 160), who in 1970 conjectured that
‘as the percentage of overall surplus value formed and realized by industry begins
to decline, the percentage created and realized by real-estate speculation and
construction increases. The second circuit supplants the first, becomes essential’. Da-
vid Harvey (1973: 312), in Social Justice and the City, gave Lefebvre credit for mak-
ing a ‘simplistic but quite useful distinction between two circuits in the circulation
of surplus value’, but remarks, ‘it is premature to argue that the second circuit has
replaced the first’ (ibid.: 313). Ed Soja (1989), instead of contrasting the industrial
sector and real estate sector, suggested that finance capital has become more impor-
tant, but not because it has supplanted industrial capitalism as Lefebvre thought, but
because it increasingly absorbs surplus value from collective consumption.
In ‘The Urban Process Under Capitalism’, Harvey (1978) returns to the question of
the circuit of surplus value, and defined the primary circuit of capital as the produc-
tion of goods, and the secondary circuit of capital as the capital flows into fixed asset
and consumption fund. The financial institutions, credit and money, had the role in
managing the switching of investment between the primary and the secondary cir-
cuits of capital. In The Limits to Capital, Harvey (1982) no longer regarded the land
as an object of external investment flows, but was interested in ‘the true capitalist
form of landownership’, that is when ‘the land is treated as a pure financial asset’
and ‘trade in land is reduced to a special branch of the circulation of interest-bearing
capital’ (Harvey, 1982: 347).
There are two obstacles for the treatment of the land as a pure financial asset: the
first concerns the landowner and the second the comparability between land and
financial assets. First, the land was and still is owned by different types of owners
– private owners, the Church, the state, municipalities, corporations, financial
institutions – with their different motives and attitudes towards the land. Can such
a motley group of owners ‘constitute “one of the three great classes in capitalist
society”’, asked Harvey (1982: 347), and answered that despite such a variety
 Financialisation and Real Estate 565
of landowners, there is a tendency of them sharing the attitude of treating ‘the
land as a pure financial asset’. The second obstacle is the incommensurability bet-
ween land and financial assets. Financial assets – stocks and bonds, for example –
are tradable on the stock market, even in small doses. Land, in contrast, is a real
asset, fixed in location, and with limited divisibility. How should a real asset then
be treated as a financial asset? The development of financial instruments resolved
this problem and made the land easier to trade. In the following this development
is elucidated.

The Reciprocal Development of Financial Instruments and

the Market for Real Estate

Enclosing and the parcelling of land in Europe since the thirteenth century and the
privatisation of collectively owned land more recently in Asia, Africa, and South
America made the land tradable, a commodity to be bought and sold on the market.
Both enclosure, described by Karl Polanyi (1944), as well as contemporary priva-
tisation were violent processes. Compared to the brutal methods of enclosure and
contemporary privatisation, the process of treating the land as a financial asset was
a subtle process, but with devastating consequences. I distinguish two phases in this
process: first, inventing financial instruments, called ‘innovative’ in the economic lit-
erature, and, second, experimenting with these innovative instruments.
The first step was inventing financial instruments. These were fabricated in the
academia. Irving Fisher (1928) had realised the powerful effect of money on the real
economy. He formulated this insight in the theory of money illusion: people tend
to misinterpret the value of their assets and prices and are slow to adjust to infla-
tion and changes in interest rate (Nasar, 2012: 170). In the 1960s, economists, such
as Paul Samuelson, Franco Modigliani, Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe, Eugene
Fama, Robert Merton, and Myron Scholes at leading universities of the United States
began applying mathematical tools to solve two problems of the financial market:
pricing financial assets and hedging risks. This so-called ‘academic finance had a
tremendous impact on the way the business is done around the globe’ (Johnson and
Kwak, 2011: 68). A central idea was the efficient market hypothesis formulated by
Eugene Fama (1970), ‘because traders are looking for and exploiting inefficiencies
in asset prices, those inefficiencies cannot last for more than a brief period of time;
as a result, prices are always “right”’ (Johnson and Kwak, 2011: 68). An example of
recent speculations using private information is Nick Leeson, who speculated with
the price difference of the Nikkei 225 futures in two markets, Singapore and Osaka,
and incurred a one billion US dollar loss for the Barings Bank. The scam failed,
because something unexpected happened: the Kobe earthquake. Leeson should have
taken ceteris paribus reservation seriously. Nevertheless, Barings, one of Britain’s
oldest banks, collapsed.
Efficiency in the efficient market hypothesis does not mean allocating resources in
the way that increases production, but efficiency in the financial market means that
prices ‘reflect all available information about the assets which are traded’ (Ormerod,
1994:175). As Fama stated, ‘A market in which prices always “fully reflect” available
information is called “efficient”’ (Fama, 1970). Beating the market using private
566 Anne Haila
information, then, became a hobby of venturesome academic economists. This
hobby was not without consequences. First developed the bubbles, then followed the
crashes, as in the years of 1987 and 2008. The irony is that ‘there was no way to be
sure whether the market was irrationally volatile or not’ (Fox, 2009: 207). Some saw
these crises as showing that the market failed, some others interpreted it as showing
that the market corrected itself.
Critics of the efficient market hypothesis, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Shiller, and Daniel
Kahneman, among others, did not accept the idea of ‘correct’ prices. ‘Behavioural
finance’ economists collected empirical evidence that showed that prices are volatile.
They claimed that economists do not understand the behaviour of people, espe-
cially when people face uncertainty. Nevertheless, while economists spend their days
studying disturbances and biases on the market, they did not abandon the assump-
tion that out there somewhere are ‘pervasive forces pushing prices at least in the
general direction of where they belong’ (Fox, 2009: 301).
Which national economies experimented with the financial instruments cooked
up by academic economists? And given that Europe, Asia, and the United States’
institutions, legal systems, cultures, and traditions are quite different, how could
the financial instruments invented in the universities of the United States produce
worldwide crises? There are two arguments in the literature suggesting that there
exists parallel development in different countries: the first referring to the pressure
by economists, media, and some powerful organisations, and the second referring to
the ideology of the free market.
Europe is a good example showing why different national economies con-
verge. In many of the European societies, argued Fligstein (2001), ‘workers and
government bureaucrats play much larger roles in the institutions of capitalism than
they do in the United States’ (Fligstein, 2001: 232). Workers with their unions and
governments with their policies have been concerned about equality and welfare.
However, Fligstein continues, ‘now, the power of these groups is being assaulted by
academics, officials of such organisations as the OECD, and various policy com-
munities’ (ibid.). Workers and bureaucrats were accused of making the European
economies inefficient. As one example, Fligstein mentions the Economist magazine
that, for example, in its July issue in 1996 ‘argued that if European business did
not adopt the “shareholder rights” conception of control, it was certain to fall far-
ther and farther behind the United States’ (ibid.: 245). Another reason for parallel
development is ideological. As Johnson and Kwak (2011: 68) argue, perhaps more
important than the mathematical tools and innovative financial instruments was the
ideology that the academic finance created: ‘if a free market will always produce
fundamentally correct asset prices, then the financial sector can be left to its own
devices’ (ibid: 60).
Among those innovative financial instruments that made real estate more com-
mensurable with financial assets are the following: securitisation packaged non-
marketable assets, for example, mortgage loans, into marketable bundles and made
real estate liquid and comparable (Gotham, 2009; Theurillat et al., 2010; Yrigoy,
2018); real estate investment trusts (REITs), companies that own and manage real
estate (offices, retail, industrial, hospitality, healthcare, and residential) and pay div-
idends to their shareholders, made it possible to divide the ownership of real estate
into smaller doses; subprime housing loans bought by hedge funds were divided into
 Financialisation and Real Estate 567
tranches of junk and prime and sold to banks, with the result that when homeown-
ers failed to pay their loans and lost their homes, the division to tranches made it
possible for financial firms to make profit. In addition to these ‘innovative financial
instruments’, there are, and will be, several others methods complemented with new
techniques, such as the use of algorithms, electronic trading, and high speed trading,
to boost profits.
How these financial instruments work in practice has been investigated in sev-
eral case studies, for example, by Fields (2017). First a real estate company or
investor buys housing units, or rent-regulated housing as in New York City, using
mortgage loans from a bank, then the bank securitises the mortgage and sells it
further. Debt and risk have an important role in these financial rearrangements
(Ashton, 2009, 2012; Soederberg, 2004, 2014). In search of better return on their
investment, the new owners raise the rent and those residents who cannot pay the
higher rent must leave. This does not concern only tenants, but also homeowners.
Securitisation and selling of securitised mortgages made homeownership precari-
ous (Wyly et al., 2006) and homeowners became the tenants of predatory lenders
(Wyly et al., 2009). The development of financial instruments has been accompa-
nied by two trends in the housing market: production of luxurious housing and
emergent amateur landladies.

Ultra-High Net Worth Individuals and Luxurious Housing

In the Forbes 2018 list of the 100 richest individuals in the world, nine has amassed
their wealth from finance and eight from real estate (the real number is higher,
because, for example, the diversified category also includes real estate tycoons).
This makes finance and real estate the largest source of wealth. It is interesting
to note that in the list, six out of the nine financial tycoons come from the United
States, and six out of the eight real estate tycoons come from Hong Kong and
China. To give some idea of the amount of money that these billionaires make is
the earnings of Blackstone co-founder Steve Schwarzman, who in 2006 earned
US$398.3 million (Politi et al., 2007: 1). How these new rich spend their money
is not insignificant. There are stories of the rich Chinese buying castles and wine
estates in Europe, stories of the post-reform generation in China who are used,
from the early age, to buy luxurious products. One of the favoured investment
options has been housing.
One example is Lakshmi Mittal, CEO of the LNM Group, who in 2004 paid
GB£70 million for a house in Kensington, London (Chow, 2008). Mittal is not the
only ultra-high net worth individual who has invested in real estate. It is estimated
that ‘real estate currently accounts for around a fifth of the invested wealth of ultra-
high net worth individuals … [and] around 3%, or US$5.3 trillion, of the world’s
total real estate value is owned directly by 200,000 of the wealthiest individuals
(0.003% of the global population)’ (Savills, 2014: 4).
Cities quickly realised the possibilities offered by these extravagant investors. For
example, Singapore amended its Trustees Act to ‘attract high net worth individuals
from around the world’ (Latif, 2004). Some countries grant a residence permit in
568 Anne Haila
return for investment in real estate. For example, in Portugal, the law allows anyone
to obtain a residence visa with the investment of a minimum of €500,000 in residen-
tial or commercial property (Latham, 2013: 14).
For developers, the demand by ultra-wealthy individuals offered a new opportu-
nity. The ultra-wealthy are not demanding just any type of housing, but luxurious
housing. A luxury is a special type of commodity: its demand increases when the
prices increase, whereas in the case of ordinary commodities, the increase in prices
decreases the demand. For developers the production of luxurious housing means
extra profit. This can be seen in the housing prices that keep setting record prices.
For example, in Manhattan a penthouse set a new record when it was sold for
US$90 million in 2012 (South China Morning Post, 23 May 2012). In Hong Kong,
developers expected to make up to HK$8 billion through the sale of luxury homes
in Redhill Peninsula (China Daily, 16 May 2012).
The strategy to make a product into a luxury product is to create images through
advertising and by differentiating a luxury product from other products. The fol-
lowing is an example of such a differentiating strategy: ‘At Wallich Residence, your
morning begins with an idyllic swim in the infinity pool on Level 39, soaking in
breathtaking views of the city, sea, and beyond. When you head for breakfast at Sofi-
tel hotel or a café at Tajong Pagar Centre, you find yourself plugged into a thriving
community of Wallich residents and Guoco Tower residents. And who knows what
new business ventures come out of your conversations with them. At noon, you will
have a lunch appointment where the subway takes you within minutes without fuss.
Then fitness club, dinner, and drinks in the lush greenery of the sky gardens, every-
thing at Wallich Residence or its vicinity. The new way of living is about how the
lines between living, playing, and working are blurred.’
The city where one can have such a programmed life is Singapore. However, this
description is not the latest social engineering attempt by the government, but a
suggested representation of your day by a private developer, GuocoLand. Wallich
Residence is GuocoLand’s new development that is Singapore’s highest apartment
building with luxurious flats. The text above was GuocoLand’s advertisement in The
Straits Times, January 2018.
Ultra-high net worth individuals paying record high housing prices increase the
general price levels in the city in which they invest. This excludes ordinary wage
earners from the housing market and creates a housing crisis, as, for example, in
San Francisco Bay Area that ‘is going through the worst housing crisis in its his-
tory’ (Walker, 2018: 193). Whereas in San Francisco prices are rising, in Las Vegas
the ‘average per sq ft prices in the resale market plummeted from about $190
at their peak in March 2007 to just over $60 by January 2012’, and Las Vegas
became the foreclosure capital (Thomson, 2018: 3). In some cities, high housing
prices has incited illegal activities. In Hong Kong, listed as one of the most expen-
sive cities in the world, high housing prices have been compensated by building
illegal basements, swimming pools, and extra rooms: this is an open secret, and
there is a saying that people will only buy a house in certain areas, because they
know there are illegal additions (Zhao, 2018). Transformations in the housing
market are not limited to the market for the purchase of homes, but also include
the rental market.
 Financialisation and Real Estate 569
Amateur Landladies and Peddling of Sweet Home

Realist novels of the nineteenth century portrayed the landlady who kept an eye on
and patronised her tenants. In Balzac’s Le Pere Goriot, the fat landlady’s ‘whole per-
son explains the boarding-house, as the boarding-house implies her person’ (Hem-
mings, 1974: 45). In Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov tries to
sneak out avoiding facing the landlady to whom he owes a rent of several months.
It is interesting to note that the landowner in novels is usually a female. Duties
such as collecting the rent and keeping an eye on the tenants were regarded suitable
tasks for women who had only limited rights to property, and their ownership being
conditional on their relationship to men (McCrone and Elliott, 1989; Warner, 1963;
Whitehead, 1984).
Today anybody who owns or rents an apartment can use an Airbnb platform to
advertise their home to find tenants. An entry into becoming a landlord has become
easier, or as Luke Kennard (2017) puts it, ‘the last decade had seen the professionali-
zation of the amateur landlord’. Airbnb is not only an issue for cities to try to prevent
tax evasion or the hotel business facing competition, but is a challenge for urban
scholars who have claimed that the home provides the privacy that is an inalienable
value (Saunders, 1990: 80). Do Airbnb landlords inviting strangers to their homes
signify that the value of the privacy of home was alienated, or does it show that such
a value never existed?
In addition to becoming an Airbnb landlord, another possibility of making money
through real estate for the man on the street is to invest in REITs and become an
owner of someone else’s home.

Rise and Fall of REITs

A real estate investment trust is a company that owns and manages a portfolio of real
estate and pays dividends to its shareholders. REITs have made it possible to divide
the ownership of real estate into smaller doses and to buy a piece of real estate, thus
increasing the number of people who can invest in real estate. The activity of publicly
listed REITs is regulated by financial authorities, for example, there are restrictions
concerning the share of dividends of the profit and the ratio of debt to the total value
of the property.
In their policies, REITs seek to maximise the yield from real estate ownership and
management. This has several effects on cities’ housing markets, provision of pub-
lic services, and built environments. REITs increase real estate speculation and are
regarded as the main driver of rental increases. Although REITs increase speculation,
they do not create it. Speculation, uneven investment, and cycles are common fea-
tures of property development, as Susan Fainstein (2015) has remarked. REITs have
the reputation of being inflexible negotiators regarding the level of rent. In this, they
differ from the landladies of the world gone by. Raskolnikov could have escaped the
surveillance of the landlady, or the landlady may feel empathy and let him go. REITs
do not have moral feelings.
In addition to residential REITs, there are healthcare REITs, hotel and resort RE-
ITs, industrial REITs, office REITs, and retail REITs. These have an effect of making
570 Anne Haila
urban life dependent on accidental private finance and frustrate zoning efforts by
planning authorities.
Listed real estate investment trusts offer ordinary wage earners an opportunity
to benefit from the increased value of real estate. Recently, several development and
real estate companies have been delisted. Some examples of recent delistings are
Keppel Land, Popular Holdings, Wing Tai, Ho Bee, Goucoland, and Wheelock, who
were delisted or were considering listing in Singapore (Tan, 2015b). In Japan, Sumi-
tomo Real Estate Sales delisted from Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2017. In Hong Kong,
China’s second-richest man, Wang Jialin, offered HK$4.4 billion to privatise Hong
Kong listed Dalian Wanda Commercial Properties (Hughes, 2016). The reasons
these companies presented were the following: easiness of making investments as a
fully controlled company (in the case of Keppel) (Tan, 2015a); a growing number of
unsold homes (Popular Holdings) (Tan, 2015b); expectations of growth of the mar-
ket and fiercer competition (Sumitomo Annual Report of 2017); the difference bet-
ween valuations of dual-listed Chinese companies in two stock exchanges (Shanghai
and Shenzhen higher compared to in Hong Kong) (Hughes, 2016).
The reason for the privatisation wave could also be that listed companies are
no longer the best way of making profit. In the business literature, more attractive
investment options than publicly listed REITs are private equity funds (Episcope, 2017).
Jensen (1989) argues that public companies are inefficient, whereas private equity
firms are efficient. The reasons for their ‘efficiency’ are that they are less regulated
than public companies, they can use leverage debt financing to buy companies, and
there is no need to redistribute the profits. The largest funds are in the United States,
but Europe also has private equity firms (Fields and Uffer, 2016). One example of
a private equity firm is Blackstone, a multinational asset management and financial
services firm based in New York. On its webpage (accessed on 31 July 2018) Black-
stone introduces itself as ‘the largest real estate private equity firm in the world today
with $119 billion of assets under management’. It invests in North America, Europe,
Asia, and Latin America.
Blackstone became known as the largest buyer of foreclosed houses during the 2008
crisis in the United States. Blackstone and other private equity real estate funds bought
foreclosed housing, financed their purchase with debt, securitised mortgages loans,
and sold slices of the securitised packages to investors. Following this strategy, com-
panies like Homes 4 Rent in the United States made big profits, and ‘many tenants
used to own the houses they are now renting from the company’ (Corkery, 2014).
The fate of these homeowners raises the question why the public authorities did not
save households, but used public money to save banks.

State Real Estate

What has been the role of the state in the era of financialisation? Some studies sug-
gest that the state is no longer merely the enabler, but has financialised its practices
(Beswick and Penny, 2018) and increasingly promotes land rents (Yrigoy, 2018).
Adisson (2018) has noted that in Europe many urban development projects take
place on land belonging to public bodies and administrations and publicly owned
firms. Did these public bodies have any policy on how to use the public land? There
 Financialisation and Real Estate 571
is, however, not much research on this. Christophers’s (2017) study of public land
in the United Kingdom is one of few. He concludes that the UK state has sold land
to the private sector, but ‘the state has not itself treated its land as a financial asset’
(ibid.: 81). Finland offers another example.
In Helsinki, the state of Finland owns 8% of the land and the City of Helsinki
owns 64% (in 2017). At the end of the 1990s, both the state and the city reorganised
the management of their real property. They concentrated the management of pub-
lic real estate under corporations established for this purpose, whereas previously
public bodies and administrations managed the land that they needed themselves. As
corporatised companies, these former state and municipal real estate departments
began charging the market rent for the use of public land, whereas before the state
and the municipal land were given free of charge to schools, libraries, day care cen-
tres, etc. This is not treating the land as a pure financial asset, but maximising the
land rent. However, the state and municipalities in Finland have been willing accom-
plices to those who make profit on the financial market. Public subsidies to private
care for elderly people have made small private care homes targets of acquisitions for
private equity firms and asset management companies, for example, G Square (UK)
and ICG (UK). Another example of the state of Finland supporting the financial sec-
tor is the delisting of Sponda, a real estate management company, the original port-
folio of which consisted of the properties that the state appropriated after the crisis
in the beginning of the 1990s. The Chamber of Commerce in the court of arbitration
gave Blackstone permission to confiscate the stocks of owners, against their will.

Calculating Landlords and Real Estate Mentalities

Airbnb landlords, REITs, private equity funds, and public authorities selling pub-
lic land calculate the monetary value of their possessions. There is nothing new in
calculating as such, and, for example, REITs were established in the Unites States
already in the early 1960s (Wurtzebach and Miles, 1987: 338). Assessing the value
of a building, real estate, and land for different purposes such as insurance, taxes,
and selling is an old practice and there are valuation professionals who apply the
established methods of valuation, such as cost method, market price method, and
yield method. Financialisation has naturally made it necessary to update the calcu-
lative practice of property valuation (Crosby and Henneberry, 2016). Text books
on real estate and real estate finance have written about financial intermediaries,
secondary markets, mortgage bankers, investment bankers, venture capitalists,
mortgages and deeds of trust, securities, private mortgage securities (Wurtzebach
and Miles, 1987), and methods to finance development, such as forward fund-
ing with an institution, bank lending, and equity finance (Cadman and Austin-
Crowe, 1991).
However, there are two new trends: first, those who earlier did not think the
monetary value of their possession have begun calculating its value and, second,
the  properties have been concentrated in the hands of those who treat their real
estate as a financial asset.
First, there was no need for homeowners and tenants to calculate the monetary
value of their home until Airbnb made it possible to rent it to strangers; and
572 Anne Haila
there was no point for the man on the street to compare the yield of real estate
investment to that from other sources until REITs made it possible to invest in real
estate. By following these trends their behaviour started to resemble the business
concept of private equity firms that is based on the calculation of the expected
yield of real estate and the unbundled assets of companies. Even whole cities are
valued based on calculations of their real estate values. This is done by internation-
ally operating real estate firms that define a world city based on its ‘investability’
(Savills, 2014: 10).
Second, although these new calculating owners add to the variety of owners,
ownership since the 1980s has become concentrated in the hands of those who
treat their real estate as a financial asset. This happened through acquisitions,
privatisations, and buying foreclosed properties. Eugene Fama, who formulated
the efficient market hypothesis, regarded the primary role of the capital market
as the allocation of ownership of the economy’s capital stock (Fama, 1970; Fox,
2009: 104). Financial institutions became the holders of the debt and equity of
companies (Ormerod, 1994: 61). This explains the increased influence of financial
institutions.
Calculating the monetary value is not just a technical task and neutral engineering.
As Michel Callon writes: ‘economics frames the world to make it calculable; it cre-
ates “calculative agencies” that uses these framings’ (cited in Collins, 2017: 13).
Calculating the value of real estate created what Rogers (2017) has called ‘real estate
mentality’, and I have called ‘property mind’ (Haila, 2016).
Calculating activity and money disturbed social scientists and philosophers in the
nineteenth century. Georg Simmel pondered the psychological effects of handling
money and thought that the abstract means of exchange created an abstract mindset,
and Hegel was afraid that ‘the self-interested mentality of “calculators”’ threatened
the family and the state (Muller, 2002).
What were the concerns raised by the ‘innovative’ financial instruments in
the twentieth century? Desiree Fields (2017) has pointed out that financialisa-
tion generates dissent and there are also unwilling subjects of financialisation.
Kevin Fox Gotham (2009: 368) regards securitisation as conflictual, contested,
and deeply contradictory. And Jane Collins (2017) believes that it is the politics
of value that matters and identifies three movements that value things differently:
demanding corporate responsibility is to oppose shareholder value doctrine, slow
money movement is against neoliberal globalisation, and the movement demand-
ing counting value to the public sector criticises austerity discourse. Nevertheless,
despite unwilling subjects and the movements that value things differently ‘while
there is anger at bankers’ duplicity and populist outrage over their bonuses, there
seems to be no movement in North America or Europe to embrace radical and
far-reaching changes’ (Harvey, 2010: 218). Why was individual investor bankers
criticised, some even jailed, but there was no disapproval of financial speculation
as such? One answer, from the point of performativity of economics, is given by
Donald MacKenzie (2007) who argues that the Black-Scholes-Merton model made
option trading and derivatives morally acceptable. This was done ‘by transform-
ing options and derivatives into economic goods whose prices can be calculated
objectively. The accusation of gambling and immorality automatically falls away’
(Callon, 2007: 345).
 Financialisation and Real Estate 573
Finance or Real Estate

The financialisation literature with its stretched extension and open-ended defini-
tion of the concept of financialisation, and financialisation defined as the ‘increasing
dominance of finance markets, institutions, actors and motives’, gives an impression
that the financialisation is an external force and the financial sector is a separate sec-
tor, outside from other sectors of the economy. This chapter has reviewed the finan-
cialisation together with the development in the real estate sector. Lastly, I discuss
the question of whether the real estate sector and the financial sector are separate
sectors. Three debates can be identified.
The first discussion is about the function of landowners. Classical economists
Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Marx regarded landlords redundant in the
capitalist economy. More recently, Jeremy Rifkin (2000) has argued that the new
‘hypercapitalism’ has made ownership old fashion: use rather than owning matters.
Those companies that were thinking like this sold their premises and stayed there as
tenants. In 2010, Jones Lang LaSalle anticipated that ‘having gone out of style during
the economic downturn, sale-leasebacks activity has returned’. As reasons for this
the real estate services company mentioned ‘a significant amount of equity seeking
a home in real estate and improved conditions in the commercial mortgage market’
(Jones Lang LaSalle, 2010). Corporations that sold and leased back their premises
argued that such business strategy releases capital to the core business of companies.
The same argument was used when public owners, states, and municipalities, sold
their properties: more money to public services and less to walls.
The companies, states, and municipalities that sold their premises and stayed as
tenants made one mistake. The mistake was thinking that they could rent the prem-
ises they sold with the rent they calculated from the sales price. They did not expect
that the ownership of real estate becomes concentrated and that the new owners
are financial institutions and real estate companies that are managed by financial
engineering and real estate professionals who maximise the rent revenue and who
through their monopoly position could charge monopoly rents.
The second debate concerned the relation between the productive and the real
estate sector, explained with the theory of switched investment. The question was if
the real estate sector is separate of its own dynamics or is the land just an object for
switched investment. Matthew Edel (1977) has distinguished two views of finance
capital, as a separate fraction and as connected with industrial capital. Harvey was
criticised for emphasising the financial capital (Harloe, 1976) and failing to under-
stand own dynamics of investing in land (Gottdiener, 1985). Gotham (2009: 359)
criticises views of ‘the real estate sector as conceptually separate and analytically
distinct circuit of capital investment that is organised by diverse networks of actors,
organisations, and laws and public policies’, and states that ‘the secondary circuit is
not the exclusive domain of separate real estate agents, but consists of a structure of
banks, other financial conduits, and diverse modes of agency, such as monopolistic
and small real estate and financial firms, appraisers, public and private investors,
and homeowners’ (Gotham, 2009: 359).
The third discussion has contrasted financialisation and urban redevelopment
literature. Guironnet et al. (2016) have criticised the approach of urban political
economy, particularly that based on Harvey’s argument of ‘land as a financial
574 Anne Haila
asset’ for reinforcing ‘the increasing tendency to treat land as a financial asset’,
and understating ‘the importance of market finance actors, neglecting to demon-
strate how, in practice, such financial investors, who have been shown to adopt
selective investment practices, shape urban redevelopment projects’ (Guironnet
et al., 2016: 1442). Ted Rutland (2010: 1171) does not accept the idea that studies
of urban redevelopment have not taken an interest in financial capital. He admits
that financialisation literature can contribute studies on urban development, how-
ever, the role of ‘the material and ideological mechanisms through which prop-
erty is continually reproduced as a financial asset’ (ibid.: 1168) should not be
forgotten.
There is no solution to these discussions. The only thing that is certain is that
the classical economists and those who anticipated that the ownership becomes old
fashioned were wrong. ‘The power of land and resource owners has been much un-
derestimated, as has the role of land and resource asset values and rents in relation
to the overall circulation and accumulation of capital’ suggests Harvey (2010), and
estimates that ‘this arena of activity accounts as much as 40 per cent of economic
activity in many of the advantaged capitalist countries’ (ibid.: 182). Landowners’
power in alliance with developers, construction interests, and financiers has increased
and ‘far from being a “residual class” of landed aristocrats and feudal lords, this
landed developer interest takes an active role in making and remaking capitalism’s
geography as a means to enhance its income and its power’ (ibid.: 181). This calls
for a theory explaining landowners’ power and alliance with financiers and the rela-
tionship between real estate and finance sectors.

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 27
Housing in the Global North and
the Global South
Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala

Introduction: The Housing Policy Challenge at the

Global Scale

The aim of this chapter is to present a critical overview of contemporary housing

policy issues across the world. What we call today ‘housing policy’ dates back to the
transition from pre-industrial to industrialised societies, with its accompanying pro-
cess of mass urbanisation. This process, which occurred at various times in different
parts of the world since the mid-nineteenth century, has meant the rapid influx of
large numbers of rural inhabitants seeking employment opportunities and there-
fore housing in cities, leading to unsanitary and overcrowded living conditions.
The inability of markets alone to meet housing demand resulted in the provision of
housing solutions, initially by industrial philanthropists and later on by governments
(Malpass, 2014; Mokyr, 1998).
Thanks to these interventions, conditions have largely improved over the last
century, albeit to various extents in different countries. Nevertheless, affordable
housing in the twenty-first century remains a challenge across the world. The
McKinsey Global Institute frames the housing challenge as a global affordability
crisis, pointing out that ‘330 million urban households around the world lack decent
housing or are so financially stretched by housing costs that they forgo other ba-
sic needs, including food, health care, and schooling for children’ (Woetzel et al.,
2014: 1). Today’s housing problems are the result of how housing policies have been
implemented in different political economy contexts. Housing policies, whose pri-
mary objective is to meet real housing needs of the population (Angel, 2000), have
played a role in the creation of ‘problem areas’ in the Global North (GN), and in

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
580 Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala
the widespread formation and consolidation of slums in the Global South (GS). In
general terms, while in the GS policies have been largely influenced by international
and multilateral organisations such as the UN-Habitat and the World Bank (Wakely,
2014), countries in the GN have followed their own path.
The capitalist political economy context in which housing markets have devel-
oped in the GN, ruled by the imperatives of private property, market exchange,
and capital accumulation, resulted in the 2008 global financial and economic crisis
(GFEC). This crucial event that affected national economies at a global scale brought
about awareness of the global housing crisis (Aalbers, 2016; Fields and Hodkinson,
2018). Linked to this is what the United Nations Report on the Right to Adequate
Housing identifies as the global financialisation of housing, defining it as ‘structural
changes in housing and financial markets and global investment whereby housing
is treated as a commodity, a means of accumulating wealth and often as security for
financial instruments that are traded and sold on global markets’ (Farha, 2017: 3).
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing argues that treating the
house as a repository for capital – rather than a place for habitation – is a human
rights issue.

Shifting Housing Paradigms

While recognising the limitations of generalising housing policy issues in regions
across the globe housing policy interventions can be traced back to the end of
World War I. In the 1920s, affordable public housing programmes were intro-
duced in many European countries to tackle the severe housing shortage (Mum-
ford, 2002). From the 1950s to the 1970s the predominant model for housing
delivery across the world was government-built housing. In Europe, the focus
of housing policies was on solving the housing shortage brought about by the
destruction of cities during the war. Across the continent, post-war welfare states
built social rental housing for the working classes on a large scale. Since the
1980s these welfare states have seen a progressive dismantling, with housing
policies focusing on expanding homeownership as a means of building asset wel-
fare societies through the privatisation of formerly publicly owned social rental
housing (Doling and Ronald, 2010). The early 1990s also meant the mass privati-
sation of large-scale post-war multifamily housing in formerly communist coun-
tries. This resulted in significant management and maintenance problems due
to the lack of appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks (Gruis et al., 2009;
Hegedüs, 2012).
While Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States have in common a
relatively limited social housing sector, Hulse (2003: 32) has previously noted that
the division between the private rental and the social housing sector is consider-
ably less rigid in Canada and in the United States compared to Australia and New
Zealand – the first two have a broader mix of housing arrangements (Gabriel et al.,
2010: 10).
In the colonised countries of Asia and Africa housing policies were mainly tar-
geted to specific groups such as public sector employees, war veterans, and the mil-
itary. This approach persisted long after a wave of independence of former colonies
during the 1960s and 1970s, in which housing delivery continued to be targeted to
 Housing in the Global North and the Global South 581
specific groups. Keeping intact the legacy of high housing standards and regulations
inherited from colonial rule, many of these countries failed to address the housing
needs of the great majority who could neither access nor afford housing within the
existing delivery structure (Payne and Majale, 2004; Yahya et al., 2001). The result
was the formation and, over time, the consolidation of urban informal settlements.
In contrast, Latin America’s independence from colonial rule in the early nineteenth
century meant a different development path and a comparatively more advanced
industrialisation process. Urbanisation in many Latin American countries was char-
acterised by massive rural–urban migration, triggered by employment opportu-
nities in the industrial as well as the service sector. Under the predominant model of
direct housing provision by the state, the urban transformation of the mid-twentieth
century resulted in widespread housing informality. Realising the impossibility to
cope with the housing challenge at hand, national governments approached the issue
either in a laissez-faire manner or through authoritarian measures such as forced
evictions, demolition of incipient informal settlements, or by displacement of the
urban poor to the urban fringe and rural areas (Ward, 2012).
During the 1970s the GS saw the emergence of non-conventional housing policies.
Mainly influenced by John Turner (Turner and Fichter, 1972), the so called “self-help era”
significantly changed the way that governments, scholars, and housing practitioners
looked at the housing challenge. State provision of housing had failed to address the
challenge on the ground. Informal housing construction became the main vehicle
through which the great majority of the urban poor population could access and
afford any kind of housing solution. The recognition of people’s efforts to solve
their housing needs was translated into supportive housing policy approaches which
resulted in a wave of aided self-help housing programmes and projects, such as sites-
and-services and core and incremental housing. The recognition of informal settle-
ments and the need to upgrade them by providing security of tenure and adequate
access to urban infrastructure was fundamental for the housing paradigm shift of the
1970s (Chiodelli, 2016; Wakely, 2014; Ward, 2012).
Since the 1980s, however, the inability of governments in developing countries
to provide housing with their scarce resources led them to adopt a new approach
based on strengthening institutional frameworks that allow private housing markets
to work within their particular context (Chiodelli, 2016; Harris, 2015). Thus, non-­
conventional approaches were replaced by the current ‘enablement’ paradigm, which
has meant a policy shift away from direct provision of housing by governments,
either conventional or non-conventional, towards housing development approaches
relying on multi-stakeholder arrangements. It is argued that this paradigm has re-
sulted in favouring well-off populations and that it has been implemented with
strong bias towards market mechanisms and without a substantial improvement of
the necessary institutional framework to make the housing sector work (Zhang and
Ball, 2016).

The Challenge of Housing Policies

As a result of the these developments, housing has come to be progressively regarded
as a capital asset to be traded in the market, as opposed to a home, which has ultimate-
ly benefited the well-off rather than the poor (Burgess et al., 1997; Chiodelli, 2016;
582 Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala
Helmsing, 2002; Jenkins et al., 2006; Pugh, 2001; UN-Habitat, 2003; Ward, 2012).
The 2007 subprime mortgage crisis in the United States that led to the GFEC
occurred after many years of ideological and economic promotion of homeown-
ership at the expense of the rental sector. Even though this crisis in itself was a
wake-up call to the need for stronger financial regulation, the commodification of
housing has continued into the twenty-first century (Aalbers, 2016; Rolnik, 2013;
Marcuse, 2012).
As described above, the outcome of well-intended housing policies follow-
ing changing housing paradigms across the globe has often resulted in the
concentration of poor households in derelict neighbourhoods; the stigmatisation
and ghettoisation of migrants, ethnic groups, and other vulnerable population; so-
cio-spatial segregation, displacement, and homelessness. In the GS, the result has
been the formation and consolidation of informal settlements as the only housing
alternative for the urban poor (Bardhan et al., 2011; Göschel, 2001; Häußermann
and Siebel, 2001; Huchzermeyer, 2010; UN-Habitat, 2003; Wetzstein, 2017).
In the GN, some countries are seeing a deepening and expansion of housing
exclusion, for example, through gentrification processes (Bridge et al., 2011),
and the structural unaffordability of housing for increasing groups of the
population.
In light of the severity of the situation, across the world housing seems to
be gradually gaining recognition as a human right. Key in this development
has been the adoption of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and
Cultural Rights that recognises the right to adequate housing, which ought to
be understood as the right to live in security, peace, and dignity (Van Eerd and
Banerjee, 2013).

Purpose, Scope, and Structure of the Chapter

The aim of this chapter is to provide a critical overview of major housing policy
issues in different parts of the globe. While applying the book’s distinction between
GN and GS, we recognise the specificities of different countries and/or groups of
countries within each of these two broad categories.1

1 
For simplification purposes, in the GN, we follow Doling’s (2012) categorisation of
advanced capitalist countries in three main groups, namely: Europe, English-speaking
non-European countries (North American and Australasian), and East Asian countries
(Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia). The definition of the GS
has been contested by several authors in terms of its extremely wide generalization (Da-
dos and Connell, 2012; Levander and Mignolo, 2011; Pagel et al., 2014). In our defi-
nition of the GS we follow the Brandt Line, which is still regarded as relevant despite
criticism (Jiménez, 2019) and includes the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean,
Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. We would like to highlight that within this broad
categorization of the GS there are a number of countries that fall under a category that
diverts from the accepted notions of the GN and GS. These are, for example, the BRIC
countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and some of the OECD countries (i.e. Chile,
Mexico, and Israel).
 Housing in the Global North and the Global South 583
We have aimed to provide historical references at different points in the chapter
to illustrate the emergence of current systems and trends. However, the temporal
scope of the chapter is mainly the last three to four decades, with an emphasis on
the years following the GFEC. Following this introduction, the next section presents
housing policy issues in the GN and the GS, respectively. Each of these two parts
are structured in five themes, namely, land, planning, and infrastructure; tenure and
management; finance; environmental sustainability; and governance and user’s par-
ticipation. The third part of this section presents a brief comparative analysis of the
major policy issues and approaches on each of these themes across the globe. The
third section concludes with final reflection and a set of recommendations for a new
political economy of housing.

Housing Policy Issues and Approaches

Contemporary housing policies seek to ensure that the general population enjoys
adequate housing. What exactly constitutes ‘adequate’ housing has varied histori-
cally and across specific cultural and geographical contexts. A widely accepted con-
temporary definition of the term is provided by the United Nations Human Rights
Office, which focuses on seven elements: (i) legal security of tenure; (ii) availability
of services, materials, facilities, and infrastructure; (iii) affordability; (iv) habit-
ability; (v) accessibility; (vi) location; and (vii) cultural adequacy (UN Committee
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1991, 1997). Housing policies take the
shape of legislation and regulations that seek to redress the imbalances in adequate
housing provision if the market is left to operate freely (Angel, 2000; UN-Habitat
2010). Historically, diverse policy approaches have emerged across the world, which
respond to specific sociopolitical and economic circumstances. Trying to make sense
of these different approaches, scholars have developed theories that seek to compare
and identify trends towards ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’ across countries in the
GN (Doling, 2012; Harloe, 1995; Kemeny and Lowe, 1998). In the GS, the empha-
sis has rather been on evaluating the impact and outcomes of international policy
directions, heavily influenced by multilateral organisations such as the World Bank
and UN-Habitat. The focus has been on how replicable policy approaches are pos-
sible in different contexts, aiming at bringing interventions to a global scale (King
et al., 2017).

Housing Policy Issues and Approaches in the Global North

Housing policy in the GN can be looked at from a supply- and demand-side per-
spective. Following Kemeny and Lowe’s (1998) classification of housing systems
as either unitary or dualist, the overall trend in Europe is moving towards increas-
ingly dualist systems with a residual social rental housing sector and government
policies favouring the expansion of the homeownership sector. However, since the
GFEC, this model has proved insufficient to provide adequate housing for large sec-
tions of the population, with mortgage lenders retreating into more cautious lending
policies. The result has been a widening gap in access to and affordability of ade-
quate housing for different groups, notably the young – with the emergence of the
584 Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala
‘generation rent’ phenomenon (McKee et al., 2017) – and people on middle incomes
and/or on temporal employment. Against this backdrop, some expected the private
rental sector to step up its offer. However, with the exception of countries like Ger-
many, private rental sectors remain comparatively small, poorly regulated, and of
uneven quality standards.
In Malaysia, it is the private sector that plays a predominant role in housing pro-
vision, producing more units for low-income housing than the public sector (Zhang
and Ball, 2016). Shuid (2016) makes a case for the enabling role of the government
in facilitating the private sector to provide affordable housing for the low- and
middle-income people, while maintaining active intervention. In Hong Kong, on
the other hand, public (rental) housing for low-income residents is one of the main
housing policies.
The high levels of socio-spatial segregation in North American cities is one of
the main problems in the US housing policy (Jargowsky, 2015). There are two polar
approaches to housing policy directed at low-income households in disadvantaged
neighbourhoods: the people-based strategy, on the one hand, which aims to increase
the opportunities for low-income households to live in good-quality and afford-
able housing, outside of deprived neighbourhoods. On the other hand, place-based
strategies aim to increase the quality of life and opportunities in currently deprived
neighbourhoods, namely, through assisted housing and affordable housing preserva-
tion strategies (Galster, 2017: 262).
Alongside these supply-side developments, demand for housing has been chang-
ing significantly over the last decades. In Europe, two main trends stand out: on the
one hand, the rapid ageing of the population and, on the other hand, the massive
recent influx of asylum seekers from outside Europe. Both trends require new types
of housing solutions, not only in terms of quantity but also in terms of the quality
and type of housing needed. Elderly people require housing that is adapted to their
specific needs, which means investment in the physical adaptation of old housing
stocks for this purpose. In addition, the mounting problem of loneliness and social
isolation in old age is prompting housing providers, governments, and society at large
to rethink the whole approach to housing the elderly, with new models emerging
such as senior co-housing and age-friendly neighbourhood planning (Labit, 2015).
Providing housing for refugees, on the other hand, poses challenging questions to
politicians, housing providers, and planners on how to avoid (further) segregation
and stigmatisation of ethnic minorities, which is already a long-standing problem in
cities across the GN. Tackling socio-spatial segregation has been addressed both in
Europe and in the United States through policies such as social mix, an approach not
devoid of criticism (Musterd and Andersson, 2005).
In Hong Kong, the lack of affordable solutions for the young generations is
leading private companies to invest in building co-living complexes, where shared
facilities and services complement small individual units (Liu, 2018).

Land, Planning, and Infrastructure

The affordability crisis currently characterising most of the large cities in the GN
is strongly connected to the limited availability of land for affordable housing,
often linked to land speculation processes. Overall, countries with a strong market
 Housing in the Global North and the Global South 585
orientation tend to apply land liberalisation policies that result in urban sprawl
and market-led provision of single-family homes in low density suburban residen-
tial areas (e.g. United States, Australia). By contrast, most European countries have
historically privileged compact city approaches, which advocate urban density and
mixed use (Burton et al., 2003). In the United States, inclusionary zoning policies
have been applied since the 1970s to allow lower- and moderate-income house-
holds to buy or rent property in middle- and upper-income areas. While advocates
allege positive impacts of these policies on social inclusion, detractors claim that
this approach in fact decreases the number of affordable homes being produced
(Calavita and Mallach, 2010). More recently, some European cities (e.g. London,
Paris, Barcelona) have applied similar policies with specific targets (percentages)
of social and/or affordable housing in every new private development. Singapore
stands out as a globally unique model of public–private housing, where the state
owns most land and is actively involved in redeveloping sites and building new
dwellings (Wetzstein, 2017).
A recent trend is the adoption and development of community-based land own-
ership and management approaches, such as the US-initiative community land trust
(CLT) model in England, France, and Belgium, among other European countries. At
the centre of this approach is the provision of affordable housing at perpetuity, an
aspect that is gaining increasing attention not only from local citizen groups but also
from housing providers and local authorities in Europe (Aernouts and Ryckewaert,
2018; Moore and McKee, 2012).

Tenure and Management

As part of the asset-based welfare approaches discussed earlier on, homeownership
has been increasingly promoted as the preferred tenure by governments across the
GN since the 1980s, with some notable exceptions, such as Germany, Switzerland,
and the Republic of Korea. The Republic of Korea has seen rapid growth of pub-
lic housing in the last few decades, with different types of subsidised housing for
diverse target groups. Permanent public rental has been developed since 1989 for
households on very low income and for those with special needs (Ronald, 2013).
On the opposite extreme is Singapore, with 90% of homeownership and a unique
public–private housing system made of predominantly highly subsidised owner-oc-
cupied leasehold housing alongside a much smaller homeownership sector, with only
marginal public rental housing (Wetzstein, 2017).
The overall trend towards homeownership has been accompanied by the reduction
in the supply of, and demand for, non-market forms of housing, often involving
the privatisation of social housing stock. In Europe, this privatisation has taken
two main forms: on the one hand, sale or stock transfers of formerly state-owned
housing to not-for-profit housing companies (e.g. United Kingdom, the Netherlands)
and, on the other hand, sale to tenants, either in the form of ‘right to buy’ policies
(e.g. England) or large-scale sales at discount rates to ‘sitting tenants’ in formerly
communist East European countries. More recently, selling off of social housing
has extended to non-European countries, e.g. the United States (Doling, 2012).
Housing provision in Australia is predominantly market-led with homeownership as
the main tenure (70%). Increased problems of housing affordability combined with
586 Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala
a decline in public rental housing stock has facilitated greater reliance on private
rental housing for long-term occupancy rather than a transitional tenure, particu-
larly among low-income households (Gabriel et al., 2010). New Zealand shows a
similar situation, with approximately a quarter of households renting privately in
2000 (Hulse, 2003: 31).
Since the GFEC, in the United States and large parts of Europe the homeowner-
ship trend has either reversed or stagnated in varying degrees in different countries,
prompted by stronger regulation of mortgage lending. Furthermore, racial displace-
ment from urban centres and segregation in large cities in the United States have
led to more severe impacts of financialisation and the mortgage crisis being experi-
enced by African American households (Rugh and Massey, 2010). The role of private
rental has thus attracted the attention of policymakers as a possible answer to unmet
demand for affordable housing, especially for young people. However, despite policy
rhetoric attempting to boost the sector (e.g. in England and the Netherlands), the
supply of private rental housing remains low and of irregular quality. In addition,
new types of (hybrid) tenures have started to emerge, including different types of
collective or shared tenure forms and a renewed resident-led co-operative sector
(Czischke, 2018; Nasarre Aznar, 2014).
In Europe, the existence of large housing stocks dating back to over a century
means important management challenges. In western Europe, most of this housing
stock is still in the hands of either not-for-profit or public landlords, who have
had to increasingly adopt business-like asset management approaches to make
maintenance, sales, and allocation decisions (Czischke, 2017, 2009; Gruis and
Nieboer, 2004). In southern European countries, large parts of the housing stock
are owned by individual households, with quality and maintenance issues be-
ing addressed privately. In addition, urban regeneration policies and programmes
often make up, partially, for the lack of private investment in housing, especially
in old city centres. In Eastern Europe, the mass privatisation of formerly public
housing estates in the early 1990s, often lacking the necessary legal and regulatory
frameworks, has translated into degradation of the housing stock and common
areas. This problem has been addressed differently by (local) governments in these
countries, often relying on European structural funds to implement stock upgrad-
ing measures, notably in the field of energy efficiency (see point on environmental
sustainability).

Finance
Overall, housing finance systems for social and/or public housing in recent decades
have followed the general trend towards increasing market orientation, with a wide-
spread retreat from direct state supply-side subsidies in favour of demand-side sub-
sidies (in the form of housing allowances or benefit, depending on the country).
In most European countries, capital grants are either marginal or have starkly
diminished, with France a notable exception. In addition, the privatisation of social
housing provision, especially in western Europe, has resulted in a bigger drive
towards market finance. Housing providers are increasingly borrowing in the mar-
ket, usually relying on state guarantees that lower the cost of lending. While dereg-
ulation of financial markets has a history of several decades in Australia and the
 Housing in the Global North and the Global South 587
United States, in the European Union it only started in the 1990s (Evans et al., 2008).
Both in New Zealand and Australia, the private rental sector has been dominated
by individual or family investors (Berry, 2000; Hulse, 2003). Despite the effects of
the GFEC, governments have continued to focus on attracting capital and wealthy
investors with reduce taxes and other benefits (UNHRC, 2017). Alongside broaden-
ing access to homeownership by extending access to housing finance, deregulation
also introduced more risk into the system (Stephens, 2007), as demonstrated by the
GFEC. Furthermore, in EU member states, the European Community internal mar-
ket regulations also affect the way housing is being financed at local level, in so far
that housing providers need to comply with competition and state aid regulations
(Czischke, 2014).
A recent trend is the rise of social or ‘affordable’ homeownership products in
many countries, resulting in a mix of private household borrowing and subsidies to
providers, aided by a degree of loans. In western European countries, mortgage loans
as a proportion of GDP expanded considerably in the period 1992–2006 (Doling,
2012). Furthermore, homeowners in European countries such as Belgium, the Neth-
erlands, Greece, and Italy benefit from tax breaks on housing-related investment,
such as relief from tax on imputed rental value of owner-occupied housing and
reductions on loan interest (Figari et al., 2017). Following the collapse of the Soviet
Union, European transition countries saw the development of market-based housing
mortgage, with a large increase in the amount of residential mortgage debt as a
proportion of GDP (Doling, 2012).

Environmental Sustainability
Housing and environmental sustainability are linked with each other in two ways:
on the one hand, choices related to the location, construction, and maintenance
of housing can have important impacts on the environment; on the other hand,
different policies may significantly affect the environmental sustainability of the
housing stock. In particular, energy efficiency has gained prominence in recent
debates on urban sustainability and housing policy across the GN due to its poten-
tial consequences for climate change. In the EU, about 75% of the buildings that
will comprise the European housing stock in 2050 have already been built today
(Visscher et al., 2016). Furthermore, housing in the EU currently amount to 25%
of the total EU energy consumption.2 At the local, national, and international
level, numerous policy initiatives promote energy savings and the use of renewable
energy to reduce the environmental burden. In the EU, Community directives on
energy efficiency targets have driven the efforts by house builders, landlords, and
households to upgrade the stock, with differing goals and results. Several incen-
tives both at EU and national level focus on encouraging private owners and land-
lords to invest in energy-efficient renovation measures. Relevant energy neutral
housing policy developments include: Energy Performance of Buildings Directive
(2010 recast of the EPBD 2002); low Carbon Economy Roadmap (EU, 2011); and
the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED, 2012), among others. Furthermore, circular

2 
http://www.housingeurope.eu/section-10/energy.
588 Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala
economy principles (Murray et al., 2017) are being gradually mainstreamed into
house building, maintenance, and management at EU-level and nationally/locally
in some countries.
The Australian government has committed to delivering a 60% cut in carbon
emissions from 1990 levels by 2050. Higher concentrations of low-income house-
holds within the private rental sector and existing problems of housing affordability
place financial restrictions on the capacity of these households to adapt to increased
energy prices. Early interventions to address environmental sustainability within the
residential sector were predominantly focused on new builds. This is changing with
a range of new policy initiatives directed towards retrofitting existing stock (Gabriel
et al., 2010).
In the United States, federal policies to curb the impacts of climate change have
experienced a sharp turn since the election of Donald Trump in 2017. Trump pro-
posed a 30% budget cut for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including
major reductions to its enforcement work and staffing, as well as the elimination of
some programmes (Hansler, 2017). At local level, however, city mayors are joining
global efforts to make up for the lack of a federal commitment to globally agreed
targets. Some examples include the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San
Francisco (Pontes, 2018) and the ‘We Are Still In’ coalition in 2017 (between gov-
ernors, mayors, businesses, investors, and universities) to carry forward the goals of
the Paris climate agreement (Keating, 2017). Climate adaptation and post-disaster
reconstruction rising in the agenda of (possibly) affected regions (e.g. United States,
Japan, southern Europe).

Governance and User Participation

The governance of housing in the GN is strongly determined by tenure structures
in specific countries, as well as by the relative balance between market provision
and government involvement. Overall, as Bengtsson (2012) points out, housing is at
the same time an individual market commodity and a public good demanding state
involvement, with ‘voluntary market contracts between buyer and seller or between
landlord and tenant serving as the main mechanism for distributing housing, while
state intervention typically [takes] the form of correctives’ (p. 323). This means that
housing policy is in fact implemented via markets, sometimes redressed by political
intervention. Within this broad scheme, housing tenures are among the most impor-
tant political institutions of housing provision, as they are meant to ensure that
different groups of citizens have a real opportunity of finding decent housing at a
reasonable cost in the market. Accordingly, in most countries in the GN, the role of
local governments is limited to organising and implementing physical, economic, and
social planning with the aim of fulfilling, in the long term, citizens’ housing needs.
The provision and allocation of housing is thus primarily left to private providers, be
it for profit or not-for-profit. Residents’ involvement occurs predominantly at local
and/or estate level, either in the shape of participation in neighbourhood planning
processes (with different degrees of influence, depending on specific countries and
cities), or in terms of tenants’ participation in (social) housing management processes.
Recent changes in the respective roles of the state and the individual in the pro-
vision of public services, as well as in their relationship, are redefining the n­ ature
 Housing in the Global North and the Global South 589
of citizens’ participation in housing provision. A series of successive shifts in
these roles and relationships have occurred since the days of the post-war welfare
state in western European societies, when citizens where viewed as ‘recipients’,
‘subjects’, or ‘users’ of public services (Gofen, 2015; Needham, 2008). In the mid-
1980s, citizens started to be seen as ‘consumers’ (Clarke, 2007) or as ‘customers’
(Mathiasen, 1999) who should be ‘served, satisfied, and provided with a choice
between alternative service providers’ (Gofen, 2015: 405). Since the late 1990s
and up until today, state withdrawal has deepened across large parts of Europe,
accentuated by the effects of the GFEC and ensuing austerity policies. The latter is
linked to the increasing influence of discourses of responsibilisation (Dean, 2010;
Lemke, 2001; Rose, 1999), also in the housing field (Flint, 2004; Heeg, 2013;
McKee, 2009), which reconceptualise social problems and risks as individual
problems that individuals are primarily responsible for managing. Within this con-
text, the concept of ‘co-production’ has gained attention, emphasising the trans-
formative aspect of service delivery for citizens (Alford, 1998; Boyle and Harris,
2009; Cahn, 2004) as well as the unique characteristic of service as a simulta-
neous process of production and consumption. In this sense, the traditional rela-
tionship of producer–consumer is being hybridised in what Ritzer and Jurgenson
(2010) named ‘prosumption’. In the field of housing, scholars have identified the
(re)emergence of bottom-up housing solutions across the GN, such as resident-led
cooperatives, co-housing, community land trusts, and a variety of self-help housing
initiatives (Lang et al., 2020). In Australia, the bottom-up Nightingale model has
been developed and applied by a group of architects to ‘deliver multi-residen-
tial housing in cities that is environmentally sustainable, financially affordable
and socially inclusive’.3

Housing Policy Issues and Approaches in the Global South

In the GS the concern with housing conditions is relatively new, with a history in
housing policymaking of about sixty years. Rapid urbanisation has remained the
main driver of housing policy across the region. In general terms, the persistently
poor access to affordable housing and land continues to push millions of people
into inadequate housing conditions (Wakely, 2014). While the absolute number
of people living in slums and informal settlements has increased from c. 700 mil-
lion in 1990 to c. 900 million in 2014, the proportion of people living in inade-
quate housing conditions has diminished, from 46.2% in 1990 to 29.7% in 2014 –
mainly as the result of slum upgrading and land regularisation policies (UN-Hab-
itat, 2015).
In South East Asia the housing challenge is and will continue to be determined by
the estimated increase of its urban population by 1.4 billion in 2050 (UN-Habitat,
2011a). Land scarcity and high land prices constitute a major barrier to affordable
housing supply, excluding low- and middle-income households from well-located
urban land. Availability of and accessibility to formal housing finance is gener-
ally low and is unaffordable to low-income households due to, for example, high

3 
http://nightingalehousing.org/model/
590 Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala
down payment requirements and soaring interest rates. Nevertheless, the region
has seen positive developments regarding housing microfinance and community-
based finance. The challenge is how governments can scale-up these bottom-up
approaches. Many Asian countries are at the forefront of slum upgrading policies,
such as the Kampung Improvement Programme in Indonesia and the Baan Mankong
Programme in Thailand. India and China also show positive developments in terms
of increasing access to affordable housing, for both ownership and rental, through a
number of national housing programmes implemented at the local level (UN-Habi-
tat, 2011a).
In Africa, despite being the less urbanised region of the world, with about four
out of ten people living in cities, urban growth is characterised by a sustained and
rapid urbanisation process. In many countries urban growth is equated with infor-
mal growth. In a context of highly dysfunctional housing and land markets, several
issues prevent access to affordable land and housing by low- and middle-income
families. However, important progress has been made in the provision of affordable
housing in North Africa. In the last 20  years, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia have
experienced an important decrease in both absolute numbers and proportion of peo-
ple living in slums. Ethiopia and South Africa show evidence of affordable housing
programmes with positive results despite shortcomings. In the rest of the sub-Saha-
ran countries, housing programmes are either non-existent or unaffordable or of
insufficient scale to match demand. Housing finance is underdeveloped and low- and
middle-income households tend to resort to non-conventional and informal sources
of housing finance, which in turn are not supported by institutional and regulatory
frameworks. Nevertheless, microfinance and community-based saving groups con-
stitute an important source for housing provision. Other issues that characterise the
housing and land challenge are gender inequalities and discrimination of women in
accessing land and the complexity of land tenure regimes where customary land sys-
tems co-exist side-by-side to formal tenure systems (UN-Habitat, 2011b).
Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanised region in the GS (esti-
mated at 85% by 2030). Housing affordability remains a challenge, among other
reasons, because of the high cost of key inputs across the housing value chain (nota-
bly, construction materials). Formally built housing and access to land is out of reach
for the great majority who find accommodation in the informal sector without any
government help. One-third of the region’s population lived in informal housing in
2005 (UN-Habitat, 2011c). In Mexico, from 1980 to 2003, informally produced
housing provided shelter to more than two-thirds of the urban population. Failed
policies to provide affordable (mass) housing, the growth of housing finance mainly
targeting middle- and high-income households, and large-scale slum improvement
programmes and infrastructure development have resulted in one of the highest
homeownership rates globally (estimates show that as many as 73% of households
are owners) (UN-Habitat, 2011c).

Land, Planning, and Infrastructure

In the GS the provision of affordable housing in the right locations with access to
land and infrastructure is a highly controversial and political issue. This is because
scarce land needs to be efficiently used and power structures within governments,
 Housing in the Global North and the Global South 591
as well as private developers, tend to favour more profitable land uses (King et al.,
2017). In some contexts, land issues lead to urban spatial segregation and exclusion,
hindering the realisation of the right to adequate housing. Examples are the spatial
legacy of exclusionary land policies of the apartheid regime, which still affect access
to urban land by the great majority (Joseph et al., 2015) and the scarcity of affordable
urban land in Caracas, Venezuela, where the poor occupy the worst possible loca-
tions within and around middle- and high-income neighbourhoods (Ayala, 2012).
Inflexible and static land use regulations have been conceived in a technocratic
manner, ignoring the dynamics of rapid urbanisation and the prevalence of infor-
mal housing that have been shaping cities of the GS for decades. Enforcement of
minimum lot sizes and low floor space index (FSI) regulations have a negative
impact on housing availability and affordability for low-income households as has
been observed in major cities in India, for example, in Mumbai, where FSI values are
quite low and do not differentiate between residential and commercial uses (Bhede
and Petkar, 2015). Land use planning in this context promotes informal occupa-
tion of land and prevents densification of urban cores (Mumtaz, 2014; UN-Habitat,
2016). Restrictions regarding mixed-use housing developments contribute further to
ignoring people’s real needs for housing, who combine shelter with income genera-
tion activities (Tipple, 2001).
Affordable housing projects are usually located at the urban fringe where land is
cheaper but poorly served. This situation is linked to neoliberal approaches to urban
planning and strategies on urban expansion, densification, and urban renewal, which
fail to cater for land and infrastructure for affordable housing projects (King et al.,
2017; Pugh, 1992).
In the history of pro-poor housing policies, the difficulty of providing serviced
land in the right locations is exemplified by sites-and-services projects implemented
across the GS between the 1970s and 1990s (Wakely, 2014). Albeit recognising the
incremental housing process by which the urban poor solve their housing needs,
these projects were considered badly located and underserved. While this approach
was eventually abandoned, it is currently being reconsidered in light of the realisa-
tion of its premature evaluation, which did not allow the necessary time to assess its
long-term impact. The argument in favour highlights sites-and-services projects that
developed into thriving mixed-use neighbourhoods, subsequently connecting with
the extended city (Owens et al., 2018; King et al., 2017).
Nowadays there is a return to conventional housing policies of mass production.
Many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are building mass housing such
as Angola’s ‘My Dream My Home’ programme, Brazil’s ‘Minha Casa, Minha Vida’,
and Mexico’s Mass Housing programme. Poorly located, unaffordable for many,
and even vacant, these projects are the result of policies driven by the commodifica-
tion of housing (Buckley et al., 2016; Croese et al., 2016; Wakely, 2014).
Several innovative land development policies have been designed recently to
counteract profit-driven and exclusionary land markets. These include, among
others, land pooling or land readjustment, transferable development rights, land
sharing, and community land trusts (Payne, 2014). Examples are the ZEIS in the
Brazilian city of Recife, the inclusionary housing policy of the Philippines (also
known as balanced housing development), and community land trusts in Kenya
and Puerto Rico.
592 Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala
Tenure and Management
Both as the result of housing policy developments since the 1970s and of cultural
perceptions, ownership has become the preferred tenure option in the GS. Public
housing, initially for renting, fell into disuse because of poor management and was
subsequently sold off, contributing to the ownership bias. Widespread ownership
has also been fuelled by self-help housing and informal settlement upgrading policies
(Gilbert, 2016).
Despite governments supporting homeownership, rapid urbanisation has meant
an increase in the absolute numbers of tenants amounting to around 1.2 billion
people (ibid.). The ownership versus the rental debate has risen on the international
agenda because of the number of urban poor renting accommodation in the infor-
mal market. Rental housing has been neglected in housing policy (UN-Habitat and
Cities Alliance, 2011). Informal rental accommodation is usually accessible and
affordable, albeit described as inadequate, insecure, and, in many cases, exploit-
ative. The informal rental market is run by hundreds of ‘invisible’ small-scale land-
lords whose demographic characteristics do not differ very much from their tenants
(Gilbert, 2012).
Homeownership raises issues of maintenance to sustain the quality of
accommodation over time. In many countries housing is either heavily subsidised
or given to the poor for free, often disregarding the extra costs of long-term main-
tenance. This situation results in the gradual dilapidation of the housing stock
and in market distortion (Hoek-Smit, 2015). Furthermore, rental housing within
social or public housing schemes requires regular investment in maintenance and
management, particularly in multifamily buildings. The need to pay for communal
spaces is often not understood for cultural reasons, or the fees that people are wil-
ling or able to pay are too low to cover it. The net result is poor maintenance and
unclear management to ensure the proper operation and maintenance of buildings
(Aziabah, 2018).

Finance
In the GS a key policy issue is the lack of a sizeable mortgage finance market cater-
ing for lower-middle to middle-income groups that are eligible, so that they can
acquire a loan as purchasers or investors in the rental market. Mortgage markets
in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia are quite small, representing
no more than 5–10% of the country’s GDP. Their growth in many countries lags
behind in relationship to rapid urbanisation. Little policy attention has been given
to expanding mortgage finance to cover the urban middle-income sector. This has
led to a gap for these groups, who turn to the informal sector or to other housing
solutions (Hoek-Smit, 2016).
As the mortgage market does not serve the poor, especially those whose infor-
mal income makes them ineligible, ‘non-mortgage housing loans’ models have been
developed to cater for them. These include, for example, unsecured loans such as
microloans for housing (e.g. Banco Sol in Bolivia) or community-based loans to
acquire land by a group of people, leaving the financing of house construction or
improvements to individuals (e.g. community mortgage programme of the Philip-
pines) (Hoek-Smit, 2015).
 Housing in the Global North and the Global South 593
Many households across the GS resort to informally financed housing strategies
in order to support the incremental housing process, such as borrowing from fam-
ily and friends or using family savings and remittances from abroad. Incremental
housing finance models help towards improving access to finance for the poor.
Housing microfinance is an important tool to enable access to finance in this con-
text (Ferguson and Smets, 2010) along with community-financing schemes such
as the Kuyasa fund in South Africa, which, in addition to being a microfinance
lender, uses rotating saving groups or ROSCAs (Houston, 2010). As Hoek-Smit
(2015) points out, the most significant challenge in housing policy regarding
finance is the lack of a range of financial products that can provide progressive
loans for the poor.
The last decades have seen a gradual disappearance of housing subsidies under
the neoliberal agenda. Supply-side subsidies in the form of (rental) public housing
schemes have mostly disappeared due to a number of reasons, such as rapid urban-
isation, the mismatch between demand and supply, budget cuts, and the necessary
institutional and legal framework to be able to provide access to housing across
the house value chain. The targeting of these subsidies has also been problematic,
not reaching in most cases the poorest of the poor. In addition, demand-driven
subsidies and the emergence of targeted capital subsidy programmes have had an
important impact in closing the housing deficit in countries like South Africa, Chile,
and Colombia. According to Gilbert (2012), ‘one key error underlies this policy; the
obsession with owner-occupation. Since there may be as many as 1.5 billion tenants
in cities across the globe, offering subsidies to the poor only if they become home-
owners appears to be a misguided approach’ (p. 642).

Environmental Sustainability
Understanding the contribution of the housing sector to sustainability objectives and
resilience in housing is a major concern across the GS for two main reasons. The first
one is the impact that extensive housing informality has on the environment, the
second is climate-induced disasters. In this context new housing and informal settle-
ments need to be more resilient in the long term. This is particularly important for
countries where climate change events take hundreds of lives and render thousands
homeless every year (e.g. South East Asia) and cities that are highly vulnerable to
earthquakes (e.g. Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Mexico City).
According to several studies (UNEP, 2009; Fawcett, 2012; Murphy, 2012; Löf-
ström and Palm, 2012) the most efficient way to slow down climate change is to
use less energy. This refers to the building sector as a whole, but as housing makes
up the highest proportion of land use in cities, the contribution of individual house-
holds to reducing the carbon footprint is paramount. Both adaptation and miti-
gation actions are necessary, which include building resilient houses, retrofitting
the existing stock, and ‘building back better’ after a major disaster. An example
of the last one is the people’s process methodology of the Post-Yolanda Support
for Safer Homes and Settlements Project implemented in the Philippines (UN-
Habitat, 2015).
Currently, the potential of using circular economy approaches for achiev-
ing sustainability objectives is gaining momentum in the GS. The culture of
594 Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala
maximum usage of material resources, by repairing and reusing, is part of the
historical survival mechanisms and livelihood strategies of many households.
The potential of circular economy approaches in this context is therefore huge
and opens a window for transforming survival livelihoods into gainful economic
opportunities. The housing sector is gradually applying the principles of circular
economy, especially in relationship to building technologies. A few examples are
El Salvador, where earthquake-resistant technologies are used in social housing
for extending the use cycle, and in India, where modular construction is used
in the city of New Delhi to build low-cost housing in order to have more effi-
cient disassembly at the products’ end of life, allowing for re-use (Preston and
Lehne, 2017).

Governance and User Participation

Governance of the housing sector in the GS remains a challenge due to a number
of issues related to the institutional, legal, and regulatory framework necessary
to put in place a functional housing sector. There is a need for multi-stakeholder
participation in housing policy design and implementation, including multilateral
organisations, national and local governments, private sector actors, non-govern-
mental organisations (NGOs), and people themselves. A people’s centred approach
is critical for a number of reasons, such as the satisfaction of real housing needs,
the acceptability of housing outcomes by people, and the realisation of adequate
housing for all as a fundamental human right. Participatory housing approaches
have proven to be more successful in terms of people’s satisfaction of housing
outcomes, as well as the sustainability of interventions due to the sense of owner-
ship of the housing process (Boonyabancha, 2005). Good examples are the Baan
Mankong Programme in Thailand (Boonyabancha, 2005) and participatory bud-
geting in Brazil (Souza, 2001).
Particularly for the urban poor in the GS it is considered important to enact pol-
icies that support incremental housing approaches, including incremental housing
finance and revised building standards and regulations that allow for such a process
(Peek et al., 2018; Tipple, 2000). A case in point is the ad hoc housing transforma-
tions of government-built housing by residents, which is a universal phenomenon.
This can be found, for example, in Ghana, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Nigeria, Bangladesh,
India, Indonesia, Philippines, Israel, Ecuador, and Venezuela (UN-Habitat, 2011a,
2011b, 2011c). As in the incremental housing process, the housing transformation
process is widely linked to the lifecycle of the family and it is triggered by fixed
housing solutions which do not reflect the dynamism of households’ housing needs
and ignore the incremental housing process that characterises the way in which
low-income families conceive housing accessibility and affordability (Tipple, 2000;
Turner and Fichter, 1972).

Comparative Analysis

This section brings together the main policy issues described above across the five
themes for each of the two global regions in comparative perspective.
 Housing in the Global North and the Global South 595
A crucial challenge for the provision of adequate and affordable housing in the
GN is the shortage of land in high-pressure areas. In order to foster access to land,
many local governments are applying different types of inclusionary planning
policies for social and/or affordable housing in large cities. While this approach
has been a long-standing practice in North America, some European cities have
caught up in recent decades (e.g. London, Paris, Barcelona). Furthermore, increas-
ing socio-spatial segregation on both sides of the Atlantic has led to the imple-
mentation of social mix policies aimed at social cohesion in cities, albeit with
varying results. In many countries in the GS, neoliberal policies have led to uncon-
trolled urban expansion, often without any formal infrastructure provision. Cur-
rently, there is a new wave of mass housing production at the urban fringe (e.g.
Mexico, Angola). Countries such as the Philippines, Colombia, and South Africa
are seeing emerging examples of inclusionary zoning policies and there is evidence
of some innovative programmes on community-ownership and management of
the land (e.g. ZEIS in Brazil, and community land trusts in Puerto Rico, Kenya,
and Thailand).
In the GN, following a period of strong state support for homeownership since
the 1980s, this trend is stabilising in countries hit by the 2008 crash. The trend
towards the residualisation of social housing in western Europe continues, while
the private rental sector has emerged as new housing policy issue across the wider
region, with young people and lower-middle-income groups caught in the gap
between unattainable homeownership and ineligibility for increasingly small and
targeted subsidised rental sectors. The advanced age of the stock across the GN,
particularly in Europe, requires management strategies for the adaptation to new
types of demands. In recent decades, and especially since the GFEC, alternative
tenures have started to emerge, including a new wave of resident-led cooperatives
(France, Canada, Switzerland) and other forms of community-led housing. In the
GS, like in the GN, there is a strong bias towards policies supporting homeown-
ership at the expense of the development of the rental housing sector; there is a
growing informal rental sector and ‘invisible’ small-scale landlordism and the
threat of eviction due to tenure insecurity. The maintenance of subsidised mul-
tifamily and condominium housing is gradually emerging as an issue requiring
policy attention.
Across the GN, the deregulation of financial markets in the last decades has
led to market finance dominance across housing sectors. This is coupled with
an overall decrease of state support for subsidised housing. In addition, there is
a recent rise of homeownership products targeting lower-middle-income house-
holds, combining private borrowing and subsidies to providers. Meanwhile, in the
GS, there is scarce or inexistent support for mortgage finance for low-middle- to
middle-income households housing purchasers as well as for investors in the rental
market. There is a lack of support for incremental housing from formal financial
institutions. In addition, supply-side housing subsidies in the form of (rental) pub-
lic housing schemes are gradually disappearing and demand-side capital subsidy
programmes are emerging, which have had an important impact in closing the
housing deficit.
In the GN, there is a wide range of regulations and policies supporting energy-
efficient retrofitting across the housing stock (EU, national, and local level).
596 Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala
In Europe, circular economy principles are gradually mainstreamed in house
building, maintenance, and management at EU-level, as well as at national and
local level in some countries. Climate adaptation and post-disaster reconstruction
are rising in the agendas of (possibly) affected regions. Key environmental actions
related to housing in the GS include the new construction of resilient housing (mit-
igation), retrofitting of existing stock (mitigation and adaptation), and building
back better post disaster (mitigation and adaptation). Efforts to reconcile envi-
ronmental, engineering, and socioeconomic objectives, on the one hand, and the
supply of adequate housing, on the other, are increasing. The adoption of circular
economy principles in the housing (technology) sector, using the potential of the
existing ‘repair and re-use culture’ are practised by many households as part of
their livelihood strategies.
In the GN, the overall market orientation of housing provision is weakening multi-
stakeholder governance structures. However, the 2008 crash and ensuing austerity
measures have triggered social movements against eviction, housing exclusion, and
homelessness in some cities across the wider region. Against this background, the
re-emergence of bottom-up housing solutions in the shape of collaborative housing
forms stands out as alternative solutions to structural problems. Across the GS, there
is a history of weak multi-stakeholder involvement in governance of housing provi-
sion. End-user participation is usually detached from governance structures. Infor-
mal end-user involvement in housing remains the norm, notably in ad hoc housing
transformations.

Conclusion

Over the last two centuries, the living conditions of the majority of the world
population have improved thanks to technological, economic, and political
change. However, despite these advances, a huge gap between the well-housed
and those experiencing housing exclusion remains. International institutions as
well as many national and local governments acknowledge the existence of a
global affordability crisis, brought about by the increasing financialisation of
housing over recent decades. Hence, rather than a material or technical problem,
the main housing challenge of the twenty-first century across the globe is one of
political will.
Shifting housing paradigms across the world have shown how contextual the
housing problem can be when it comes to producing housing outcomes that cater
for the needs of disadvantage populations. Whether it is conventional government-
built (mass) housing, government supported social (rental) housing, or private
sector affordable housing production both formal and informal, the housing
challenge remains. The housing paradigm of the twenty-first century is moving
towards the gradual recognition and operationalisation of the right to adequate
housing. This is underscored by the wave of social movements in cities across the
GN reclaiming the right to housing in the aftermath of the evictions crisis follow-
ing the 2008 global economic and financial crisis (Barbero, 2015; Di Felicianto-
nio, 2017; Fields, 2015).
 Housing in the Global North and the Global South 597
Based on the thematic analysis presented in this chapter, a new political economy
of housing that puts real housing needs of people at the centre must address several
issues in different contexts. A set of resulting recommendations to address these
issues are summarised as follows.

• Planning and land use policies should enable the provision of housing for dif-
ferent income groups in safe, well-connected areas. Policy instruments ought
to balance private interest with public interest and prevent speculation. Land
use systems and human settlements should follow climate adaptation princi-
ples to make housing more resilient to climate change.
• The long-standing dominance of homeownership over other tenures should
be replaced by a balance between different tenures. To this end, incentives
could be provided for a well-regulated and affordable private rental sector
that offers a viable alternative to households who are either unable or unwill-
ing to own a home. In addition, new types of tenures that fulfil the needs of
different types of households ought to be recognised by local and national
regulatory and legal frameworks; for example, new types of cooperatives and
other types of collective housing ownership models that are currently thriving
in different parts of the world from the bottom-up.
• Access to housing finance should be de-coupled from speculative investment
processes, thereby re-establishing the notion of financing ‘homes’. A diverse
range of financing instruments would enable context-specific forms of pro-
ducing housing, for example, incremental housing particularly in countries in
the GS, but also emerging (collective) self-build initiatives in the GN. Innova-
tive housing finance models, combining long-term institutional investors and
the public sector would allow the production of genuinely affordable housing
in a sustainable way.
• Housing production should move towards the adoption of circularity prin-
ciples that minimise the impact of this sector in the environment. Energy-
efficient housing and sustainable neighbourhood planning principles ought
to be incorporated in all new (and refurbished) housing as a way to improve
housing and neighbourhood quality and contribute to diminish the carbon
footprint of the housing sector.
• Governments should continue and renew their efforts in empowering end
users through genuine participatory processes in housing provision. This
includes the recognition of the advantages of involving residents in the pro-
duction of their homes, ranging from a sense of psychological ownership as
well as community building and care for common goods.
• Initiatives which takes the shape of new types of self-organised and self-
provided housing forms in the absence of market or public provision should
be recognised and enabled by local and national regulatory and policy frame-
works, which can pave the way to new ways of meeting real housing needs.

The broad overview presented in this chapter might pave the way towards a criti-
cal understanding of current policy trends and approaches to housing. Ultimately,
these need to be addressed in each region of the world in more depth, considering
their respective contextual specificities.
598 Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala
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Part VI
CLOSURE
 28
Conclusions
Anthony Orum, Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and
Serena Vicari Haddock

Highlights and Reflections

There are many excellent chapters in this volume. Here in the conclusions we have
chosen to focus on a single set, those regarding the various regions and cities of the
world. In our view these chapters both individually and collectively are superb. They
literally cover countries and regions across the world. We hope that readers will find
them as informative and as insightful as we have. We believe that the chapters have
the potential to furnish a springboard for many different comparative analyses and
projects. Before getting into the substance of the concluding remarks we want to
offer a few thoughts regarding theory in the field of urban studies.

************

Of Paradigms and Social Theory

The field of urban studies is vast, indeed overwhelming. As co-editors in this vol-
ume, each of us brings our own special kind of focus as well as questions to our
work. Anthony Orum is an urban as well as a political sociologist. He tends to be
concerned with the everyday happenings in cities and regions, but especially issues of
power, social exclusion, and the public spheres of cities. Javier Ruiz-Tagle is an urban
planner with interdisciplinary interests in the sociology of housing, neighbourhoods,
and urban poverty. Serena Vicari Haddock is an urban sociologist with interests in
urban development and regeneration policies from a comparative perspective. But
there are many other specialisations as well. Urban geographers may well dominate

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
608 Anthony Orum, Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
the field of urban studies today and they have helped to focus our attention on
matters of space and scale. Yet there are also urban political scientists, many of
whom today seek to explain as well as to describe the nature of urban regimes across
the globe. Beyond this there are urban planners, as well as one of Orum’s favourites,
that of urban anthropology, especially the compelling work of Setha Low. And yet
there are interdisciplinary schools, like the one still dominant today, which are fol-
lowing the lead of key figures like David Harvey and Peter Marcuse emphasising
critical theory and the material features of the political economy of cities. But this
modernist paradigm has decreased its centrality due to the emergence of other com-
peting postmodern and poststructuralist approaches, like the postcolonial approach,
urban assemblages, creative cities, political ecology, urban land nexus, planetary
urbanisation, and so on.
The result is a cacophony of voices and concerns, struggles over which are the right
questions to ask and whether it is better to focus on material or non-material issues
(see also Scott and Storper, 2015). These various and sundry perspectives in turn lead
to multiple ways of thinking about and even creating cities and regions. What is any-
one to make of all this? If there is no single paradigm what and how shall we pass
along our key lessons and insights to our students? And how can we possibly agree on
the substance of the major findings on which the field of urban studies is to be con-
structed? Some, maybe most, would argue that we should follow the dominant par-
adigm (whatever that might be), the one that attracts the greatest scholarly attention
and seems to exhibit the greatest reliability and validity in its findings. Of course, that
must be the correct approach, right? Well, it is important that we remind readers,
especially the younger ones, about what happened to the human ecology paradigm of
the Chicago School of sociology. Dominant, indeed pervasive in the research of urban
scholars for many decades it eventually was supplanted in the 1970s by the writings
on critical theory by Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells. Today there
is not much left, if anything, of the old human ecology paradigm, as Chapter 9 on the
legacy of the Chicago School reveals. Our point is this: countless citations and volu-
minous writings do not make for a bulletproof case about the whys and wherefores of
cities – nor even for more effective ways of implementing social change and of ridding
the world of injustices. We must not only follow particular paradigms but also be open
to new and critical insights that might topple conventional wisdom.
Theoretical frameworks, in our view, can often get in the way of deeper under-
standings and better knowledge, perhaps especially in the field of urban studies. In
the social sciences there often is a considerable tension between the effort to gener-
alise, to come up with allegedly universal concepts, on the one hand, and the need to
be attentive to the special character of individual cities or regions, on the other hand.
Orum is keenly aware of this tension in his own writing – and he tends to favour
the path of unfolding the particular and the unique as compared to being bound by
an overarching paradigm. This in fact led him to write a detailed social and political
history of Austin in the mid-1980s, a small college town that was the capitol of the
state of Texas. Little did he realise in 1987 that he was telling the story of a city and
a region that would come to assume worldwide prominence in the field of high tech-
nology, thanks in part to the inventions of Michael Dell and Dell Computers.
There is one additional point we wish to make along these lines regarding some
of the differences in the way scholars have approached the workings of cities and
 Conclusions 609
regions. Over the past couple of decades the idea of a global city has been all the
rage. In part this has happened because the notion of a global city, found first in the
writings of John Friedmann and later more fully developed by Saskia Sassen, became
highly attractive to city leaders across the world. Every city wanted to become a
global city, and soon political officials across the world were clamouring to get on
the global city bandwagon and remake their cities into global cities.
The pendulum may now be swinging in the opposite direction – though readers
should attend carefully to the fine chapter by Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker
(Chapter 5) on Australasian cities and their ambition to become global cities. We
asked our authors to pay close attention to the cities and regions in their part of
the world, and to describe developments there as carefully as possible. In answer to
our call, the authors of the chapters on European cities and Latin American cities,
in particular, pointed to how cities in their regions may best be understood today
as the products of unique configurations of circumstances and events, not simply of
global forces. In each instance the authors insisted that much could be gained and
learned by focusing on those special contexts and histories themselves and how cities
emerged from them. In short, rather than attending to the simple effort of generalisa-
tion, or to adopt fashionable conceptions, they chose to focus instead on key details
and themes to particularise the character of the city in western Europe and in Latin
America in order to better understand it.

***********

Now as readers turn to the various chapters on different regions and parts of the
world, hopefully they will discover that each and every author tries to tell the spe-
cial story of those regions. Instead of being hamstrung by some fashionable set of
concepts, the authors clearly try to focus their attention on furnishing specific and
detailed accounts of urban growth and regionalism in their own parts of the world.
This approach, we firmly believe, is the best one. It informs readers about the con-
siderable richness of urban and regional life in each region. Most of all, it permits
readers to reach their own judgements of the materials, to compare and contrast
what takes place in North America, for example, with what has taken place in East
Asia. It allows for creative and new interpretations and judgements that may push
our understandings as well as our political actions forward. So will it be as well with
our conclusions here; they furnish our way of putting these rich materials together,
but there will be other readers who wish to slice and dice the materials in other ways.

************

Some Common Themes: Similarities and Conclusions

Let us then turn our attention briefly to some of the key issues in the differential
development and growth of different regions of the world. We want to point to some
important variations as well as key similarities. But we also want to remind readers
that all these chapters were completed prior to the pandemic. Thus, observations and
conclusions made then are likely to change in the wake of the crisis.
610 Anthony Orum, Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
Perhaps one of the first and most significant concerns across the different regional
chapters is the role of the state in fostering urban development. Readers will discover
considerable variation in the ways that the state has operated in different regions
and nations. In the United States, for example, the federal government has varied
in the role it plays in urban and regional growth. Currently its role is a diminished
one if we are to take its role in combatting the Covid-19 pandemic as any indica-
tion (see Chapter 7 by Teaford). Indeed, there are those scholars who have argued
that localities have been in control of urban growth, at least since the early 1970s
if not earlier. By contrast there exists the history and unfolding of the role of the
state in East Asian countries. This history is nicely summarised in Chapter 2 by
Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He. Having spent a great deal of time in China,
dating back to November 1988, Anthony Orum remained absolutely astonished at
the ways that the state, and the party, set urban development into motion. Mao Tse
Tung was determined to keep China close to its rural origins and sought to dimin-
ish the significance of Shanghai, the darling of Western ex-patriots in the 1920s.
Deng Xiao Peng, who rose to become premier on the death of Mao Tse Tung in
1978, unleashed the forces that led both to economic growth and to urbanisation.
Deng set into motion a set of changes that eventually would lead China to become
the second greatest economy in the world. He and his compatriots pursued urban
growth in various ways. They included the effort begun in the early 1990s that pro-
moted the development of coastal cities like Shenzhen, making them into the sites
where Western companies would shift their manufacturing, taking advantage of the
low cost of labour there. Companies like Apple were able to expand owing to the
movement of its factories to China.
Elsewhere, however, the state would come to play a different role. In Latin America,
Guillermo Jajamovich, and his colleagues Oscar Sosa López and Gabriel Silvestre,
share the stories of a different kind of state and urban governance. They observe:

If the period of rapid urbanisation of most of the twentieth century was character-
ised by centralisation, authoritarianism, and narrow spaces for citizen participation,
contemporary urban governance is marked by decentralisation and the opening of the
institutions and decision-making processes to non-state actors … today Latin American
urban governments are characterised by new forms of governance in which the state
collaborates with civil society in the co-production of policies and plans. (Chapter 3)

In sub-Saharan Africa there is yet an alternative form of actions by the state regard-
ing urban governance. Here, the formal urban government has historically been
rather weak and governance today takes the form of a broad collaboration among a
range of actors. Warren Smit observes:

Governance is still an important and useful concept that reflects that decision-making
is seldom just the preserve of the formal processes of government, but almost always
involves a variety of stakeholders in both formal and informal processes … Key actors
in governing can include all levels of government (and the political parties that attempt
to control them), traditional leaders, the private sector (across the entire formal/infor-
mal continuum), international agencies and civil society (community groups, religious
organisations, NGOs). (Chapter 4)
 Conclusions 611
Any effort then to claim that there is a uniform and universal role of the state runs
squarely into the reality that history and culture, and current political challenges
today, shape urban governance in profoundly different ways across the world.
But there are some important similarities, especially with regard to the economy.
In the United States and Canada the formal economy has been a major engine behind
the expansion and development of cities and their regions. In Latin America as well
as in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, a great majority of workers
are employed in the informal economy. And thus, they live on meagre subsistence
day-to-day wages. In Latin America, urban expansion has taken place often in the
absence of economic development. Such patterns have all sorts of consequences, per-
haps the most notable in the manner of housing. Informal settlements range across
Latin American cities as they do also in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. These
informal villages have become part and parcel of the character of urban life; they
define the character of life in cities to make it substantially different than that to be
found in western Europe as well as in the United States. And even in countries like
China today, one can find a growing number of informal villages that have arisen
to house both international as well as migrants from the rural countryside. Poverty
in Latin America, as well as in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, is a constant
presence in everyday life in urban regions. It dogs the ability of governments, many
already weak, to make a dent in the quality of the lives of local residents. It requires
the efforts of other actors to play a role in making life better for the impoverished.
And, of course, it contributes to relentless expansion of inequality between the very
rich and the vast majority of people who are very poor.
Western Europe presents a very different picture from the rest of the world. Here
the conditions have an entirely different history, grounded, among other things, in
political actions that resulted in the formation of the European Union. This, an effort
to create a regional economy that could compete with that in countries like the
United States and China, has until recently served to draw together a precarious
collaboration of separate nations, each with different economies, the strongest of
course being that of Germany. What impact has that had over urban and regional
development? Yuri Kazepov and his co-authors write an exceptionally nuanced and
insightful summary regarding these and related matters, noting the ways that the
European Union has contributed to urban growth. They add that:

Focusing on the national state to understand contemporary urban Europe poses a num-
ber of issues … doing so would forgo the critical importance of the city, its inhabitants,
and urbanisation as a driver for change and reform all throughout the modern era …
In this sense one should remember that the class struggles that led to the development
of the welfare state were intimately linked to an urbanised working class. (Chapter 6)

Yet, we believe, their most interesting conclusion underscores the need for a re-
newed appreciation, following the lead of Max Weber, of European cities as unique
historical settlements that ‘[differ] in terms of their distinctive national and local
institutional arrangements, dependent on their own governance regimes’ (Chapter 6).
While all cities across the world have experienced unparalleled immigration and
population expansion in recent decades, some of the most explosive has occurred
in the cities of South Asia. Here lie some of the largest concentrations of people
612 Anthony Orum, Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
c­ lustered into urban areas: the mega-cities of the world. They include Delhi, Dhaka,
and Karachi, among others. Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sarni, the authors of Chapter 1
on South Asian cities and regions, are especially sensitive to the political issues that
have arisen from rapid urban growth, especially to the mistreatment of women. They
argue that cities, instead of being seen only as the engines for economic development,
should also be viewed as engines of inclusive development ‘with a view to [increas-
ing] female workforce participation’. They also are keenly aware of the variety of
ethnic conflicts existing in South Asia and how these conflicts play a part in the
character of urban development. Here, in contrast to most other chapters we are
transported to the level of everyday life on the streets, especially to the issues facing
groups of people that are socially ostracised because of their caste and/or gender.
We learn of the expanding role of the middle class in cities as well as the ‘significant
rise in the number of social movements … in the form of demonstrations, strikes,
protests, candlelight vigils, and social media activism’ (Chapter 1), all of which play
a role into the everyday character of urban life. Moreover, the chapter spotlights an
issue that makes cities and regions of South Asia particularly vulnerable – that of
natural disasters. Floods and earthquakes always threaten local settlements of peo-
ple, while a ‘majority of the larger cities suffer from poor air quality due to increased
traffic congestion … [and] urban density can cause both streets and water supplies
to become polluted with garbage and human waste’ (Chapter 1).
Though other areas of the world suffer in parallel fashion, that chapter is partic-
ularly powerful in identifying the manner in which such events can cripple everyday
life in the urban spaces of South Asia.

*********

The above mentioned chapters tell us about some of the specific ways in which
urban development occurs in different cities and regions of the world. In our reading
of the materials, there seems to be no simple story, though the growth of poverty,
inequality and social exclusion are to be found everywhere, from developed to devel-
oping countries and cities. Different regions, different cities, different actors, and
events turn up to play key roles. History makes a difference as well – history and
culture. Sometimes cities in one part of the world even become a model for cities in
another and urban development ideas travel and are implemented much faster than
before. Such are the varied lessons that the authors of these richly detailed chapters
have shared with us. We thank them all for their hard work and insights.

Reference

Scott, A.J. and Storper, M. 2015. The nature of cities: The scope and limits of urban
theory. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(1): 1–15.
 Index

Note: Page numbers referring to figures are indicated with italics ‘f’.

Aaronson, D., 248 Alienation, 160, 166

Abbott, A., 180, 189 Alihan, M, A., 179, 180
Abrajano, M., 481 Allen, A., 166
Abrego, L. J., 487 Allport, G. W., 484
academic community, 313 Almandoz, A., 52
Accra, 72 Alpha cities, 48, 93
Addams, Grace, 182 Alpha+ cities, 48
Addams, J., 182 Alpha++ cities, 48
Addressing Inequality in South Asia, 6 Alpha- cities, 48, 93
Adey, P., 335 Althusser, 159
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 76 Amaru, Tupac, 57
adopting policy, 341–343 Americanah (2013), 76
Adorno, T. W., 157, 160 American Community Survey, 251
Affordable Care Act (ACA), 484–485 Americanisation movement, 477
Africa Amin, A., 168, 352
policies and policy approaches in cities, Amsterdam, 119
552–554 Anderson, E., 291
sub-Saharan Africa (See sub-Saharan Anderson, J., 157
Africa) Anderson, K. F., 362
air pollution, 55–56 Anderson, L., 297
Alba, R., 481, 484 Anderson, N., 283
Albrow, M., 352 Anglo-American states, 33
Alburez-Gutierrez, D., 253 Angola, 69
Alderson, A. S., 320 Angotti, T., 51, 52
Algan, Y., 439 Anjaria, J. S., 291
alienation, 156 Anselin, L., 188
injustice as, 159–163 Arab Gulf cities:
residential, 161 inequalities, 386–387
self-alienation, 159 Arab Spring movements, 390

Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
614 INDEX
Arbaci, S., 411, 436, 504 Barcelona model of urban
archetypical cities, 341 regeneration, 338
Aristotle, 111 Barnes, T. J., 256, 257, 258
Asad, T., 181 Barra da Tijuca, 54
Asia: Basque Declaration, 200
East Asia (See East Asia) Baylina, M., 221
feminists in, 229 Beaman, J., 287
policies and policy approaches in Becker, Howard, 284
cities, 549–551 Beckfield, J., 320
South Asia (See South Asia) Beck, U., 355
Asian Century (Australian Bedi, T., 225, 227
Government, 2012), 93 Been, V., 251
Asian familialism, 225 Beijing, 23, 28, 32
Asian migrants, 91 gentrifications, 31
Asians, 140 Beijing Olympic Games (2008), 466
Asociación Madres de Plaza Mayo, 218 Bell, M. M., 289, 290
assembling policy, 338–339 Benevolo, L., 111
asylum seekers, 425 Bengtsson, B., 588
Atiku, Jelilu, 76 Berlin Wall, 113
Atlanta, 141 Bertoncello, B., 465
Atlantans, 141 Besteman, C., 287
Auckland, 86, 87, 89, 97, 99, 102 Beta- cities, 48
Austin, 136, 137, 139 Beyond the Borderlands, 287
Australasian cities, 85–86. See also Bhagidari system, 11
Australia; New Zealand Bhatikar, Tanvi, 612
economy and employment, 93–95 Bhattacharya, S., 229
housing, 96–100 Big Data, 241, 245, 259, 277, 323
migrants, 90–93 demographic methods and, 252–253
population, 88t data revolution, 253
ethnic diversity, 90–93 IUSSP, 253
growth and distribution, 86–89 surveillance techniques, 254–256
indigenous peoples, 89–90 US Census Bureau, 253–254
socio-spatial divides, 101t knowledge/power, relationship
spatial inequality, 100–102 with, 257
Vietnamese refugees to, 91 pitfalls and risks of, 256–258
Australia. See also Australasian cities urban planning, 258
population, 85–86, 88t to use or not to use, 258–259
autoconstruction, 46 big data cybersurveillance methods, 255
Auyero, J., 285, 297 Bischoff, S. F., 357
Azteca Stadium, 54 black communal ghettos, 379
Black community, 313
Baan Mankong Programme in Thailand, 594 Black feminists, 223
Bailey, N., 362 Black flight, 148
Baiocchi, G., 297 Black on the Block, 292
Baker, T., 608 Black people, 140, 147–148
Balzac, 569 Black-Scholes-Merton model, 572
Bangladesh: Black women, 221
Chittagong Hill Tracts conflict, 9 Blanco. I., 407
civil society in, 11 Blokland, T., 168, 314
dalits in, 10 Blomley, N., 509
Barcelona, 52–53 Boal, F. W., 501
feminist in, 229 Boas, Franz, 184, 192
Barcelona Model, 53 Bodaar, A., 360
 INDEX 615
Bodomo, A., 465 Canada. See also North American cities
Bogotá, 44 foreign-born Canadians, 140–141
Placa y Pico, 56 homelessness, 149
Bogota model of BRT. See BRT policy model immigrants, 140
Bohon, S. A., 258, 259 metropolitan population, 135–136
Boko Haram, 74 policies and policy approaches, 541–543
Bolt, G., 433 poverty, 148
Booth, C., 376 Caohejing Economic and Technological
Borges, 56 Development Zone, 27
Boston, 137 Čapek, Stella, 294
policies, 541 Carmel, 142
Bourgois, P., 297 Castañeda, E., 287, 296
Boyer, R., 564 Castells, M., 180, 608
Bracero programme, 478 Castels, R., 381
Brainard, James, 142 Cayton, Horace, 183
Brayne, S., 252, 254, 255 Cedar Rock, 139
Brazil, 44 Census Tracts, 187
urbanisation rates, 44 Centenary city, 71
Bredeloup, S., 465 Central American Refugee Parole (CAM)
Brekhus, W., 290, 293 programme, 486
Brenner, N., 114, 118, 155, 156, 160, 341 Charter on Fundamental Rights and
Brickell, K., 225 Freedoms (1982), 542
Bridge, G., 503 Chicago, 137, 139, 145
Bridgman, R., 291 policies, 541
Brisbane, 87 Chicago Housing Authority, 541
Britain’s farm, 95 Chicago School, 178–179, 283,
Brown, C., 102 353, 364, 398
Brown-Saracino, J., 188, 290, 296, 297 approaches to, 179–181
Brown, T. M., 287 colligation period, 180
Brown, Wendy, 171 complexification and revisionism phase, 180
BRT policy model, 338–340 consolidation period, 180
Brunkhorst, Hauke, 157 interdisciplinary conceptualisations
Budapest, 119, 218 city and urban, 185
Buenos Aires, 44 customary view, 182
Buffalo, 137 Hull House, 183
building, 201 inter-institutional and extra-­
Bunnell, T., 340 disciplinary, 182–183
Burgess, E. W., 183, 187–189, 189, race production and legitimation, 183
192, 353, 364 University of Chicago (See University
Burkina Faso: of Chicago)
Gini coefficients of, 72 the urban, 181–182
Bush, George W., 488 urban anthropology, 184–185
Bus Rapid Transit, 56 interdisciplinary methodologies
cartographic pasts, 186
Caldeira, T. P., 289, 291 communities, 186–187
Caldwell, J., 102 Community Area maps, 187
Calgary, 138 digital tools and data, 188
California, 136, 149 maps, 187–188
California’s Proposition 187, 484 sociological map, 187
California’s Silicon Valley, 136 spatial autocorrelation, 188
Callon, M., 572 STS scholarship, 186
Cameroon, 69 legacies, 181
Camic, C., 181 lineage-making, 181
616 INDEX
population censuses, 241 Climate Resilient Cities Initiative in Latin
predecessors, 181 America (CRC-Latam), 207
scholarship under, 198 Clinton, William Jefferson, 485
Chicago School of Sociology, 51, Cold War, 47
241, 266, 608 Collins, J., 563, 572
Childerley, 289 Collins, W. J., 501
Chile: Colombia, 44
CASEN, 243–244 Columbia University drug study, 333
communal population projected and real Comfort, M., 286
to 2017, 244f commodification, 390
crisis of territorial representation in, 242–244 commodification of diversity, 356
failures in applications of censuses, 244 communication, 320
omission of population censuses, 243f Community Area maps, 187
slum clearance during Pinochet dictator- Community as Urban Practice, 168
ship, 248–252 community networks, 382
2011 student movement (See 2011 stu- community-as-place, 312–313
dent movements in Chile) community-as-population, 313
Chilean national socio-economic characteri- definition, 312–314, 314f
sation survey (CASEN), 243 importance of, 315–317
China, 21–22 neighbourhoods, 316–317
hukou system, 32–33 network actors, 316
inequalities, 387–388 as a pattern, 313–314
policies and policy approaches, 549–550 social networks, 315–316
social credit system, 277 urbanites, 315
Chinese-born residents, 91 Community Reinvestment Act
Chinese Communist Party, 455 (1977), 248
Chinese Exclusion Act, 478 Compass Housing (2018), 99
Chittagong Hill Tracts conflict in Concentric Zone diagram, 187
Bangladesh, 9 Conciencia Urban, 278–279
Christchurch, 85, 87 contact hypothesis, 484
Christophers, B., 563, 571 content-fit model, 181
circular economy, 201 Copper Belt, 65
circulation approach, 334 Cortes, R., 240
Cities for People, 162 COVID-19, 255
citizens, 11–12 Cox, Oliver, 183
inequalities, 381–382 Crenshaw, K. W., 221
City of Chicago, 179, 186, 189, 190, 192 Crime and Punishment novel, 569
City, Society, and Place, 191 crime maps, 270
Civil Rights Movement in the Fair Housing criminal immigrant, 486
Act (1968), 247 critical GIScience, 269–271
civil war in Sri Lanka, 8 cartography, 269–270
Clark, E., 505 commercial tools, 270
Clarke, N., 335, 339 counter-mapping, 271
Clark, T. N., 189 crime maps, 270
Cleveland, 137, 144–145 social construction of geoinfor-
immigrants, 480 mation, 270
Climate and Development Knowledge critical scholarships, 35
Network (CDKN), 207 Critique of Everyday Life, 156, 161
climate change, 203–207. See also Critique of Forms of Life, 162, 166
environment Cronon, W., 320
policies and policy approaches, 554–555 Crouch, C., 380
South Asia, 12–14, 18 Cruz, Teddy, 57
sub-Saharan Africa, 77 Cuba Street Tribe, 102
 INDEX 617
cumulative causation process, 478 Dharavi, 16
Cutler, D. M., 501 Diamniadio Lake city, 71
diffusion, 333–334
Dakar Apollonia city, 71 Dines, N., 291
Dalits, The, 10 Dirksmeier, P., 503
Dangerous Love (1996), 76 disability rights, 9
Dar es Salaam, 66 disaster in South Asia, 13
Datta, A., 225 risk and management, 14–15
David, Torres, 57 disaster risk management (DRM) insti-
Davis, Allison, 183 tutions, 15
Dear, Michael, 189 Discovering Nature, 293
Debord, 167 displacement, 509
decentralisation: distance, 332
Latin America cities and regions, 49–50 diversity. See social heterogeneity
sub-Saharan Africa, 74–75 and diversity
De Coulanges, N. D. F., 110, 111 Dixon, J., 361
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Dolowitz, D., 333
(DACA) programme, 486 Dostoyevsky, F., 569
Delhi: Down, Out, and Under Arrest, 286
slum problem, 16 Downs, A., 563
smog and pollution, 13 Downtown Eastside, 149
Delhi Slum Dwellers Federation, 16 Downtown Hyde Park, 177
Dell, Michael, 608 Drake, St. Clair, 183
Del Río, J. P., 403 Dronkers, J., 437
Demirovic, Alex, 171 drought, 77
democracy, 50–51 Dubet, F., 406
demographic disparities: Duneier, M., 285, 291, 292, 298
South Asian nations, 6 Dunn, K., 355
demographic methods and sources, 239–240 Durham Population Laboratory
administrative and vital records (DPL), 256
challenges, 244–245 Durkheim, E., 311
surveys and, 242–245 Durkheim, Émile, 283
big data and, 252–259
territorial equity and socio-spatial segre- Earth Summit (1992), 556
gation, 245–246 East Asia, 21–23
redlining in the United States, gentrifications, 31–32
246–248, 247f globalisation, 35–37
slum clearance in Chile during literature, 23–25
Pinochet dictatorship, 248–252 mega-urban regions, integrated
trajectory and biases over time regions, and urban networks,
administrative and vital 28–31
records, 242–245 neoliberalism and urban gover-
population censuses and power/ nance, 33–34
knowledge dynamics, 240–241 socio-spatial disparity and
surveys, 242–243 inequality, 32–33
territorial representation in transitional economies and world/global
Chile, 242–244 city making, 25–28
urban planning, as tool for, 245–252 urbanisation, 35–37
Denis, E., 5 urban transformations, 31
Denton, N., 401 Economic and Philosophical
désaffiliation, 381 Manuscripts, 158, 159
Detroit, 137, 147, 148 Economic Commission for Latin America
Dewey, 179 (ELAC), 44
618 INDEX
economy: urban metabolism (See urban
Australasia, 93–95 metabolism)
feminist urban research, 225–226 environmental justice organisations, liabil-
South Asia, 7–9, 17 ities and trade (EJOLT), 208
sub-Saharan Africa, 68–70 environmental mechanisms, 404
Edel, M., 573 Environmental Protection Agency
Edge Cities: Life on the New Frontier, 142 (EPA), 588
Edmonton, 138 Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974), 248
Eko Atlantic, 71 Eraydin, A., 363
Ellis, P., 5 Erradicación de campamentos housing
El Movimiento Nacional de Mujeres, 219 programme, 246, 248–249, 259
employment: demographic methods, 251–252
Australasia, 93–95 policies, 249
North American city, 142 population displacement under eradica-
rate of working-age refugees in European tion programme 1975–1979, 250f
countries, 438f Tiebout model, 249–250
enclave urbanism, 52 US redlining policy vs., 251
energy, 201 Esping-Andersen, G., 116
Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), 587 Ethiopia:
Energy Performance of Buildings Directive Gini coefficients of, 72
(EPBD), 587 housing programmes, 71
Engels, F., 112, 283, 376, 385 ethnography. See urban ethnography
England: Euler, L., 311
urban inequality, 378–379 Europe. See also European cities
English migrants, 92 city model, 109, 110, 113–114, 128
environment, 196–198 neo-Weberian debate, 114
climate change policy levels, coexistence of dif-
international institutional tack- ferent, 116
ling, 206–207 public administration, 114–115
threats, risk, and hazards to urban governance, 115
cities, 203–205 social inequalities, 358
urban resilience, 205–206 spatial segregation, 500–501
Latin American cities and, 55–56 European-American urban theory, 37
organic metaphors and urban European cities, 109–110
sustainability challenges facing structural and contex-
biological analogies, 199 tual changes, 118–127
global sustainability, 199–200 demographic and economic profile of
industrial and political ecological European capital regions,
approaches, 200–203 124–125t
projects and initiatives, 200 economic and political transfor-
scholarship under Chicago School, 198 mations, 127
urban ecology, 198 financial crisis, 126–128
WUF, 200 history
political ecology, 202 ancient city, 110–111
principles contemporary city, 113
interdisciplinary and intersectoral industrial city, 112–113
approach, 211–212 medieval city, 111–112
justice and governance, 212 modern city and rise of national
planning and integration at multiple states, 112
scales, 211 housing, 123f, 127
risk, 204 industrialisation, 112–113
sub-Saharan Africa, 77 labour market, 127–128
urban environmental justice (See urban migration, 120, 126
environmental justice) policies and policy approaches, 546–549
 INDEX
population, 120
aged 0–59, 122f
risk of poverty or social
exclusion, 121f
social and spatial inequalities, 120
state and multilevel governance in
Europe, 116–118
urban labour and housing markets, 115,
119, 120, 126–127
European citizenship, 118
European Commission, 200
European Conference on Sustainable Cities
and Towns, 200
European Social Survey Round 1, 434
European Sustainable Cities Platform, 200
Executive Order 13769, 482
Expert, P., 315
Facebook, 312, 313
factory enclaves in post-reform China,
463–464, 467
Fader, J. J., 286
Fainstein, S., 163, 360, 569
Fair Housing Act of 1968, 318
Fair Shared Cities (2013), 226
Fama, E., 565
families, 382
Fan, C. C., 34
Farrer, J., 292, 297
favelas, 52
Federal Immigration Restriction Act
(1902), 90–91
feminist urban research, 218–219
academic literature, 220
alternative imaginations and
futures, 228–230
collectives and coalitions, 229
European Union, 226–227
feminist sensibilities, 219
gender inequalities, 220–221
Global South vs. Global North, 222
homes and housing, 223–225
intersectionality, 221
perspectives and praxis, 219–222
planning and politics, 227–228
and queer urbanists, 229–230
scholarship, 221, 230–231
spaces, 226–227
subjects and subjectivities, 222–228
transportation, 226
work, economic development, and
poverty, 225–226
Fernandes, L., 11
Festinger, L., 312
619
Field, A. D., 292, 297
Fielding, A. J., 32
Fields, D., 567, 572
finance, insurance, and real estate
(FIRE), 563–565
financial crisis, 126–127
financial instruments, 565–567
financialisation and real estate:
amateur landladies and peddling of
sweet home, 569
crises and criticism, 563
efficient market hypothesis, 565
financial instruments and market for real
estate, 565–567
financialisation defined, 562
FIRE and asset prices, 563–565
landlords and real estate mental-
ities, 571–572
landowners function, 573
productive and real estate sector, 573
property, 562
REITs, 569–570
state real estate, 570–571
ultra-high net worth individuals and lux-
urious housing, 567–568
urban redevelopment and, 573–574
Financial Times, 564
Fine, G. A., 180
Finley, M. I., 111
Fischer-Kowalski, M., 200
Fligstein, N., 563, 566
floating population, 388, 467
families and communities, 453
institutional and social constraints, 453
in large cities, 459
post-reform China, 450–454
residence, 453
urban villages, 458–459
flooding risk, 77
Florescu, D., 253
Flores, R. D., 485
Florida, R., 354, 358, 360, 502
Foner, N., 481, 484
food security, 72–73
Fordism, 113, 377
Fordist period, 115, 377, 384
Ford, R., 441
foreign direct investment (FDI), 25, 27, 450
China, 21–22
India, 8
Foreign Investment Review Board
(2018), 98
Forrest, J., 355
Forst, R., 157, 160, 165, 166
620 INDEX
fortification, 51–52 data acquisition, 277
Foucault, M., 239 GIScience, 269–271
Fourastié, J., 117 ownership and interests behind technol-
Foxconn Group, 463–464, 467 ogies, 268–269
Frankfurt critical theory, 155–157 public participation, 276–277
alienation, injustice as, 159–163 spatial citizenship approach, 278
progress in critical and urban the- student movements in Chile (2011) (See
ory, 166–171 2011 student movements in Chile)
Young Marx, and, 157–159 theoretical foundation and recent
Frankfurt School, 155–158, 160, development, 265–268
164, 165, 171 urban consciousness, 278–279
Fraser, N., 156, 157, 163, 165, 167, 171 urban problems, 265
freedom of movement, 120, 166, 170, 172 Georgetown, 139
French banlieues, 377 Ghana, 68
Friday Harbor conference, 270 Ghertner, D. A., 11, 12, 18, 288
Friedmann, J., 168, 609 Gidley B., 297
Fromm, E., 158 Gieseking, J. J., 257
Fry, R., 357 Gilbert, A., 593
Fujita, K., 32 Gillborn, D., 257
Giroud, M., 406
Galster, G., 400, 404 Glaeser, E., 136
Gamma cities, 48 Glaeser, E. L., 501
Gandomi, A., 254 Glass, R. L., 505
Gans, H. J., 354 Glikman, A., 434
Ganuza, E., 297 global city concept, 47
Garreau, J., 142 Global Climate Action Summit in San
Gates, G., 360 Francisco (2018), 588
gender: global financial and economic crisis
gender-specific issues, 390 (GFEC), 580
inequalities, 220–221, 382, 384 global financial crisis, 33
rights, 9 globalisation, 117–118
gentrifications, 146, 497–498, 510–511 Latin America cities and regions, 47–48
Anglo-American theories, 505–506 cities classification, 48
definition, 505 flexibilisation of labour, 48
described, 505 industrial centres, 48
disinvestment, 507 private sector in urban services, 49
displacement, 509 pro-market urban development
East Asia, 31–32 strategies, 49
ethnography, 288–289 services and infrastructure, state’s
Latin American cities, 544 role in, 48
mixed-community policies, 507 Latin American cities, 544
rent gaps, 508 Globalisation and World Cities (GaWC)
social mixing and, 506–509 (See also Research Network, 93
social mixing) Globalization and the Affective Labour of
spatial segregation, 506, 508 (See also Motoring Men, 225
spatial segregation) Globalization and World Cities Research
by stealth, 503 Network (GaWC), 48
territorial stigma, 508 Global North, 373, 378
geographical mechanisms, 404 housing policy, 583–589
geographic constructivism, 403 inequalities in contemporary cities
geographic information systems (GIS), 188 of, 378–384
geography of polarization, 484 global positioning systems (GPS), 266
geoinformation systems (GIS), 277–279 Global South, 373, 375
 INDEX 621
housing policy, 589–594 Hamilton, 89
inequalities in contemporary, 385–388 Hannerz, U., 180, 184, 185, 191, 284
global urban networks: Harare, 77
cities’ development, 320 Hardoy, J. E., 52
corporations, 321 Hardt, M., 161
technological advances, 319 Harley, J. B., 269
trade, 319 Harper, D., 287, 297
transportation and communica- Harper, E. M., 199
tion data, 320 Harris, A., 341
world city hypothesis, 320 Harris School of Public Policy, 191
Gluckman, Max, 284 Harvey, D., 113, 156, 161–163, 162, 166,
Gmelch, G., 285 167, 170, 180, 284, 563, 564,
Goffman, E., 284, 290 573, 574, 608
Goldman, M., 341 Ha, S., 31
Goodfellow, T., 71 Hashem, I. A. T., 257
Gorodzeisky, A., 439, 441 Havekes, E., 362
Gotham, K. F., 572, 573 hazards to cities, 203–205
governance, 212 Hazare, Anna Baburao, 11, 12
Latin America cities and regions, 49–51 H-1B visas, 487
models, 51 Health Barcode, 255
neoliberalisation of (See neoliberalisation) Hegel, 156–160, 163, 164, 572
shifting policies and governance of diver- Heidegren, C. G., 164
sity, 354–357 Heiman, R., 289
sub-Saharan Africa, 73–75 Helbrecht, I., 288, 503
Gowan, T., 292 Heritage of Sociology series, 180
Graedel, T. E., 199 Herzfeld, M., 288
Graglia, Dunckel, 226 He, Shenjing, 610
Grannis, R., 314 Hickman, P., 363
Gray, M. L., 294 Hightower, J., 333
Grazian, D., 292 Highway Act (1956), 540
Great Australian Dream, 96 Hildyard, N., 70
Great Depression, 241, 478 Hillery, G. A., 312
Great Recession, 481 Hill, R. C., 32
Greco-Roman civilisations, 110–111 Hipp, J. R., 314
Grey Lynn Tribe, 102 Hispanics, 140, 148
Grillo, R., 355 Hoang, K. K., 292
Gross, N. C., 333 Hoek-Smit, M., 593
Ground Truth, 270 Holling, C. S., 205
Grundrisse, 161 homeownership, 592, 597
Guangzhou, 23, 28 Home Owners Loan Corporation
gentrifications, 31 (HOLC), 246
Guayaquil, 48 homosexuality, 10–11
Guimerà, R., 315 Hondagneu-Sotelo, P., 287
Guironnet, A., 573 Hong Kong, 21, 23, 27, 28
Guo, Terry, 463 Honneth, A., 156, 157, 160, 163–168
Hope city, 71
Habermas, J., 155, 157, 163, 164, 166, 168 HOPEVI programme, 542
Habitat Agenda, 199, 200 Horkheimer, M., 155, 157, 158, 160
Habits of the Heartland, 290 housing:
Haddock, Serena Vicari, 607 Australasia, 96–100
Haider, M., 254 European cities, 127
Hajnal, Z. L., 481 feminist urban research, 223–225
Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), 76 policy (See housing policy)
622 INDEX
South Asia
economic implications, 15–16
environmental implications, 16–17
slum dwellers, 15–16
social implications, 16
sub-Saharan Africa, 70–72
housing policy, 582–583, 594–596
challenge of, 581–582
Global North, 583–584
environmental sustainability, 587–588
finance, 586–587
governance and user participa-
tion, 588–589
land, planning, and infrastruc-
ture, 584–585
socio-spatial segregation, 584
tenure and management, 585–586
Global South, 589–590
environmental sustainability, 593–594
finance, 592–593
governance and user participation, 594
land, planning, and infrastruc-
ture, 590–591
tenure and management, 592
governments, 597
homeownership, 592, 597
housing production, 597
initiatives, 597
planning and land use policies, 597
shifting housing paradigms
self-help era, 581
social housing sector, 580
specific groups, 580–581
Hou, Z., 256
Hsinchu Park, 27
Hudson, C, 228
Hudson, M., 361
hukou system, 32–33
agricultural hukou, 452
danwei, 452
economic reform, 452
non-agricultural hukou, 452
rural hukou, 454
Hull House Maps and Papers, 183
Hull House mission, 182
Hulse, K., 580
Hu, M., 255
100 resilient cities programme (100RC), 206
Hyde Park, 176–178, 191, 192
Hyde Park Walking Tour. See Walking Tour
hyper-diversity, 354
hyperghetto, 382–383
Hyra, D., 504
Ibero-America, 43
Ibero-American Center for Strategic Urban
Development (CIDEU), 47, 53
imitation, 332
Immigration Act, 92
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE), 486
Immigration and Nationality Act
(1965), 478
immigration/immigrants, 352, 420–422
asylum seekers, 425
distribution of immigrants across coun-
tries, 426, 427t
economic integration of immi-
grants, 436–439
ethnography, 286–287
European countries, 420–422
distribution of immigrants across
countries, 426–431
economic integration of immi-
grants, 436–439
employment rate of working-age ref-
ugees, 438f
flow of immigrants, 422–425,
423t, 424f
GDP nominal, 427–428t, 429–430f
Muslim immigrants, 441
opposition or objection to immigra-
tion, 440–444, 442–443t
policies, 439–440
unemployment rate of foreign-born vs.
native-born, 437f
France, 424
Germany, 422, 424
inequalities, 383–384
North American city, 140
Scandinavian countries, 424
western Europe, 424–425
Immigration Reform and Control Act
(IRCA), 480
import substitution industrialisa-
tion (ISI), 44
India:
civil society in, 11
dalits in, 10
demographic transition, 5–6
economy, 7–9
gender ratio, 10
homosexuality, 10–11
liberalisation process, 8, 550
policies and policy approaches, 550–551
population growth, 13–14
smog and pollution, 13
 INDEX 623
urban middle class, 11–12 Global North, 584–585
urban population, 9 Global South, 590–591
urban transition, 8–9 sub-Saharan Africa, 70–72
Indian-born residents, 91 urban villages in post-reform China, 461
Indo-Pakistan conflict, 9 institute for transportation and development
Indo-Sri Lankan Accord, 10 policy (ITDP), 339–340
industrialisation: institutional mechanisms, 404
economic growth and, 555–556 instrumental mechanisms, 401
European cities, 112–113 Inter-American Development Bank’s
United States, 476–477 Emerging and Sustainable Cities
Industrial Revolution, 376 (ICES) programme, 206
inequalities, 373–375. See also social Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
movements and urban Change’s (IPCC) 2014
inequalities committee, 12
Australasia, 100–102 International Monetary Fund
citizens, 381–382 (IMF), 381, 520
European cities, 120 international resident communities in post-
Global North reform China, 468–469
citizens, 381–382 commodity housing sector in
difficulties and conflicts, 384 Beijing, 464–465
England, 378–379 Guangzhou, 465, 466
families and communities, 382 Xiaobei, 465, 466
financialisation and neoliberal pol- international residents, 456–457, 459–460
icies, 380–381 international settlers, 456
gender inequalities, 384 International Union for the Scientific Study
hyperghetto, 382–383 of Population (IUSSP), 253
immigrants, 383–384 international visitors, 455
refugees, 384 involuntary geographic information
social heterogeneity and (IVGI), 269
fragmentation, 381
welfare capitalism, 378–380 Jacobs, J., 354, 360
Global South, 385–386 Jacques, S., 297
African cities, 387 Jaeggi, R., 156, 157, 160–162, 166, 171
Arab Gulf cities, 386–387 Jajamovich, G., 610
China, 387–388 Janowitz, M., 180
Latin American cities, 386 Japan, 21, 25, 36
urbanisation, 386 gentrification in, 32
immigrant workers, 376–377 policies and policy approaches, 549
poverty Jencks, C., 401
spatial segregation, and, 377–378 Jensen, M. C., 570
in urban space, 376 Jerolmack, C., 294, 296, 297
rural communities, 378 Jews, 158
social movements, 388–392 Jhabvala, R., 7
socio-spatial segregation, 377 Jia, Ling, 610
sub-Saharan Africa, 72–73 Jialin, Wang, 570
urban ethnography, 285–286 Jim Crow laws, 498
urbanisation and industrialisation, 376 Johnson, K. M., 481
women, 377, 384 Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, 478
informal economic activity, 69 Johnson, S., 566
infrastructure: Jones Lang LaSalle, 573
built environment and urban net- Jones, N., 294
works, 317–319 Joseph, T. D., 485
housing policy Jou, S. C., 32
624 INDEX
Jurgenson, N., 589 democracy and neoliberalism, 50–51
Justice and the Politics of Difference, 164 developmentalism, 44–47
Justification and Critique (2014), 166 environment, 55–56
feminists in, 229
Kahneman, Daniel, 566 globalisation, 47–49
Kahn-Harris, K., 297 idea of, 43–47
Kamat, L., 11 inequalities, 386
Kansas City, 137 mega-events, 53–55
Kantor, P., 540, 546 planet of slums, 56–58
Karuri-Sebina, G., 78 policies and policy approaches in cit-
Kasinitz, P., 287 ies, 543–546
Kazepov, Y., 611 regional initiatives, 57–58
Kearns, A., 404 societies and academic circles, 58
Kefalas, M., 289, 292 spaces of hope, 56–58
Kelley, Florence, 182, 183 spatial segregation, 500
Kemeny, J., 583 urban governance, 49–51
Kennard, L., 569 urban projects and policy models, 52–53
Kennedy, J. F., 489 violence, fortification, and social displace-
Kenya, 70, 72, 73 ment, 51–52
Keynesian compromise, 378, 380 Latino Threat Narrative, 482
Kia, Kiluanji, 76 Latour, B., 340
Killen, S., 400 Laurie, N., 334, 339
Kindleberger, C., 564 Leeds, A., 46, 185
King, A. D., 336 Lee, J., 564
Kingsolver, A. E., 287 Lees, L., 505, 506, 508
Kinshasa, 66 Leeson, Nick, 565
Kinyanjui, M. N., 225 Lefebvre, H., 155, 156, 160–163, 166–169,
Kisumu Water and Sewerage Company 180, 266, 284, 564, 608
(KIWASCO), 70 Left-wing Melancholia, 171
Kitchin, R., 252, 257 legacies, 181
Kitwe, 72 Le Galès, P., 378, 391
Knowles, C., 287, 297 legal violence, 487
Konza Techno city, 71 Lelea, M. A., 229
Koopmans, R., 355 Lemanski, C., 506
Korpi, W., 377 Le Pere Goriot novel, 569
Kuhn, 181 Lerner, Jaime, 56
Kuppinger, P., 285 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and
Kwak, J., 566 queer (LGBTQ) issues, 9
Kwesta, 76 liberalisation process, 550–552, 585
Kyoto Protocol, 555 India, 8, 11
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam
Lacy, K. R., 289 (LTTE), 10
Lagos, 66 Lima, 48, 57
Langegger, S., 291 slums, 46
Lang, R. E., 141 lineage-making, 181
large urban projects (LUP), 53 Lingang New Town, 27
Larner, W., 334, 339 Lin, L., 256
Lassiter, L. E., 297 Lisbon 2000 Policy Agenda, 549
Las Vegas, 136–137, 137 literature:
Latin America: East Asia, 23–25
after developmentalism, 46–47 feminist urban research, 220
contemporary urbanisation social heterogeneity and diver-
processes, 51–55 sity, 360–363
decentralisation, 49–50 Lloyd, R., 288
 INDEX 625
Local Agenda 21 (LA21), 556 marginality, 45
localisation, 403 cultural explanations of, 46
Lofland, L. H., 290 Margo, R. A., 501
Logan, J. R., 188 Markowitz, Harry, 565
Lokpal Bill, 12 Marrow, H. B., 485
London, 115 Marshall, T. H., 379, 380
cholera in, 265 Marsh, D., 333
low-income populations, 411 Martinez, M. J., 288
women, 228 Martin, P., 488
López, E., 411 Marx, K., 112, 155–163, 201,
López, Oscar Sosa, 610 283, 284, 573
Los Angeles, 145, 148 Massey, D. S., 401, 482
Louargant, S., 226 Mather, M., 240
Lower Manhattan, 144 Mathews, G., 287
Lowe, S., 583 Mayer, M., 57, 381
Low, S., 285, 363 Mayer, S., 401
Luanda, 66 Mayorga-Gallo, S., 296
Lukas, M., 405 May, R. A. B., 292
Lung-Amam, W., 287 McCann, E., 330, 338, 339, 341
Lupton, R., 406, 409 McFarlane, C., 334, 551
Luther, Martin, 148 McGuirk, J., 57
Lützeler, R., 32 McKenzie, R. D., 319, 321
Lynd, H. M., 297 McKinsey, 70
Lynd, R. S., 297 Mead, George H., 164, 179, 182, 183
mega-events, 53–55
Macdonald, L., 341 megaprojects, 53
Macgregor, L. C., 290 Melbourne, 85, 86
MacKenzie, D., 572 defined, 93
Madden, D., 156, 161 economies of, 94–95
Maharashtra, 15–16 immigrants, 91
Mahon, R., 341 population growth, 86–87
Malaysia: Mele, C., 291
housing policies, 584 Mellander, C., 358
Malecón 2000, 53 Memoir on Pauperism, 376
Malheiros, J., 411 Menjívar, C., 487
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 184 Menke, Christoph, 171
Managua, 48 meritocratic principle, 407
Manchester, 119 Merton, Robert, 565
Mangin, William, 46 Methodological Innovations, 297
Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of metropolitan population trends, 135–138
Financial Crisis, 564 Mexico City, 48, 50–51, 341
Mansueto Institute for Urban air pollution, 56
Innovation, 190, 191 Hoy no Circula, 56
Mansueto, Joseph, 190 urbanisation rates, 44
Māori, 89, 90 middle classes in city, 288–289
Mapping the Young Metropolis: The Midgely, E., 488
Chicago School of Sociology, migrants. See migration/migrants
1915–1940, 186 migration/migrants, 6
Marcińczak, S., 358, 359 Australasia, 90–91
Marcuse, H., 160 ethnography, 286–287
Marcuse, P., 156, 161, 608 European cities, 120, 126
Marcus, G. E., 296 factory enclaves, 463–464
marginalisation: international resident commu-
defined, 45 nities, 464–466
626 INDEX
post-reform china, 450–451
dual cities, 458
floating population, 451–454, 467
hukou system (See hukou system)
illegal immigration, 457, 460
international residents, 456–
457, 459–460
international settlers, 456
international visitors, 455
landscapes of migrant commu-
nities, 460–466
large cities, 459
neighbourhoods, 451
open door and international resi-
dents, 454–457
rural migrant, 452
three illegals, 457, 460
urban China, 457–460
urban villages, 458–459
world factory, 457–458
sub-Saharan Africa, 68, 70
Sydney, 87
United States
civic nationalism, 477–478
credible fear, 488
criminal immigrant, 486
cumulative causation, 478
demographic change and back-
lash, 476–482
fifth phase of immigration, 488–489
geography of polarization, 484
H-1B visas, 487
immigration phases, 475–476
industrialisation, 476–477
legal residence, 485–487
legal violence, 487
nativism, 478
neighbourhoods and workplaces, 477
politics of fear and deserving-
ness, 482–485
racial domination, 483
undocumented immigration,
478–480
US-Mexico border wall, 481–482
urban villages, 460–462
Milan, 119
millennium development goals (MDG), 200
Milwaukee, 145
immigrants, 480
Minhang Industrial Development Zone, 27
Miraftab, F., 225
MIT Media Lab, 256
Mittal, Lakshmi, 567
mixed-communities policy:
gentrification, 507
social mixing, 503–504
Mockus, Atanas, 57
Modigliani, Franco, 565
Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 73
Monroe, K. V., 291
Monterrey, 48
Montevideo, 44
Montreal, 136, 138, 140
policies, 542
Moore, S., 341
Moral Geography, 156
moral relocation, 170
Moreno, J. D., 312
Morris, Olive, 228
Mouffe, Chantal, 171
moving-to-opportunity (MTO)
programme, 541
Muller, J., 563
multiculturalism, 355
multidimensional migrant integration policy
index (MIPEX), 439–440, 440t
Mumbai:
policies and policy approaches, 550–551
slum sanitation programme, 551
Muslim population, 427, 429, 431
Musterd, S., 436
Myanmar:
Rohingya crisis in, 9–10
Naegler, L., 288
Nairobi:
food security, 72
Nájera, J. R., 287
Nanetti, R., 362
National Crime Records Bureau
(NCRB), 10
National Family Health Survey (NFHS), 10
National Immigration Administration
(NIA), 455
long-term visitors, 456
permanent residents, 456
short-term visitors, 456
National Origins Quota Act (1924). See
Johnson-Reed Act of 1924
National Slum Dwellers Federation
(NSDF), 16
Nations Development Programme, 64
native-born Europeans, 431, 433, 434,
436–438, 445
natural disasters, 203–204, 294
natural hazards, 13
 INDEX 627
Neal, Z. P., 321, 362 Noir, Petit, 76
Negri, Toni, 161 non-governmental actors, 357
neighbourhood effects. See also residential non-governmental organisations (NGOs),
contexts and public policies 36, 57, 77, 543, 551, 554, 594
social mixing, 503 non-Hispanic White people, 140
spatial segregation, 502 non-mortgage housing loans models, 592
United States, 477 Normativity and Power (2017), 166
neoliberalisation: North American cities, 149–150
Latin America cities and regions, 50–51 central cities, 141–142, 144–149
of urban governance geography, 136
quintessential elements, 33 metropolitan population trends, 135–138
urban renaissance policy, 34 socio-spatial segregation, 584
urban restructuring, 33–34 suburbanisation
neoliberal spatial equivalence, 410 business and employment, 142
Nepal: central cities, 141–142
dalits in, 10 communities, 143–144
homosexuality, 11 downtowns, 142–143
network actors, 316 ethnic group, 140
networks, 311–312 housing, 138–139
built environment and urban networks immigrants, 140
income segregation, 319 migration of foreign-born
individuals/households and key organ- Canadians, 140–141
isational sites, 318 population, 139
infrastructure, 317–319 racial and ethnic group, 140
racial segregation, 318–319 Northern American cities:
residential segregation, 318–319 policies and policy approaches, 540–543
social networks, 317 North Shore Tribe, 102
challenges, 322 Not for Profit, 162
community (See community networks) notices to appear (NTAs), 486
data collection, 322 Novy, J., 57
global urban networks (See global Nussbaum, Martha, 563
urban networks)
missing data, 322 Obama, Barack, 485, 488
social networks, 315–316, 322–323 Oberti, M., 381
spatial, 322–323 occidental city, 113
Nevada, 137 Ocejo, R. E., 285, 289
new-build gentrification, 31 Offe, Claus, 157
New Directions in Critical Theory, 166 Okora, Nnedi, 76
new international division of labour Okri, Ben, 76
(NIDL), 320 Olympic Games:
newly industrialised economies (NIEs), 21 1968, 54
Newman, K., 401 2016, 52, 54
New Poor Laws (1834), 376 Ong, A., 28, 34
New Study Designs, 296 Ong, P., 358
New Urban Agenda, 206 open-door policies, 455
New York, 137, 148 OpenStreetMap (OSM), 276
policies, 541 opportunity structures:
New Zealand. See also Australasian cities access to, 413
economy, 95 defined, 399
population, 86–89, 88t housing market segment, 402
Nigeria, 69, 75 and perceived opportunities, 400
Nigerian film industry (Nollywood), 76 Organisation for Economic and Cultural
Nightingale model, 589 Development, 200
628 INDEX
Organisation of Women of Asian and governmental decentralisation, 553
African Descent (OWAAD), 228 Habitat Caucus, 554
Orne, J., 294 local government, 554
Orum, Anthony, 607, 608, 610 urbanisation, 552
Osaka: Asian cities
gentrification in, 32 China, 549–550
Osborne, N., 230 India, 550–551
Japan, 549
pacifying police units (UPPs), 52 environmental challenge, to tackle
Pakistan: climate change, 554–555
dalits in, 10 economic growth and industrialisa-
slum dwellers in, 15 tion, 555–556
Papatoetoe Tribe, 102 socially innovative actions, 556
Paradise Transplanted, 287 sustainability, 555
Pardo, I., 285 European cities
Paris: deindustrialisation, 546
policies and policy approaches, 547 Germany, 547–548
Parkinson, M., 404 immigrants and refugees, 547
Park, R. E., 184, 186, 188, 189, 192, 298, multilevel governance, 548
311, 353, 364 Paris, 547
Parraguez Sanchez, L., 271, 273, 275 service economy and corporate
Parson, Talcott, 181 presence, 547
Participation and Human Rights index, 73 social cohesion, 548–549
Pattillo, M., 289, 292, 504 social inequality, 547
Pearl River Delta, 23 United Kingdom, 546–547
Peck, J., 330, 341 urban poverty, 547
Peng, Deng Xiao, 610 urban violence, 547–548
People’s Participatory Movements, 11–12 Latin American cities, 543–546
People’s Republic of China democratisation and decentralisa-
(PRC), 450, 455 tion, 544–545
Pérez, G., 287, 288 gentrification, 544
Perry, E. M., 292, 296 globalisation, 544
Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity investment in public works, 544
Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), 484 participatory budgets, 545–546
Pert, 87 social urbanism, 545
Phenomenology of Spirit, 164 urbanisation, 543–544
Philadelphia, 137 Northern American cities
philosophical anthropology, 156 Canada, 541–543
Pieterse, E., 75 economic and financial crisis, 541
Piketty, T., 252, 357 market-based approach, 541
pink tide, 57 public education and affordable
Pinochet Dictatorship: housing, 541
slum clearance in Chile during,248–252 social-centred vs. market-centred
Pinol, J., 110 policies, 540
Pittsburgh, 137 social housing, 540
planet of slums, 57 United States, 540–542
Plato, 111 policy mobilities, 329–331, 343–344
Plender, J., 564 academic references, 330f
Polanyi, K., 116, 390, 565 adopting policy, 341–343
policies and policy approaches, 539, 557 BRT policy model, 342
African cities fast policy, 342
administrative decentralisa- history-laden contexts, 341–342
tion, 553–554 inter-referencing, 340–341
 INDEX 629
municipal diplomacy, 341 public participation GIS (PPGIS), 266
speculative urbanism, 341 public policies. See residential contexts and
assembling policy public policies
policy model defined, 338 public space, 290–291
topographical/topological space, 339 Puerto Madero, 53
translation process, 338–339 Purcell, M., 169
circulating policy, 339–340 Purple Hibiscus (2003), 76
circulation, 334 Putnam, R. D., 352, 363
diffusion and policy transfer, 333–334
imitation and distance, 332 Qian, J., 610
paradigm, 334–336 Quadrangle Club, 182
phases, 337t quarter acre paradise, 96
scholarship, 330, 331 queer feminists, 228–230
theoretical underpinnings to, 331–336 queer men, 292, 294
policy models:
defined, 338 races:
policy transfer, 333–334 production and legitimation, 183
political ecology, 210–211 spatial segregation, 499
pollution, 13, 555 US census, 241
urban air pollution, 55–56 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 184
Polynesian migration, 92 Rae, I., 411, 504
population: Rama, M., 6
Australasia, 86–93 Ramdas, K., 225
censuses, 240–241 Ramos-Zayas, A. Y., 287
European cities, 120, 121f, 122f Rapoport, E., 339
India, 9 Rath, J., 360
North American city, 135–138 Ratzenhofer, Gustav von, 182
South Asia, 8 Rawls, John, 162, 163
sub-Saharan Africa, 67–68 Raza de Bronze (1997 [1925]), 56
Population Registration Act, 499 real estate. See financialisation and
Porto Alegre model of participatory bud- real estate
geting, 338 real estate investment trusts (REITs), 566
Porto Maravilha, 53, 54 policies, 569
poverty, 376–378 privatisation, 570
European cities, 547 types of, 569–570
feminist urban research, 225–226 Reardon, K., 357
spatial segregation, and, 377–378 Recapturing Democracy, 162
sub-Saharan Africa, 72–73 Redfern, 90
in urban space, 376 Redfield, Robert, 184
Pradhan, K., 5–6 redlining in United States:
pragmatic resignation, 170 discriminatory and racist prac-
Prague, 119 tices, 247–248
Prato, G. B., 285 HOLC, 246
predecessors, 181 map of Baltimore (1930), 247f
Pren, K. A., 482 Red Vienna, 117
Préteceille, E., 381 Rees, P., 240
PREVI programme, 57 refugees:
primate cities, 67, 86, 87 European cities, 438f, 547
Prince, R., 330, 335 inequalities, 384
privatisation, 410 Vietnamese, 91
REITs, 570 Regional and Urban Planning Commission
sub-Saharan Africa, 74 of the Latin American Council of
prototypical cities, 341 Social Sciences (CLACSO), 52
630 INDEX
Regulations on the Administration of Entry Ricardo, David, 573
and Exit of Foreigners, 456 Rifkin, J., 573
relocation, 171 Right to the City, 162
Remuera Tribe, 102 Rika, 190
Rennie, N., 466 Rio de Janeiro, 44, 54
rent gaps, 508 UPPs, 52
Ren, X., 387 Rios, V. M., 286
residential contexts and public pol- risks to cities, 203–205
icies, 398–399 Ritzer, G., 589
access to opportunities, 399 Roberts, M., 5, 226
geography in opportunities and Robinson, J., 330, 339, 341
inequalities, 400 Robinson, Z. A., 295
access to opportunities, 399 Rockfeller Foundation, 206
geographic constructivism, 403 Rodó-de-Zárate, M., 221
instrumental mechanisms, 401 Rogers, D., 99, 572
intra-urban inequalities, 400 Rohingya refugee crises in
localisation defined, 403 Myanmar, 9, 10, 12
location, 402 Romero Lankao, P., 55
opportunity structures (See opportu- Romero, M., 483
nity structures) Rönnblom, M., 228
socialisation mechanisms, 401 Rose, R., 333
lower income groups, 412–413 Rossi, U., 156
neighbourhood effects, 403–404 Rousseau, 160, 164
categories, 404 Rowntree, B. S., 376
dual dimension of inequalities, Ruga, Athi Patra, 76
406–407 Ruiz-Tagle, J., 362, 410, 411, 498, 607
inequalities, 404 Ruming, K. J., 608
neighborhoods described, 405–406 Rushing, W., 295
position and opportunities, 406–407 Rutland, T., 574
scales on production of inequalities, Ryan, B., 333
404–407, 404t Rydgren, J., 391
neighbourhood in public policies against
inequalities Salamon, S., 290
equipment and infrastructure, Sampson, R. J., 383
access to, 407 Samuelson, Paul, 565
European cities, 411 Sánchez de Madariaga, I., 226
Latin American cities, 411 Santiago, 56
neoliberal spatial equivalence, 410 Santo Domingo, 48
privatisation process, 410 São Paulo, 48
residential context, 408 Sapir, Edward, 184
social conflict, 409 Sarni, Neha, 612
social explosion, 408–409 Sassen, S., 563, 609
social marginalisation, 411 Saunders, P., 191
territorial organisation, 410–411 Savitch, H. V., 540, 546
perceived opportunities, 400 Schachter, A., 485
socio-territorial inequalities, 412 Schalliol, David, 191
resident welfare associations (RWAs), 11 scholarship, 178
resignation, 170–171 Chicago School, 198
resilience, 205–206 ethnographic, 299
resilient cities, 204–205 feminist, 219, 221, 224, 230–231
resilient cities profile programme gentrification, 288–289
(RCPP), 206 policy mobilities, 330, 331, 340–341
resistance, 171 sociological scholarship, 183
revanchist urbanism, 51–52 STS, 186
 INDEX 631
urban anthropology, 185 Chinese, 460
Scholes, Myron, 565 Global South, 580, 589–590
Schonberg, J., 297 Lima, 46
Schuurman, N., 265 sub-Saharan Africa, 68, 72–73
Schwarzman, Steve, 567 slum upgrading, 16
Scott, J., 170 Small, Albion, 182, 283
Seabeck, A., 352 small data methods, 255
Searching for the Just City, 162 Small, M. L., 287, 288, 292, 401
secondary cities:, 67 small towns, 289–290
Second Chicago School, 284 Smart, A., 564
Seeking Spatial Justice, 162 smart management system (COVID-
self-alienation, 159 19 SMS), 255
Self Employed Women’s Smith, Adam, 573
Association (SEWA), 7 Smith, D, M., 156, 163, 167, 168, 182
Semyonov, M., 434, 439, 441 Smith, N., 505, 507
Sen, Amartya, 563 Smithsimon, G., 291
Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Snow, D. A., 297
Reduction (2015–2030), 206 Snow, John, 265
Sender, H., 564 social cohesion:
Seoul, 25, 27, 28 friends and neighbours, 362
gentrifications, 31 interaction and networking, 361
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of social networks, 361–362
Capitalism, 161 social conflict, 409
sexualities, 294 social credit system in China, 277
Sexuality and Gender in Urban social displacement, 51–52
Spaces, 294 social diversity, 502
Shanghai, 23, 27, 28 Social Ecology: A Critical Analysis, 179
gentrifications, 31 social explosion, 408–409
Sharpe, William, 565 social heterogeneity and diversity, 351–352,
Shatkin, G., 341 364–365
Shenzhen, 27, 28, 34 Chicago School, 353
gentrifications, 31 current processes concerning, 357–359
Shiller, Robert, 566 debates, 353–354
Shuid, S., 584 heterogeneity defined, 351
Shutika, D. L., 287 immigrants, 352
Sidewalk, 291 income and wealth inequality, 357–358
Silicon Hills, 136 income polarisation and residential segre-
Silver, Hilary, 298 gation, 359
Silvestre, G., 610 literature
Simmel, G., 283, 311, 331, 332, 572 diversity implication on economic
Simmons, P., 141 competitiveness, 360–361
Simone, A., 75, 296, 334 social cohesion, 361–362
Singapore, 21 spaces of interaction, 362–363
slash-and-build gentrification, 31 shifting policies and governance of diver-
Slater, T., 506, 508 sity, 354–355
slum clearance, 550. See also citizenship tests, 355–356
Erradicación de campamentos commodification of diversity, 356
housing programme diversity turn, 355
in Chile during Pinochet dictator- governance initiatives and diversity-
ship, 248–252 related policies, 356–357
Delhi, 16 multicultural policies, 356
slum developmental international, 16 social inequalities, 358–359
slum dwellers, 15, 16, 200, 229, 249, 250 social housing, 90, 98–100
slums, 45, 56–58, 68, 550–552 social inequalities, 120, 358–359
632 INDEX
social-interactive mechanisms, 404 geography, 4
socialisation mechanisms, 401 homosexuality, 10–11
Social Justice and the City, 162, 564 housing in, 15–17
social marginalisation, 411 People’s Participatory Movements, 11–12
social mixing, 497–498, 510–511. See also social processes, 9–12, 18
gentrifications; spatial segregation subaltern urbanization, 5
described, 502–503 urbanisation, 3–5, 12–14
gentrification by stealth, 503 urban middle class, rise of, 11–12
mixed-communities policy, 503–504 South East Chicago Commission
neighbourhood effects, 503 (SECC), 177
the new downtown, 503 South Korea, 21, 25
objective of policies, 503 spaces of interaction, 362–363
policymakers, 504 Spain, 47
social diversity, 502 feminist in, 229
social movements and urban spatial autocorrelation, 188
inequalities, 388 spatial citizenship approach, 278
capitalism, 389 spatial inequalities, 101, 118–120,
civil society organisations, 391 378, 548
commodification, 390 European cities, 120
counter-movements, 391–392 spatial segregation, 354, 497–498, 510–511.
gender-specific issues, 390 See also social mixing
Global North and South, 392 Europe, 500–501
urban mobilisations, 390–391 gated communities, 501
social networks, 315–316, 322, 361–362 geography of opportunity, 502
social processes, 283, 383, 404 Latin American cities, 500
South Asia, 9–12, 18 manifestations and connotations, 499
Social Science Research Building, 182 meaning, 498
social trust: neighbourhood effect, 502
defined, 362 races, 499
societal metabolism, 200–201 root causes, 498–499
sociocultural change, 75–77 social problems and, 501–502
Socio-economic Segregation in spatial scales, 499
European Capital Cities: East structural causes, 499
Meets West, 358 United States, 499–500
socio-natural risks, 203–204 Special Collections Research Center’s
socio-spatial segregation, 377 (SCRC) Gallery, 186
socio-territorial inequalities, 412 splintering urbanism, 48
Soja, E., 163, 564 Springer, S., 166, 167
Soja, E. W., 117 Sri Lanka:
Soulside, 284 civil war in, 8, 10
South Africa: dalits in, 10
housing programmes, 71 economy, 7–9
South America, 43, 221, 296, 342, 420, 565 ethnic conflicts in, 9
South Asia: homosexuality, 10–11
cities, 3–4 slum dwellers in, 15
climate change, 12–14, 18 State of Australian Cities 2014–2015
conflicts and disparities, 9–11 report, 93
countries, 4 State of the World’s Cities Report
dalits in, 10 (2010/2011), 72
demographic transition in cities, 5–6 stereotypical cities, 341
disaster risk and management, 14–15 Stewart, John, 256
economy, 7–9, 17 Stiglitz, J. E., 251, 252, 566
environmental processes, 12–15 Stiman, M., 290, 296
 INDEX 633
Stockholm Conference on Human subsidiarisation, 118
Environment (1972), 199 suburbs, 289–290
Stone, D., 333 Şule Özüekren, A., 508
Streeck, W., 389 Sunny Florida, 136
Stuart, F., 286 super-diversity, 354
2011 student movements in Chile surveillance techniques, 254–256
democratic government, 274 survey, 72, 73, 240, 242–244, 453,
Greater Santiago top 100 schools by 456, 465, 530
foundation year, 275f survey movement, 187
hot spots of mobilisation, 271–272, sustainability, 56, 198–203, 555
271–273, 272f Sustainable Cities and Towns Project, 200
level of secondary students’ mobilisation sustainable development goals
in Greater Santiago, 272f, 273f (SDGs), 70, 200
percentage of parents with tertiary Suttles, 189
education expectations per school Sydney, 85, 86, 90
(2010), 275f defined, 93
spatial integration, 274–275 economies of, 94–95
time–space dialectic approach, 274 immigrants, 91
upper-class private schools, 273–274 population growth, 86–87
subaltern social groups, 31 system of systems, 205
Subirats, J., 407
sub-Saharan Africa, 64–65 Taşan-Kok, T., 354
decentralisation, 74–75 Taggart, J., 297
definitions, 65 Taipei, 28
division by agencies, 65–66 gentrification, 32
economic growth and change in, 68–70 Taiwan, 21, 27
electricity-generating capacity, 70 Tallinn, 119
environmental change, 77 Tamil Tigers in 2009, 10
future of, 78 Tammaru, T., 358, 359
geography, 65 Tang, E., 287
Gini coefficient, 72 Tarde, G., 331–333
governance Tatu city, 71
decentralisation, 74–75 Tauranga, 89
definition by United Nations Taylor, M. M., 288
Development Programme, 73 Taylor, P. J., 321, 357
informal business organisations, 75 temporary protected status (TPS), 480
Overall Governance index, 73–74 terra nullius, 89
public violence, 74 territorial organisation, 410–411
traditional leaders, 75 Texas, 136, 138, 139
housing, 70–72 The Block, 90
informal economic activity, 69 The Condition of the Working Class in
infrastructure and housing, 70–72 England, 283, 376
middle class, 69 The Cosmopolitan Canopy, 291
migration, 68, 70 The End of Progress, 166
poverty and inequality, 72–73 The Full Record of Guangzhou’s Black
slums, 68 Tribe, 466
sociocultural change, 75–77 The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), 283
subregions, and, 65–66 The Grand Domestic Revolution
UNDESA definition of, 65 (1982), 228
United Nations definition of, 65 The Hobo (1923), 283
urbanisation in, 66–68 The Just City, 163
urban population growth, 67–68 The Laws of Imitation, 332
World Bank definition of, 65 The Limits to Capital, 564
634 INDEX
Theodore, N., 330, 341
theory of marginality, 45
The Politics of Recognition, 165
Therborn, G., 391
The State of European Cities, 127, 128
The Struggle for Recognition, 164
The Truly Disadvantaged, 399
The Urban Dimension in European Union
Policies 2010, 549
The Urban Process Under Capitalism, 564
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban
and Regional Studies, 221
5th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) Report, 204
Thomas, W. I., 184, 189, 297
threats, 204
3D city models, 267
Thrift, N., 162, 352
Thucydides, 251
Tiebout model, 249–250
Tilly, C., 116
Tlatelolco Massacre, 54
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 376, 385
Tokyo, 27, 28
gentrification in, 32
policies and policy approaches, 549
urban restructuring, 33–34
Tokyo as global city, 34
Tokyo Waterfront, 34
Toledo, 137
Toleration in Conflict (2013), 166
Tönnies, Ferdinand, 283
Toronto, 136, 138–140, 143, 146, 148, 341
policies, 542
Torres, H. A., 410
transportation:
African cities, in, 70
global urban networks, 320
women, 226
Treaty of Waitangi (1840), 89
Treaty of Westphalia, 109
Treaty on European Union, 118
trickle-down economics, 380
Trump, Donald J., 475, 476, 481–483,
485–489, 588
Trustees Act, 567
Tsing, A., 335
tsunami, 8
Tummers, L., 227
Tung, Mao Tse, 610
Turner, J. F., 581
Turner, John, 46
Turok, I., 69, 362
Twitter, 312
Tysons Corner, 142
UChicago Urban, 190, 191
Uganda:
Gini coefficients of, 72
Uitermark, J., 504
UK-born residents, 91
UN Conference on Housing and
Sustainable Urban Development
(Habitat III), 206
UNDESA, 65–67
UN-Habitat, 53, 200, 206
UN Habitat II summit, 199
United Kingdom, 91, 98, 208, 341, 433–
435, 437–440, 503, 546, 547, 571
immigration rates, 424, 431
policies and policy approaches, 546–547
United Nations, 65, 199, 200
definition of sub-Saharan African subre-
gions, 65, 66t
United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development (UNCED), 199
United Nations Development
Programme, 73
governance defined, 73
United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP), 64
United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) report, 10
United Nations Millennium declaration, 200
United Nations Office for Disaster Risk
Reduction (UNISDR), 206
United Nations Report on the Right to
Adequate Housing, 580
United States. See also migration/migrants;
North American cities
income inequality, 357
metropolitan population, 135–138
policies and policy approaches (See
­policies and policy approaches)
redlining in, 246–248
segregation ordinance, 499
spatial segregation, 499–500
University of Chicago, 182, 192
institutional arrangements for urban
research, shifting
data-related methods, 190
sociology, 189
UChicago Urban, 190
Urban Workshop, 189–190
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to
Housing, 580
 INDEX 635
urban age programme (2009), 358 water, 201
Urban China Research (1997–2017), 23, 24f urban networks. See networks
urban consciousness, 278–279 urban political ecology, 210–211
urban culture, 292–293 urban population. See population
urban ecology, 198 urban renaissance policy, 34
urban environmental justice: urban resilience, 205–206
academic field of research, 208 urban theory, 166–171
brown facilities, 210 urban tourism, 293
definition of environment, 209 urban transformations, 31
environmental injustice, 207–208 urban villages in post-reform China:
environmentalism, 209 Chinese slums, 460
environmental issues, 209–210 floating population, 461–462
environmental racism, 207 housing and living conditions, 461
green facilities, 210 infrastructure, 461
issues of, 208 municipal funding, lack of, 461
new dimensions of, 210–211 neighbourhood, 462
origins, 207 rural migrants and floating
structures of environmental groups, 209 population, 460
urban liveability, 210 Urban Workshop, 177, 189, 191
urban political ecology, 210–211 Uruguay, 44
urban ethnography, 282–285 US Census Bureau, 187, 253–254
emerging developments Big Data, 253–254
new places, 295–296 US Citizenship and Immigration Services
new research designs and (USCIS), 486
methods, 296–298 US Department of Housing and Urban
new topics, 293–295 Development (HUD), 541
gentrification and middle classes US-Mexico border wall, 481–482
in, 288–289
inequality and exclusion in inner Vancouver, 136, 139, 142, 143, 145–146
city, 285–286 policies, 542
migration and immigrant commu- Van Kempen, R., 508
nities, 286–287 Vannini, P., 297, 298
public space, 290–291 Van Tubergen, F., 439
sociological vs. anthropological,284–285 Vargas, R., 286
suburbs and small towns, 289–290 Vasconcelos, J., 56
urban cultures, 292–293 Venkatesh, S. A., 298
urban governance. See governance Vertovec, S., 354
urban inequalities. See social movements Vienna, 119
and urban inequalities Vietnamese migrants, 91
urbanisation: Vietnamese refugees, 91
crime and, 51–52 Vietnam War, 91
inequalities, 386 Vijayabaskar, M., 11
public safety, 52 Vilnius, 119
South Asia, 3–6 vinyl house villages, 32
sub-Saharan Africa, 66–68 violence, 51–52
urbanisation dependency theory, 543 legal, 487
Urbanism as a Way of Life, 180 sub-Saharan Africa, 74
Urbanities, 299 urban, 547–548
urban metabolism: Voiculescu, S., 229
building, 201 Vranken, J., 352
energy, 201
metaphor, 203 Wacquant, L., 296, 377, 382
policy analysis and urban design, 202 Walking Tour, 176, 189
636 INDEX
Wall, C., 228 Wood, A., 336, 339, 340
Walzer. M., 168 work, 225–226
Wankiewicz, H., 226 Working Group on Impacts, Adaptation and
Ward, K., 330, 341 Vulnerability, 204
Warner, William Lloyd, 284 Workshop on Social Structures and
Washington, 541 Processes in Urban Space, 191
Washington, Booker T., 183, 184 World Bank, 17, 46, 53, 200, 381
water: sub-Saharan Africa definition by, 65
Latin American cities, 55 World Cup (2014), 54
sub-Saharan Africa, 70 World Health Organization (WHO), 13
urban metabolism, 201 world’s factory, 27
waterfront renewal programmes, 53 World Social Forum, 57, 200
Watson, T., 357 World Summit on Sustainable
Weberian city model, 114 Development, 200
Weber, M., 109–113, 182, 283, 284, 611 World Urban Forum (WUF), 200
Web of Science, 23 World Urbanization Prospects Report (2018
welfare capitalism, 378–380 revision), 5
Welfare Reform bill, 484 World War II, 90, 96, 97, 136, 284, 378,
Wellington, 85, 87, 95 387, 389, 420, 478, 510
Wellman, B., 313 Wounded City, 286
West Africa, 68 Wright, R., 297
Westphalian nation-states, 112 Wynn, J. R., 293, 296
Wheelmap.org, 276
White Australia Policy, 91 Yeoh, B. S., 225
White backlash, 475 Yongkang–Qingtian–Wenzhou:
White flight, 246 gentrification of, 32
White people, 148 Young, I. M., 164, 165
White population, 246, 247, 294, 480, 499 young Marx, 156–160
William, P., 505 Youngstown, 137
Wilson, M. W., 256, 257 Yusuf, F., 240
Wilson, R. H., 401
Wilson, W. J., 382, 399, 401, 403 Zambia, 65
Winkler, R. L., 481 Gini coefficients of, 72
Wirth, L., 284, 311, 353, 364 Zibell, B., 227
Wirth, Louis, 180, 184 Žižek, S., 363
Woldoff, R. A., 292 Zipf, George, 256
Wolman, H., 333 zoning technologies, 27
women. See also feminist urban research Zorbaugh, H., 189, 283, 292
collective life, 228–229 Zueblin, Charles, 183
inequalities, 377, 384 Zukin, S., 361
South Asian countries, 7
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