The City, Redux but Deeply Flawed

In the mid-19th century, Baudelaire complained that Paris was changing more rapidly than the human heart. Cities are again going through upheavals, in their built environments, their economic activities, and their forms of life. When Baudelaire was writing about Paris, few large cities existed anywhere in the world and only a handful with one million people or more. Today there are over five hundred cities with populations over one million. These are no longer confined to Europe and North America, but also occur in the Global South, especially in Asia.

Half a century ago and more, the economies of major cities were based largely on manufacturing. Even the commercial capitals of this lost world, like London and New York, were important manufacturing centers. Traditional manufacturing is now a minor driver of large-scale urban development. Instead, new dynamic sectors such as finance, business services, technology-intensive production, and creative industries, represent the main engines of urban growth.

The manufacturing cities of the mid-20th century were marked by a division of labor focused on white- and blue-collar workers. This was then expressed, imperfectly but tangibly, in a spatial division of neighborhoods. As the new sectors have steadily supplanted manufacturing in major cities, a new division of labor has appeared, and with it a changing pattern of neighborhoods. The new arrangements revolve around highly qualified cognitive and cultural workers on the one side and low-wage service workers on the other. The social marginality of the latter group is accentuated by the fact that so many of them are immigrants from diverse backwaters and peripheries.

Get PDF Link