Implications for socio-spatial segregation in urban theories

Abstract

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, our understanding of cities has gone through important changes due to major sociospatial processes. Specifically, over the last few decades processes like globalisation and decolonisation have produced significant consequences in cities and these have attracted the attention of prominent urban scholars. Of these consequences, segregation has become infamous in the discourse of numerous disciplines, including governmental debates and policies. However, sociospatial transformations have been a source of new challenges for urban theory makers throughout history. At a certain point, the physical focus of early urban theories was no longer sufficient to interpret the city, causing a shift towards process-oriented theory-making. The central theme of this paper is to investigate this shift by analysing the evolution of urban theories with regard to their implications for urban social geography. In this context, the analytical focuses of main urban theories are evaluated and their explanatory power for socio-spatial segregation is stressed. Such a developmental perspective enables us to observe urban theories’ receptiveness to changing circumstances, as well as their power to guide urban scholars. The evaluation reveals that urban theories capture the spirit of their time (zeitgeist) through their own lenses and explain the social geography of the city either partially or fully with regard to these lenses. In conclusion, it may be said that urban theories which have implications for segregation are not generated universally, but rather in specific frameworks which might or might not be explanatory for other circumstances. All in all, it is believed that this evaluation will provide guidance for future studies that aim to understand and/ or develop the role of urban theories in explaining socio-spatial segregation in the city.