The Dual City or the City of Many Parts? Rethinking Differences in Cities in Transition

Abstract

For more than a decade urban analysis and debate has drawn attention to growing social spatial polarization in many cities. As the rich have got richer and the poor poorer, so also there has been a tendency to construct the notion of the divided or dual city (Fainstein, Gordon and Harloe, 1992). In this formulation social and economic divisions are mapped onto urban space in what is sometimes a simplistic fashion. There is ample evidence to suggest that there have been strong polarizing tendencies in cities, which in some cities of the US have been particularly extreme. White people have fled to the suburbs leaving the inner city to black and Hispanic minorities. Yet there is also growing evidence to support the argument that the picture is more complex, and that it may be more helpful to talk in terms of quarters or parts of cities (Marcuse, 1989, 1995) or in terms of fragments or patchwork quilts. Fainstein, Gordon and Harloe (1992), comparing London and New York, initiated this approach. The problem is often that the detailed statistical evidence is either not available or difficult to access.