Inequality
Urban inequality is the unjust distribution of what the city offers —housing, jobs, transport, greenery, clean air, safety— among its neighbourhoods and inhabitants. It is measured in income but seen on the map: life expectancy changes by up to ten years between two metro stops in the same city.
It is not a natural outcome of the market but of accumulated decisions: where the motorway went, where the park, who got a mortgage and who did not. Urban inequality is the shared object of almost every thinker on this site, from Engels to Harvey, from Jacobs to Sassen.
Videos on this term (68)
- Housing
Mike Davis: Risk Is Not Natural but a Construct of Power
Mike Davis argued that urban disasters are built before the emergency through segregation, speculation and unequal…
Mike Davis 3 min read - Urban form
Néstor García Canclini: Where Cultures Mix, Belonging Emerges
Néstor García Canclini explains Latin American urban culture as hybridity: Hybrid Cultures, consumption as…
3 min read - Urban psychology
Dolores Hayden: Transform Spaces, Transform Gender
Dolores Hayden shows how homes, suburbs and public memory reproduce gender inequality and how design can undo it.…
Dolores Hayden 3 min read - Urban economy
Ananya Roy: The State Can Also Be Informal
Ananya Roy shows that urban informality is produced by the state as it tolerates, authorises or demolishes…
Ananya Roy 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Why Cities Are the Key Nodes of Globalization: Saskia Sassen
Saskia Sassen explains why a dispersed economy needs global cities to coordinate it: command functions, social…
Saskia Sassen 3 min read - Urban economy
Why Some Cities Innovate and Others Do Not: Michael Storper
Michael Storper explains why some cities innovate and others do not: organisations, technologies and territories,…
Michael Storper 3 min read - Housing
Wacquant: Advanced Urban Marginality and Territorial Stigma
Loïc Wacquant explains how precarisation, social retreat and the penal state produce advanced urban marginality,…
3 min read - Housing
What a Housing Bubble Is and Why It Is a Problem for the City
A housing bubble appears when price detaches from rents and wages and is sustained by credit and resale…
3 min read - Climate change
Shade in Extreme Heat: A Divisive Privilege and an Urban Right
Shade is survival infrastructure distributed unequally: redlined neighbourhoods are hotter, awnings are cut as…
3 min read - Urban history
Lewis Mumford: five thousand years of city in one book
From Mesopotamia to the industrial city, Mumford shows each era built the city it deserved, and judges the…
Lewis Mumford 2 min read - Surveillance / data
Stephen Graham: Militarisation and Surveillance in the City
Stephen Graham describes in Cities Under Siege the new military urbanism: how techniques of war, surveillance and…
Stephen Graham 2 min read - Urban form
John Forester: Dialogue and Mediation for Inclusive Urban Planning
John Forester explains what planners do among conflicting interests and how dialogue and mediation produce fairer…
John Forester 2 min read - Public space
Latin American Urban Theory: Marcelo Lopes de Souza
Latin American urban theory reads the city through inequality, informality and social struggle.
2 min read - Urban form
Vertical by Stephen Graham: The City from Satellites to Bunkers
Stephen Graham shows in Vertical that the city is a volume: skyscrapers and drones above, tunnels and bunkers…
Stephen Graham 3 min read - Urban economy
Nik Theodore: Neoliberal Urbanism, Informal Work and Migrants
Nik Theodore explains how neoliberal urbanism produces precarity, what his studies of day labourers and migrants in…
Nik Theodore 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Mike Davis: Planet of Slums, Inequality and Megacities
Mike Davis explains in Planet of Slums how the megacities of the Global South grow without jobs or infrastructure,…
Mike Davis 2 min read - Urban AI
Manuel Castells: from neighbourhood struggle to network city
Castells read urban movements as structural responses to power, then showed how information networks reconfigured…
Manuel Castells 2 min read - Urban economy
Urban Change and Social Conflict: Roger Lee's Perspective
Urban change redistributes advantages and losses and therefore produces conflict. What the volume Urban Change and…
Roger Lee 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Cities: Reimagining the Urban by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift
Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002) by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift proposes thinking the city as flows, rhythms and…
Ash Amin 3 min read - Urban economy
Critical Urbanism: What It Is and What Harvey and Brenner Propose
Critical urbanism analyses the city as a product of power and capital. What David Harvey and Neil Brenner…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Çağlar Keyder: Istanbul Between the Global and the Local
Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local (1999), edited by Çağlar Keyder, explains how Istanbul turned its…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Hong Kong as a Global City: Stephen Chiu and Tai-lok Lui
Stephen Chiu and Tai-lok Lui explain how Hong Kong went from colony to global financial centre and what that means…
Stephen Chiu 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Henri Lefebvre: The Urban Revolution as a Global Process
In The Urban Revolution (1970) Henri Lefebvre argues that urbanisation overflows the city and becomes a global…
Henri Lefebvre 2 min read - Housing
Sonia Hirt and Zoning: The Roots of Urban Inequality in the USA
Zoned in the USA (2014) by Sonia Hirt shows that the exclusive single-family zone, unique in the world, raises…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Teresa Caldeira and São Paulo: Growth, Inequality and Equity
Teresa Caldeira explains how São Paulo grew through self-built peripheries and split into fortified enclaves.
Teresa Caldeira 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis by Mbembe and Nuttall
Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall read Johannesburg as a modern African metropolis rather than an exception. The…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Manuel Castells: the space of flows
What Manuel Castells means by the space of flows: how networks of information and capital reorganise global cities,…
Manuel Castells 2 min read - Urban economy
City of Quartz by Mike Davis: The Inequality That Made Los Angeles
City of Quartz (1990) by Mike Davis excavates the power that built Los Angeles: developers, homeowners, police and…
Mike Davis 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Shanghai as a Global City: From the Concessions to Pudong
Shanghai went from an open port in 1843 to a cosmopolitan metropolis and, after 1990, to a state-directed global…
3 min read - Urban history
Robert Caro and Robert Moses: The Legacy of The Power Broker
The Power Broker, by Robert Caro, tells how Robert Moses transformed New York without ever being elected: parks,…
Robert Caro 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Saskia Sassen: what makes a global city global
New York, London and Tokyo concentrate capital, information and decisions. Saskia Sassen explains what links them…
Saskia Sassen 2 min read - Infrastructure
Graham and Marvin: Splintering Urbanism and Inequality
Splintering Urbanism explains how transport, water, energy and telecommunications networks stopped integrating the…
Stephen Graham 2 min read - Urban history
Cairo According to Nezar AlSayyad: Histories of a Superimposed City
Cairo: Histories of a City by Nezar AlSayyad explains Cairo as superimposed cities, from Fustat and the Fatimids to…
3 min read - Public space
Sharon Sutton: Social Inclusion and Participation in Urban Planning
Sharon Sutton, a pioneering African American architect, argues for designing with marginalised communities and…
Sharon Sutton 3 min read - Urban economy
Michael Storper: The Regional World and regional development
What Michael Storper argues in The Regional World: why regions still matter in a global economy, regional worlds of…
Michael Storper 2 min read - Urban economy
The Spectacle City: Consumption and Exclusion per Debord and Zukin
The spectacle city is built to be seen: events, icons and showcases that exclude residents. What Guy Debord and…
3 min read
