RESTRUCTURING AND SPATIAL POLARIZATION IN CITIES

This review surveys the recent evidence and debate surrounding social and spatial polarization within cities. To begin with, a brief account is provided of the significance of global restructuring and the contr action of the welfare state for widening inequalities in capitalist so cieties, and how this is being reflected, in turn, in modifications to the character and incidence of poverty in cities. In this section, to pick up on the concluding remarks in the preceding review (Badcock, 1 996), attention is drawn to how emphatically important structural effe cts remain to an understanding of spatial polarization in cities and t he profound changes that are taking place in people's lives at the com munity level. The next section selectively documents some of the key c ontributions to research on urban poverty and polarization in the USA including the theories relating to the 'new urban poverty', the format ion of a ghetto-bound 'underclass' and the emergence of a new spatial order based upon a 'global city' paradigm. In the third section the co mparative evidence for growing spatial polarization in cities is exami ned. This includes some consideration of the portability and relevance of constructs developed under American conditions for cities in other , mostly western, societies. Lastly, a case is made suggesting why thi s research on spatial polarization is quite vital from a public policy perspective, and why human geographers should be in the thick of it.