Gentrification

Harvey emphasizes the importance of analyzing cities as processes rather than just things.  Gentrification is one example of this dialectical relationship between the urban and the urbanizing process. These processes themselves must not only be considered to be shaping and shaped by the city, but also must be considered within a global context. As industrialization has been decoupled from urbanization, Smith argues that generalized gentrification has taken over as a production function and capital accumulation strategy. Gentrification has been recast as a positive process of reintegrating residents into the urban core of the city and as an environmentally friendly policy of developing on brownfields. New terms for gentrification like “urban regeneration,” sugarcoats this process of displacement. Just as Harvey argues that the urban cannot be separated from broader social, political, and economic trends, neither can the process of gentrification. Gentrification is just one of the many urbanizing processes that are disempowering individuals, marginalizing communities, and producing pollution and environmental degradation. As society continues to transform form rural to urban, these processes will affect more and more of the world’s population.  As opposed to the 19^th Century where urban problems were confronted with an attitude of social reform, the current negative trends are often ignored and treated with indifference and apathy. 

Poverty and Planning

As the top 1% in the United States become richer and richer, more and more individuals are slipping into poverty. In their chapter Poverty, Social Rights, and the Quality of Citizenship, Roger Lawson and William Julius Wilson describe the “new poverty” arising from Reagan and Bush era trickle down economics. This “new poverty” is a more pervasive and seemingly inescapable inequality characterized by, “ ‘changes in the size and composition of economically marginal groups, the crystallization of racial cleavages among them, a downward turn in their life chances, and an increase in their social and political isolation’”(151). Just like capital, poverty can also be spatially fixed. Through redlining and other zoning practices, planners are responsible for the spatial fix of poverty. When Lawson and Wilson were writing, poverty was concentrated in inner city ghettos. Efforts of poverty deconcentration during the Clinton era have led to more of the same problem. Now instead of poverty concentrated solely in the inner city, poverty is also starting to concentrate in the suburbs. For example, in Chicago, there are more New Urbanist neighborhoods in the city and more areas of poverty in the inner ring suburbs. These suburbs may not have as many resources as the city to alleviate this poverty.  

Megacities and Cities of Slums

Cities are growing. Future world population growth will be shouldered by cities, which will pose many challenges for planners. In his article Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Proletariat, Mike Davis describes this population growth and this new “species of urbanism” and its price—inequality between and within cities(8). Much of the world’s future population growth will occur in second-tier cities, which lack adequate planning and infrastructure to absorb the exponential growth. This urbanization is decoupled from industrialization everywhere except for China. Davis describes this rapid urbanization as a “’perverse’ urban boom.” Even though the population is increases, residents of cities are still facing falling wages, rising prices, and unemployment. This “‘perverse’ urban boom” is a result of IMF enforced programs and Structural Adjustment Programs that pushed people from the country though mechanization, food imports, and the consolidation of small holdings into large agribusiness farms and pulled them into cities. Davis indicts neoliberalism and the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs for increasing urban poverty and slums. With no other job opportunities, people are forced to participate in informal economies in order to support themselves. In his chapter Urban Informality as a “New” Way of Life, Nezar AlSayyad writes, “We have learned that urban informality does not simply consist of the activities of the poor, or a particular status of labor, or marginality. Rather, it is an organizing logic which emerges under a paradigm of liberalization”(26).