Causes of the Urban Social Divide and the Intensifying of Marginalisation
Saskia Sassen's book, Global City: New York, London and Tokyo, comprehensively and statistically attempts to identify and analyse the forces currently reshaping social and economic life in the contemporary city. She argues that the post-industrial global economy has led to a condition of economic and social polarisation and we can understand this concept via the current discussion of economic inequality. What is fuelling the ever widening socio-economic gap? Sassen identifies what she feels are key factors leading to this trend of economic and social polarisation of residents within the inner cities and her findings include; a de-centralised workforce with dispersed labour opportunities, a centralisation of ownership and management within the inner city and a fragmentation of the "work process" as well as a movement away from the city of traditional manufacturing and resource jobs. This has led to a loss of middle-income jobs in the new economy. Jobs are either high-pay, for owners and managers, or low pay, for service workers providing service sector tasks for the economic elites. Sassen argues that centralisation of global economic and service industry power into the major cities while the work and industry are de-centralised leads to class and income polarisation within the "global city". These factors have led to the creation of a two-tiered society that has played out most visibly within the inner city. How do all these forces impact the social makeup of the city? Sassen argues the centralisation of ownership and management into the city has played out in the following way:
Major corporate transactions today typically require simultaneous participation of several specialized firms providing legal, accounting, financial, public relations, management consulting, and other such services. Moreover, concentration arises out of the needs and expectations of the high income workers employed in these firms. They are attracted to the amenities and lifestyles that large urban centres can offer and are likely to live in central areas rather than in suburbs.
(Sassen 11-12)
Traditionally, when the city was a centre for manufacturing and industry, the economic and social elites lived outside of the city but with the change from an industrial to a knowledge based economy we have seen a movement back. Cities no longer contain factories and they have become attractive places to live due to the high end amenities found there. Due to the concentration of knowledge sector jobs such as management, logistics, accounting, and research and development positions within the city, the wealthy and elite are choosing to make their homes there. This trend produces another force that is transforming the new urban socio-economic landscape. An influx of urban residents who arrive to perform the "supply of low-wage jobs required by high-income gentrification in both its residential and commercial settings. The increase in the numbers of expensive restaurants, luxury housing, luxury hotels, gourmet shops, boutiques ... that ornament the new urban landscape illustrates this trend" (Sassen 9). Due to the proliferation of service and support jobs for these new wealthy urban residents, many low income earners who perform these jobs also live within the city. This has led to a physical manifestation of the two-tiered society that Sassen identifies. Sassen also states that "distinct socio-spatial forms arising out of these processes are high-income residential and commercial gentrification... and sharp increases in spatially concentrated poverty and physical decay" (Sassen 251). We will discuss this concept of spatially concentrated poverty further when we analyse Loic Wacquant's work investigating this very concentration of socio-economic marginalisation into what he calls "neighbourhoods of relegation".
Sassen identifies most of the above trends as a feature of the "New Logic", which is an increasing Weberian rationalisation of society through labour, economy, economic rationalisation and structural rationalisation. The polarisation leading to increased marginalisation within the urban centre can be seen as an effect of, in the Weberian model, hyper-rationalisation. The extreme rationalisation of the urban social structure and economy is, of course, based on the principles of neo-liberal capitalist ideologies. These ideologies place profit, the freedom and effectiveness of capital and reduced labour costs as priorities over social equality and the welfare of citizens and a life lived well.
However, these trends do not wholly take into account the fates and existences of the traditional urban poor, or sub-proletariat, who have lived an extremely marginalised life for decades. How do these changes in the socio-economic order affect these people? We can infer that a loss of traditional manufacturing and resource economy jobs will have greatly affected this social group, but to what extent? Loic Wacquant has more to say about this.
The change in economic structure identified by Sassen has undoubtedly become a topic of great interest and Wacquant echoes this when he states that "the theme of the dualization, or polarization, of the city has taken center stage in the most advanced sectors of urban theory and research, as the extremes of high society and dark ghetto, luxurious wealth and utter destitution, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and urban outcasts, flourished and decayed side by side" (Rise 122). Wacquant, building on Sassen, focuses his studies in a more micro level as he analyses how the shifting economic structure affects populations within the city. He outlines his theory as:
Cities are now confronted with what we may call advanced marginality. Such new forms of exclusionary social closure and peripheralization have arisen, or intensified, in the post-Fordist metropolis as a result, not of backwardness, but of the uneven, disarticulating, mutations of the most advanced sectors of Western societies and economies, as these bear on the lower fractions of the working class and on dominated ethnoracial categories, as well as on the territories they occupy in the divided city.
(Rise 123).
Wacquant argues that the traditional working class and the poorest residents of the city have been affected the most by the economic changes brought on by neo-liberal late capitalist methodologies. He says that "this advanced marginality is fed by the fragmentation of wage labor, the reorientation of state policy away from social protection and in favor of market compulsion, and the generalized resurgence of inequality – that is, it is marginality spawned by the neoliberal revolution" (Ghettos 115). Traditional marginalised populations have become even more marginalised and this is what he terms "advanced marginalisation". Wacquant points out that these populations of advanced marginalisation tend to live in specific areas within the city. He states that "one of the distinctive features of advanced marginality is the suffusive spatial stigma that discredits people trapped in neighborhoods of relegation. In every advanced society, a number of urban districts or towns have become national symbols and namesakes for all the ills of the city" (Ghettos 116).
Areas that used to be known as "ghettos", banlieues, or the "rough part of town" have been affected disproportionally. He calls these areas "neighbourhoods of relegation". He claims that these neighbourhoods are influenced by:
The structural forces that produce these forms of marginality, includ[ing] polarized economic growth and the fragmentation of the labor market, the casualization of employment and autonomization of the street economy in degraded urban areas, mass joblessness amounting to outright deproletarianization for large segments of the working class (especially youths), and state policies of urban retrenchment if not outright abandonment.
(Rise 123)
Wacquant continues this idea by saying that these forces lead to "territorial fixation and stigmatization" which places immense social and political pressure onto these neighbourhoods. Social and political pressures lead to a narrative claiming that "well-identified, bounded, and increasingly isolated territories viewed by both outsiders and insiders as social purgatories, urban hellholes where only the refuse of society would accept to dwell. A stigma of place thus superimposes itself on the already pervasive stigmata of poverty" (Rise 125). An identity is placed upon these neighbourhoods and their residents and it seems that "on this level, whether or not those areas are in fact dilapidated, dangerous, and declining matters little: the prejudicial belief that they are suffices to set off socially detrimental consequences" (Rise 125). Wacquant goes on to claim that this concept of territorial stigmatisation from outside leads to an erosion of identity, self, pride and community within the populations, felt by the residents themselves. Residents of relegated neighbourhoods, while always wanting to "escape" to a better a life, traditionally identified with their working class neighbourhoods. Wacquant sees a shift away from this position as he claims that a major feature of "this process of territorial stigmatization is the dissolution of 'place', that is, the loss of a locale that marginalized urban populations identify with and feel secure in" (Rise 126). He goes on to say that these changing conditions within the relegated neighbourhoods have changed the way they are politicised from outside, made into spaces that need to be controlled, as well as changes within the neighbourhoods where all sense of connection to community has been lost. Wacquant also argues in support of this analysis as he says that "this is consistent with the change ... from communal 'places' suffused with shared emotions, joint meanings and practices and institutions of mutuality, to indifferent 'spaces' of mere survival and contest" (Rise 126).
As a final effect of advanced marginalisation, after neighbourhoods of relegation, after a stigmatisation associated with these neighbourhoods and after the erosion of the sense of community felt by the residents of such neighbourhoods, we can identify one final feature that is considerably more abstract. Wacquant claims that:
Advanced marginality also ... develops in the context of class decomposition rather than class formation or consolidation, and under the pressure of deproletarianization rather than proletarianization. It therefore lacks a language, a repertoire of shared representations and signs through which to conceive a collective destiny and to project possible alternative futures.
(Rise 126-7, italics mine)
This idea that marginalised populations lack a language of representation and signs and signifiers is something that I will develop further in my next essay. People from outside of these populations often impose language and signs and signifiers onto these communities in a form of "othering" and as a way to explain or justify the disturbing features of socio-economic and political inequality that exists in our advanced society.
In conclusion, while Sassen's work focuses more on macro level trends within the new global economy and forces that are re-shaping the contemporary city economically and structurally and Wacquant's work is more micro in its detailing of specific populations within specific neighbourhoods of advanced marginalisation, both, taken together, begin to illuminate many of the forces, trends and causes that are contributing to the manifestation of a two-tiered, economically, socially and politically polarised urban population. Understanding these trends may provide us with the insight necessary to agitate for political and economic policies, at various levels of government, that will address and alleviate these issues.
In the following essay I will apply many of these concepts to Vancouver and its notorious neighbourhood of relegation, the Downtown East Side, to see if these global trends translate to, or are relevant to, our city. I will pay particular attention to political and public rhetoric and narrative, as established by Wacquant, to analyse the discourse surrounding the DTES and to understand how that discourse and rhetoric plays out in physical forms of signification and representation.