In previous chapters, we studied the growth and development of metropolitan regions in the United States. The next two chapters concern the people of the metropolis and explore the relationship between everyday life and local territory. The sociospatial approach to metropolitan life asserts that diversity in lifestyles and subcultures exists not just within the city but throughout the metropolitan region. This is especially the case since 1980 as suburban settlement spaces have matured and as a new wave of immigrants from Asia and Latin America have entered the country since the 1960s. In this chapter we consider the interplay between the social factors of income, gender, age, ethnicity and race, and the spatial patterns of population concentration or dispersal across the metropolitan region.
A basic tenet of the sociospatial approach is that social factors determining the patterns of population dispersal are also linked to particular spaces. Class or gender relations, for example, are conducted through spatial as well as social means. Lifestyle differences are externalized in a specific environment: the ghetto, the street corner, the mall, the ethnic village, the golf course. Furthermore, these places are always meaningful. Interaction is shaped through the signs and symbols of sociospatial con text. In this chapter we will consider the effect of class standing on lifestyles, gender differences, and everyday life; racial and minority distinctions; and new patterns of ethnic formation and immigration. The effects of class, gender, and race are so powerful in our society that we will also consider them in Chapter 9 when we discuss social problems. We will see how differences in sociospatial factors affect the way people live, their interactions with others, and their use of space.
Max Weber believed that an individual’s class position is important because it helps determine the life chances that can be expected in the future; in other words, the possible opportunities or constraints for future achievement open to any individual. Weber also suggested that economic factors of class status, such as the type of occupation or monetary resources that an individual possesses, are not the only determining factors of overall social status. One’s social standing in the society’s hierarchy also depends on particular cultural attributes, such as religion, ethnicity, or symbolic differences, and on the possession of political power. Thus, life chances differ according to economic, political, and cultural factors, but material wealth, as Karl Marx maintained and on which Weber agreed, is clearly the most important of all social variables.
The United States is a stratified society. This means that individuals and households are located within a social hierarchy that determines their access to resources. Stratification is often pictured as a pyramid of social standing. Those at the very top control most of the society’s resources; they also enjoy the most symbolic prestige and political influence. Those below are the most numerous and have the least power. The United States, despite an active ideology that preaches equality, has the most unequal distribution of wealth of any industrialized nation (Phillips, 1990). The top 1 percent of the population control over 70 percent of the wealth, and the top 5 percent control over 90 percent. Status considerations such as driving an expensive car, living in a large home, taking fabulous vacations, and wearing expensive clothing are greatly influenced by the media images of affluence and what life is supposed to be like at the top of the stratification diamond.
American culture and the lifestyles it supports connect the financial resources of individuals and families, expressed in our hierarchy of social stratification, to patterns of consumption. For this reason, sociologists often study how class differences in our society are expressed by different styles of consumption. Consumption patterns are also supported by credit card debt, housing loans, car loans, educational loans, buying through financing, and other arrangements that enable people to spend more than they earn.
Acts of consumption are also moments in the reproduction of social relations that structure everyday social interactions: the social relations of production, capital/land/labor, the commodity form, private property; the social relations of domination and subordination, the stratum of technocrats/consumers and citizens; the bureaucratic form; the social relations of communication, the advertising/propaganda form, media elite/spectators, speech without response. Members of each social class consume in distinctive ways that reproduce them as capitalists, wage workers, technocrats, landlords, and so on. For example, a worker uses her wages to buy various commodities—food, shelter, clothing, and recreation—that will allow her to return to work the next day as well as to prepare her children to assume their positions in the social structure when they become adults. Her place in space will affect her family’s access to quality schools and cultural amenities. Her expenditures require her to return to work to continue the process as well as allowing capitalists and landlords to realize profits that will allow them to continue as investors—it reproduces her dependence on her employer and landlord and their dependence on her, which is what Lefebvre means by the reproduction of class differences and the social relations of production. For technocrats and members of the upper middle class, price is not the only consideration when buying or renting a home. Their place in social space affects their access to quality schools for their children, to the quality of neighborhood recreational amenities, and to the quality of their social networks.
As we move through different local spaces within the metropolitan environment, we encounter a tremendous diversity in lifestyles. These differences are a function of relative class standing and, in turn, are expressed through the activity of consumption. While many persons in our society consume at a high level by incurring debt, they do so in distinct ways thereby enabling us to talk about lifestyle differences in the metropolitan region.
Research on the American class structure divides our society into a number of different groups based on what social scientists call SES, or socioeconomic status, which is a particular combination of wealth, occupation, education, gender, and race, among other factors (Robertson, 1987). Many studies divide the population into five groups: the lower class, the working class, the lower middle class, the upper middle class, and the ruling class. Only the ruling class controls enough wealth to be considered independent from economic needs; many persons in the lower class do not have access to regular sources of income because of a lack of jobs in the inner city, while many working-class households have discovered that it is necessary for both husband and wife to work to support their families, and middle-class families find it increasingly difficult to maintain their standard of living due to the stagnant wages and a declining dollar in the world economy.
Socioeconomic standing also involves the household’s ability to establish residence in a particular place. Thus, a significant component of socioeconomic status is determined by one’s address and the symbolic reputation of particular neighborhoods within metropolitan neighborhoods. It means something very different to live in the north shore suburb or oceanfront town than it does to be from the “hood” or to have grown up in the projects. In our society, due to stratification differences, the choice of residential location is not always voluntary. Restrictions of wealth, race, and gender are particularly potent sifters of population across the metropolitan regions. Socioeconomic difference and the system of social stratification therefore manifest themselves both as differences in individual lifestyles and as differences in neighborhood living or local space, and these differences are reproduced in everyday life through acts of consumption.
According to Lefebvre, urbanization has a differential logic; it creates a world of differences. Difference is another form that becomes detached from its content and particularities. This leads to a polarization between those who manipulate the form—the technocrats and those who possess the content—differential groups. Like urban sociologists at the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century, Lefebvre ar gues that a unique quality of the urban form is the myriad differences that are evident there. While most American urban sociologists analyzed these differences in terms of subcultures or minority groups, and natural, ecological processes, Lefebvre used this concept to emphasize relations of inequality (of domination and subordination) and thought about them in terms of political, economic, and cultural processes. In the struggles that take place in urban social space, differential groups affirm their difference against the process of homogenization, for example, race differences, gender differences, sexual orientation differences, and age differences. They assert their right to participate in the decision-making centers, against fragmentation and marginalization, and they claim their right to equality in difference against the process of hierarchization, for example, Occupy Wall Street. According to Lefebvre, differential groups have no existence as groups until they appropriate a space of their own. Let us consider some of the distinct ways stratification is reflected in this interaction between social relations and territorial practice, as the sociospatial perspective suggests.
The upper classes often have the advantage of owning many homes because they are able to afford it. Former president George H. W. Bush, for example, for many years maintained residences in Houston, Washington, DC, and Kennebunkport, Maine. Many wealthy people alternate among townhouses, suburban estates, and rural recreational homes. At any given time the family can occupy just one of these residences, so multiple home ownership is a symbol of wealth and power that carries meaning and prestige in our society. In the city, the wealthy are associated with fashionable districts such as Nob Hill in San Francisco, Beverly Hills in Los Angeles, the Gold Coast near Lake Michigan in Chicago, Beacon Hill in Boston, and Park Avenue in New York City. Their activities take place within certain spaces that are allocated to the particular mix of restaurants, resorts, and social clubs reserved for the upper class.
One important way the wealthy manifest their power and status is by isolating themselves as much as possible from the rest of the population. This type of segregation is voluntary. In the city, voluntary segregation may be accomplished by living in ultra-expensive housing with security guards and controlled entrances. Even though public transportation and taxis are available, the wealthy often utilize private, door-to-door limousine services. Shopping and recreation are all located in heavily policed areas. Maintaining this level of isolation is a chore that taxes the resources of surveillance and control, requiring private security guards, apartment buildings with twenty-four-hour doormen, and private schools or academies for children. In the suburbs or at country homes, however, the benefits of isolation are more readily enjoyed in gated communities and exclusive country clubs.
One of the best studies by a sociologist of the upper-class lifestyle is E. Digby Baltzell’s Philadelphia Gentlemen (1958). This study indicates that while the wealthy require their own segregated space, the areas they choose for their voluntary isolation vary over the years, because, in an effort to remain invisible, the wealthy had to move as the metropolitan region expanded over time. Baltzell distinguishes between the elite, or the technocrats in Lefebvre’s terms, and the upper class. The former are “those individuals who are the most successful and stand at the top of the functional class hierarchy. These individuals are leaders in their chosen occupations or professions” (1958:6). Baltzell’s book is not about the elite but about the upper class, which he defines in contrast as the “group of families whose members are descendants of successful individuals one, two, three or more generations ago.... [Individuals in this social grouping are] brought up together, are friends, and are intermarried one with another; and finally, they maintain a distinctive style of life and a kind of primary group solidarity which sets them apart from the rest of the population” (1958:7).
According to Baltzell, the upper class in Philadelphia restricted itself to a particular location in the city and tried to remain out of sight. Over the years, however, its choice of location varied. It usually did not stay in the same neighborhood generation after generation, but was subject to the same forces of deconcentration and regional drift as were other individuals in the metropolis. Most American cities have a pattern similar to Philadelphia of once fashionable districts that have declined as the wealthy shuffle around the metropolitan region in search of secure enclaves for their lifestyle. The most characteristic area of upper-class life was the Main Line, which stretched westward from the central city of Philadelphia on the commuter railroad to the suburbs of Overbrook, Merion, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Rosemont, and other towns out to Paoli, Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia upper-class lifestyle consisted of a withdrawal from civic affairs and the concentration on business by the males; while females were expected to stay close to home minding the household and entertaining when necessary for the husbands’ needs. In addition, however, women were expected to be involved in philanthropic enterprises outside the home, such as organizing charity balls or fund-raising activities for the arts. Children were sent to exclusive private schools, and social life meant interacting only with other members of the upper class on the Social Register. Family time for these people was divided between town and country residences. In this way, the upper class maintained its spatial and social isolation from other segments of the society.
The upper class is not confined to city residence. One of the earliest studies of the affluent in suburbia was Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Although wealth was behind their behavior, the most important characteristics of the lifestyle were symbolic or cultural. Veblen coined the concept conspicuous consumption to refer to this particular aspect of the affluent style of suburban life. This concept refers to an outward display of consumption that demonstrates wealth and power through the wasting of resources and the symbols of upper-class membership. The suburban homes of the wealthy, for example, were endowed with excess. Houses were huge, over 5,000 square feet or more, with many more rooms than were necessary to service the immediate family. Estates had large front and rear lawns that were landscaped and attended to by a staff of gardeners. Conspicuous consumption was symbolized by the landscaping of yards precisely because land was allowed to lie uncultivated as a resource—the lawn was just for show.
The suburban lifestyle of the wealthy is focused on leisure activity as a sign of conspicuous consumption. This is particularly significant because symbols of leisure mean that people do not have to work. The suburban country club, costly to belong to and restrictive in its membership, is an essential component for the exclusive set. The fees usually run into the tens of thousands of dollars, thereby keeping out the working class. In many parts of the country, clubs such as the Everglades Country Club in Florida prevent African Americans and Jews from belonging even if they can afford membership fees. The leisure activity of choice for the affluent is golf, and in recent years this game has come to symbolize suburban wealth and leisure itself, because golf is most often played at country clubs. A second important recreational pursuit is tennis, which also requires outdoor maintenance when played at the country club, although tennis is also played in the city. In a wealthy area such as Palm Desert, California, located about a hundred miles east of Los Angeles, a considerable amount of the town land is devoted to golf courses, which require immense amounts of water and daily care. Because Palm Desert is located in the desert, the presence of so many golf courses is indeed a luxury. For the most affluent families in the largest cities and most exclusive suburbs, membership in the local Polo Club may be the most significant indication that the family has reached the top of the stratification pyramid.
Wealthy suburbanites maintain their isolation through mechanisms similar to those utilized in the city, such as the high price of homes, surveillance and control by private security forces, gate-guarded and enclosed communities, and the separation that comes from spatial dispersal itself. Whether we are dealing with the city or the suburbs, the wealthy tend to use topography to their advantage. Their homes are located at the greatest heights. In the suburbs, this often means that estates are built on the high ground, on hillsides or escarpments. In the city, this “god’s eye view” is acquired with apartments at the top of luxury high-rises, where there is intense competition for the condominium with the best views of the city.
In short, the wealthy possess a distinct lifestyle founded on class privilege and symbols of high social status. Their daily life manifests itself in space through unique molding of the environment to create isolation and exclusion. The wealthy also overcome the limitations of space by owning several residences, each with its own locational advantages. Whether living in the city or the country, their lifestyle, like any other, is sociospatial; that is, it is organized around expressive symbols (Fussell, 1983) and particular spaces, and it contributes to their reproduction as a class.
A large proportion of central city residents are not members of the upper class but do have significant discretionary income because of monetary rewards associated with their chosen field of work. Since the 1970s, as manufacturing has declined in the city, there has been a phenomenal increase in service-related jobs (see Chapter 6). Many of these are professional positions created by the information-processing economy of the city, such as the financial and legal institutions associated with corporate headquarters. In previous chapters, we discussed how certain kinds of economic activity create or help reinforce lifestyles, community relations, and expressive symbols. The shift to information-processing professional services has also affected metropolitan settlement space by reinforcing certain upper-middle-class (the technocrats in Lefebvre’s analysis) patterns of behavior. As with all other lifestyles in our society, socioeconomic standing and the financial resources of these groups are expressed through particular consumption patterns and contribute to their reproduction as a class.
The term yuppie, or young urban professional, has acquired a derogatory connotation, but it is a very useful way to describe relatively young (late twenties to early forties), middle-class professionals who live in the city. We should note that yuppies represent an urban subpopulation characterized by their income, occupation, and lifestyle; they are not identified by ethnicity or race. According to Sassen (1991), yuppies were responsible for gentrification and the upgraded housing and renovation of older loft buildings in New York and other cities; their culinary demands spurred the opening of many new and often exotic restaurants; and their more specialized everyday needs, such as last-minute food shopping, health and fitness requirements, and reading and cinema tastes, have opened up new sectors of employment for a host of immigrant groups and working-class urban residents looking for entry-level service positions. Gentrification involves the movement of upper middle class households into housing abandoned by the rich after World War I, often subdivided into apartments from WWI to WWII, and reclaimed starting in the 1960s. Or it can involve the movement of members of the creative class into the warehouse and factory structures in urban centers.
In the early 1980s, the leaders of many cities believed that the two-pronged explosion of jobs and spending related to the expansion of the business service sector would replace manufacturing as the key growth industry of urban areas. Indeed, places such as Pittsburgh (Jezierski, 1988) managed to change from centers
Box 7.1 The Upscale Urban Lifestyle
Market researchers have studied yuppies in detail because they spend so much of their income on consumer products. They identify characteristic yuppie areas as located in the more affluent sections of the central city (Weiss, 1988). Many live in high-rise buildings in areas of high population concentration and in newly gentrified housing in suddenly fashionable areas of the inner city. According to one report:
Almost two-thirds live in residences worth more than $200,000, decorating their living rooms according to Metropolitan Home, buying their clothes at Brooks Brothers, frequenting the same hand-starch Chinese laundries. In Urban Gold Coast, residents have the lowest incidence of auto ownership in the nation; these cliff-dwellers get around by taxi and rental car. (Weiss, 1988:278)
Market researchers also note the peculiar, service-dependent nature of yuppie consumer behavior. For the sake of last-minute convenience, they will spend more to eat out or purchase items at nearby grocery stores that charge more than large supermarkets. Convenience is prized by people whose high salaries often require them to devote extra hours to their work. According to Weiss:
Residents usually eat out for lunch and dinner, and their forays to grocery stores mostly yield breakfast items: yogurt, butter, orange juice, and English muffins—all bought at slightly above-average rates. Compared to the general population, residents buy barely one-fifth the amount of such pedestrian treats as TV dinners, canned stews, and powdered fruit drinks. Where these consumers do excel is at the liquor store: They buy imported champagnes, brandy, beer, and table wine at twice the national norm, possibly to take the edge off stress-filled urban living. (1988:281)
of industry to focal points for global banking and investment. Restructuring of the financial and corporate business sectors with a consequent decline in the growth of jobs, however, occurred in the mid-1980s, cutting short this expansion. Especially significant were the changes that occurred after the October 1987 New York stock market crash, which led to greater computerization of financial transactions, the reining in of risky ventures such as junk bonds, and the failure of several investment firms (Minsky, 1989). Throughout the 1990s, corporate downsizing led to the loss of tens of thousands of white-collar jobs in cities across the country. Further, corporate downsizing continued in the aftermath of the dot-com meltdown in 2001 and the Great Recession in 2008 and has reduced the size of the middle class. Hence, despite what was once believed, the place of “yuppies” in the revitalization of central cities may be overrated. But Richard Florida insists that this stratum constitutes a new social class, the creative class, and that it is the critical agent for transforming industrial cities into postindustrial cities in the restructuring of the economy since 1973.
Is this really a new class or another differential group in Lefebvre’s terms?
From the sociospatial perspective it looks more like a differential group that is an important agent in the restructuring of urban social space. But Florida misses the larger process—the social production of space and the reproduction of the social relations of production, the structural side of the process. He has little to say about the relation of this purported class to capital, and he opposes this class to the working class, which he sees as reactionary. He ignores the social division of labor—the class division of labor, capital/land/labor—and focuses on the technical division of labor—the occupational structure. From Florida’s perspective, the future of urban America is best left to those urban regions that attract the members of this class who value lifestyle over their positions in labor markets.
This is not how capitalism has survived the crises in the global economy since the Great Depression; it has survived by occupying and commodifying space—by turning profits and accumulating capital on real estate investments. While the central contradictions have been attenuated, they have not been resolved as the 2008 Great Recession demonstrates. Florida acknowledges that the members of this class lack class consciousness, but they have created spaces for themselves, which qualifies them as a differential group in Lefebvre’s terms. They are agents of gentrification and central city revitalization transforming factories and warehouses into artist lofts, upscale bars and restaurants, condominiums and coops, and other cultural institutions. They have revitalized centers whether in cities or suburbs—within urban regions—that contribute to the production of multicentered urban spaces. Of course this is the bright side, the winner’s side, in what is an uneven process of spatial development, and it ignores the dark side, the loser’s side, in this process: the poor, working-class homeowners and renters, racial groups, and even middle-class professionals like Henri Lefebvre who have been expelled to the urban peripheries to make way for the redevelopment of urban centers under the leadership of the creative class and its allies. Redevelopment tends to raise property values, which often means higher taxes for homeowners on modest incomes and higher rents for tenants. Often the children of these homeowners are priced out of that market when they attempt to replicate their parents’ achievements.
Rather than seeing the creative class as the agent of societal transformation as Florida does, it is more likely that it will contribute to social change as a differential group within a coalition of differential groups with the working class an important potential ally not an opponent.
Most households that we would identify as middle-class do not live in the city. Decades of white flight for those who could afford to move to the ever-expanding suburbs have emptied the central city of much of the middle class. This has also been happening recently in black middle-class households as well. The majority of middle-class Americans have spread out and prospered across the vast expanses of developed housing tracts located in suburban settlement space throughout the metropolitan region. Middle-class suburban living might be thought of as the upper-class lifestyle within a more modest budget. Symbols of status abound in this kind of environment as well. The typical suburban home is a scaled-down replica of the upper-class estate. It consists of a front yard that is strictly ornamental and a backyard reserved for leisure. In the warmer parts of the country, the desirable backyard may contain a built-in swimming pool, which usually is no more than thirty feet long. The 1990s may be known as the decade of the backyard deck; most new middle-class homes have decks in the backyard where children play and adults cook on the gas barbecue, and home improvement chain stores have spread across the suburban landscape. While the upper-class estate requires a team of gardening and maintenance people to take care of the yard, the middle-class homeowner is a do-it-yourselfer. Indeed, a stereotypical activity of the suburban male invariably involves fighting crabgrass, repairing roofs, and maintaining home appliances. Women in suburbia also have a unique lifestyle, as we will discuss more fully later when we consider the relationship between gender and space.
For suburbanites, after World War II and continuing into the early 1970s, leisure activities were confined to the weekend, when there was some free time from work—at least for households where parents do not have to work overtime or stagger their work schedules during the week so that one parent can stay home with the kids. In many municipalities, tax money has been used to acquire the kind of public facilities that the affluent enjoy in private. These include public golf courses, swimming pools, tennis courts, and parks. In areas close to the ocean or a lake, suburban municipalities often build and service public marinas for boating and other water sports. But increasingly for middle-class employees the working day never ends, since the digital work culture allows them to work at home or anywhere they find themselves. The Internet and cell phones keep them connected to work organizations 24/7, even when they are on vacation. Further, their children are absorbed with social media, video games, and trips to the mall. Juliet Schor had already pointed out in 1991 that American workers worked 160 more hours per year than their European counterparts and that our two-week vacations compare poorly with the four to eight weeks of paid vacations enjoyed in European countries (Schor, 1991:81). As a nation we could have taken advantage of our increasing productivity after World War II to reduce our work week to thirty, even twenty hours without sacrificing our 1950 standard of living. Of course this would require us to limit our rising standard of living—less work, fewer things—which would contradict the logic of the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” that is predicated on endless economic growth. In addition, it would require a political struggle to achieve, an issue that the US labor movement has neglected since the New Deal. And since these middle-class employees are rarely unionized, it would require them to create unions for themselves or to form a common front with overworked working-class Americans. The digital work culture has made a bad situation worse, although it does create the possibility for reintegrating work life and private life for telecommuters if some limits can be placed on the working part of their day. Suburban life was family life, but family time has been shrinking, and this makes the reproduction of this class far more problematic.
In the nineteenth century, life in the city was dominated by factories. Modest working-class housing was constructed in grid-pattern rows nearby. Weekly schedules were centered in this space, which included the few amenities available to the working class—the pub, the association football park (soccer) or the local baseball diamond, and the streets themselves, which served as playgrounds for children (Hareven, 1982). In the period immediately after World War II, US cities contained a prodigious density of such working-class districts. Since the 1960s, however, this pattern has been in decline. One reason is that many factory workers attained middle-class status with the ability to purchase single-family homes in the suburbs (Berger, 1957), often with liberal government-sponsored veterans’ benefits. A second, more drastic cause was the decline in manufacturing. When the factories closed, working-class life and the reproduction of this class became precarious.
Although working-class families have suburbanized in large numbers since the 1960s, many still reside in large cities. They are often referred to as the “working poor” because their standard of living is declining as cities become expensive places to reside. The quality of life of the working class depends on the public services provided by local government. They require mass transportation, for example, which is becoming increasingly expensive. The level of medical care for this less affluent group is seriously deficient and dependent on city-supported hospitals because they work at jobs that do not provide adequate, if any, health insurance. In fact, the Health and Hospitals Administration of New York City, which runs that city’s medical facilities, has a yearly budget of about $1.5 billion, as much as the entire budget of several small countries.
Because their standard of living depends on city services, the working poor are often at odds with public administrators. City politics involve clashes between this public and the municipal administration over the quality of services. Since the late 1970s, the declining fiscal health of cities has made this political conflict worse because of budget crises and cutbacks (as we will see in Chapter 9). The working poor and their advocates in the city fight a running battle with the mayor over the declines in education, fire and police protection, sanitation, highway maintenance, health care, and recreational amenities.
In Chapter 9 we will discuss the serious issue of segregation. Being isolated and poor, living in what is commonly referred to as a ghetto, is not a lifestyle that anybody chooses. It is a set of circumstances forced on people who do not have the economic, political, and social resources to oppose being marginalized. Yet we must discuss this phenomenon here in order to present a clear picture of the kind of diversity that exists in our metropolitan regions that includes not only poor people but residents who are involuntarily ghettoized by negative attitudes toward race and poverty.
Living in the worst areas of the central city means that the ghettoized poor are subjected to an endless list of pathological consequences of city living, including public health crises such as AIDS, child abuse, and tuberculosis, dropouts from education, juvenile crime, drug addiction and the bearing of addicted babies, juvenile motherhood, murder, rape, and robbery. The crime and pathology associated with poverty-stricken ghettos makes city living difficult for everyone, leading middle-class whites and blacks to the exits, and are largely responsible for the continuing levels of violence associated with the inner city. However, gentrification and the elimination of public housing projects have increasingly driven the poorest residents out of these neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Boston. Ghettos have been broken up at the expense of the former residents, although simultaneously new slums in the aging working-class suburbs outside of urban centers are forming.
One way of showing the spatial effects of extreme segregation on daily life is by examining access to adequate food shopping facilities. In an influential UK study (Wrigley, 2002): “Research confirmed that there was a lack of easy access to shops for deprived households and, furthermore, places that did service the low income neighborhoods had higher prices.... Adopting the term ‘food deserts’ first coined by the low-income project team of the nutrition task force, the report argued that ‘some areas have become food deserts exacerbating the problems those on low incomes face in affording a healthy diet’” (p. 2030).
Through the concept of “food desert,” the health inequalities and spatial exclusion of the poor became firmly linked. Most discussions of extreme isolation for ghettoized Americans point out their segregation in distinct areas of cities, but they fail to connect that exclusion to the everyday effect of failing to find adequate and healthy food at a cost enjoyed by more advantaged Americans because they live in a “food desert.” Research of this kind of deprivation proves how discrimination and segregation lead to physical and emotional injuries rather than simply a “different way of life” for the poor and how this class fraction is reproduced.
The issue of gender and urban space is a vast topic on which urban sociologists have largely been silent. As recently as the 1970s, one well-known geographer wrote a book entitled This Scene of Man (Vance, 1977) and, not to be outdone, more than a decade later an equally famous urban sociologist published a study of Chicago entitled The Man Made City (Suttles, 1990). Feminist scholars agree that the city is man-made because women had little to do with its planning, less to do with its construction, and received few benefits from being confined within a man-made environment. The built environment reflects men’s activities, men’s values, and men’s attitudes toward settlement space. Yet the lives of women are a critical component of urban and suburban activities. Increasingly, with the prodding of feminist observers, urban sociology should gain greater insight into the role of women as a differential group, and their needs, in everyday metropolitan life.
During the nineteenth century in the early stages of industrial manufacturing, it was common for entire families to labor; ten and even twelve hours a day, six days a week, was the norm. Home life was second to the needs of the factory, and even children were pressed into the service of wage labor in textile mills and other industries (Hareven, 1982). Over the years, conditions in these “Satanic mills,” as Karl Marx (1967) called them, changed. Child labor laws were passed at the turn of the century in the United States prohibiting school-age youth from full-time employment. Many women continued to work, but the growing number of middle-class families during the 1920s enabled people to copy the upper-class lifestyle with married women remaining at home. This effect of class, which occurred because of successful economic growth beginning in the last century, resulted in the redefinition of the middle-class woman’s role to that of a housewife consigned to the ghetto of private life (Spain, 1992).
Over the years, other changes would alter the relationship of women to both the family and the larger society. Status differences were caused by the effects of male social dominance, which dictated women’s life chances, and by the effects of the economy. For example, among the middle class during the 1920s, women were expected to remain housewives. During World War II, however, many women returned to full-time occupations, including manufacturing, as in the image of “Rosie the Riveter.” After the war and especially during the suburbanization of the 1950s, middle-class women were once again expected to remain home as housewives. But in the 1970s, real wages in the United States began to decline, and participation in the middle-class lifestyle has since grown increasingly expensive. Owning a home in the suburbs typically requires more than one income, and it is common for both spouses to pursue full-time employment. A majority of all adult women now work outside the home, whether single or married.
Recent statistics from the US Department of Labor illustrate the phenomenal changes in the labor force participation of women since the 1950s. In 1950 roughly 30 percent of women worked outside the home, but by 1986 the figure was 55 percent. By 2012, 57.7 percent of women were in the work force making up 46.9 percent of the total work force (US Department of Labor, 2014). In 1950 it was relatively rare for married women with children to be employed. Only 28 percent of women in this group with children between ages six and seventeen worked, but by 1986 the figure had jumped to 68 percent (Hochschild and Machung, 1989). By 2012, 70.7 percent of women with children under eighteen worked (US Department of Labor, 2014). The ratio of women’s to men’s median income has slowly improved from 0.60 in 1974 to 0.77 in 2009 (US Census Bureau, 2010). At present, a majority of women return to the labor force within a year after giving birth, and most families represent dual-income households.
Working-class and minority women have always had to secure employment outside the home, even if limited to part-time work. Minority women, for example, have always worked, and many are the main sources of income for families due to employment discrimination against males. Certain industries, such as garment manufacturing, depend almost exclusively on the exploitation of female labor in factories. Women in Asia and Latin America, in particular, are exploited as the source of labor for the electronics and garment industries in countries such as Mexico, Singapore, China, and South Korea (see Chapter 11). McDowell suggests that male domination of female roles is an integral part of the global economy and a major reason for the success of recent restructuring that has shipped manufacturing jobs to developing countries (McDowell, 1991). In short, gender roles appear to be dictated in part by patriarchal social conventions and, in many parts of the world, by the demands of the global economy.
Domestic labor is unpaid and has low status. Housework is usually not a family topic of importance. Yet the well-being of the family depends on the cooking, cleaning, nurturing, and monitoring of the household. In most societies, it has been women’s lot to bear the responsibility for these tasks. Even when women work outside the home, men expect them to complete a “double shift” of cleaning, cooking, and child care when they return home. According to a classic study of this burden (Hochschild and Machung, 1989), married women who work outside the home still do an average of three hours a day of housework compared with seventeen minutes for their male spouses. Indeed, women usually do not get recognition from the family for the housework they do, unless the wife is working and the husband—or the husband’s family—becomes concerned that she is not doing enough around the house. As one group of observers note:
As women it is assumed that we will be ultimately responsible for the upkeep and general maintenance of our homes whether we have another job or not. . . . Even when others contribute to this work, the primary responsibility remains with the women. We are conscious of its demands at all times; responsibilities cannot be shut off by retreating into a “room of one’s own.” (Matrix Collective, 1984)
Domestic or unpaid labor supports child rearing and family life. While these activities are necessary in all societies, the tasks themselves are the primary responsibility of women, who for the most part labor alone. Urban sociologists refer to these activities as the social reproduction of the labor force, because household work along with education and health care combine to nurture children until they themselves enter the labor force. The socialization of women to accept the role of domestic laborer in our society, therefore, is an essential and necessary component of the economy.
The participation of middle-class women in the formal economy has been cyclical but increasing in recent decades. Since the 1970s, women have entered the paid labor force in record numbers. As a result of economic restructuring—that is, with the decline in manufacturing and the rise of service industries (see Chapter 6)—new opportunities have been created for women. Women have responded by returning to college and moving into the professional service sector. One consequence of this shift has been a change in the way both men and women view household tasks, with a greater willingness among middle-class men to share in domestic labor, especially a growing percentage of men who “mother” (Lamb, 1986; Grief, 1985). Another consequence has been the multiplication of service-related jobs created by working mothers. Many of the pressing household tasks have been farmed out to specialized service workers for a fee. Child care, housecleaning, shopping assistance, and lawn care are but some of the services that have taken the place of unpaid domestic labor. In addition, fast foods, restaurants, and take-out shops have expanded their operations greatly over the last twenty-five years. All of these new economic activities have changed the texture of space in both cities and suburbs. Specialty shops and services spring up everywhere to cater to those families with double incomes. Supermarket and giant merchandising stores such as Walmart make shopping more efficient for the consumer although they have other negative consequences for local business. Along with malls, retailers also redefine metropolitan space through the construction of minicenters across the region.
The sociospatial relations of the modern global economy have much to do with gender roles and patriarchy, but they also are a consequence of economic and political factors. When women stayed at home and engaged in full-time but unpaid labor, they were responsible for keeping up the appearance of the neighborhood. Once middle-class women in the United States were encouraged to change their social role, although still expected to do a “double shift,” energies and resources were transferred to service industries that catered to domestic needs. Neighborhoods changed to accommodate fast-food and take-out places, restaurants, laundries, and dry cleaners, and supermarkets and malls made shopping progressively more convenient.
Houses in the suburbs required at least two-car garages because both spouses commuted to work, and teenagers required their own vehicles for work, school, and leisure activities. In both urban and suburban settlement spaces, day care and extended child care programs changed the place where children went to play—from city streets supervised by mothers to indoor group play areas supervised by paid day care specialists. Elsewhere in the global economy, young girls comprise the bulk of the manufacturing labor force in electronics and garment industries because patriarchal relations make them docile and low-paid workers. The control of women’s bodies is as essential to the sustenance of countries in the developing world as it is to the “first world” patriarchal societies. Everywhere, then, the nature of gender roles has a direct effect on sociospatial relations.
The relations between settlement space and gender extend from the home to the community to the larger metropolitan region. The home, for example, is the one space in the environment where people can be themselves. It is the most private and intimate space. Due to the family division of labor, women have been assigned the main task of decorating the home. Through this activity they express their own individuality (Matrix Collective, 1984). Of course housing has several meanings, as we will see, and it is a signifier of class status. But for women, their control over the environmental space of the home has meant an opportunity for self-expression. For the middle class, it also has developed into a restricted domain within which women are allowed to influence their environment. Box 7.2 reviews some of the important aspects of the environment as they relate to women’s lives.
If the home space can be viewed in this way, it is partly because women have been socialized to take on responsibility for shelter maintenance. Spatial relations therefore play a great role in the perpetuation of female socialized roles in our society. However, if the female gender role assigns a certain power to women through control of the home environment, the opposite is the case for the larger physical environment of the city and metropolis. Once out in public space, women have to beware. They are subject to harassment and, quite often, danger. Women living in large cities must acquire “street smarts” early if they are to successfully negotiate public space. As one commentary noted: “Whether you wear a slit skirt or are covered from head to foot in a black chador, the message is not that you are attractive enough to make a man lose his self-control, but that the public realm belongs to him and you are there by his permission as long as you follow his rules and as long as you remember your place” (Benard and Schlaffer, 1993:390).
In contrast to men, women are situated in a constrained space and do not enjoy the same freedom of movement. For example, women are cautioned not to go out alone at night, and with good reason. If they walk or jog around the neighborhood, they usually do so only in secure places. The women’s movement has been particularly attentive to the needs of females for safe places, such as “Take Back the Night” rallies. The constricted and confined safe places for women in our society are another form of oppression. By patterning what activities are allowed, what are
Box 7.2 Gendered Space in the Built Environment
The sociospatial approach asserts that urban and suburban settlement spaces influence individual behavior; however, this influence is mediated by gender, class, and other individual characteristics. In this way, the meaning of space and the built environment may differ for men and women. Consider the ways in which the structure of settlement space in Sweden and that in the United States have very different consequences for the daily activity and well-being of women.
Suburban developments in the United States usually consist of single-family homes located some distance from the urban center. Local zoning restrictions require that suburban settlement space be low-density (not simply single-family homes instead of apartments but also lot sizes of between one and three acres). Land-use plans also require physical separation of residential areas from business and commercial development. The federal government has spent billions of dollars constructing a highway system for private automobiles, and public transportation is limited.
In Sweden, suburban developments are of moderate density, usually garden-type apartments located in mixed-use districts where stores and businesses are located within walking distance. Extensive public transportation connects suburban settlement space to the city core, and child care and other services (provided through the public sector) are available within the local community (Popenoe, 1977).
The effects of these two very different built environments on women’s lives could not be more dramatic. In the United States, women who live in suburban housing developments are comparatively isolated from friends, relatives, their place of employment, and health and other public services. A second family automobile is needed for women to take their children to day care, go grocery shopping, or travel to their jobs. Then there is the cost of travel time to and from each of these destinations (separated from one another by zoning). In Sweden and other Scandinavian countries with similar welfare state structures and urban planning, women in suburban developments are more likely to live near friends, relatives, and their place of employment. If they do not, public transportation is available, eliminating the need for a second automobile. Because day care and other family services are funded by the state and located in the new planned suburban communities, they are readily available. And because friends and even relatives may live within walking distance, it is easier to pool resources to arrange for other family needs (Popenoe, 1980).
The arrangement of suburban settlement space in Scandinavian countries encourages women to become fully integrated into the metropolitan community and to build strong social networks with others in the community. In contrast, the structure of suburban settlement space in the United States—where homes, workplaces, schools, and shopping areas are separated from one another—places a significant burden on suburban women’s time needs and isolates them from employment opportunities and daily activities within the metropolitan region.
isolated, what are considered safe or dangerous, and what are connected to other activities, such as the combination of child care and shopping found in the mall or the gender segregation of children in elementary schools (Thorne, 1993), space plays a role in gender socialization.
The secondary status of women is reinforced through spatial design. Community planning invariably assigns the major portion of open space to traditionally male-dominated activities, such as sports. Places for mothering are rarely considered at all and are often restricted to playgrounds. Creating safe environments for children and mothers requires some planning. In Columbia, Maryland, one of the totally planned New Towns in the United States, pedestrian and automobile traffic are separated by the segregation of space. This feature of Columbia makes it easier for mothers to protect children at play. It is not so easy to suggest ways the home and community environments can be improved by taking the needs of women more into account, although some progress through feminist activism has been made in sensitizing planners and architects to the specific needs of women (Matrix Collective, 1984). Change in the accepted gender roles and the new demands placed on family life may affect our environment in the years to come (see Chapter 12 for an extended discussion on environmental and planning concerns).
Finally, there is a sharp difference between men and women regarding travel. Men travel more than women, and most, but not all, use transportation solely for work-related purposes. Men, more than women, are drawn away from their homes for business trips. Married women, in contrast, most often seek out jobs close to home and, although they commute, their everyday space is confined to family chores using a car that is close to home as well. Shopping, being a “soccer mom,” and picking or dropping off children at school are all circumscribed activities in a more restricted daily space than the one enjoyed by men who occasionally go on business trips many miles from home. Men, whether single or married, are also much more likely to travel significant distances for leisure purposes than women—for fishing or golf trips, for example. In short, there is a large gender gap regarding differences in travel behavior that has an impact on male/female and family relationships.
Almost without exception, when the issues of neighborhood and community are discussed in urban sociology textbooks, the overriding assumption is that they are peopled by heterosexual individuals and/or couples. Only recently has that perspective been challenged by a new generation of researchers concerned about the dynamics of “queer space.” Aside from the presence of gay, lesbian, and transgendered community networks in urban regions, researchers have uncovered differences in the way interaction among people belonging to the “queer” community is structured:
While gay men have often produced highly visible territorial enclaves in inner-city areas, lesbian forms of territoriality at the urban scale have been relatively “invisible” since their communities are constituted through social networks rather than commercial sites. Contrasting the patterns produced by these two populations in the inner-city areas of postindustrial cities during the “queer” 1990s has created a gender-polarized and historically specific interpretation of their patterns of territoriality and visibility that may differ significantly from those of earlier periods. (Podmore, 2006:595)
A key finding of research into gay, lesbian, and transgendered communities echoes aspects of Lefebvrian theory: such places have to be produced; they do not appear whole cloth within urban areas. Again, without a space of its own, a differential group has no existence according to Lefebvre. While it is true that sections of cities, such as the West Village in New York and the Castro in San Francisco, are well-known homosexual neighborhoods, in all urban areas, nonheterosexuals must produce the spaces within which they can commune. As one observer notes, “Just as individual persons do not have pre-existing sexual identities, neither do spaces. In other words, space is not naturally authentically ‘straight’ but rather actively produced and (hetero) sexualized” (Binnie, 1997:223). The production of queer space, then, for these commentators, occurs as a kind of resistance and liberation from heterosexualizing social forces trying to claim space within urban areas for normative activities. The production of gay communities, therefore, is a form of activism.
Keeping in mind the remarks of Podmore on lesbian life, then, we can also observe that the production of queer spaces differs between gay men and women. The latter’s mode of liberation and activism is less tied to material neighborhoods and more characterized by active networking, even if both genders, like heterosexual males and females, rely on commercial establishments for socializing outside the home. Social networks are a way of viewing lifestyles that have less need of actual urban spaces. They are sometimes referred to as “communities without propinquity,” and they represent another kind of sociality found in urban regions.
Bohemian quarters are another form of differential group common to large urban areas. Box 7.3 below discusses this group in the modern era.
Despite the domination of suburbia in regard to total regional population, there is no doubt that the historical central city retains a pedestrian and consumer-oriented culture that remains relatively unique and attractive to all residents. One way of demonstrating this aspect is by examining the important role downtowns play in nighttime
Box 7.3 The New Bohemia
Richard Lloyd notes that while cities have always played an important role as incubators of cultural innovation, new ideas about the artist and his or her relationship to the city developed during the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in Paris. The Romantic paradigm viewed artists and poets as “exulted and often tortured geniuses” alienated from and often unappreciated by the larger society. The Latin Quarter in Paris developed from student quarter to intellectual community, described by Balzac in Un Prince de la Bohème, with the ideals of the bohemian lifestyle: hedonism and self-sacrifice, rejection of bourgeois values, and the primary of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake). The hillside village of Montmartre would later displace the Latin Quarter as the center of bohemian life in Paris.
In the past, one had to look deeply to find bohemia in the United States; Greenwich Village in New York City was the original bohemian area in the United States, consciously drawing on the European example. After World War II, a new bohemian style developed—the beatnik—along with bohemian districts in San Francisco (North Beach) and Los Angeles (Venice Beach). In the last two decades, however, there has emerged an alternative nation, populated by struggling writers, thrift stores, indie rockers, and the omnipresent coffee house. Richard Lloyd explains how bohemia—once an exotic land confined to the metropolis—has become an ordinary thing in cities large and small across the country.
Bohemia has become an established district in even medium-sized cities and is promoted as a lifestyle amenity that increases property values. Richard Lloyd’s ethnographic study is situated in Chicago’s Wicker Park, once home to Frankie Machine, a junkie, in Nelson Algren’s Walk on the Wild Side, later the site of violent gang warfare in the 1970s and 1980s, and finally the location of Rob Gordon’s record shop, Championship Vinyl, in the 2000 film High Fidelity. Today Wicker Park is home to fashionable bars, art galleries, and high-tech start-up companies, as well as the people who work in them. Lloyd locates the new bohemia at the intersection of contemporary alternative cultures and the new forces of globalization; the locals are drawn to creative industries like media, advertising, and design and have a tolerance for other nonconformists; they are “creatures of the night” who flaunt thrift store clothes, piercings, and tribal tattoos, and they are the perfect workforce for the new creative industries, willing to work odd hours on a freelance basis at relatively low wages. The bartenders, baristas, and computer designers of Wicker Park have developed a lifestyle and values that are at odds with the suburban lifestyle, and to some degree, with mainstream society as well, as they have traded high wages for more regular jobs in the business world for the romance of bohemia.
SOURCE: Adapted from Richard Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia (2006) and “Bohemia” (2009).
activities of a diverse group of people ranging from young adult bar hoppers, music and theater aficionados of all ages, and tourists looking for a “good time.”
Chatterton and Hollands (2003) have written an interesting case study of nightlife in the UK. They depict an active scene of young adults who carouse through all hours of the evening. Local bars draw large crowds almost every night and many offer live music, although drinking and hooking up with the opposite sex, in their study, seems to be the major attractions. The popularity of these activities brings people back into the downtown core, which had been abandoned as a place for leisure and consumption by most people due to the suburbanization of the population. For this reason, development of such nighttime businesses as bars and theaters has, in the last two decades, been viewed as a major aspect of urban regeneration that greatly benefits the city, through amusement taxes and the like, as well as local businesses. Keeping the once abandoned downtowns busy with people is viewed as a sign of urban renewal, although there remain permanent residents of these areas who complain about the increased noise and nuisance congestion in the evenings when non-night crawlers simply want to sleep.
An important contribution of Chatterton and Hollands’s study is the way they demonstrate how major beverage corporations have targeted locally owned pubs and nightclubs for takeover and for outlets that sell their products. What often started as a revival of small businesses and the welcome attraction of locally financed new ones to downtown leisure districts has turned into a money grab by major international corporations selling beer and alcohol under a variety of simulated names that mimic the appearance of existing small breweries. Packaging and advertising in pubs or bars of these mass-produced beverages exploiting consumer desires for high-quality designer products captures profits. Additionally, once local businesses are progressively bought out, or competing venues built by major developers in league with corporations move into areas, they attract enough nighttime traffic to become profitable. Consequently, the kind of chain marketing with global beverage and product control by transnational corporations that most often characterize suburbia is increasingly found in revived sections of major cities as well, according to the authors’ case study.
Another aspect of revived city life exploiting nighttime consumption and leisure has been studied recently by David Grazian (2008) in a renewed and highly popular part of Philadelphia. His case study does not have the range of Chatterton and Hollands’s, but it reports interesting findings that supplement the UK reality. The author discovers that restaurants in the newly gentrified inner-city areas resort to various tricks in order to get locals and tourists alike to spend much more money for food and drink than they would otherwise. Wine snobbery by waiters is one important means of doing this. Padding bills with drinks is a key way restaurants make money.
Another aspect of his book involves what he calls “the girl hunt.” College and young adult males make their way to the so-called meat market city nightclubs in search of pickups and one-night stands. The author writes as if he discovered a major aspect of human life on Earth when he states that, after doing extensive “sociological” research and interviews at these nightclubs, most women out with their friends actually resist pickups and are there only to have a good time and get men to pay for their drinks. This research finding plays into a very depressing and cynical view of what amounts to the major means of socializing among young adults in our society. For Grazian, exploitation and resistance are sex typed and personal. For Chatterton and Hollands, in contrast, the real exploitation, echoed by Grazian’s first part of his book, is in the way corporations exploit nightclub consumers and promote alcohol drinking for profit.
In Chapter 1 we discussed the fact that the urban form has changed from one that historically relied on the large, compact central city, to a different spatial array of multicenters that are regional in scale with the historical core becoming only one of several areas of high density. This change does not mean that the old central city has disappeared as important (see following and Chapter 14).
The relative uniqueness and attractiveness of urban culture to suburbanites and tourists as well as people seeking an inner-city address has also been exploited by developers and city officials as a means of revitalizing areas that were abandoned or deteriorated during the period of deindustrialization between the 1960s and 1990s. Research results from around Western Europe report the relative success of this kind of revival model (Miles and Paddison, 2005). Culture-led urban regeneration started with the US concept of “festival marketplace,” an approach to developing once derelict waterfront sites emphasizing consumption and entertainment. One of the most successful developments was built by the American Rouse Corporation for the inner harbor of Barcelona, Spain. Rouse is the same corporation that built harbor revival projects in places like Baltimore and Boston. Signature aspects of their approach involve a large shopping mall and an aquarium. Both aspects were carried over to the Barcelona project with success.
This formula was expanded to include investment in prime global touristoriented attractions. Perhaps the best example of this is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which was so successful as a magnet for tourists that it aided the revitalization of the entire city.
Culture-led development in the European Union arose out of a 1983 initiative called the ECOC, or the European Cities/Capital of Culture program:
Since its inception, the program has gone through a number of transformations. However the basic structure remains, namely that cities take turns acquiring the name of a European cultural capital which is tied to an investment scheme that promotes the local area. Over time there’s been a wide variety of responses by European countries with some pouring in a relatively large amount of investment in a particular city and other countries doing less with the same designation. (Garcia, 2005:843)
Although some researchers have uncovered evidence of success in a lingering outcome of greater community involvement, pride, and sense of place, Miles and Paddison also note an important criticism that, for example, Glasgow’s ability to put on a major event and gather international acclaim is now considered only a mask aimed at hiding the enduring, embedded problems and contradictions resulting from decades of poverty and related housing, health, and nutrition problems.
Despite the mixed results of the ECOC program, there are other aspects of exploiting urban culture for revitalization that have worked in Europe and Canada as well as the United States. As a consequence of globalization and after the 1980s, cities have been able to emphasize aspects of their local culture that are relatively unique in the quest for economic development in competition with other locations. “What is remarkable here is not just the speed with which culture-driven strategies have become advocated by governments and local development agencies as a means of bolstering the urban economy, but also how their diffusion has globalized. Within the space of little more than two decades, the initiation of culture-driven urban regeneration has come to occupy a pivotal position in the new urban entrepreneurialism ... The language of place marketing has become as integral to the Asian city as it has the European or North American city—that, more specifically, the invocation of culture has become central to the ambitions” (Miles and Paddison, 2005) of cities everywhere in maintaining, and enhancing, their regional positions in the world system.
What is new and different about the use of culture by cities for global positioning, such as the development of cultural tourism, is that local distinctiveness of urban places, which have developed often over the course of centuries, has now become commodified and transformed into an adjunct of profit making through consumption of space. No longer does urban culture refer to a particular way of life. In the context of capitalist economic development and global competition, the new way in which culture is exploited often clashes with the old, such as in local neighborhood resistance to grand projects of branding in attempting to acquire world attention. Opposition, for example, to the construction projects that follow a decision to hold the Olympics in a particular location is a perfect case.
A third aspect of investigating the role of culture in urban regeneration involves measuring the relative success of such efforts. After the year 2000, many cities across the globe launched their own projects with a common theme of advancing economic development. Only now has it begun to be possible to measure whether or not culture-led urban revival has been successful and under what conditions. The expansion of facilities for tourists, for example, is very much a form of investment that bypasses local citizen needs in favor of the global tourist. This is especially true for cities that have historically been working class and industrial, no matter how hard hit by deindustrialization and globalization. Investment in cultural resources does not usually translate into a more inclusive, better quality of life for the working class of such cities, and it is unlikely to bring about a large enough increase in tourism to offset declining employment.
The important question that is raised here is whether investment in culture can lead to the continued, sustainable development of a city, or is it tied more clearly to one-shot events and enterprises (Miles and Paddison, 2005:838).
A fourth aspect involves a makeover of the city for tourism. Here the consumer being addressed is someone from outside the region. Consumer attractions in this case are different in some respects from the way in which central cities seek to appeal to local white affluent shoppers who were principally from the suburbs. Thus tourism represents a separate case of the consumption of space as well as the production of space for that consumption. Bernadette Quinn (2005) researched the effects of city “festivals” in this regard. Holding festivals in cities has become a popular way to draw attention and crowds to the inner locations. Quinn argues that city authorities “tend to disregard the social value of festivals and to construe them simply as vehicles of economic generation or as ‘quick fix’ solutions to the city image problems. While such an approach renders certain benefits, it is ultimately quite limiting.” According to her research, art festivals have not worked to include enough local residents and have not led to an improved quality of life for them so that the festivals do not have a lasting effect on the people who live in the city. Quinn also notes that these festivals will continue because they are one way in which cities compete with other urban places.
Another aspect of urban revitalization using culture and consumption is reported in an interesting study of Holland by Bas Spierings (2006). He uses Lefebvre’s idea of the “spaces of consumption” to investigate how inner-city areas restructure their businesses in order to attract the more affluent consumers from suburbia as well as tourists. This is a kind of restructuring, much like the type of festival-led one reported by Quinn, that ignores the needs of local, less affluent residents, in favor of profit making from a wealthier market segment that most often commutes from outside the city.
Spierings’s research specifically focuses on attempts by cities to attract a particular consumer: an upper-middle-class, mobile, demanding person with money to spend and with an interest in having an experience in shopping as well as finding goods that might be purchased. “The belief in the accompanying mobile spending power has made intricate—urban competition flourish” (2006:189) in multicentered metro regions because developing the inner city for such consumption competes with suburban shopping malls: “In so doing, city center actors upgraded the quality of both the functional structure and the physical features of the city center. More specifically, the consumer services, the morphology, furnishings and architecture are changed for the visual consumption of shoppers” (2006:189).
The attractive consumer “is assumed to perform the act of ‘shopping the city’ to consume consumer services, as well as usually consuming ‘the shopping city’ itself—the shopping environment.” Spierings’s study uncovered differences in the development schemes according to the different cities; however, every center aimed at its renovation in favor of attracting the contemporary and highly mobile consumer with money to spend and in competition with other places with little regard for the ability of local residents to also enjoy such spaces. Transformations of this kind also change completely the culture of the city because they introduce new sign systems that come from global corporations which are instantly recognizable as chain marketing by high-end consumers and tourists alike.
Developers “created a mix of consumer services in the shopping environment . . . These contemporary consumers stroll and gaze around the consumption space to find satisfaction. The aim of both the functional and physical upgrading therefore is to enable and encourage ‘shopping the city’” (2006:192). This implies that consumers are browsing services such as retailing, catering, and cultural facilities. They also visually consumed the shopping city, which consists of such things as facades, windows, and shop interiors. Finally, developers sought to make their projects visually different from the look of other competing city centers. Some projects have to address a lack of pedestrian mall space; others had to make room through redevelopment and the tearing down of obsolete structures for new shops. The latter examples are referred to as structural changes. In addition, functional changes had to be made in order to attract an appropriate mix of sources that complement high-end consumer shopping, such as places to eat and cultural attractions.
In sum, Spierings’s study is important because it highlights three aspects of the sociospatial approach of this text. First, he reinforces the research of Holland and Chesterton by showing how global corporations invade the inner-city space and superimpose their own brands and themes on products, thereby erasing historical local culture and, in the case of consumer developments, historical local space as well. Second, like Quinn’s results, Spierings’s show how this type of urban redevelopment actually ignores the interests and needs of local residents, which produces significant tension between them and the affluent “invaders”—the tourists and high-end suburban consumers—from outside. Cultural and political conflict emerges from this tension that constitutes an important aspect of local politics and social movements. Third, the kind of projects that Spierings mentions helps illustrate an important dynamic of MMR internal processes—namely, the competition of locations throughout the region for consumer dollars. Unlike the early and now obsolete compact model of the city advocated by the 1930s Chicago School, the multicentered metro region model allows for and even promotes analysis of spatial competition among separate locations within the area that is applicable as well to the study of a similar dynamic among individual global cities for such things as competition over tourist dollars.
This process is evident in the revitalization of the city center in both Minneapolis and Kansas City. Minneapolis has attempted to restructure the central business district with its Nicollet Mall, which was modeled after a shopping district street closed to traffic in Copenhagen, Denmark. It has more importantly transformed the warehouse district that surrounded the central business district into an entertainment district. The NBA, NFL, and MLB teams are all located in this space as well as upscale restaurants, bars, brew pubs, galleries, music venues that bring in national groups as well as regional groups, the prestigious Walker modern art museum, and the Tyrone Guthrie Theater. The Target Corporation has paid for the naming rights for the buildings that house both the baseball and the basketball franchises. Young people and tourists find the area to be very attractive, especially on the weekends. Gone are the flop houses and homeless vagrants who were very evident in this area in the mid-1960s. The new residents are solidly middle-class. The new light rail system stops at Target Field, the new baseball stadium that will host the All Star game in 2014. The same light rail system will deliver tourists and consumers to the Mall of America, the largest mall in the United States. It also links Minneapolis to St. Paul, the capital of the state. Ever since the Mall of America opened, shoppers from Des Moines, Iowa, and other destinations can catch flights to the international airport that is located right across I-494. The mall is covered with patriotic signifiers telling consumers that shopping is a patriotic duty, much as President Bush advised Americans after the 9/11 attack.
The action in Kansas City has recently shifted from the oldest part of town, Westport, to the “Power and Light District” that has sprung up in the old warehouse and train yard district just east of the central business district. We find a similar mix of upscale restaurants, barbecue places, brew pubs, music venues, museums (a science museum for children in the revitalized Union railroad station) that we find in Minneapolis. There is also an outdoor entertainment space for music groups and other acts that resembles Rouse’s festival marketplace in Norfolk, Virginia.
Ethnic formation in modern society is the consequence of government policy and intergroup competition within an ethnically diverse society (Omi and Winant, 1992). In relatively homogeneous societies, lifestyle differences may exist, but they usually are not expressed as ethnicity; class, gender, religious, subcultural, and age differences may be more important. When indigenous people, such as mainland Chinese, immigrate to another country that contains people from many different origins, such as the United States, subcultural differences may take on the dimensions of ethnic differences. These are almost wholly “semiotic” or symbolic in nature (see Chapter 4). In particular, ascribed characteristics and inherited beliefs may make individuals with foreign heritages uniquely different. What counts for the dynamics of ethnicity is the extent to which those symbolic differences clash with those of the dominant society or of other ethnic groups in a diverse society.
In the United States, ethnic lifestyles are closely connected to waves of immigration from abroad. Our understanding of immigration should include a spatial perspective that acknowledges the important role of the globalization of capital as well as the push and pull factors that most often are used to explain why people left their land of origin in the first place. Three distinct waves of immigration to the United States have occurred. The first two waves are discussed in this section, and the third wave, or “new immigration,” is discussed in the following section of this chapter.
Many thousands of years ago, Asians immigrated to the Western Hemisphere over a land bridge to Alaska. Beginning with Columbus’s fateful voyage in 1492, Western European settlers from the British Isles, Spain, Holland, and France confronted the Native Americans. These European settlers arrived as a consequence of official state policy. Some were convicts taking advantage of an alternative sentence to debtors’ prison in their homeland. Others signed on with the promise of free land and other resources. Still others, such as the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony and William Penn and his Quaker community, came in search of religious freedom. At the time of the American Revolution, some 95 percent of immigrants to the United States were Northern European, and nearly 70 percent came from Great Britain (Steinberg, 1996).
During the 1840s, the potato famine in Ireland forced many people to immigrate. The Irish people were the first large group of immigrants who were not Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and they confronted extensive discrimination because they were Catholic (Higham, 1977). They were also the first large group of immigrants that went directly to the cities. By the time they arrived, the earlier groups had entrenched themselves as the ruling class. Many of them, such as John Rockefeller (from Scotland), Cornelius Vanderbilt (whose family had come from Holland), and Leland Stanford (of English origin), had made fortunes in the burgeoning industrial economy of the United States. The Irish were considered less valuable than the African slaves of the South, and they were used for dangerous tasks, such as building railroads, or as the first proletarian factory workers in the northern cities where slavery was not allowed.
By the 1800s, industrialization was in full bloom and the cities of the United States were expanding. At about that time a second substantial wave of new immigrants arrived here from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Most second-wave immigrants made their homes in the city. Many had come from rural backgrounds and had to make adjustments to the urban way of life (Handlin, 1951). As we noted in Chapter 5, the cities of the time were overcrowded. Housing for most immigrants lacked the basic necessities of sanitation and sewage. Public health crises and crime waves were quite common (Monkkonen, 1986). The quality of urban life went into decline. In addition, they found most jobs in the factories of the largest cities, and they had to accommodate themselves to the industrial daily schedule.
It wasn’t long before antagonisms developed between immigrant groups organized as workers, and city officials and factory owners. Both the Irish who had arrived somewhat earlier and the second wave of Central and Eastern Europeans were viewed by established residents as threatening to the American way of life. Some second-wave immigrants had already been exposed to radical labor movements in Europe, and these groups, such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), started up in the United States. Because of the large majority of Catholics among the foreigners, particularly the Irish, Italians, and Poles, a popular anti-urban sentiment was that large cities were centers of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.”
It may be difficult for us to imagine today, but the older first-wave immigrants, especially those among the elite of the country, propagated racist ideas about the Irish, Italians, Poles, and Jews in the late 1880s. Among the books published was Josiah Strong’s (1891) racist diatribe that blamed the white foreigners for diluting the “American race” and for spawning the crises of the city. As a solution to this problem, Strong proposed sending them back to Europe. In another case, during the 1920s, many outspoken anti-Semites operated in the open, including Henry Ford, who would not allow Jewish workers in his factories and financed a successful reprinting of the virulently anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a racist book that is still circulated today.
To a great extent, such racist and anti-Semitic attacks appeared alongside others accusing the new immigrants of harboring communist and anarchist or anticapitalist ideas. Thus anti-immigrant racism was a strong weapon used to call immigration itself into question. Around the turn of the century, reaction to the second wave of arrivals was so strong that it eventually led to a restriction of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. This was accomplished in a succession of federal acts that established quotas favoring first-wave Western European and Northern European countries. These quotas actually lasted until the immigration reform bill of 1965.
Fighting between employers and workers was not the only conflict of the time; conflict also took on a spatial manifestation. Areas in the city were marked off by ethnicity, class, race, and religion. For example, most large American cities historically have had two separate Irish neighborhoods—one for Irish Catholics, the other for Irish Protestants. These groups competed with each other over territory and access to public resources. Employers would also pit workers from different ethnic groups against each other in a largely successful effort to prevent union organizing and keep workers’ wages low. Thrasher’s study of Chicago gangs, discussed in Chapter 3, provides an excellent example of how these “defended neighborhoods” that are a sociospatial phenomenon of ethnicity came into being.
Earlier ideas about race and ethnicity and the immigrant experience are being challenged by the third wave of immigrants that has arrived since the 1970s. Changes to immigration laws enacted in 1965 replaced the earlier quota system (which had been designed to keep Asians and other non-European groups out of the country) with a preference system based on occupational characteristics. Supporters of the immigration reform legislation could not have anticipated the unprecedented response across the globe. Between 1968 and 1990, some 10 million people immigrated to the United States. Further reforms passed by the first Bush administration limited immigration to some 540,000 persons each year. But after intense lobbying from the US Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, this number was increased to 650,000 legal immigrants each year. This rate has not been observed here since the last great wave of immigration at the beginning of the twentieth century. And just as in the earlier period in our history, increased immigration is supported by business as a way to increase the labor pool—and thereby keep wages from increasing.
The composition of the third wave of immigrant groups is very different from that of earlier periods. During the first and second waves, 75 percent of the arrivals were from Europe. Today a similar percentage of arrivals are from Latin America and Asia. Each year since 1970, more than 55,000 Mexicans and 50,000 Filipinos have immigrated to the United States. In California, for example, 22 percent of new immigrants came from Asia and 43 percent from Mexico during the 1970s (Espiritu and Light, 1991). Also striking is the fact that the majority of new immigrants to the United States are female—and this is true even from countries such as Mexico and the Philippines, where women are often thought to be less independent. As a consequence of this new immigration, the United States of the twenty-first century will be more culturally diverse—and more Asian and Hispanic—than at any time in its history. To understand just how significant these changes will be, consider the fact that Hispanics will outnumber African Americans as the largest minority group in the United States early in the twenty-first century, and that even if immigration were halted completely, the US Hispanic population would still double within the next twenty years, from some 14 million to more than 30 million.
A third distinct characteristic of the new immigration is that it is economically diverse. Many recent immigrants exhibit the classic characteristics of the past: limited education, rural backgrounds, and limited resources. A large number, however, are the exact opposite. These well-endowed immigrants are educated—many have college degrees—they are former city dwellers, and they often come with enough personal financial resources to start their own businesses. In their home countries of India, Korea, the Philippines, and elsewhere, this loss of a young and highly educated population is referred to as a “brain drain.” Thus, many third-wave arrivals also achieve success in the United States in a relatively short time. According to Portes and Rumbaut (1990), in the decade between 1980 and 1990, professionals and technicians accounted for only 18 percent of the US labor force but represented 25 percent of the immigrant population.
This “bimodal” distribution—having two peaks: one high income, one low income—of immigration is a consequence of uneven development within the global system of capitalism. In the 1960s and 1970s, many countries underwent crash modernization programs that were not entirely successful. On the one hand, large numbers of the middle and working classes received technical and professional training. But upon graduation, their economies had not expanded fast enough to offer them work. On the other hand, agricultural reform programs and development of interior places forced many impoverished and uneducated rural residents into the cities. They too took a chance by immigrating rather than waiting around in their home countries for work (Espiritu and Light, 1991).
Some of the recent immigrants have not only been successful; they have realized opportunities in new ways. For example, Monterey Park, a suburb outside Los Angeles, became a focal point for new Chinese immigration. Between 1960 and 1988, the population went from 85 percent white to 50 percent Chinese, with other Asians also in residence. Consequently, the city has become known as the first “suburban Chinatown” (Arax, 1987; Fong, 1991), and it provides an excellent example of why we can no longer consider the ethnic neighborhood in large cities as the prime site for ethnic subcultures. Recent arrivals to the United States have invested over $1 billion of their own money in the suburb, and it is estimated that the Chinese own at least 66 percent of all business and property there (Espiritu and Light, 1991:43). Other areas of the country report a similar phenomenon of immigrant suburbanization, where in many cases new arrivals bypass the large city entirely.
Current immigration to the United States (and other developed nations) reflects changes in the global system of capitalism in another respect. Following the breakup of colonial systems after World War II, many European countries saw an increase in immigration from their former colonies—Caribbean blacks and Muslim and Hindu Indians in England, Indonesian and other groups in the Netherlands. At the end of the Second Indo-Chinese War, the United States admitted 300,000 Southeast Asian refugees, and the death squads and political conflicts in Central America in the 1980s brought another 500,000 refugees, despite efforts of the Reagan administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to prevent them from entering the country. And as noted earlier, each year some 50,000 people immigrate to the United States from the Philippines, our former colonial outpost in the South Pacific.
Audrey Singer’s analysis of immigration to metropolitan regions during the twentieth century suggests that the combination of recent immigration and historical settlement patterns of earlier ethnic groups has produced six types of immigrant gateway cities (see Box 7.4). Singer’s study of the immigrant gateway cities is important for our understanding of the effects of the new immigration on metropolitan regions across the country.
Box 7.4 Six Immigrant Gateway City Types
Former gateway cities: Above the national average in the percentage of immigrants during 1900–1930, followed by percentages below the national average in every decade through 2000. This category includes cities such as Buffalo, New York, and Cleveland, which were destinations for large numbers of immigrants in the early 1900s but no longer receive immigrants. Many of these older industrial cities are located in the Frost Belt.
Continuous gateway cities: Above-average percentage of immigrants in every decade of the twentieth century. Includes cities like Chicago and New York, which are long-established destinations for immigrants that continue to attract large numbers of foreign born. Many of these cities are located in the larger New York metropolitan region.
Post–World War II gateway cities: Low percentage of immigrants until after 1950, followed by percentages higher than the national average for the remainder of the century. Includes cities like Los Angeles and Miami, which were relatively small at the time of the Great Migration but have served as destinations for new immigrants in the past fifty years. Many of these cities are located in the Sun Belt.
Emerging gateway cities: Very low percentage of immigrants until 1970, followed by high proportions in the post-1980 period. Includes cities like Atlanta and Washington, which are located in metropolitan areas that nearly doubled in the 1980s and 1990s. They have experienced rapid immigrant growth in the past twenty years, and the total number of foreign born has increased five times during that period. With the exception of Washington, all are located in the Sun Belt.
Re-emerging gateway cities: Above-average percentage of immigrants during 1900–1930, below average until 1980, followed by rapid increases in post-1980 period. This category includes cities such as Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul, which were destinations for immigrants in the early twentieth century and now receive large numbers of immigrants. With the exception of the Twin Cities, all are located in the Sun Belt or in the West.
Pre-emerging gateway cities: Very low percentage of immigrants for the entire twentieth century. This category includes cities such as Salt Lake City, Utah, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, which experienced rapid growth of both foreign-born and native-born populations between 1980 and 2000. They attracted significant numbers of immigrants in the 1990s and appear to be emerging as new immigrant gateway cities for the twenty-first century. With the exception of Salt Lake City, all are Sun Belt cities, and most are located in the Southeast.
There are important differences in demographics and settlement patterns among these six types of immigrant gateway cities. Some are located in fast-growing metropolitan regions in the Sun Belt, while others are located in older and larger metropolitan regions of the Midwest and East Coast that have experienced slower overall population growth. Some of the cities have become multicultural melting pots, while others are dominated by a relatively smaller number of ethnic groups. Singer notes that in the fast-growing emerging gateway cities such as Atlanta and St. Louis, immigrants are settling in communities that are greatly stressed by rapid population growth—a situation different from that of those who have moved to cities with a long history of immigrant settlement.
SOURCE: Singer, The Rise of New Immigrant Gateways, 2004:18.
One problem with the analysis—something that is discussed in the report—is the focus on the gateway city, because most of the new immigrants live in suburban towns within the metropolitan region, not in the central city. Our focus on the sociospatial perspective will help us to understand the importance of moving beyond the city and looking at the metropolitan region more broadly when we study immigration and other demographic trends that affect our communities.
Although it is common to speak of ethnic neighborhoods in American cities—and most of us are familiar with Chinatowns, Mexican neighborhoods, Greektowns, and the like—urban sociologists are more likely to talk about the ethnic enclave, a concept that emphasizes the ways in which work, residence, and other forms of social interaction overlap in urban space. Much of this research focuses on the paradox of the ethnic enclave: the positive effects that social networks can provide for new immigrants, and the negative effects of concentration and isolation within the enclave. Increasingly, we must think of ethnic enclaves not as simply ethnic settlements in the central city, as a majority of new immigrants now reside in suburban communities of the metropolitan region (Gorrie, 1991).
The new immigration already has had a profound effect on settlement space within metropolitan regions across the country (Suro and Singer, 2003). Some groups have moved into older ethnic neighborhoods, greatly expanding their numbers and size. In southwest Chicago, for example, the Mexican neighborhood in Eighteenth Street/Pilsen has expanded across the Twenty-sixth Street/Little Village community into suburban communities beyond the city limits, while the older China town area near the Loop has seen extensive redevelopment that has doubled the number of business establishments and dwelling units. In these and other ethnic communities across the metropolitan region, local residents have constructed new settlement spaces rich with symbolic meanings—from Mexican storefronts identical to those found in Monterrey and Aguascalientes, the primary origins in Mexico for immigrants to Chicago and the Midwest, now reproduced in suburban settlement space, to a new riverfront park in the second Chinatown, designed by a Chinese American landscape architect, which reproduces traditional Chinese design elements in this new urban settlement space.
As this summary of settlement patterns for ethnic groups demonstrates, socio spatial relations continue to play a significant role in the lives of minority groups in the United States. Some groups have been able to move into the mainstream of American society and have gained access to employment, housing, and the quality of life that we believe all Americans should have. Others remain in segregated social spaces—ghettos, ethnic enclaves, barrios, or reservations—where they are isolated from opportunities in the larger society.
In the years to come, these new sources of ethnic formation and ethnic identity will influence US culture in ways we have yet to anticipate, just as the formidable influx of Eastern Europeans did some hundred years ago. At the beginning of the last century, many people feared that foreign workers would take away the jobs of American workers and dilute or destroy American institutions; yet those foreigners are now a permanent part of the American mosaic. In the 1990s, we had the lowest levels of unemployment in nearly half a century at the same time that immigration reached near-record levels, suggesting that immigrant workers need not take the jobs of American workers. Immigration was not a political issue. But in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we entered a period of prolonged economic crisis and one of the consequences has been a reexamining of immigration policy. In fact, some areas of the country, such as the extensive region bordering on Mexico in the Southwest, have local authorities that have become highly mobilized to stem illegal immigration, and the same increased vigilance is now characteristic of the federal government in managing flows of noncitizens into this country. Even the Obama administration has ramped up the deportation of illegal immigrants despite benefiting from the electoral support of Hispanics in both of his elections.
In a few short decades, the new immigrants of today will become part of an even greater American mosaic, living in ethnic neighborhoods if they choose to or living alongside other groups across the metropolitan region. Only time will tell what form this influence will take. Years ago it was proper to speak of an “urban mosaic” (a term used extensively by Robert Park) to capture the diversity of people and lifestyles in the city. Today the entire metropolitan region, both cities and suburbs, must be described this way.
As we have seen, urban and suburban settlement space is stratified by class, race, and gender. They are also differentiated according to ethnicity, race, age, and family status. Each lifestyle manifests its own daily rhythm within the settlement spaces each group has created within the metropolitan region. The built environment displays the expressive symbols of this interaction between social factors and local territory. But settlement space also directs behavior in certain ways. In contemporary societies, it is likely that gender roles are conditioned as much by the spatial restrictions of the built environment as by patriarchal domination. Sociospatial relations among groups and individuals are also conditioned by class and race distinctions ranging from inclusion in neighborhoods of shared interests to the extreme case of ghetto segregation.
In the next chapter we will examine the important concepts of neighborhood and community that are used to understand urban daily life.
class stratification
consumption and the reproduction of social relations
socioeconomic status
gated communities
differential groups
yuppies and suburban middle class
working poor
ghettoized poor
gendered space
women and the environment
gay and lesbian communities
gateways of immigration
1. What are the differences in lifestyles created principally by differential access to economic resources?
2. Is there a difference between the middle-class lifestyle in the central city and the suburbs?
3. What are the differences between the working poor and the ghettoized poor and what do studies show about those differences?
4. Are there gated communities in the area where you grew up? Do these communities match the description of those in this chapter? In what ways?
5. Discuss the phenomenon of urban nightlife and its aspects.
6. Discuss the issue of immigration and its consequences. What is the difference between attitudes toward immigrants in the late twentieth and the twenty-first century?