International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17(3), 1993.
What's So New About Divided Cities?*
PETER MARCUSE
A divided city is certainly nothing new, historically. Never mind the slave quarters of ancient Athens and Rome, the ghettos of the middle ages, the imperial quarters of colonial cities, or the merchant sections of the medieval trading cities. At least from the outset of die industrial revolution, cities have been divided in a way quite familiar to us. Disraeli coined the phrase 'dual city' in the 1860s,' and even earlier Engels had described, in striking detail worth rereading today,2 the differences between the back-alley tenements of the working class in Manchester and the houses on the main streets in front of them.
Is the fact that cities today, at least in the advanced industrialized economies of the West, are not 'dual', but more like 'quartered' cities, new? The purpose of (his paper is to try to isolate that which is really new — post 1979, generally — about the structure and functioning of our cities, and then to suggest some implications of the patterns that are continuing ones and the ones found to be new. The argument about a lurning-poiut somewhere in the postwar period, of a shift from a fordisl to a postfordist society, from a manufacturing to a service economy, from a national to a global organization of production, distribution and services, from a welfare to a post-welfare state, from modem to postmodern structures, will not be repeated here. The object is rather to specify concretely what aspects of the present urban situation are attributable to these recent causes, what aspects are longer-term and more enduring, and what consequences for the possibilities or change flow from the answer.
To recapitulate the argument about the patterns of the contemporary city1 briefly, the city may be seen as divided roughly into the following quarters:4
(1) Luxury housing, not really part of the city but enclaves or isolated buildings, occupied by the top of the economic, social, and political hierarchy.
(2) The gentrified city, occupied by the professional-maiiagerial-tcchnical groups, whether yuppie or muppie without children.
♦ I am indebted to discussions with Michael llarloe, Susan and Norman Fainslein and John Priedmann for some of the thoughts expressed in this article. That does not sjggesi lhal lliey agree with all ils conclusions, and misiakc9 of course remain my own.
t.  Tor a discussion of the phrase. Ils uses and misuses, see Marcuse (I989n).
2. See Marcus (1974) for an excellent new discussion, comparing Engels' account to the much les; pcrccplivc accounts of his contemporaries.
3. The reference throughout is to the major cities of.the advanced industrialized private niarkel economies. The modct used is of course New York City, and many of ihe examples are drawn from lhal cily. bul parallel, although not identical, examples witl be found In most olher major cities.
4. Sec Marcuse (1989a) and (1991). 'Quartered' is used bolli in lite sense of 'drawn and <|<iartcrcd' and of residential 'quarters', although there are also essentially four of such quarters. Ihe very wealthy not being bound by any specific spatial configuration as to where they live. For slightly different approaches, also, however, differing from duat city' formulation, see Mollcnknpf and Caslells (1991), especially llie Introduction and Conclusion, reviewed by Bob Beauregard with fncus on this issue in this journal. 17.t (1993). 143. and Wallock (1987).
© Joinl F.clilors and Basil Blackwell Ud 1993 Published by llbckwcll Publishers.
108 Cowley Rirad. Oxford OX* lip. UK mid 238 Main Slrccl. Cambridge. MA 02142. USA
356
Peter Marcuse
What's so new about divided cities?
357
(3) The suburban city, sometimes single-family housing in the outer city, other times apartments near the centre, occupied by skilled workers, mid-range professionals, upper civil servants.
(4) The tenement city, sometimes cheaper single-family areas, most often rentals, occupied by lower-paid workers, blue- and white-collar, and generally (although less in the United States) including substantial social housing.
(5) The abandoned city, the end result of trickle-down, left for the poor, the unemployed, Ihe excluded, where in the United Stales home-less housing for the homeless5 is most frequently located.
These fell divisions in the residential city are roughly paralleled by divisions in the economic cily:
(1) The places of big decisions include a network of high-rise offices, brownstones or older mansions in prestigious locations, but are essentially locationally not circumscribed; it includes yachts for some, the back seats of stretch limousines for others, airplanes and scattered residences for still others.
(2) The city of advanced services, of professional offices tightly clustered in downtowns, wilh many ancillary services internalized in high-rise office towers, heavily enmeshed in a wide and technologically advanced communicative network.
(3) The city of direct production, including not only manufacturing but also the production of advanced services, in Saskia Sassen's phrase; government offices, the back offices of major firms, whether adjacent to their front offices or not, located in clusters and with significant agglomerations but in varied locations within a metropolitan area — sometimes, indeed, outside of the central city itself.
(4) The city of unskilled work and the informal economy, small-scale manufacturing, warehousing, sweatshops, technically unskilled consumer services, immigrant industries, closely intertwined with the cities of production and advanced services mid ilms located near them, but separately and in scattered clusters,6 locations often determined in part by economic relations, in part by the patterns of the residential city.
(5) The residual city, the city of Ihe less legal portions of the informal economy, the city of storage where otherwise undesired (NIMBY) facilities are located, generally congruent with Ihe abandoned residential city.
As one progresses down the scale both in the quarters of the residential city and of the economic city, in the United States, the proportion of Afro-American, hispanic and immigrant households increases; the proportion of women heading households increases. Race, class and gender create overlapping patterns of differentiation — invidious differentiation, for there is no doubt that the differences are not simply of lifestyles' or "special needs', but reflect positions in a hierarchy of power and wealth in which some decide and others are decided for.1
Are these patterns spatial? They are certainly reflected in space, and their spatial characteristics strongly influence their substance. But they are not rigid spatial patterns, in Ihe old sense in which Burgess and Parks tried to describe city structure. And their spatial pattern varies widely from city to city, country to country; Los Angeles, for instance, has a pattern I have described as fluid, separations as of oil and water together with walled enclaves, rather than the more clearly bounded and more homogeneous quarters of New York City (Marcuse 1992b is a preliminary version of that description).
5. For Ihe concept of 'home-less housing' and discussion of its location, see Marcuse and Vergara (1992).
6. Sec. again, some of Saskia Sassen's work, for instance Sassen (1989). whose brief but provocative comments on the spatial aspects of Ihe trends she describes deserve further development.
7   I in a discussion of lite differences between special needs and Invidious differentiation, see Marcuse (1989b).
But the spatial patterns are hard to avoid, and deserve much further empirical exploration. The 1990 census results will certainly help, in the USA.
Are these patterns new? In some ways, of course not. The divisions of society, whether one chooses to speak of classes or socio-economic status or consumption or racial/ethnic/ colonial groupings, are age-old; those derived directly from capitalism are hardly products of the postwar era. Whether the postfordist system has created new classes, or simply shifts in size and influence and perhaps function among them, is debatable; certainly all of the groupings described above have existed for at least decades. 'Yuppies- is a new term, but discussion of the managerial revolution is not, nor are arguments about the nature and role of a professional-managerial-technical class. Homelessness may be different today from what it was in the 1930s — that argument is made below — but it is not the existence of homelessness, nor even the numbers of those who are without shelter, that is new.
Perhaps the extent of inequality within the city, among the divisions of the city, is new? Inequality as such in the city is certainly nothing new. The palace:hovel ratio was enormous in the middle ages; so was the mansion-.tenement ratio in the nineteenth century; and so is the penthouse condominiunrabandoned unit ratio today. It is more sensible to express outrage at all three than to spend time trying to decide which is worst.' In the recent past, the gap between the richest and the poorest has widened, then narrowed, then widened again, narrowing in the immediate postwar period and widening again since 1970; but the order of magnitude of the changes hardly demonstrates a qualitative turning point within this period.'
Inequality is in any event the wrong concept to employ in evaluating what is happening within a city, particularly in looking at the distribution of housing and residential benefits, for two reasons: First, inequality suggests some continuous linear distribution within which each individual or household can be placed. In fact, historically there have been major differentiations by group, or class or caste or status, quite discontinuous in their impact. For policy purposes it is much more important to locate the breaks, the basic lines of cleavage, than simply to measure the extent of the differences. The concept of inequality can obscure those cleavages. Second, equality lends to become synonymous with uniformity.10 That is not what is desired; Ihe equation is the Achilles' heel of all but the best of the east European product. Equality of real choice may be an acceptable formulation for the goal, but it may result in wide inequality of result.
Invidious differentiation may be the most accurate, if not the most monosyllabic, formulation for the real issue. Not inequality perse, but inequality that reflects a hierarchical relationship, one of domination and subordination, inclusion and exclusion, privilege and deprivation, is the policy concern." But even looking at the city from this perspective, differentiation of housing quality and divisions into areas invidiously differentiated front each other are hardly new. Even in the nineteenth century, one could easily have distinguished mansions from middle-class apartments from working class tenements from skid rows; Clara Cardia (forthcoming) has mapped the changing areas of such housing in New York City over a period of a hundred years.
8. If the range of inequality were the onty consideration, the eastern European housing syslems. which have met with widespread condemnation among their own residents as well as in the West, would come out as the least unequal by almost any measure; yet that hardly makes them ideal patterns to ennllale elscwlteie.
9. The preliminary (990 census figures seem to bear this out: a widening of the gap. but on a slmlll scale. See the controversy around Paul R. Kruman's calculations of the share of growth reaped by the richest I %, the Treasury Department's response, and the criticisms of that response, and lite series of reports in Ihe New York Times, Sunday 26 July 1992. pp. t8. 30.
10. There is a substantial, sometimes esoteric, lileralure on the definitions and measurement of equality. Herbert Gans's contributions are among the best; those centring on legally cognizable differences are among Ihe most interesting, e.g. Hawkins v. Shaw (1992) and the line of cases and literature it generaled: for interesting reflections on equality in the racial context, see the pieces collected in Abrams. Marcuse a at. (1965).
11. Rolf Kuhn lias spelled this out in Ihe context of the GDR in Kuhn (1985).
© Joinl Editors and Basil Mackwcll I (d 199}.
© Joinl Editors and llji.il Blackwell Lid 1993.
358
Peter Marcuse
Wliat then is so new about what we witness today? It is. it seems to me. an under-(lel).itcd question, but an important one." I want to argue here that there are very specific features of the contemporary scene that are. in fact. new. They may be seen as particular characteristics of the 'postfordist city', but leave that phrase in quotation marks for now. These new characteristics include:
(1) The nature and extent of homelessness: advanced homelessness.
(2) The growth in the size of certain quarters — notably, the gentrified city and the abandoned city — and the shrinking of others, notably the tenement city: realignment.
(3) The dynamic nature of the quarters, in which each grows only at the expense of the others: displacement as the mechanism of expansion.
(4) The importance which the identity of the quarter has in the lives of its residents: the intensity of turf allegiance.
(5) The walls created between quarters, and the intensity with which they are defended: turf barricades and turf battles.
(6) The role of government, not only acceding to but promoting the quartering of the city in the private interest, fortifying both the gentrified and the abandoned city: the subsuming of the public interest under the private.
(7) The nature of the lines of political conflict and coalition-building: reoriented political cleavages.
There are three other new phenomena, again linked to each other, which are necessary background for the above, but into which I do not propose to go here:'1
(8) The growing internationalization of the connections between certain sections of the city and the outside world, with impacts in all quarters of the city.
(9) The growing centralization of control of economic activity, with the locus of centralization being a limited number of global cities.
(10) Changes in the technical aspects of the production of goods and the production of services.
To take the first seven points up one at a time:
(I) Contemporary homelessness is not just like depression homelessness. or nineteenfh-Lculnry homelessness. or homelessness in the middle ages. Today the physical and technical resources are abundantly available to provide every man. woman and child in the United States with a decent home. That has probably been true for some time, but the failures to order society rationally so as to avoid homelessness have been more visible in times of economic recession and less in times of prosperity. Today, that is no longer the case. Today. those who are homeless or at risk of homelessness are likely to be so in good times as well as bad: the figures since 1975 show a steadily rising rate of homelessness as employment falls and also as it rises, as average wages go down and as they go up." Needless to say. what is new is new not because people have newly changed, as some of the proponents of the culture of poverty and underclass theses hold, but because of ihc different situation in which people, vulnerable and excluded then as today. Find themselves today.
The role of government is also significantly different today from its role in previous explosions of homelessness. The comparison wilh the Great Depression is instructive.
12 For one otitic few explicit discussions, see Fainslein and Fainslein (1989). On the uniqueness of Ihe £c Mr ideal ion process. Chris Hamncll has commented lhal Ml can be seen as constituting no more than nil historically and spatially specific manifestation of a sel of more general Iransformalion processes' (lianmcll and Randolph 1986). The question, of course, is for what purpose lite line between 'general' and 'specific' is sought to be drawn.
IV  On lhese points, see Fainslein el al. (1992) and Sassen (t99t).
M    the figures are provided in my cimlribulion lo llarttnul tlausennan (forthcoming).
© loinl Editors and Basil Blackwcll Lid 199)
What's so new about divided cities? 359
In the 1930s, federal public housing in the United States was adopted for the working class, for those either already employed or presumptively only temporarily unemployed. They were considered a 'submerged middle class': it was assumed public housing residents were upwardly mobile. The homeless programmes adopted nationally today (locally the pattern is similar) provide for emergency accommodations, and. if they provide for permanent housing at all. tend to assume that coupled with it should be a major effort to pull those on the streets up to the level where they will appreciate and take care of permanent housing. Such efforts may indeed be essential for an adequate programme for many of the homeless, as well as for many of the already housed. But die assumption dial the problem is a personal one. that it arises from particular characteristics of the homeless, is new. Unlike charitable housing programmes a century ago. when the assumption wits that improved living conditions would create the conditions that would largely by themselves reform the lives of slum-dwellers, who were, apart from their living conditions, essentially like everyone else, the homeless today are treated as essentially different from the rest of society. The policies resulting from such assumptions are visible today. And. linked to such policies as cause is to effect, those who are not housed today are not employed today either, nor will they be tomorrow, nor the next day. They are simply not needed: providing them with shelter is thus charity, not part of an effort to create a healthy economy.
Contemporary homelessness thus is large-scale, permanent and independent of the short-term business cycle, a combination never before existing in an advanced industrial society. It represents the inability of the market and the unwillingness of the state to care for the most basic needs of a significant segment of the population (see the misnamed 'underclass' discussion), and their consequent complete exclusion from or suppression in the spatial fabric of a technologically and economically advanced city, (t may thus fairly be called 'advanced homelessness'.
(2) The linked pattern of expansion of the gentrified city and of the abandoned city, at the expense of the tenement city, have been described in detail elsewhere (Mnrcttse. 1985'. Smith and Williams. 1986) and the economic logic underlying the changes, both on the labour market and the real estate market ends, is clear. Detailed quantitative discussion for the United States should be postponed till data from the 1990 census, now slowly becoming available, is subject to analysis. Only one point is worth taking up briefly here: that which emerges from the 'underclass' discussion.
In a number of studies, most notably some of those brought together by Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson (1991). it is argued that the 'underclass' is shrinking" One might thus expect the size of the abandoned quarters of cities, as here defined, to be shrinking. But the argument is fallacious. It relies for its statistical measure on die use of the index of dissimilarity, a measure of segregation that is quite useful in presenting a gross comparative view of developments among different cities, but provides no measure either of the intensity of segregation nor its spatial pattern.16 In the more detailed analysis by Paul A. Jargowsky and Mary Jo Bane in the same volume, the figures for New York City are given. Using a definition of ghetto neighbourhoods — more than 40% of the residents under the poverty line — that may well approximate the definition of the aliandoned quarters of a city, they find that the number of residents of such neighbourhoods increased between 1970 and 19B0from 134.139 to 477.621. Similar results are presented for other
15. See in particular Ihe contributions by Peterson and by Reynolds Farley in Jencks and Peterson (1991).
16. The index calculates Ihe percentage of a population group lhal has lo move in order for Ihe proportion in each subunil (generally, census tract) lo be equal lo Ihe proportion in the unit as a whole (generally, lire city). Thus 100 is complete segregalion. 0 is uniform mixture. Bui Ihe index says nothing of Ihc pattern of segregalion. i.e. whether all more segregated subunils are concentrated together or scattered, and il says nothing about Ihe degree of concentration, i.e. if the proportion minority in a cily is 10%. and Iwo equally populated adjacent census tracts each are 40% minority. Ihe same number will have lo move as if 80% of Ihe minority population lived in one of Ihe tracts and 20% in Ihe other.
© Jolnl Editors and Basil Blackwcll Ltd 1993.
360
Peter Marcuse
major north-eastern and north-central cities, i.e. Philadelphia goes from 49,657 to 127,134, Chicago from 74,370 to 194,338."
(3) In earlier periods, the expansion of residential areas Tor use by particular groups came out by a process of new settlement, the incorporation of new areas into the existing urban structure. New York City is a classic case: the northward movement of population in the nineteenth century, the outward movement following train and subway lines in the lale 1800s and early 1900s, the suburbanization after the first and second world wars, have all been graphically traced." Ilaussman's forcible slum clearance in France, redevelopment schemes in London several decades later, were forerunners of the displacement thai today accompanies expansion; but only in the last 15 years or so have the twin phenomena of gentrificalion and abandonment played a major role in city restructuring."
Displacement is perhaps a more central concept than gentrificalion here. Alan Murie (1991) highlights the displacement of working-class and poor council housing tenants by home owners, of higher income and occupational status, over time, as council housing is privatized. The changing demographics of public housing in the United States are largely a function of public policy, and many have left public housing when they would have preferred to stay because of such policies. And the patterns creating displacement are linked: at one end abandonment replaces a working-class occupancy by the very poor and the unemployed, Ihemselves at high risk of becoming homeless altogether; at the other end professional-iiiatiagerial-technical types, when they gentrify a neighbourhood, evict those below thcin occnpalionally and by income, while the very rich i.solale themselves from all others by iiicieasingly crass measures. And those in between, in the tenement and suburban quarters, arc pushed either up or down in the process.
The new pattern is thus one of the replacement of groups within one area by members of oilier groups: the conversion of a quarter from use by one strata/class to use by another. The city, through policies of triage, tip-zoning, allocation of public services, investment in infrastructure, and often directly by its housing policies, from the privatization of public housing to the sale of foreclosed units, if not directly by planned land acquisition and disposition directly as in earlier urban renewal, provides substantial impetus for the process.
Displacement as the fundamental mechanism of expansion, propelled by the private market but shaped and accelerated by governmental action, is thus new in scope and effect.
(4) The role of residence and neighbourhood has increased geometrically in the last 40 years. Slum clearance schemes in the 1920s aroused negligible opposition on the grounds of turf. Geographically based community solidarity was the exception rather than the rule. That changed significantly as a result of the earliest redevelopment efforts, e.g. Robert Moses' in New York City. But even in the 1960s (he hope was still for integration, for better housing and better neighbourhoods, whether in the existing location or not, the goal equality of opportunity to move and choose location. Both public policy and, although not uniformly, actual patterns of residence reflected these goals; segregation, at least in its racial form, diminished by many definitions.
Not only have the facts changed,2" but goals have changed also. Neighbourhood has
17    I tic reason southern cities do not show similar changes may have lo do with southern lo northern migration;
for western cities, census definitions (here calculalions useSMSA dala) may have an impact onihe resulls.
Again, careful analysis of the 1990 dala along similar lines should be revealing. 1«   See Cardia (forthcoming), K. Jackson (1984), Spengler (1930), Walker (1970). For Philadelphia, see
Warner (1968); for Boslon, see Edel and Sclar (1984); for London, see A.A. Jackson (1973).
19 For a discussion of causes, see Marcuse (I98S and 1991).
20 Alihough the resulls of ihe 1990 census have no) ye) been analysed, the inlra-cily patterns experienced by most cily residenls certainly re fled an inlensilicalion of segregalion and separalion. The new pallerns may be belter seen from measures of concent ration lhan from measures of segregalion (Ihe dissimilarity index, discussed in n. 16 above.) See Ihe preliminary resulls of Andrew Beveridge of Queen's College, reported in Ihe New York Ttmes, 15 July 1992.
© loinl Edilo.j mil Basil Blickwdl Lid 1993.
What's so new about divided cities? 361
become more than a source of security, Ihe base of a supportive network, as it has long been; it has become a source of identity, a definition of who a person is and where she or he belongs in society. The shift from workplace lo residence-based self-idenlification lias been much discussed.11 Whether such residence-based self-classifications are consumption-based or not, and what their relation to product ion-based ideniities is, remains much disputed; certainly there is a great deal of congruence between residential location and economic position, as our descriptions of the quarters of Ihe cily, summarized above, suggest. That the importance of neighbourhood in the equation is greater by a quantum leap than in earlier limes seems hard lo dispute; Ihe intensity of lurf allegiance is a new element in the urban (and perhaps as well the national) picture today.
(5) Putting the new displacement dynamic and the new intensity of turf allegiance together, increasing divisions between quarters and increasing battles over residcnlial turf become inevitable. Any week's worth of Ihe New York Times issues will disclose ihem: violent Afro-American v. Hassidic Jewish confrontaiions in Brooklyn; anli-gentrificalion marches on Ihe Lower East Side; protests against high-rise re-zoning for luxury units by the middle-class and yuppie-inuppie upper West Side al (lie Trump development sile; conflicts over the disposition of city-owned property for homeless accommodations in working-class and abandoned Harlem; passage of a Fair Share ordinance to deal with the apparently intractable problem of locating NIMBYs, an ordinance generally approved in theory but disregarded when it comes lo any concrete issue, os recenlly in lite localioit of homeless housing; and so on and on.
Both the market and city government have sought walls between quarters thai might avoid direct clashes; what they seek is more like barricades than boundaries. Rivers are of course natural boundaries: the location of a project such as Battery Park Cily provides a wonderful natural barrier against the intrusion of outsiders, and every architectural and policy means available was used to ensure Ihe essential homogeneity and security of its residents. In other cases, redevelopment projects have formed such boundaries; Ihe history of the West Side Urban Renewal Project and the Morningside Heights Neighbourhood Renewal Plan provide exemplary evidence. The conflicts are no longer simply among gangs coming from a particular neighbourhood, sports clubs or local school loyalties, or even simply ethnic, religious and national tensions. They are geographically based, and divide ultimately along a few sharp cleavages — four are suggested here — as never before. Turf-based tensions and measures to avoid their explosion are a qualitatively new and pervasive phenomenon on the New York City scene. The prevalence of barbed wire, and indeed the razor-edge wire developed by the United Stales army for military use after (he second world war, is a graphic and frightening symbol of the cleavages running throughout the city.
And not only New York City. My current and limited exposure lo southern California suggests that walls and fences are, not metaphorically but actually, an increasing part of the accepted everyday landscape in (hat Horatio Alger city of fluid boundaries even more than elsewhere." New private cities are built with walls around ihem, policed by private security patrols whose permission is needed for access. Even in the public city, fences around developments are ubiquitous; whether il be luxury coops or public housing, each cluster wishes to be protected from intrusion from (he outside. The scale of the phenomenon exceeds anything heretofore seen.
Where 'defence of turf was once a phrase used lo describe only Ihe conduct of street gangs, it today describes the conduct of the majority of the city's residents, the rich perhaps in even more extreme form lhan the poor.
21.
22.
Kaiznelson (1984) is slid Ihe leading discussion. See Leavill and Goldstein (1990); (1992b).
© loinl Edilors ind Basil Black well Lid 1993.
3ň2
Peter Marcuse
(6) Government has always contributed to the invidious differentiation of sections of llie ciiy from each other, in ways that should have long ago made the old hypotheses of 'natural preferences' and 'market forces' leading to stratification no longer defensible. Dm ilie mechanisms by which such actions were legitimated have changed significantly over time. In ihe planned cities nf the feudal period, monarchic decisions did not need 10 pay even lip service 10 market needs; in the market ciiies, development was incremenial, and planning directly controlled by associations of merchants, not by mechanisms of allocation by price. In the brief heyday of laissez-faire, working-class quarters were allowed 10 spread virtually without regulation; but the resultant externalities, the dangers of fire and epidemic and social explosion, were so great as to lead to public regulation almost from ihe outset. Haussman's actions in Paris were justified by both military and technical needs: ihat ihey produced a radical restructuring of residential locations by class was taken as nunc an incidental than an intended consequence of government action. Thus, before ihe modern era of redevelopment and urban renewal, government action was seen as independent of, or indeed in opposition to, the actions of private interests in the privale market.
Wiih redevelopment and urban renewal government powers were for the first time clearly and openly placed at the service of private interests, but under the claim that the comciiipljitcd result was a public benefit. A purely private benefit would not, some courts ruled, justify the use of public powers such as 'eminent domain'.23 The separation of public and private spheres remained intact in theory, if often blurred in practice. It is litis distinction that has today evaporated.
Under slogans ranging from economic development to public—privale partnership, government in the United States has for the first time unabashedly taken the position that the incrciise in privale profits is per se a public benefit, and without any reliance on redistribution or any control of ultimate benefits. In western Europe and Japan such an assumption has for a longtime, at least since the end of the first world war, been accepied as the grounds for national economic policy. But that acceptance has been legitimated by its linkage with the policies of a welfare state (or perhaps in Japan with social benefits ;i I loomed directly by industry). That linkage is absent in this new phase of governmental action in ihe urban arena in the United States. Again, in contrast to western Europe, economic policy focused on direct aid to business has been more visible at the local than in the national level (with some major exceptions, of course).
The rise of what might be called local economic development policy" has in fact been paralleled by a radical conservative shift in national and local policies and ideology, departing from the earlier welfare-state compromise reached in most of western and northern Europe. Programmes such as the UDAG, Urban Development Action Grants, which provide direct ledcral subsidies for municipal actions from land acquisition to infrastructure investment lor the purpose of aiding private business enterprises, or programmes of tax ahaietiietii and tax exemption or municipal loan programmes, or the currently touted enterprise zones, aid private firms virtually without conditions." Where private market cfforts to shift occupancy of given areas of the city from lower (price-wise) to higher uses has faltered or met resident opposition, government lias not hesitated to move in with direci physical force. The recent 'clearing' of Tompkins Square Park in the Lower East Side of ihe homeless who lived there, so tliat the occupants of the gentrified housing in
23   Sec Hugman (1975: 311 ft).
24. Ndi lo be confused with community economic development, which, as far as most gciverniiicnls in the tinned Stales arc cdnccrncd. is more pnnliiiicnl in sl.nlciitcnls and .speeches than in actual policy
-V Sec Ihe several analyses hy Stale Senator Franz Uichler nf real estalc lax benefit programmes in New 1 "ik (ily. or Ihe analysis by Susan Palnslcin (1987). or by Ihe Soulh Brooklyn Legal Services Office .....,c Mclrolcch project in Brooklyn. On enterprise ranes. see William Goldsmith's analysis (1982).
f'l Iniiil liililiirs and Basil Blui-kwcll Lid 1991.
What's so new about divided cities?
363
the neighbourhood would not be disturbed and the process of gentrification might continue, is but the latest and most blatant example in New York City.2''
At the same time, political leaders are using government to build and reinforce ghettos. Per se, that is nothing new, of course. Public housing, at its inception, was racially segregated; the subsidization of the suburbs ghettoized women by gender and class. But the tendency, at least in talk and, in the case of public housing, in law, was in the opposite direction for the first postwar years. Today, in a movement that can find its magnification beginning in the early 1980s, the pattern of ghettoization is reoccurring in vastly greater force. Look at a map of the location of public housing in any major city in the United Stales;" look at where homeless shelters, AIDS clinics, drug treatment centres, halfway houses, are located, and you will find a pattern in which some areas are saturaied (die abandoned city), and others are insulated (Ihe suburban and gentrified city). Where there is counter-movement and protest, as in the Fair Share efforts in New York City, the outcome of the battle is hardly in doubt: segregation will prevail.
This open subsumption of the public interest under the promotion of private profit is thus new, both in its bald assumption of legitimacy and in the directness in which its goals are skewed upwards. Under this ideological cover government has fortified well-to-do areas, the gentrified and suburban cities, and has concentrated and exacerbated the problems of the ghettos, the abandoned city. It has contributed to the increase of invidious differentiation within United States cities in a way that goes beyond anything that preceded it.
(7) The political consequences of these new developments make change in the status quo difficult. On the one hand, coalition-building is made more difficult as the spaiial quartering of the residential ciiy reinforces economic and social divisions. The conscious policy of Ihe established political leadership has been — quiie logically, and in some cases quite openly, as with Mayor Koch in New York — to base its control on alliances of the middle and professional-uianagerial-iechnical and ruling groups, geographically tile .suburban and gentrified cities and the luxury enclaves, dividing the less well-paid working bhte-and white-collar workers from the very poor, the tenement city from the abandoned city. On the other hand, as the areas of conflict appear more and more residentially and neighbourhood based, and thus more locally oriented, it becomes more difficult to develop a common agenda among disempowered groups on any broader base, whether city-wide or national.
Turf-based battles can be the basis for broader coalitions if they leave the pariicnlariiies of the turf and take up the issues of policy and practice that underlie turf-based problems. Gentrification directly affects particular areas only, but the economic and social forces that produce the pressure for gentrification are city-wide — indeed, much broader limit thai. II needs to be dealt with on that broader terrain, if the champions of one turf are not simply to fight the residents of another turf, shifting the locus of gentrification bin not altering its impact.
The history of social movements in the last decades has demonstrated these facts amply. If (he focus is fighting one urban renewal plan, success or failure will depend on local strength; if the issue is translated to an attack on the urban renewal programme us a whole, local issues being only exemplary of common problems, wider changes may be produced. If a community group seeks only to develop housing it itself will own or manage, it may divide itself from its natural allies elsewhere; if it seeks to change the city's housing policies, coalitions with its natural allies will be easy. In the most recent experience in New York City, attempts by tenement and abandoned communities to control what happens in llteir
26. Neil Smith (1992) provides ■ graphic descriplion. and its conlcxt. .....
27. The paliern has been Iraeed for New York City. Philadelphia. Chicago. Cincinnati liml I?icliiiii.n.I. at least thai t know of.
icl lninl Fililors and Basil Blackwell Ltd 199.1.
364
Peter Marcuse
Wlwl's so new about divided cities?
365
own neighbourhoods, in New York Ciiy at the Communiiy Board level, have led to ihe strategy of development of local communiiy plans governing zoning, investment in public facilities etc. As long as the campaign was to change the charier of the city to permit such local plans to have effect, a broad coalition was developed; now that partial victory lias been achieved, each communiiy board is pursuing its own plan, and the broad-based coalition earlier in process of formation has dissolved.
The political problem is not accidental. Divisions have always plagued oppositional movements: racism and sexism have divided directly political movements, sexism has lieen a problem in ihe civil rights movement and racism a thorny issue in the women's movement. Religious and ethnic differences can be divisive. But the focus on turf accentuates the differences qualitatively; perhaps there are local parallels to what is happening in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Locally, smart political leaders today see these divisions as desirable: decentralization takes a city-wide leadership away from the difficulties of allocation, yet leaves cily-wide, and critical, policies out of reach of turf-based decentralized entities. Each community board is given a greater voice in deciding whether it wants its potholes fixed or ihe grass cut in iis parks, a pittance of new housing or of reliabiliiated housing; bui how much money is allocated to housing, and what cily-wide prioriiies in allocation of revenues are, become questions out of the reach of community influence."1
So, while the restructuring of cities, the creation of deep and shifting divisions within them, are of long standing, important aspects of the particular form that restructuring takes loday are new. Whether ihe new outweighs the old depends on the purpose of the question. If the point is thai what is wrong, inhuman, uncivic, invidiously discriminatory, in advanced cilies loday is something unseen before, that injustice in the city is a recent phenomenon, allrilitilable to events since ihe first world war or since 1970 or so, and the remedy is thus lu learn to deal will) these new forces and thereby return to an earlier long-term trend of steady progress, integration, justice and civic democracy, then no — what is happening is iiol a new and unfortunate exception 10 a benign long-term pattern. But if the question lias to do wiih the need to modify strategies of change, to create new coalitions to provide democratic control over the forms and functions of cities and what happens within them, io adapt Inng-ienn efforts to create really human urban environments to the specific ciiciimsiuiiccs of today, then there is substantial new will) which io deal.
l'elcr Marclise, The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Avery Hall, Col.....bia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
References
Abrains, C, P. Marcuse et al. (1965) Equality. Pantheon Press, New York.
Beauregard, R.A. (ed.) (1989) Economic restructuring and political response. Urban Affairs Annual
Review, vol. 34, Sage, Beverly Hills. Beveridge, A. (1992) Analysis. Reported in the New York Times, 15 July, 1992. Cardia, C. (forthcoming) In P. Marcuse (ed.), The permanent housing shortage: the history of
working class housing in New York City, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, lidel, M. and E. Sclar (1984) Shaky palaces: homeownership and social mobility in Boston's
suburbanization. Columbia University Press, New York. Faiiislein, S. (1987) The politics of criteria: planning for the redevelopment of Times Square. In
P. Fischer and J. Forester (eds), Confronting values in policy analysis. Sage, Beverly Hills.
28 The handling of the CHAS, Ihe newly mandated Comprehensive Housing Affordabilily Strategy each ciiy iniisi adopt under ihe 1990 Housing Act. is evidence; where Ihe law technically requires a clear and formal sialemenl or priorities among policies and programmes, city leaders do everything in Iheir power to modify ihe regulations Io make these requirements meaningless, and then deliberately fill out Ihe forms so dial no traceable commitments will be contained in Ihe required reports. See Marcuse (1992a).
_and N.l. Fainstein (1989) Technology, the new international division of labor, and location:
continuities and disjunclures. In Beauregard (1989). _, Ian Gordon and M. Harloe (eds) (1992) Divided cilies: New York and London in the
contemporary world. Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge, MA. Gans, H.J. (1973) More equality. Pantheon Books, New York.
Goldsmith, W. (1982) Enterprise rones: if they work, we're in trouble. International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 6.3, 435-42. Hagman, D.G. (1975) Urban planning and land development control law. West Publishing Co..
St Paul. MINN.
llamncll, C. and B. Randolph (1986) Tenurial Iransformalion and Ihe Hal break-up markei in Luidou:
the British condo experience. In Smith and Williams (1986). Hawkins v. Shaw (1972) US Court of Appeals. Fifth Circuil, 461 F.2d 1171. Jackson, A.A. (1973) Semi-detached London: suburban development, life and transport. Allen and
Unwin, London.
Jackson, K.T. (1984) Technology and Ihe ciiy: transportation and social form in New York. Annuls
of the New York Academy of Sciences 424, 283—8. Jencks, C. and P.E. Peterson (eds) (1991) 77ie- urban underclass. The Brookings Institution,
Washington DC.
Kalznelson, I. (1984) Ciiy trenches: urban politics and the patterning of class in the United States. Pantheon, New York.
Kuhn, R. (1985) Lösung der Wohnungsfrage als soziales Problem in ihrem Einfluß auf l^bcnsweise und Stadtgestaltung. Akademie für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim Zk der SED, Berlin (April).
Leavill, J. and C. Goldslein (1990) The doors are closed, die lights are oul. Architecture California (August), 56.
Marcus, S. (1974) Engels, Manchester and the working class. Random House, New York. Marcuse, P. (1985) Genlriflcalion, abandonment, and displacement: connections, causes and policy
responses in New York City, Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law 28, 195—240. __(1989a) 'Dual city': a muddy metaphor for a quartered ciiy. International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 14.4, 697-708. _(1989b) The pitfalls of specialism: special groups and the general problem of housing, hi
S. Rosenberry and C. Hartman (eds) Housing Issues of the 90s, Praeger, Weslport. CONN. _(1991) Housing markets and labour markets in ihe quartered ciiy. In J. Allen andC. Ilainnell,
Housing and labour markets: building the connections, Unwin Hyinan, London.
_(1992a) Comprehensive planning — nol! City limits (June/July), 22.
_(1992b) The goal of lite wall less city. Period Lecmre, UCLA, April 1992.
_ (forthcoming) Genlriflcalion and advanced homelessness in New York Ciiy. In II.
Hiiuserman. forthcoming. _and C. Vergara (1992) Gimme sheller. Artforum, Spring.
Mollenkopf. J.H. and M. Caslells (eds) (1991) Dual city: restructuring New York. Russell Sage Foundation, New York.
Murie, A. (1991) Tenure conversion and social change: new elements in British cilies. In J. van Weesep and S. Muslerd, Urban housing for the better-off: genlrification in Europe. Sledelijke Nelwerken, Utrecht.
Sassen, S. (1989) New trends in Ihe sociospalial organization of the New York City economy.
In Beauregard (1989).
_(1991) Global eitles. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Smith, N. (1992) New city, new frontier: the lower east side as wild wild west. In M. Sorkin (ed.),
Variations on a theme park: the new American city and the end of public space, Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, New York.
_and P. Williams (eds) (1986) Genlrification and the city. Allen and Unwin, Boston.
South Brooklyn Legal Services, Briefs and Affidavits, 105 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201. Spengler, E.H. (1930) Land values in New York in relation to transit facilities. Columbia University
Press, New York.
Walker, J.B. (1970) Fifty years of rap id transit: 1864-1917. Amo Press, New York (original cdn 1918) Wallock, L. (1987) Tales of two cilies: genlriflcalion displacement in contemporary New York.
In M.B. Campbell and M. Rollins (eds), Begetting images, Peter Lang, New York. Warner, S.B. Jr (1968) The private city: Philadelphia in three periods of its growth. University
of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
© loinl Editors and Basil Blackwell Lid 1993.
© Joinl Editors and Basil Blackwell Ltd 199).