A Companion to the City
Edited by
Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson
Chapter 23
Cities in Quarters
Peter Marcuse
Everyone can see today, in any city in the world, that there are extremes of wealth
and poverty, each concentrated in one or more sections of the city. The wealthy areas
seem pretty well insulated from the city around them, sometimes in high-rise towers,
sometimes at suburban-type remove. The poor areas, on the other hand, seem
marginalized, unconnected to the economic and social life of the city around them.
The concentration is voluntary for the rich, involuntary for the poor, it would seem.
And there are other sections of each city that are neither very rich nor very poor;
among them, differences can be perceived, not only of richness, but perhaps also of
housing style, of culture, of language, of street pattern, of public spaces. Business
areas are also very differentiated; factories are clearly different from office buildings,
and their locations differ correspondingly. But some manufacturing is done in or
near older business districts too. Commercial areas cater to buyers of different tastes
and different incomes; they tend to cluster together in certain sections of town, often
but not always near where their targeted customers live. Recreational areas, likewise,
are used by different types of people for different purposes: the elderly want
peace and quiet, toddlers need playgrounds, youth want fields for active sports ± and
different sports for different people, bocci for some, baseball for others, volleyball
for a third type, with baseball even meaning different sports for different people.
All of these differences, these divisions of the city, seem quite natural and common-sensical
to most of us, most of the time. But there are disturbing aspects to
some of them, too. Poor areas seem to be getting poorer, rather than being in
transition to improvement, and they seem, in many places, to be disproportionately
occupied by members of minority groups, usually distinguishable by their color.
They are more and more considered dangerous places to be in or to go. Ethnicity
seems to be more and more a controversial issue, as the scale of immigration swells
and debates about bilingualism, multiculturalism, self-segregation crowd newspaper
columns and referendum ballots. Business areas seem more and more to be fencing
themselves off, requiring permission and identification to even go in. Public places,
like parks and streets and squares and plazas, seem to offer less and less opportunity
for different people to meet people unlike themselves, to mix, to express themselves
in a public arena. Cities today seem fragmented, partitioned ± at the extreme, almost
drawn and quartered, painfully pulled apart.
Are these perceptions correct? Are our cities becoming increasingly divided,
polarized, fragmented?1
If so, why? Is there a pattern to what is changed, a logic
behind it? Who is responsible ± is it simply a private sector phenomenon, reflecting
changing individual preferences and behavior patterns, or is government involved,
and if so, how? Is marginalization more than simply someone having to be at the
bottom of the pile, and is it related to ghettoization? Should anything be done about
these developments? Can anything be done?
These questions have been central to much of the debate about urban policy
around the world today, and not coincidentally have been major themes in urban
research and writing over the last 30 years or so. Much of that discussion involves
the relationship between these divisions and the effects of globalization on urban
structure. Globalization is a broad and sometimes amorphous concept, but it is
generally linked to a shift from manufacturing to services, from Fordist mass
production to post-Fordist flexible production within manufacturing, to a heightened
mobility of capital across national borders, partly in consequence of a reduced
power of labor vis-aÁ-vis capital, and thus also to a reduced welfare provision by
national states. These developments have accentuated longer-term trends in the
spatial structure of cities, in general leading to increased inequalities, increased
social and economic divisions, and increased reflection of those divisions in space.
This chapter traces some of those spatial consequences.2
The Nature of Divisions in Cities
To begin with, divisions in cities have always existed. It is not the fact that they are
divided that is the particular characteristic of the partitioned city today; rather, it is
the source and manner of their division. Some divisions arise of economic functionality,
some are cultural, and some reflect and reinforce relationships of power; some
are combinations of all three.
Division by economic function, broadly defined, is a generally accepted necessary
division within a city. Zoning is today the accepted legal embodiment of such
divisions. That zoning should be by function, generally defined as economic use
(residential from heavy industrial from light industrial from retail from wholesaling
from offices), is not as self-evident as it might seem; ``performance zoning,'' for
instance, attempts to define permitted uses of land not by their economic nature but
by their environmental impact: traffic generated, shadows cast, air circulation
impeded, green space occupied, etc. And, while ``use'' may separate manufacturing
from retail from residential, it has never been quite clear why residential use for one
family should be a different type of use than residential use by two or three families.3
Be that as it may, separation by function, by use, is generally accepted today as in
general an appropriate division within a city.
Other forms of division seem much more problematic, however. We may name
four as of growing importance and concern today: divisions by
. class
. ``race'' or color
. ethnicity
. lifestyle.
CITIES IN QUARTERS 271
These separate sources of division are often commingled, and even more often
confused.4
Walled or gated communities, for instance, are a growing feature of
urban settlement patterns throughout the world, and reflect separation along each
of these lines.5
Only those living within them or their announced and welcomed
visitors, are allowed in; usually private security is provided to enforce restrictions
not only on entry but also on activities within. An estimated 4 million live in
such communities in the United States, with the figure climbing to 15 million if all
forms of privately regulated living communities are included.6
If we add highrise
apartment buildings with security arrangements regulating entry, essentially
vertical walled communities, the number grows even larger. If we were then to add
the number of communities where restrictions on entry are enforced by effective
social custom±racially discriminatory suburbs, developments limited to a narrow
band of income-eligibles by price or law ± we may almost describe many of our
contemporary cities as entirely fragmented, composed only of a collection of separate
areas of concentration of different people all desiring to stay apart from all
others.
But the bases of separation between each of these parts of the contemporary city ±
ethnicity, lifestyle, class, and ``race'' ± are not the same, and have very different
impacts on the city. As a general rule:
. Divisions by class and ``race'' tend to be hierarchical, involuntary, socially determined,
rigid, exclusionary, and incompatible with a democratic city life ±
although often legitimated as cultural divisions.
. Divisions by ethnicity and lifestyle tend to be cultural and voluntary, individually
determined, fluid, non-exclusionary, and consistent with a democratic city life.
``Class'' is a much-debated concept,7
but for our purposes, the understanding of the
division of space in cities, two characteristics are central: income, and power.
Income, because much (not all!) of the allocation of land to different users is made
in the market, in which those with higher incomes able to pay higher prices will
prevail in their choices over those with lower incomes, and power, because that large
part of land allocation not determined solely by the market, e.g. governed by zoning
rules, owned or controlled by the state, subject to tax payments or entitled to
subsidies, etc., is determined by relationships of power in the state and the economy.
These two characteristics, which largely go together, are not bad indicators of class;
they correlate quite consistently with ``higher'' and ``lower `` in almost any ranking of
classes, but are somewhat more ambiguous in the exact lines of demarcation
between them.8
Using these criteria, then, we may almost speak of separate cities within most
cities today.
The Residential Cities
One may speak of separate residential cities. The luxury areas of the city, the
residences of the wealthy, while located in clearly defined residential areas, are at
the same time not spatially bound. The very rich, in terms of residential location, are
not tied to any quarter of the city, just as the men that whipped the horses that pulled
272 PETER MARCUSE
apart the quartered prisoner are not linked to any one of the resulting quarters. For
the wealthy, the city is less important as a residential location than as a location of
power and profit. The restructuring of cities has led to an increased profitability of
real estate, from which the already wealthy disproportionately benefit. Joel Blau
cites figures that indicate from 1973 to 1987 additional revenue from property
constituted 45 percent of the income growth among the top 1 percent of the
population.9
It is for them first and foremost a profit-making machine. They profit
from the activities conducted in the city, or (increasingly) from the real-estate values
created by those activities; they may enjoy living in the city also, but have many
other options. If they reside in the city, it is in a world insulated from contact with
nonmembers of the class, with leisure time and satisfactions carefully placed and
protected. If the city no longer offers profit or pleasure, they can abandon it;
75 percent of the chief executives of corporations having their headquarters in
New York City lived outside the city in 1975.10
It is a disposable city for them.
Many years ago they were concerned to protect their separate space in the city by
public instrumentalities such as zoning;11
Seymour Toll vividly describes the interests
of the wealthy residents of Fifth Avenue to protect their mansions from ``inconsistent
neighboring uses'' through the adoption of New York City first zoning law in
1916. Today, each private high-rise condominium has its own security, and elsewhere
walls protect the enclaves of the rich from intrusion. The new architecture of
shopping malls, skywalks, and policed pedestrian malls is a striking physical mirror
of the social separation. Downtown skywalks, for instance, both symbolically and
physically, permit the men and women of business to walk over the heads of the poor
and the menial.12
The gentrified city13
serves the professionals, managers, technicians, yuppies in
their twenties and college professors in their sixties: those who may be doing well
themselves, yet work for and are ultimately at the mercy of others. The frustrated
pseudo-creativity14
of their actions leads to a quest for other satisfactions, found in
consumption, in specific forms of culture, in ``urbanity'' devoid of its original
historical content and more related to consumption than to intellectual productivity
or political freedom.15
The residential areas they occupy are chosen for environmental
or social amenities, for their quiet or bustle, their history or fashion; gentrified
working-class neighborhoods, older middle-class areas, new developments with
modern and well-furnished apartments, all serve their needs. Locations close to
work are important, because of long and unpredictable work schedules, the density
of contacts, and the availability of services and contacts they permit.
The suburban city of the traditional family, suburban in tone if not in structures or
location (see below) is sought out by better-paid workers, blue- and white-collar
employees, the ``lower middle class,'' the petit bourgeoisie. It provides stability,
security, the comfortable world of consumption. Owner-occupancy of a single
family house is preferred (depending on age, gender, household composition), but
cooperative or condominium or rental apartments can be adequate, particularly if
subsidized and/or well located to transportation. The home as symbol of self,
exclusion of those of lower status, physical security against intrusion, political
conservatism, comfort and escape from the work-a-day world (thus often substantial
spatial separation from work) are characteristic. The protection of residential property
values (the home functioning as financial security and inheritance as well as
CITIES IN QUARTERS 273
residence) are important. Archie Bunker is the pejorative stereotype; the proud and
independent worker/citizen is the other side of the coin.16
The tenement city must do for lower-paid workers, workers earning the minimum
wage or little more, often with irregular employment, few benefits, little job security,
no chance of advancement. Their city is much less protective or insular. In earlier
days their neighborhoods were called slums; when their residents were perceived as
unruly and undisciplined, they were the victims of slum clearance and ``up-grading''
efforts; today they are shown their place by abandonment and/or by displacement,
by service cuts, deterioration of public facilities, political neglect. Because they are
needed for the functioning of the city as a whole, however, they have the ability to
exert political pressure, to get public protections: rent regulation, public housing,
were passed largely because of their activities, although often siphoned up to higher
groups after the pressure went off. When their quarters were wanted for ``higher
uses,'' they were moved out, by urban renewal or by gentrification. The fight against
displacement, under the banner of protecting their neighborhoods, has given rise to
some of the most militant social movements of our time, particularly when coupled
with the defense of the homes of their better-off neighbors.
The abandoned city, economic and, in the United States, racial, is the place for the
very poor, the excluded, the never employed and permanently unemployed, the
homeless and the shelter residents. A crumbling infrastructure, deteriorating housing,
the domination of outside impersonal forces, direct street-level exploitation,
racial and ethnic discrimination and segregation, the stereotyping of women, are
everyday reality. The spatial concentration of the poor is reinforced by public policy;
public (social, council) housing becomes more and more ghettoized housing of last
resort (its better units being privatized as far as possible), drugs and crime are
concentrated here, education and public services neglected.
The Multiple Cities of Business
In similar fashion, one may speak of different cities of business and work. The city of
business and its divisions is not congruent in space with the residential city and its
divisions. The dividing lines in the spatial patterns of economic activity define areas
in which people of many occupations, classes, status, work in close proximity. Yet, if
we define economic divisions by the primary activity taking place within them, one
may again get a four- or five-part division.
The controlling city, the city of big decisions, includes a network of high-rise
offices, brownstones or older mansions in prestigious locations, that is less and less
locationally circumscribed. It includes yachts for some, the back seats of stretch
limousines for others, airplanes and scattered residences for still others. But it is not
spatially rooted. The controlling city is not spatially bounded, although the places
where its activities at various times take place are of course located somewhere, and
more secured by walls, barriers, conditions to entry, than any other part of the city.
Yet the controlling city tends to be located in (at the top of, physically and
symbolically) the high-rise centers of advanced services, because those at the top
of the chain of command wish to have at least those below them close at hand and
responsive, and so it goes down the line. Our interviews with those responsible for
planning the then new high-rise office tower for the Bank fuÈr Gemeinwirtschaft in
274 PETER MARCUSE
Frankfurt revealed professionals who had concluded that a separation of functions,
with top executives downtown but all others in back-office locations, was the most
efficient pattern for the bank, but who were overruled by their superiors, with only
the advantage cited above as their reasoning. By the same token, Citibank in New
York City wants its next level of professionals directly accessible to its top decision
makers; credit card data entry operations may move to South Dakota, but not
banking activities that require the exercise of discretion. Those locations, wherever
they may be, are crucially tied together by communication and transportation
channels which permit an existence insulated from all other parts of the city, if
dependent on them.
The controlling city parallels in its occupancy and character, but is not congruent in
time or space with, the luxury areas of the residential city. Its prototypical form is the
citadel, the protectively defended high-rise complex in which business, refreshment,
amusement, can be undertaken without threat of intrusion by anything unwanted,
generally in ``smart'' buildings where communication with the world is possible
without leaving the citadel, with either residential possibilities inside or direct access
from luxury enclaves outside without touching the remainder of the everyday life of
the city. Battery Park City in New York, Docklands in London, La Defense in Paris,
Berinni in SaÄo Paulo, Lujiazui in Shanghai, all come close to the model.
The city of advanced services, of professional offices tightly clustered in downtowns,
with many ancillary services internalized in high-rise office towers, is heavily
enmeshed in a wide and technologically advanced communicative network. The
skyscraper center is the stereotypical pattern, but not the only possibility. Locations
may be at the edge of the center of the city, as in Frankfurt/Main, outside it, as in
Paris at La Defense or outside Rome or the Docklands at London, or scattered
around both inside and outside a city with good transportation and communications,
as in Amsterdam. Social, ``image,'' factors will also play a role; the ``address''
as well as the location is important for business. Whether in only one location or in
several in a given city, however, there will be strong clustering, and the city of
advanced services will be recognizable at a glance.
The city of advanced services parallels in the economic city the characteristics of
the gentrified residential city.
The city of direct production, including not only manufacturing but also the
lower-level production aspect of advanced services, government offices, the back
offices of major firms, whether adjacent to their front offices or not, is located in
clusters and with significant agglomerations but in varied locations within a metropolitan
area. Varied, indeed, but not arbitrary or chaotic: where customers/clients
(itself an interesting dichotomy!) wish to be in quick and easy contact, inner-city
locations are preferred (as in the industrial valley between Midtown Manhattan and
the Financial District for the printing industry, or Chinatown and the garment
district for textile production, in New York City).
For mass production, locations will be different. Here the pattern has changed
dramatically since the beginning of the industrial revolution. At first factories were
near the center of the city; indeed, to a large extent they led to the growth of the city
around them, as in the manufacturing cities of New England or the Midwest or the
industrial cities of England. But more modern manufacturing methods require more
single-story space, vastly more, with parking for automotive access rather than paths
CITIES IN QUARTERS 275
for workers coming on foot, and many more operations are internalized; so land
costs become more important than local agglomeration economies, and suburban or
rural locations are preferred. The city of direct production parallels but is clearly not
congruent with, in either space or time, the residential suburban city. In a development
pushing the suburb as a spatial form one step further, edge cities,17
cities within
the metropolitan area of major centers but largely self-contained in terms of residence
and employment increasingly house both service and production functions,
excluding only those relegated to the abandoned city in the center.
The city of unskilled work and the informal economy, small-scale manufacturing,
warehousing, sweatshops, technically unskilled consumer services, immigrant industries,
is closely intertwined with the cities of production and advanced services and
thus located near them, but separately and in scattered clusters,18
locations often
determined in part by economic relations, in part by the patterns of the residential
city. Because the nature of the labor supply determines the profitability of these
activities, the residential location of workers willing to do low-paid and/or unskilled
work has a major influence. Thus in New York City sweatshops located in Chinatown,
or the Dominican areas of Washington Heights, in Miami in the Cuban
enclave, or in the slums of cities throughout the world.
The economic city of unskilled work parallels the tenement city, although again in
different times and places. In many developed countries, the city of unskilled work
counts within it major ethnic enclaves, concentrations of immigrant communities
whose recent arrival and sometimes fragile legal status makes them particularly
vulnerable to the conditions of work at the lowest ends of the legal pay scale, and/
or pushes them into subsistence activities within the informal labor market.
The workless city19
(not because its residents do not work, but because their work
is not rated or valued as ``real'' work in the prevailing view), the city of the less legal
portions of the informal economy, the city of storage where otherwise undesired
(NIMBY ± Not In My Back Yard) facilities are located, the location of abandoned
manufacturing buildings, generally is also congruent with the abandoned residential
city. But for political protest many of the most polluting and environmentally
detrimental components of the urban infrastructure, necessary for its economic
survival but not directly tied to any one economic activity, are located here: sewage
disposal plants, incinerators, bus garages, AIDS residences, housing for the homeless,
juvenile detention centers, jails. New York City's recently adopted Fair Share
regulations, aimed at distributing NIMBY facilities ``equitably'' among districts, are
a reflection both of the extent of the problem and its political volatility.
The workless city largely parallels the abandoned city. And it is, in many places,
also a ghetto to which a ``racial,'' ethnic, or immigrant population is confined. We
will return to this issue below.
Thus the cities of business. Divisions of commercial activity, of recreation, of
entertainment, are likely to parallel these cities. For commercial activities, the
sophisticated marketing analyses of modern merchandising define for us with operational
precision the exact market a given retailer seeks. Income is the primary
consideration: how up-scale a store is depends on the incomes of those it hopes to
lure as its customers. Within the circle of wants of those at different income levels,
appeal may further be narrowed to specific population groups, by lifestyle or
demographic characteristic or, to a much lesser extent (except perhaps for foods)
276 PETER MARCUSE
by ethnicity. Thus an up-scale department store near the coast may feature more
shore-related sporting goods, near the mountains more goods related to skiing; a
more down-scale store may feature bowling equipment here, gambling paraphernalia
there. Mapping the location of Starbucks coffee bars, the latest craze in yuppie
relaxation, provides a good map of the location of the gentrified city in New York.
Malls will attract one class, boutiques another. And the location of each will be near
the area in which it expects to find its customers.
The same divided distribution of recreational facilities can be easily traced: by
looking at the kinds of facilities provided, one can judge quite accurately the class
composition of the neighborhood in which it is located. Jockey clubs will be in the
luxury city, country clubs in the gentrified city, baseball fields in the suburban city,
basketball courts in the tenement city, fire hydrants in the abandoned city. And
divided locational patterns similarly characterize religious institutions, from storefront
evangelical sects in the abandoned city to high Episcopalian in the luxury city.
None of these divisions is of course in complete congruence with the other; individual
tastes can outweigh social conformity, historical locations are not so easily
changed as population and class change, public efforts may or may not try to
counteract the effect of distinctions by wealth.
``Racial'', Ethnic, and Cultural Divisions
None of the foregoing can be understood, certainly not in the United States, and to a
lesser extent not elsewhere either, without taking into account issues of ``race,''
ethnicity, and culture.
The formation of the ghetto has been alluded to several times above. Ghettos are
very different from enclaves; ghettos are involuntary spatial concentrations of those
at the bottom of a hierarchy of power and wealth, usually confined on the basis of an
ascribed characteristic such as color or ``race''; enclaves are voluntary clusters,
usually based on ethnicity, often coupled with immigrant status, in which solidarity
provides strength and the opportunity for upward mobility.20
Today's ghetto differs,
not only from such enclaves, but also from older forms of the ghetto. It is new in that
it has become what might be called an outcast ghetto, a ghetto of the excluded, the
marginal, rather than only the isolated and ``inferior.'' 21
It embodies a new relationship
between the particular population group and the dominant society: one of
economic as well as spatial exclusion.22
The older integrationist hopes that the
ghetto might disappear as an involuntary confinement in the face of an ever more
open, democratic, and nonracist society, have largely disappeared.
The integrationist view of the ghetto is no longer shared by many in the United
States deeply involved in the struggles of minority communities for justice.23
They
are responding, not only to the entrenched force of racism in the United States, but
also to economic changes which broadly affect all major cities: a new situation in
which capital is replacing labor and is shifting its locations for production at a rapid
pace and on a worldwide basis, leaving an ever growing percentage of the population
in the older industrial countries24
not needed for production ± no longer a ``reserve
army of the unemployed,'' because no reserve at home is any longer needed. Similarly,
the opening of new markets worldwide has reduced the economic importance
of maintaining an effective market at home with high wages and full employment,
CITIES IN QUARTERS 277
the old Keynsian strategy. Thus business interests see no use in ghetto residents for
purposes of business; political leaders see more to lose than to gain in shaping public
policies to benefit ghetto residents, and many in the majority, for complex reasons,
continue to look down on ghetto residents. The ghetto is functional for ``society'' to
the extent that it provides protection against the anger and the disorder that ghetto
residents might cause if not limited to the space of the ghetto. Spatial isolation further
gives employers, public officials, and agencies an easy way to identify the economic
and social position of a given applicant for a job, for admission, or for benefits: by
their address shall they be known. Ghetto residents are outcasts; hence an outcast
ghetto, to ``define, isolate, and contain'' their victims.25
The developments that lead to ghettoization exist in many countries other than
the United States as well. Events in Britain are similar enough to those in the United
States to provoke an extensive debate as to whether there are ``ghettos'' in Britain;26
major studies in continental Europe have raised similar questions about the concentration
of Turks in Germany, Algerians in France, Indonesians in the Nether-
lands.27
The conclusion of these studies generally has been to raise serious concern
about tendencies moving in the direction of the pattern in the United States, but not
yet comparable to it in scale.
In developing countries, while the impact of the factors that constitute globalization
has been much more recent, current trends show a convergence of patterns, e.g.
between SaÄo Paulo and New York City, or Shanghai and London. Favelas are the
extreme example of abandoned cities ± although abandonment is perhaps not the
right word, since there was no prior period when they were better off. Early research
focused, however, on precisely that characteristic that differentiated favelas from the
outcast ghetto: their close relationship to the economy of the city in which, or
around which, they developed. And in most developing countries race or color
distinctions played a minor role. South Africa is of course the notable example of
the exception, although the shantytowns that were much of the townships of apartheid
South Africa were not, deliberately not, parts of the cities to which they related,
and they were created well before the present phase of globalization of the world
economy. Today, however, the pattern of ghettoization visible in the First World is
also visible in the Third.28
As unemployment increases in the industrial portions of
the metropolitan region of SaÄo Paulo, the social ``disorganization'' characteristic
of the ghettos of the United States, including the level and role of criminal activity,
increases, and the overlapping of skin color and poverty becomes more visible.
Homelessness, both its extent and how it is treated, is a painful indicator of the
strength of these processes of division in any given city. The homeless are essentially
the diaspora of the abandoned city. The point is startlingly evident in the obsequiousness
with which a city like New York rushes to evict the homeless from the streets
or transportation centers that serve the citadels and the gentrified city, removing the
homeless from the sight and sensibility of the rich to the distant ghettos of the poor,
from washing down the floors of Grand Central Station with lye so no one would
sleep on them to putting up ``occupied look decals,'' posters of plants and venetian
blinds pasted on the boarded-up windows of abandoned houses to create a Potemkin
village for the rich to look at on their drive to work. Engels would have found the
pattern familiar. But a new ingredient has been added to the historical picture: the
homeless today, and the residents of the abandoned city in general, are permanent.
278 PETER MARCUSE
They have little hope of getting jobs, of joining the mainstream when conditions
get better; in fact, the number of the homeless remains high through good times
and bad, unlike in previous years, creating what is appropriately called the ``new
homeless.''29
Conclusion
The criticism of the quartering of our cities does not imply a desire for cultural or
social uniformity, or for the suppression of differences or the neglect of personal
preferences and individual choices. Hierarchical differences, differences based on
ascribed rather than achieved characteristics, differences that permit some to exercise
power over others, are the problem, and it is a problem that is growing. What is
called for then is not an egalitarian uniformity that wipes out all differences, but
rather a careful structuring of public actions that will counteract the invidious
pressures of hierarchical division and will solidify spaces of public openness, solidarity,
and communication, so structured as to allow of a full expression of civic life
and the activities of civil society without the distortions of power. The types of
concrete public action such a policy would imply can only be briefly mentioned here:
the constitution of public space, the attention to boundaries between groups and
activities that promote positive contact and harmony, zoning that rewards social as
well as physical diversity, public support for those organizations needing it to
become full participants in city life, adequate subsidies (implying adequate redistribution)
to provide an acceptable quality of life for all citizens.
The formulation of policies to deal with the harms revealed by the patterns of
contemporary city life and structure is not hard; but the conflicts involved in putting
such policies in place do not promise an easy success.
NOTES
1. For a criticism of the use of some of these terms, see Peter Marcuse, ```Dual city': a muddy
metaphor for a quartered city,'' International Journal of Urban and Regional Research,
13, 4, (December 1989), pp. 697±708.
2. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between spatial structure within cities
and globalization, see Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (eds.), Globalizing Cities:
A New Spatial Order? (Blackwell, Oxford, 1999), and, more generally, Saskia Sassen,
Cities in a World Economy (Pine Forge Press (Sage Publications), Thousand Oaks, CA,
1994).
3. The United States Supreme Court struggled with this issue in its landmark decision
legitimating zoning under the United States Constitution, Euclid v. Amber, 272 US 365
(1926), and some commentators today consider it to have been mistaken in accepting this
particular division. Even a separation between high-rise and low-rise buildings is today
often questioned, as in new developments which deliberately mix sizes and configurations
for variety and esthetic appeal.
4. The Chicago School, for instance, and the subsequent attempts to apply factorial analysis
to the spatial structure of cities, their urban morphology, all share this weakness.
5. See Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated and Walled
Communities in the United States (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA,
CITIES IN QUARTERS 279
and Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1995); and Peter Marcuse, ``Walls of
fear and walls of Support,'' in Architecture of Fear, ed. Nan Ellin (Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ, 1997), pp. 101±14, and Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson
(eds.), Postmodern Cities and Spaces (Blackwell, Oxford, 1994).
6. Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowners Associations and the Rise of Residential
Private Government. (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994).
7. See Erik Olin Wright, ed. The Debate on Classes, Verso, London, 1989. Classes used
here are in any event not the same as Rex's ``housing classes,'' because the basis for the
distinction is economic, housing the result, rather than the reverse. John Rex, Race,
Community and Conflict (Oxford University Press and Institute of Race Relations,
London, 1967).
8. And they are of course not substantively defined by these indicators.
9. Joel Blau, The Visible Poor: Homelessness in the United States (Oxford University Press,
New York, 1992), p. 85.
10. Steven Brint, in Mollenkopf and Castells, p. 155.
11. Toll, Seymor, 1969 Zoned American, Grossman, New York.
12. See Marcuse, Peter 1988. ``Stadt ± Ort der Entwicklung,'' in Demokratische Gemeinde,
November, pp. 115±22; and Jonathan Barnett, ``Redesigning the metropolis: the case for
a new approach,'' Journal of the American Planning Association, 55, 2 (spring 1989),
pp. 131±5.
13. I use the term here, not in its narrower sense, as a portion of the city in which higherclass
groups have displaced lower class, see definitions in Peter Marcuse, ``Gentrification,
abandonment, and displacement: connections, causes, and policy responses in New
York City,'' Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, 28 (1985), pp. 195±240, but in
the broader sense of areas occupied by, or intended for, professionals, managers, technicians,
which may include newly constructed housing as well as housing ``gentrified'' in
the narrower sense of the word.
14. The reference here is not to creative artists, to what in earlier days would have been
called Bohemians, who cannot generally afford the prices of the gentrified city, and are
more likely to live somewhere between the abandoned and the tenement city. To the
extent that they tend to congregate in specific neighborhoods, they may serve as
precursors of gentrification (see Damaris Rose. ``Rethinking gentrification,'' Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, 2 (1984), pp. 47±74, who differentiates
sharply among different categories of gentrifiers.
15. Hartmut HaÈusermann and Walter Siebel, 1987. Neue UrbanitaÈt. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt
am Main. See also Marcuse, Peter, ``Housing Markets and Labour Markets in the
Quartered City,'' in Housing and Labour Markets: Building the Connections, ed. John
Allen and Chris Hamnett (Unwin Hyman, London, 1991), pp. 118±35.
16. I still find Damaris Rose's ``Toward a Re-evaluation of the Political Significance of
Home-Ownership in Britain,'' in Political Economy of Housing Workshop, Conference
of Socialist Economists, March 1980 Housing Construction and the State, London, pp.
71±6, one of the best pieces dealing with the very ambiguous relationships of homeownership
to political position.
17. The term comes from the quite uncritical but vivid discussion: Joel Garreau, Edge City:
Life on the New Frontier (Doubleday, New York, 1991).
18. See, for instance Saskia Sassen, ``New trends in the sociospatial organization of the New
York City economy,'' in Economic Restructuring and Political Response, ed. Robert A.
Beauregard (Sage, Newbury Park, CA, 1989), pp. 69±114, with brief but provocative
comments on the intra-city spatial aspects of the trends she describes.
19. William Julius Wilson has been prominent among those pointing to the central position
of the absence of work in shaping the lives of those in this division of the city; see
280 PETER MARCUSE
William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
(Alfred A. Knopf, New York City, 1996).
20. I have suggested formal definitions in Peter Marcuse, ``The enclave, the citadel, and the
ghetto: what has changed in the post-Fordist US city,'' Urban Affairs Review, 33, 2,
(November 1997), pp. 228±64.
21. Christian Kesteloot suggests, in an interesting paper, that ``the growing importance of
exclusion over marginalization'' is a key characteristic of the present phase, Christian
Kesteloot, ``Three levels of socio-spatial polarization in Brussels.'' Paper presented at the
ISA International Congress, Bielefeld, Germany, 1994.
22. ``Institutionalized'' is added to the definition by Van Amersfoort: a ghetto is ``an institutionalized
residential area in which all the inhabitants belong to a single ethnically,
racially or religiously defined group and all members of this group live in this area . . .
`institutionalised' means that the inhabitants did not choose their dwelling or residential
area themselves: they were to some degree coerced by society. . . by law or. . . by subtle
discrimination.'' Quoted in Ronald Van Kempen, ``Spatial segregation, spatial concentration,
and social exclusion: theory and practice in Dutch cities.'' Paper presented at
European Network for Housing Research Workshop, Copenhagen, May 1994, p. 3. It is
thus apparently intended to be synonymous with ``involuntary,'' and an important, if
self-evident, addition to the definition. Were it to mean either ``with its own institutions''
or ``created by formal institutions of the dominant society'' it would raise other important
questions.
23. See, for instance, Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of
Racism (Basic Books, New York, 1993).
24. And increasingly in newer ones also, witness the unemployment rate of 34% in SaÄo
Paulo where 20 years ago it was in one of the fastest industrializing regions in the world.
25. The appropriate historical analogy for the outcast ghetto is more the leper colony than
the medieval Jewish ghetto. For a detailed history of the United States ghetto, see Peter
Marcuse, ``Space over time: the changing position of the Black ghetto in the United
States,'' Netherlands Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 13, 1 (1998), pp.
7±24.
26. See Ceri Peach, ``Does Britain have ghettos?'' Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, 22, 1 (1996), pp. 216±35.
27. For instance, John O'Loughlin and JuÈrgen Friedrichs, Social Polarization in PostIndustrial
Metropolises (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1996), H. Priemus, S. Musterd,
and R. van Kempen, Towards Undivided Cities in Western Europe: New Challenges
for Urban Policy. Part 7: comparative analysis (1998), pp. 5±20, and Marcuse and van
Kempen, supra.
28. If indeed that distinction is still appropriate; major ``Third World'' cities could as easily
be considered First World, from all points of view except the timing of their development
and the nature of the national economies and states in which they exist.
29. See Peter Marcuse, ``Space and race in the post-Fordist City: the outcast ghetto and
advanced homelessness in the United States today,'' in Urban Poverty and the Underclass,
ed. Enzo Mingione (Blackwell, Oxford, 1996), pp. 176±216.
CITIES IN QUARTERS 281