Inner Cities Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Inner city refers to the decaying central area of a major city, urban metropolis, or conurbation, comprising the most deprived neighborhoods around the central business district. It is different from the rest of the city in a number of its characteristics: it is an area affected by long-term urban infrastructure decay, poor housing conditions, and lack of basic modern social amenities; it is inhabited by a low-income population, usually ethnic minorities; and it has high unemployment rates, low school standards, and high crime rates. However, not all cities’ areas around the central business district have these physical and social characteristics. On the contrary, in some major cities the ring around the business center is the area where the upper social classes live, and the periphery of the city is where the low-income people reside. In this article, inner city means the physical, economic, and socially deprived areas around the city center, containing all or some of those characteristics mentioned above and having been the target of special public policies. These inner-city policies include diverse types of policy measures, applied differently in each city, with different urbanistic discourses adopted over the years, ranging from modern urbanism to new urbanism. For that reason, any generalization must be considered with caution, given the diversity of inner-city areas, the variety of inner-city policies around the world, and the strong overlap of influences and practices from one policy period or generation to the next.

The first generation of inner-city policies, implemented from the 1960s until the 1980s, defined inner-city problems essentially in social terms, in the sense that the inner city’s problems should be addressed mainly through social programs carried out by local and central government departments. The aim of these policy measures was to improve these dispossessed neighborhoods through public investments in infrastructures, social welfare services, professional training, and crime prevention, among other social measures, including also the reduction of physical rehabilitation costs through the removal of buildings in brownfield sites, for example. These urban renewal projects were inspired by modern urbanism, with its principles of functional specialization, and led to the demolition of derelict housing and its replacement by tower blocks. It was an urban model easy to implement, a model that provided housing with modern amenities and open spaces where they did not previously exist but that, in some cases, was also responsible for a lower sense of community, for a decrease in the intensity of social life compared with what existed before, and for gentrification due to rises in rents and prices of homes. Economic development policy was based on public subsidies, tax incentives to encourage private investment, and other forms of support in favor of inner-city investors. The overall evaluation of the first generation of inner-city programs suggests that in numerous places in Europe (e.g., in the United Kingdom: London, Birmingham, Sheffield), in North America (e.g., Baltimore), and in other countries, besides physical improvements (e.g., reduction of preexisting densities, improved housing conditions and public space standards), they failed to eradicate part of the social and economic problems they were supposed to solve.

The second generation of inner-city policies, from the 1980s onward, looked at the inner city essentially as an economic problem, contrary to the first approach that saw it primarily as a social issue. The new vision emerged in the context of wider political and ideological shifts on both sides of the Atlantic, epitomized by the Reagan administration in the United States and the Thatcher government in the United Kingdom. Conceived mainly as a problem of economic competitiveness, the regeneration of inner cities was seen as requiring policy instruments different from those used before to create dynamic economies in and around the inner-city area, based on economic sectors in which the inner city had real competitive advantage. It included initiatives such as enterprise zones and empowerment zones, among other similar instruments. There are many examples of this approach all over the world, involving in some cases the creation of private or public-private entities to run the development process (e.g., London Docklands and its Urban Development Corporation, Hong Kong and its Land Development Corporation and Urban Renewal Authority). For the proponents of this new vision, the competitive advantage of inner cities resulted from factors such as their locations, especially their access and proximity to transportation and to the central business district, the size and characteristics of their own consumer markets, and the availability and diversification of their workforces, among other factors. On the other hand, the new approach argued that the regeneration process, contrary to what happened before, should be conducted by private corporations and through special programs for the promotion of homeownership seen as the best answer to gentrification.

Since the 1990s, a third generation of inner-city policies is replacing the previous one as part of a more general shift in the mainstream discourse on urbanism. Cultural urbanism is now seen as the key driver for urban regeneration in the inner city and in other parts of the city as well (e.g., in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Canberra, and Shanghai, to mention just a few cases). This includes the promotion of iconic architecture, the hosting of large-scale events as place promotion, and the creation of a new image for the inner city, its brand image, as part of a larger project for the cultural city.

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