Urban Inequality And Poverty Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Urban inequality and poverty have been subjects of political inquiry since industrialized societies became primarily urban, and began to exhibit many of the contemporary social and political dynamics currently seen in the Western world. Ever since the urbanization of the world began in the 1800s, cities have been the centers of political action and protest, often resulting in major social movements. In industrialized countries, contemporary manifestations of these urban political processes were evident in periodic urban unrest in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1990s, as well as more recently in Europe.

Scholarly analysis of urban riots suggests common origins for riots rooted in the politics of inequality and poverty. The 1965 Los Angeles riots came when the fight for civil rights was at its height in the United States, and this incident was seen largely as part of a deep racial divide within the country between blacks and whites. The urban manifestation of this divide highlighted the existence of two societies, separate but unequal and coexisting in close proximity in urban areas across the country. These riots led to a period of federal policy attention to urban inequality focused on poor neighborhoods.

Twenty-seven years later, the Los Angeles riots of 1992 revealed not only the ongoing challenges of these urban inequality and poverty dynamics, but also how the ethnic and social dynamics of cities had shifted. These riots were the result of deep socioeconomic divisions within the metropolitan region in which African Americans were one of several ethnic and racial minorities with vastly different access to resources such as public schools, adequate police protection, and a local job market. The frustration stemming from this unequal access led to unrest exhibiting a distinctly multiethnic character, however, in which Latinos and whites joined African Americans in their protests, often targeting Korean immigrant businesses. Such diversity marked a divergence from 1965, which was primarily seen as an African American and white event.

Racial and ethnic urban riots, however, are not limited to the particularities of American history, and similar dynamics of unequal access to urban resources by ethnic and racial minorities could be seen in France in the early 2000s. The comprehension of why cities are hotbeds of political unrest requires an understanding of the social and economic dynamics inherent to urbanization.

Much of the debate on urban inequality and poverty has centered on the poverty of places as well as people. A racial analysis of poverty in the United States shows high rates of residential segregation for minorities, which has contributed greatly to residential instability, unemployment, and low home equity. Urban populations have been and continue to be segregated along a race-class axis, increasingly creating spatially isolated poverty and unemployment amidst generally prosperous cities. This segregation was the result of officially sanctioned “redlining” practices as well as social dynamics, both of which have played an important role in the creation of what some see as a permanent “underclass.” This association between poor neighborhoods and socioeconomic isolation point toward the important intersection of race and place in the understanding of urban inequality and poverty, and the public policies designed to alleviate it that have centered on both people and places.

Residential segregation does more than simply arrange the poor into neighborhoods, however. Studies of the so-called underclass have long argued that the long-term unemployment characteristics of many poor neighborhoods can have effects well beyond the labor market; these can be socially and psychologically debilitating.

The alleviation of urban inequality has been a difficult task because of the spatial nature of urban poverty. The historic pathway out of poverty in industrialized countries has been through the labor market, yet residents of poor neighborhoods face a particular difficulty in accessing jobs. This is due to the persistence of what is known as a spatial mismatch between poor neighborhoods and the growing job market. Since the late 1960s, the spatial mismatch hypothesis has focused on long-term ghetto unemployment and the suburbanizing job market, arguing that residential segregation is a fundamental limitation in providing opportunities to the urban poor. Thus, as long as cities remain residentially segregated, it is likely that poverty and inequality—and their political manifestation in urban unrest—will remain one of the defining characteristics of cities in the industrialized world.

Bibliography:

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Kain, John F. “Housing Segregation, Negro Unemployment, and Metropolitan Decentralization.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 82, no. 2 (1968): 175–197.
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