Urban fragmentation in the "post-industrial city"

KOZAK, DANIEL

Landscape of Fragments: The New Urban Periphery

Carleton University Press

Lugar: Ottawa; Año: 2012;

Over at least the last three decades fragmentation has become a recurrent word in urban discourse. Besides the different meanings that the term may have and the ways in which it is used -a matter already discussed in other texts- it is apparent that there are spatial manifestations that have motivated an ongoing debate about the fragmented condition of the contemporary metropolis. Notions of the "archipelago city", the "partitioned" and "quartered" city, "splintering urbanism", "metropolarities", to name but a few, point to the same conclusion: the recognition of new forms of separation, or the exacerbation of previous divisive forms, that in the current period seem to play an increasingly central role in the form and structure of contemporary cities and urban regions. As a preliminary hypothesis, Rod Burgess argues that the relationship between social and spatial distance has once again changed since the last quarter of the twentieth century. According to Burgess, distance between social classes in the pre-industrial society was great but spatial distance was small. Masters and slaves used to live close to one another. In the industrial society, with the emergence of the middle class, social distance became smaller but spatial distance greater. Cities became more extended, working-class neighborhoods were usually located close to factories in the urban peripheries, far away from the urban areas chosen by the elites, and the middle strata were located in between. In general, spatial distance used to replicate the social gradient. In the post-industrial society social distance has once again increased. After decades of monetarist policies, along with the prevalence of the financial sector in the world economy and generalized deindustrialization processes in a large part of the western world, the gap between rich and poor has reached unprecedented figures since at least the 1920s. Nevertheless, in many cases, spatial distance between the opposite ends of the social spectrum has decreased again with the appearance of rich enclaves next to enclaves of poverty. The case of gated communities side by side with squatter settlements -a common phenomenon in many regions of the world including South America- is exemplary in this sense. In the current "post-industrial city", the separation by means of spatial distance typical of the "industrial city" is often replaced by a type of separation reinforced by the forcefulness of boundaries, as well as a display of security devices, and different forms of urban fragmentation.