Paper Sociology of the city

6. The new urban sociology (Gottdiener & Hutchison)

“Globalization and urbanization in the developing world”

At the beginning of the 21st century, the center of global urbanization clearly moves to the Global South. The urban population is now more than 3 billion people and, according to projections, it will reach about 5 billion by 2030. This fast growth happens mainly outside the Western world and appears in the rise of megacities (cities with more than 10 million inhabitants) and, even more, of mega-urban regions. These are large metropolitan areas that include a dense urban core and a wide surrounding region. Growth is often faster outside official administrative borders.

The authors explain that traditional planning and statistics often underestimate these extra-urban areas, even if they are the places where the strongest changes happen. In the long term, the biggest urban concentrations are increasingly located in less developed regions of the world.

To understand different urban paths, the chapter uses Aprodicio Laquian’s classification of Asian mega-regions, divided into four types. First, advanced East Asian cities (Osaka, Tokyo, Seoul) show low population growth, social homogeneity, and strong governments able to provide basic services. Second, Chinese megacities (Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Tianjin) have controlled population growth and very strong economic expansion, but also growing pressure on housing and services. Third, primate capitals in Southeast Asia (Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila) have moderate growth but serious problems with housing, water supply, traffic, and pollution. Finally, South Asian cities (Dhaka, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Karachi) experience very high growth and widespread problems: slums, informal settlements, poor transport, unemployment, and environmental degradation.

The main comparative lesson is clear: policies that work in countries moving from central planning (like China or Vietnam) do not automatically work in market-based systems with colonial legacies (like India or the Philippines), and the opposite is also true.

Population growth and migration directly feed informal urban expansion. Every month, cities around the world add almost one million people. Mexico City alone receives tens of thousands of internal migrants each month from poor rural areas. Public and private sectors cannot provide enough adequate housing. As a result, many people move into slums and informal settlements.

However, slums should not be seen as unproductive or marginal areas. In many cases, they support active local economies, including trade and informal real estate markets, and they become stable working-class neighborhoods.

The section on slum formation focuses on two main issues: fragmented metropolitan governance and the imbalance between economic growth and social infrastructure. In cities like Dhaka or Mumbai, metropolitan regions cover very large areas. In Manila or Jakarta, mega-regions include many local governments that are hard to coordinate. The lack of affordable housing for low-income groups, together with policies that favor real estate and commercial development, has encouraged the growth of slums and informal occupations. In middle-income countries, private developers mainly build for the middle class, leaving the poor without options and pushing informal settlements to the urban margins.

The text also shows that slums are not all the same. Differences depend on location, building materials, social groups, and forms of tenure (relations to property). Charles Abrams identified five types of settlements in South American cities:

• Owner-occupiers who build their own houses on land they do not own;
• “Illegal tenants” who rent from other squatters, creating informal landlords;
• Speculators who occupy land hoping to gain legal ownership later;
• Small business owners who live and work in slums to avoid rent and taxes;
• Semi-squatters who later reach an agreement with the legal landowner.

In many Southeast Asian cities, the fast growth of shopping malls and condominiums creates traffic congestion and land pressure that squeeze slums between luxury developments. In Ho Chi Minh City, informal housing represents a large part of the total housing stock, while in Dhaka access to clean water and sewage systems is still extremely limited. In many countries, slums are the only housing market available to the working class, often through renting. This creates a popular informal real estate sector, which provides income opportunities but also brings insecurity and rising costs.

Urban politics reflect these tensions. The chapter highlights the role of social movements, often with strong participation by women, and the close link between global economic changes and local conflicts. In the 1970s, policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), such as austerity and cuts to subsidies for basic goods, led to IMF riots in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. At the same time, forms of local self-organization developed. Examples include the campamentos in Santiago de Chile and informal neighborhoods in Mexico and Nigeria that became active political actors. The main idea is that unequal urbanization produces new forms of conflict and new practices of citizenship.

A large part of the chapter focuses on regional patterns. Latin America is one of the most urbanized regions in the world. Colonial heritage strongly shaped its cities. The Leyes de Indias (1573) established rules for urban design, such as the central plaza, the location of the cathedral and city hall, and the layout of blocks and courtyards. These elements are still visible today. Colonial urbanization, based on trade with Europe and coastal development, also created primate cities and internal inequalities. Today, megacities like Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires coexist with large favelas housing millions of people.

From a theoretical point of view, the authors argue that we should move beyond the old comparison between the industrialized West and developing countries. They propose a sociospatial perspective. This approach recognizes both growing global connections (production chains, finance, real estate investment) and national and local differences that shape outcomes. These differences include institutions, power relations, metropolitan governance capacity, and social structures within families and informal neighborhoods.

Shared phenomena such as primate cities, complex social order in slums, household survival strategies, and informal economies must be understood together with the specific historical and institutional context of each place.

In conclusion, the chapter shows that urbanization in the Global South is not a delayed copy of the Global North. It is an original process produced by the interaction of population growth, migration, global economic restructuring, and the capacity (or incapacity) of urban institutions to manage these changes. Mega-urban regions are key nodes in national and global economies. Slums are not only marginal spaces, but an integral, though unequal and precarious, part of contemporary urbanization. Social movements transform these contradictions into urban political action. To understand how cities in the developing world are changing, we must connect the global, national, metropolitan, and neighborhood levels.

Key definitions (simple list)

• Uneven development: Concentration of investments and services in a few cities, while other areas and social groups are left behind.
• Colonialism: Political and economic domination that created large coastal cities linked to trade with colonial powers.
• Internationalization of capital: Global integration of production, consumption, and profits through globalization.
• Demographic transition: Decline in death rates while birth rates remain high, leading to fast population growth.
• Natural increase: Population growth from births minus deaths, excluding migration.
• Primate city: A city much larger than the second city in the country.
• Overurbanization / underurbanization: Excessive concentration of population and functions in one main city.
• Slum (shantytown): Informal and often illegal settlements with poor services but active social and economic life.
• Informal economy: Economic activities without legal contracts or social protection.
• Household coping strategies: Ways families manage poverty, such as sharing income and resources.
• Crony capitalism: Close ties between political and economic elites that distort development.
• Mega-urban region: Large urban area with a dense core and an extended metropolitan zone.
• IMF riots: Urban protests caused by cuts to subsidies and austerity policies.
• Leyes de Indias: Spanish colonial urban laws shaping Latin American cities.
• Maquiladoras: Export-oriented factories in Mexico linked to global production chains.

7. The cost of racial and class exclusion in the inner city (1989)

Loïc J. D. Wacquant & William Julius Wilson

In The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City (1989), Wacquant and Wilson study the transformation of Black ghettos in large US cities, especially Chicago. They argue that the crisis of the inner city cannot be explained by psychological or cultural theories, such as the idea of a “culture of poverty.” Instead, they propose a structural explanation. The worsening living conditions in ghettos are caused by deep changes in the economy, urban policies, and the spatial organization of cities, which create combined racial and class exclusion.

For much of the 20th century, the Black ghetto was a stable and recognized urban area, marked by racial segregation and discrimination in housing and labor markets. However, it was not always an area of extreme poverty. Many residents had industrial jobs, and local institutions and associations supported community life.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, this situation changed. Ghettos became places where unemployment, insecurity, fragile families, and social isolation were highly concentrated.

The main cause was economic restructuring, especially deindustrialization. Factories closed or moved away from cities, destroying stable jobs accessible to low-skilled workers. New service jobs required higher education and were often unstable. As a result, unemployment became a long-term condition, not a temporary problem.

At the same time, jobs and middle-class residents moved to the suburbs. This suburbanization reduced the tax base and political power of inner-city neighborhoods and increased their isolation. The ghetto became disconnected from job opportunities and social networks. Isolation was not cultural, but produced by segregation and economic change.

The authors describe this process as hyperghettoization: an extreme form of segregation with very high concentration of poverty. This leads to the collapse of institutions, weak social control, poor schools, and insecurity. Not all Black neighborhoods are the same. Differences depend on the interaction between race, class, and urban space.

Comparing low-poverty and high-poverty Black areas, the authors show that extreme-poverty neighborhoods have higher unemployment, more welfare dependence, fewer assets, and weaker social networks. This disproves the idea of a single “ghetto culture.”

Behaviors often seen as deviant are better understood as adaptations to environments with very limited opportunities. Poverty is not caused by culture, but by structural exclusion.

In conclusion, the crisis of the inner city cannot be solved by moral or individual solutions. The cost of racial and class exclusion is the creation of long-term, spatially concentrated urban marginality, produced by economic restructuring and urban policies, not by residents’ choices.

Red belt, Black belt — Loïc Wacquant

In the article Red Belt, Black Belt, Loïc Wacquant compares urban marginality in the United States and in France. He compares the American Black ghetto with French working-class suburbs, especially the banlieues of the so-called “red belt.” His main goal is to show that, even if these places look similar on the surface (poverty, unemployment, territorial stigma), they follow very different historical, institutional, and political logics.

Wacquant criticizes interpretations that treat European suburbs as if they were the same as American ghettos. He argues that these comparisons hide the key role of the state, race, and social policies in creating urban marginality.

He starts from the idea that, from the 1970s and 1980s, Western societies experienced more structural unemployment, more insecure jobs, and more urban poverty. These processes hit working-class groups and vulnerable people especially hard, but they take different forms in different countries. In the US, marginality has historically been concentrated in Black ghettos. In France, it appears mainly in popular suburbs with many immigrants and children of immigrants. For Wacquant, treating the two situations as the same means ignoring differences in welfare systems, urban policies, and social stratification.

In the American case, the Black ghetto is described as a historical institution based on racial segregation. It was created as a space of forced confinement for African Americans, and over time it became a place of cumulative exclusion. With deindustrialization and the restructuring of advanced capitalism, the ghetto lost many jobs and became more and more a territory of mass unemployment, concentrated poverty, and social isolation.

This process leads to what Wacquant calls hyperghettoization: an extreme form of urban marginality where racial segregation, exclusion from the labor market, territorial stigma, and the retreat of public institutions come together. In this context, the American state acts in an ambivalent way: on one side it reduces social support; on the other side it strengthens punishment and penal control, which helps to criminalize urban poverty.

France shows a very different situation. Working-class banlieues are not the result of legalized racial segregation. They mainly come from housing and urban policies that concentrated working-class people in large public housing estates. Many immigrants live there, but marginality is not organized along a strict racial line like in the US. Also, the French state remains strongly present through welfare, public schools, social services, and urban policies. Because of this, poverty is real and growing, but it does not create the same level of institutional and social isolation seen in American ghettos.

A central point of the article is the role of the state in producing and managing urban marginality. Wacquant shows that in the US the state gradually abandoned the ghetto in social terms and replaced welfare with punitive policies and control. In France, the state remains a central actor, even if its action is often contradictory and not enough. This difference explains why French suburbs should not be called “ghettos” in a strict sociological sense: they are still integrated (even if in a subordinate position) into national institutions and the broader social space.

Wacquant also criticizes media and political speeches about the “Americanization” of European suburbs. For him, these speeches are more about fear and symbolic narratives than about real structural convergence. Visible similarities (urban decay, youth unemployment, conflicts with police) should not make us forget that the mechanisms are different. In the US, marginality is strongly racialized and territorially closed. In France, it is mainly class-based and mediated by still-active public institutions.

In conclusion, Wacquant argues that urban marginality is not universal and identical everywhere. It is produced by specific historical and institutional conditions. Understanding the differences between the American ghetto and European suburbs is essential to avoid simple analyses and to design appropriate policies. The main lesson is that race, class, and the state interact differently in different countries, creating different forms of urban exclusion that cannot be understood with generic categories taken from other contexts.

Key concepts to remember (B1)

• Ghetto: An urban institution based on racial segregation, combining spatial confinement, economic exclusion, and symbolic stigma.
• Hyperghettoization: An advanced stage of the US ghetto with concentrated poverty, structural unemployment, social isolation, and retreat of social policies.
• Advanced urban marginality: Today’s form of exclusion linked to economic restructuring, insecure work, and weaker social protection.
• Banlieue: French suburb, often with public housing and working-class residents; not the same as the US ghetto.
• Territorial stigmatization: A process where an area is labeled as dangerous, deviant, and degraded, which reduces residents’ opportunities.
• Role of the state: Social, urban, and penal policies shaping marginality (more punitive in the US; more social/welfare-based in France).
• Race vs class: In the US marginality is strongly racialized; in France it is mainly structured by class.

“A good place for the poor!” — Fattah & Walters

Simple English (B1)

In the article “A Good Place for the Poor!”, Fattah and Walters study territorial stigmatization in cities of the Global South. They use an ethnographic study in two informal settlements in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The main aim is to understand how people living in stigmatized informal neighborhoods not only absorb negative ideas from outside, but also create counter-narratives to resist stigma and to justify their right to live in the city.

The authors co