restructuring and spatial polarization in cities

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Page 1: Restructuring and Spatial Polarization in Cities

http://phg.sagepub.com

Progress in Human Geography

DOI: 10.1191/030913297670500369 1997; 21; 251 Prog Hum Geogr

Blair Badcock Restructuring and spatial polarization in cities

http://phg.sagepub.com The online version of this article can be found at:

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Progress in Human Geography Additional services and information for

http://phg.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:

http://phg.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

© 1997 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at ROOSEVELT UNIV LIBRARY on September 12, 2007 http://phg.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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Progress reports

Restructuring and spatialpolarization in citiesBlair BadcockDepartment of Geography, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 5005,Australia

This review surveys the recent evidence and debate surrounding social and spatialpolarization within cities. To begin with, a brief account is provided of the significance ofglobal restructuring and the contraction of the welfare state for widening inequalities incapitalist societies, and how this is being reflected, in turn, in modifications to thecharacter and incidence of poverty in cities. In this section, to pick up on the concludingremarks in the preceding review (Badcock, 1996), attention is drawn to how emphaticallyimportant structural effects remain to an understanding of spatial polarization in citiesand the profound changes that are taking place in people's lives at the community level.

The next section selectively documents some of the key contributions to research onurban poverty and polarization in the USA including the theories relating to the `newurban poverty', the formation of a ghetto-bound `underclass' and the emergence of a newspatial order based upon a `global city' paradigm. In the third section the comparativeevidence for growing spatial polarization in cities is examined. This includes someconsideration of the portability and relevance of constructs developed under Americanconditions for cities in other, mostly western, societies.

Lastly, a case is made suggesting why this research on spatial polarization is quite vitalfrom a public policy perspective, and why human geographers should be in the thick of it.

I Global restructuring, the contraction of the welfare state and the`new urban poverty'

The revival of political economy that coursed through the social sciences in the 1970scoincided with a series of economic crises that positivist science was unable to foresee, letalone make sense of. For example, no economic forecasting model contained the kind ofpredictive capacity that could anticipate the shocks delivered to oil prices in 1974 and1979, or a counterintuitive phenomenon like stagflation. Whereas political economyentertained the possibility of structural adjustment and the shift to a new phase withincapitalism as part of each state's attempt to restore equilibrium to the economic system,mainstream economists were more inclined to put the instability down to cyclical self-

*c Arnold 1997 0309±1325(97)PH153PR

Progress in Human Geography 21,2 (1997) pp. 251±262

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corrections. And while a newly `spatialized' form of political economy big-noted theuneven nature of capitalist development, neoclassical economics all but ignored spaceuntil the last year to two (Krugman, 1995).

For some time, in insisting that as western economies recovered, retooling and theadoption of new technology would restore industrial output and even lift it to newheights, economists quite missed Bluestone and Harrison's (1982) point about deindus-trialization: a fundamental shift was beginning to take place in the division of labour withnot only domestic but also global ramifications for the reorganization of capital (Probert,1990; Dicken, 1992; Fagan and Webber, 1994).

Harvey (1989) correctly read the momentous import of `flexible accumulation' as itbegan to unfold, including the prospect in a post-Fordist era of a more flexible mode ofproduction. Governments responded to the need to restore conditions for profitability byderegulating markets in the domestic economy (Kuttner, 1996), by dismantling institu-tional structures (Laws, 1996), and by agreeing to the freer circulation of capital, goodsand labour globally (Bryan, 1995). While Budd (1995) cautions against overstating theshift to `globalization', there is no question that the pace at which national and regionaleconomies are being integrated into worldwide production and financial systems exceedsthat of any other era (Stilwell, 1996). As a direct consequence of this heightened competi-tion between `borderless' economies ± or more pervious boundaries between states ±cities are repositioning themselves within the global economy (Sassen, 1994; Knox andTaylor, 1995), and inequalities appear to be opening up at all levels: between the northand the south (Fieleke, 1994; Jolly, 1996); between cities within urban systems (Warf andErickson, 1996); and between communities within cities (Forster, 1995).

By the mid-1990s a point has been reached where the evidence for a widening in theincome gap in many OECD countries is now indisputable (Atkinson et al., 1995; OECD,1996). Hence the general postwar trend to income equalization in welfare state societies isnow being reversed. This has been confirmed for the USA in a 1989 study by theTwentieth Century Fund (Herbert, 1996: 8), and in a recent US Census Bureau report(1996); for the UK by the Rowntree Foundation Inquiry into Income and Wealth (Barclay,1995); for Canada by Statistics Canada (Wolfson, 1994); and for Australia in studies bySaunders (1994).

What closer examination of these national trends reveals is that the growth in incomeinequality has been quite variable from country to country depending, first, upon thesectoral composition of economies in the 1970s. In particular, much of the fall in realincome in the lower deciles has been due to the effects of trade liberalization and labourmarket flexibility upon the division of labour. In an era of globalization and deregulation,the demand for unskilled labour collapsed during recession in the early 1980s and early1990s pushing down wages and increasing unemployment. On the other hand, thesalaries of the well educated continued to rise in most OECD countries due to the creationof new jobs in the producer services and knowledge-based industries (Reich, 1991).

This tendency to bifurcation in the labour market has been associated with a dis-proportionate loss of `middle pay' jobs in a number of countries, most notably the USA(Dobrzynski, 1996) and Australia (Gregory, 1993); though the `disappearing' or`shrinking middle' is not so apparent in the UK (Hamnett, 1996) or Canada (Bourne,1995). At the same time jobs in those occupations traditionally dominated by womenhave increased in number (Gregory, 1993). But many of these jobs in expanding sectors ofthe economy are typically part time or casual, on a contract-only basis, nonunionized andlow wage (Kobayashi, 1994; Hanson and Pratt, 1995). For example, of the 1.4 million new

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jobs created in Australia between 1980 and 1993, 60% were part time and 75% of thesejobs were filled by women (Department of Social Security, 1993).

What does vitally effect changes in income distribution is how each state treatsearnings for tax purposes, and the extent to which the losses in real wage income havebeen offset by transfer payments and social wage adjustments. Esping-Anderson (1990)recognizes three variants of the welfare state model that are different enough to affect thesystem of support and entitlements that citizens receive. There is a clear pattern wherebygovernments that have been the most ruthless in removing the institutions that protectworkers and in cutting back income support, while also failing to develop labour marketprogrammes, exhibit the greatest increases in income inequality over the last two decades.The UK, the USA and New Zealand fall into this category.

By contrast, during the 1980s social redistribution in Canada and Australia helped todampen inequalities in earnings (Bourne, 1995; Harding, 1995) ± though not withoutshifting part of the burden of `after costs' poverty from the elderly to households withchildren, expressly one-parent families. However, with conservative parties now in powerand intent on lowering the deficit, there is a real likelihood that the gap between the richand poor has begun to widen more drastically in both these societies.

Therefore in approaching the question of global restructuring and its impact upon thedistribution of national income, social classes and housing within cities, observers havebeen made keenly aware of the mediating role of the state (Dieleman and Hamnett, 1994;Murie and Musterd, 1996). Notwithstanding the sameness about many of the structuraltransformations taking place within welfare state societies, comparative research attests tothe crucial importance for urban communities of the different approaches taken bygovernments to managing economic and social restructuring in the post-Fordist era(Musterd, 1994). These are the changing structures of social provision, then, that arelargely responsible, along with the deregulation of labour and housing markets, for theemergence of `the new urban poverty'.

II Conceptual approaches to social and spatial transformation in USA cities

The expression, `new urban poverty' encapsulates a wide-ranging debate about the socialand spatial transformations currently taking place in western cities (Mingione, 1995;Marcuse, 1996). Economic and social restructuring during the 1980s and 1990s has beenaccompanied by frequent spells of unemployment ± sometimes prolonged in manyhouseholds (Philpott, 1994); the growth of an unregulated, informal, partly illegal sectorwhich avoids minimum wage rates; deinstitutionalization; and the curtailment of servicesrepresenting `in-kind' income. Oft-repeated symptoms of the `new urban poverty' in USAcities include the very high incidence of ethnic minorities, women and children living indestitution; homelessness; drug-related crime; and street peddlers and beggars (Marcuse,1996: 9±18). In pointing to what is `new' about poverty in Europe in the 1990s, theresearch tends to distinguish between the elderly who have traditionally formed the `hardcore' poor, and the recent rise in income support for the unemployed and lone parents(Room, 1990; Neef, 1992).

The USA, with a labour market that is fractured by race, provides some of the mostgraphic instances in its cities of both the worsening concentration of poverty and the city-wide social polarization that has taken place over two decades (Abramson and Tobin,1995; Frey and Fielding, 1995; O'Hare, 1996). Segmented labour markets combine with

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discriminatory housing markets to leave USA communities profoundly divided on thebasis of race and ethnicity (Massey and Denton, 1993; Iceland, 1996). By 1990, more thanhalf of all African Americans and Hispanics in the metropolitan areas of Chicago,Washington, Philadelphia, Detroit, St Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland, Memphis and Buffalolived in neighbourhoods that were at least 90% black (US Department of Housing andUrban Development, 1995: 12).

These neighbourhoods are among the poorest in the USA: more than 60% of familieswith children are headed by single women; more than 40% of working-age males are outof work; one in three households are receiving welfare benefits; more than half of alladults did not graduate from high school; and high homicide and incarceration ratesamong young black males raise the level of solo parenting (US Department of Housingand Urban Development, 1995: 13±14). What is equally disturbing is the increase innumber of these severely distressed communities: in 1990, 11% of the population of thenation's 100 largest cities lived in extreme-poverty neighbourhoods, compared to 8% in1980 and 5% in 1970.

Marcuse (1996: 19) describes this coming together of the spatial and racial concentra-tion of poverty with the change in the nature of that poverty as the `outcast ghetto'.Wilson (1987) goes further in arguing such are the circumstances confronting the `trulydisadvantaged' in these neighbourhoods that they are creating an underclass detachedfrom the rest of USA society.

Wilson's thesis highlights the explicitly racial dimension of economic marginalizationand deprivation in the USA along with the spatial entrapment of blacks within the ghetto(Schill and Wachter, 1994). He argues that not only does this cut African Americans andHispanics in the ghetto off from mainstream society, and hence the normal channels ofsocialization; but with the running down of the education system and job decline in theinner city, and few labour market programmes, many young blacks have dropped out ofthe formal labour market altogether. As Newman (1995) shows for Harlem, of the high-school graduates that manage to obtain work locally, most are languishing in low-paid,`dead-end' jobs in the service sector with little prospect of working their way outof poverty.

On the other hand, conservatives like Murray (1984) place responsibility for deepeningpoverty within the black community in the USA much more squarely upon behaviouralprocesses, including the cultivation of welfare dependency. In part, his theory harks backto arguments advanced by cultural theorists suggesting that, over time, a distinctivesubculture of poverty forms as the shared values and social orientations to work andfamily are passed from one generation of the poor to the next. So for Murray, accultura-tion has produced a mainly black underclass living upon government handouts and nowinured, or just resigned, to the violence of the ghetto.

As well as coming under withering criticism (Bagguley and Mann, 1992; Gans, 1993), ithas to be said that UK studies, at least, do not support the suppositions regarding thetransmission of poverty or a culture of dependency from one generation to the next(Boddy et al., 1995: 96). Although the debate is bound to continue about the existence orotherwise of an underclass and whether it is essentially structural or cultural/behaviouralin origins (Smith, 1992; Kasarda and Ting, 1996), what can be said is that the factors thatconsistently emerge in contemporary discussions of poverty are long-term unemploy-ment and the disintegration of the family (Lee, 1994). Portentously, the historic shift in theUSA from the `war on poverty' to a `war on the poor' gives more credence to the `cycle ofdependency' than it does to structural barriers.

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Although poverty has dominated the research agenda (O'Hare, 1996), not withoutreason the divided nature of USA cities has also come into much sharper focus in the1990s (Johnson et al., 1994). In particular, it is the rise of `global cities' that has stimulatedfresh insight into the process of urban restructuring (Sassen, 1991), and led to speculationabout the bearing that has upon deepening levels of social and spatial polarization inpost-Fordist cities (Mollenkopf and Castells, 1991; Fainstein et al., 1992; Goldsmith andBlakely, 1993; O'Loughlin and Friedrichs, 1996; Musterd and Ostendorf, 1997).

This has proven especially so for first-order cities like New York and Los Angeles (andTokyo) which were busily capitalizing in the 1980s upon the internationalization offinance at the same time that they were a destination for successive waves of poorimmigrants or refugees from low-wage countries. Thus the sectoral shifts taking placemore generally within the USA economy (Reich, 1991) have been thrown into sharperrelief in the biggest conurbations partly due to the special role that they perform in theglobal economy (King, 1991).

But beyond this, in The global city Saskia Sassen (1991) reasons that the disproportionatejob growth that took place in the three expanding segments of the labour market in citieslike New York in the 1980s ± producer services, routine personnel-domestic services,informal activity ± dramatically widened social divisions between the rich and poor.Warf (1990) and Clark and McNicholas (1995) examine the impact of `bifurcation' uponminorities in New York and Los Angeles respectively. They conclude that the occupa-tional profiles of both cities are some distance from an `hour-glass effect' as yet; and thatemployment growth so crosscuts the different racial and ethnic minorities that it isdifficult to generalize about labour market outcomes. None the less, according to Sassen(1991), these polarizing tendencies are also stimulating a resorting of global city housingmarkets so that cities like New York are now much more compartmentalized, or`quartered' to use Marcuse's (1989) term, than before the advent of `globalization'.

The significance of the global city `hypothesis' rests with the extent to which the socialand spatial transformations taking place in New York and Los Angeles have come to beregarded as paradigmatic for other cities (Burgers, 1996: 99). Hamnett (1996: 109) is not sosure: he maintains that Saskia Sassen mistakenly attempts to `generalize a peculiarlyAmerican set of circumstances to all global cities'.

III Spatial polarization in cities: the evidence

Whether or not the widening of the income gap observed in many OECD countries is alsobeing compounded by processes that operate at a city-wide or more localized level is thesubject of considerable interest. For example, the OECD Group on Urban Affairs (1994)has established a project group on Distressed Urban Areas. In August 1995, the IGUCommission on Urban Life met in Cape Town to compare aspects of polarization in cities;while in Australia, the Commonwealth Department of Housing and Regional Develop-ment convened a seminar on spatial aspects of inequality. In May 1996, the DessauSeminar in Berlin brought together a group of urbanists to consider the new spatial order,and the issue of new urban forms dominated the Brisbane meeting of the InternationalSociological Association in July.

Naturally, some of the interest in this research area rests with how key methodologicaland measurement questions are resolved in practice (Lee, 1994; Bourne, 1995; Bradfordet al., 1995; Woodward, 1995; Fieldhouse and Tye, 1996). There is the reasonable

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expectation that if global economic pressures have combined with labour marketadjustment and the cutting back of welfare to create more polarized societies, then thelegacy of past urban management and housing provision is now working to sharpen ordampen spatially, as the case may be, those social inequalities in cities. And becausepresent-day polarizing tendencies are partly captive to past interventions of the state inland and housing markets, the spatial patterning of poverty and social segregation isbound to differ from city to city (Dieleman and Hamnett, 1994; Lee and Murie, 1996;Peach, 1996).

In the USA, where modes of state intervention tend to be weakest, `the ultimatepolarized urban society' has given rise to spatially partitioned and compartmentalizedcities (Musterd, 1994: 191). Although Los Angeles might be the most celebrated case(Davis, 1990), it is by no means the only USA city that has divided into desperately poor`no-go' areas into which few middle-class whites will venture, and fortified compoundsin the suburbs to keep blacks out (Massey and Denton, 1993).

Although Britain, Canada and Australia share a common past, they have eachdeveloped varied systems to manage land and housing provision in cities. Lee and Murie(1996: 119) point out that these historical differences in city structure and housing tenurehave had a powerful influence over the `new' urban geographies of poverty and socialpolarization. For example, Britain developed the largest social housing sector in Europewhich, prior to the 1970s, did not relate especially closely to the price structure of land orhousing (Murie, 1994).

In the UK, Coombes et al. (1992) and Robson et al. (1995) have revisited `socialindicators' and developed a methodology for detecting deprivation at the authority level.Pacione (1995) exposes the link between the geography of multiple deprivation in theClydeside conurbation and the housing programme. Green (1994) and Woodward (1995)chart the growing spatial polarization between the rich and poor in Britain during the1980s. Green (1994) estimates that a person in the poorest `journey to work' zone is sixtimes as likely to be unemployed, and 23 times more likely to have been out of work formore than a year, than someone living in the most affluent commuting zone.

Bourne (1995) presents a range of longitudinal data revealing the changing incomedistribution within Canadian cities, including how far apart high and low-incomedistricts have moved over a 40-year period (1950±90). While in Australia, the research ofGregory and Hunter (1995a; 1995b), Raskall (1995) and Burbidge and Winter (1996)definitely bears out the intuitions of others writing about the impact of restructuringupon urban communities (Murphy and Watson, 1994; Badcock, 1995).

In Europe, each state has moderated the impact of global economic pressures uponurban communities to varying effect with a range of labour market programmes andincome transfers (Burgers, 1996). Moreover, during the 1980s powerful trade unions,centralized wage bargaining and high minimum wages helped prop up the wages of thelow-paid. With levels of income inequality typically half those of the USA or Australia,with well regulated property systems and with sizeable social housing sectors, it is notsurprising that German, Dutch and Swedish cities are much less polarized spatially(Musterd, 1994). Sociospatial polarization seems to be rather more evident in a Europeancity like Brussels because of its almost completely privatized housing market, politicalfragmentation and large immigrant community (Kesteloot, 1994).

Yet, overall, a note of concern permeates the contributions to the Built Environmentvolume (Musterd, 1994). Governments in Europe are also reviewing spending program-mes and progressively liberalizing labour markets in an effort to increase competitive-

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ness. With heightened demand and better rewards for advanced skills outpacingearnings in the low-wage sector, and transfer payments losing their real value, socialfissures may begin to open up with poorly skilled immigrants being the real losers (vanKempen, 1994). And because they occupy the cheaper social housing in the centres ofmost of the big European cities, and wealthier households are moving into their ownhomes on the suburban fringe, there is the worry that spatial polarization might becomemore prominent (Murie and Musterd, 1996).

IV Some implications of polarizing tendencies in western cities

In coming to terms with new forms of poverty and the dispersion of employment andincomes in their own societies, it is not surprising, perhaps, that some observers havebegun to warn of the disturbing consequences should these developments follow thesame course that they have in the USA. At the Australia-OECD Conference on Cities andthe New Global Economy in November 1994, Christopher Brooks, the Head of theOECD's Territorial Development Service, warned of the debilitating effect of an under-class taking root `physically alongside places where economic wealth is created' (Brooks,1995: 107). In the main, though, debate in European Community circles `has focusedaround ideas of marginalisation and social exclusion' (Boddy et al., 1995: 96) rather thanraising the spectre of underclass formation (Woodward, 1995: 82±85). This includes theUK, where the characterization of poor communities is still mostly in terms of deprivation(Lee, 1994; Bradford et al., 1995; Pacione, 1995).

Not so in Australia: several researchers have recently suggested that developments akinto the formation of an `urban underclass' (Hunter, 1995), quarantined in `urban ghettoes'(Gregory and Hunter, 1995a) away from other parts of an increasingly fortified city ±`fortress city' (White, 1996) ± are beginning to take shape under Australian conditions.Peel (1995) and Fincher (1996) both adopt more thoughtful positions in relation to urbanpoverty. Peel (1995) contends that while the local incidence of long-term unemployment,hardship and `incomplete' families may leave the impression that the poorest publichousing estates are disintegrating socially, this can mask remarkable personal resilienceand community solidarity. Fincher (1996) suggests that governmental assistance departsfrom the USA in the way urban poverty is contextualized with respect to gender relations,thereby making for compositional differences in Australia's poor.

A further implication relates to some of the ambiguities surrounding the global cityhypothesis. These crystallize in the debate between Burgers (1996) and Hamnett (1996).Hamnett explains that he is not trying to deny the tendency to polarization in Dutch cities(Hamnett, 1994a); but rather, having properly set it in a comparative perspective, admitsto a need to question whether polarization in the Randstad and other global cities iscaused by those same processes adduced for New York and Los Angeles.

Hamnett has his doubts. Whereas the bifurcation of occupations in the serviceeconomy is leading to income dispersion, and social and spatial polarization in USAglobal cities, in many European societies (and major cities), `the occupational structure ofthe economically active population . . . is becoming professionalized not polarized'(Hamnett, 1996: 108). But this assessment of the significance of `professionalization' isbased upon studies of socioeconomic change in London that set aside those not in theworkforce, and tend to discount the special nature of London's civil service (Buck, 1994;Hamnett, 1994b). Consequently, `professionalization' might not apply to anything like

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the same degree in other British (Lee and Murie, 1996: 103±31), let alone global, cities(though see Clark and McNicholas, 1995, on Los Angeles).

But the more telling point, and here Burgers and Hamnett are in agreement, relates tothe ameliorative role of strong welfare state societies in the absence of the kind ofgrowth in low-wage employment that has occurred in the USA service economy.Whereas social polarization in cities like New York and Los Angeles has been accent-uated by the disproportionate growth of high and low-paid jobs in the USA (11.2million jobs have been created since March 1991, and by the first quarter of 1996unemployment had fallen to 5.3%; Dobrzynski, 1996), global economic pressures inEurope have displaced more workers than have been reabsorbed in the upturn. But thisis where the Dutch state, for example, steps in and helps the unemployed to copefinancially (Kloosterman and Lambooy, 1992). They are not forced `down market' in thehousing system and as a consequence spatial polarization remains much more muted inthe Dutch cities.

Lastly, these polarizing tendencies in cities raise a series of questions about `space' thatsimply will not go away. The social impact of economic restructuring upon urbancommunities over the last two or three decades has been indelible enough to begin toforce a reappraisal in some quarters of spatial policy in the 1990s (OECD Group on UrbanAffairs, 1994); or more correctly, draw attention to the lack of it. Thomas (1996: 14) writesthat `The squashing of the poorest into islands of neglect has transformed the experienceof poverty', such that they are marginalized, `Not so much by the lack of money but bygeography'.

In the USA, with the abolition of the federal programme known as Aid to Families withDependent Children and the passing of responsibility for welfare to the states, New YorkCity will incur an additional $720 million in welfare costs by 2002 because the stateconstitution requires the state to provide for the `aid, care and support of the needy', asdetermined by the state legislature (Firestone, 1996). Unlike many other states intent onlimiting entitlements, New York is obliged to replace the benefits stripped from legalimmigrants and adults who have exceeded the five-year lifetime limit for welfareassistance. How will Clinton's commitment to `ending welfare as we know it' change thegeography of poverty in the USA?

Labour economists like Gregory and Hunter (1995b) now concede that as well astraining schemes to assist the long-term unemployed back into the workplace, policymust also consider the `geographical issues'. Just as persistent long-term unemploymentis something to be avoided in any society, so too is its localization in a few parts of thecity: `In retrospect it does not seem to be a good policy to concentrate unemployed peoplein high rise public housing' (Gregory and Hunter, 1995b: 26±27). Lee (1994) andBurbridge and Winter (1996) both show how changes in the targeting of housing assist-ance through the 1980s in Britain and Australia inadvertently worked together with localhousing markets to concentrate spatially the poor in tenures of `last resort'.

During the 1980s and 1990s, departments across all tiers of government have variouslyprivatized services, introduced `user pays' pricing and engaged in community `assetstripping'. Because there has seldom been interdepartmental, let alone intergovernmentalco-ordination, the burden of public sector restructuring has fallen quite indiscriminantlyacross urban communities. But it is the poorest neighbourhoods that have had the most tolose since they invariably qualified for the widest range of matching, and special pro-gramme grants. For some of these reasons the OECD is coming round to the realizationthat any macroeconomic response to structural adjustment also needs to include

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programmes specifically for communities that have missed out on each of the upturnsfollowing recession since the mid-1970s:

we have treated our social and ecological development agenda through income transfers, consumption-ledexpenditures and transfers, rather than investing in the sorts of infrastructure in people and places in new ways, toprovide them with the capacity not to be dependent and to expand the range of opportunities open to them(Brooks, 1995: 108).

It has to be said that the prospects for redistribution of this order of magnitude remainbleak. In the realm of ideas it runs into the opposition of influential economists likeMichael Porter (1995). His advice is that

We must stop trying to cure the inner city's problems by perpetually increasing social investment and hoping foreconomic activity to follow . . . Our policies and programmes have fallen into the trap of redistributing wealth. Thereal need ± and the real opportunity ± is to create wealth (Porter, 1995: 65).

Politically speaking, spatial polarization changes the agenda to the extent that middle-class voters no longer even see themselves as occupying the same world as the poor(Thomas, 1996). Whether it is the fear to venture into `no-go' areas in USA or British cities,even though they might be close by; or whether it is the sheer remoteness of some of thepublic housing `dumping grounds' on the edge of Australian cities that breeds theindifference, either way it is a matter of `out of sight, out of mind' (Badcock, 1994).

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