Page 47 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

particular interest for cultural studies has been (a) the inner city, (b) the postmodern
city and (c) the global city.

24 Inner city The ‘modern’ Anglo-American city has commonly been understood in terms
of zones that expand radially from the centre and which are inhabited by particular
types or classes of people. In effect, various social class groups are allocated specific
residential zones by income selection. In recent years it has become commonplace
to discuss the ‘inner city’ as being a poor, non-white zone of decay paralleled by the
growth of suburbs populated predominantly by the middle class.
Typically, the formation of the inner city has involved a degree of ‘white flight’
from the city to the suburbs. At its most extreme, a city like Detroit (USA) has a poor
black inner zone with whole sections not supplied with basic services like electricity
and water. In the popular imagination these are dangerous places of gang wars, drug
abuse and crime that have emerged as a sign of intensified social polarization,
including the abandonment of an ‘underclass’ to mass unemployment, drug
trafficking, poverty and homelessness. Here are the conditions for the urban rioting
witnessed during the 1980s and 1990s in British and American cities.
However, some parts of the inner city, especially those areas that have been most
effected by de-industrialization, have been taken over by middle class groups who
have benefited from the regeneration of former industrial or dockland areas in a
process of gentrification. This has involved an increase in house prices and the
generation of cultural activities based on the lifestyles of a college-educated group.
At the same time so-called ‘inner city’ poverty is increasingly located across the
urban landscape.

Postmodern city According to some writers, most notably Soja, major changes took
place in cities during the last quarter of the twentieth century that can be described
as postmodern. Los Angeles is commonly understood to be the archetypical case.
Thus de-industrialization and re-industrialization in the context of a global
economy have shifted the economic base of the city towards a combination of high-
technology industries and low-skill, labour-intensive, design-sensitive industries.
The postmodern city is also marked by the restructuring and redistribution of jobs,
affordable housing, transport systems and lines of racial/ethnic divide. This has
spread the attributes of formally distinct urban zones across the city so that, for
example, the ‘inner city’ poor zone is not necessarily located within the physical
inner city and residential suburbs are increasingly the site of new forms of industrial
development.
The restructuring of the urban economy is implicated in new patterns of social
fragmentation, segregation and polarization marked by an enlarging managerial
technocracy, a shrinking middle class and a growing base of the homeless, welfare
dependants and cheap labour. The backbone of a cheap and weakly organized
labour force is the growing proportion of migrants. In this context the perception
of rising crime, violence and ethnic difference has led to an increasingly security
conscious city marked by walled-in estates, armed guards, patrolled shopping
centres, surveillance cameras and wire fences. Finally, on the level of cultural