Cities have become the major habitat for human societies. They are also the places where the starkest social inequalities show up. Income, social, land and housing inequalities shape the built environment and living conditions of different neighborhoods of cities, and in return, unequal access to services, environmental quality and favorable health conditions in different neighborhoods and cities fuel the reproduction of interpersonal inequalities. This book examines how inequalities are produced and reproduced both within and between cities. In particular, we review land rent and social segregation theories from diverse disciplinary references and through examples taken from around the world. The attraction of urban centralities, which is further reinforced by the growing financialization of property and urban capital, is also analyzed through the lens of its influence on rent-seeking mechanisms and the ever increasing pressure of population migration.

Cities have become the major habitat for human societies. They are also the places where the starkest social inequalities show up. Income, social, land and housing inequalities shape the built environment and living conditions of different neighborhoods of cities, and in return, unequal access to services, environmental quality and favorable health conditions in different neighborhoods and cities fuel the reproduction of interpersonal inequalities. This book examines how inequalities are produced and reproduced both within and between cities. In particular, we review land rent and social segregation theories from diverse disciplinary references and through examples taken from around the world. The attraction of urban centralities, which is further reinforced by the growing financialization of property and urban capital, is also analyzed through the lens of its influence on rent-seeking mechanisms and the ever increasing pressure of population migration.

Cities continue to be key sites for the production and contestation of inequalities generated by an ongoing but troubled neoliberal project. Neoliberalism’s onslaught across the globe now shapes diverse inequalities -- poverty, segregation, racism, social exclusion, homelessness -- as city inhabitants feel the brunt of privatization, state re-organization, and punishing social policy. This book examines the relationship between persistent neoliberalism and the production and contestation of inequalities in cities across the world. Case studies of current city realities reveal a richly place-specific and generalizable neoliberal condition that further deepens the economic, social, and political relations that give rise to diverse inequalities. Diverse cases also show how people struggle against a neoliberal ethos and hence the open-endedness of futures in these cities.

This edited volume is a lively and timely appraisal of “ordinary cities” as they struggle to implement creative redevelopment and economic growth strategies to enhance their global competitiveness. The book is concerned with new and often unanticipated inequalities that have emerged from this new city movement. As chronicled, such cities – Cleveland (USA), Heidelberg (Germany), Oxford (UK), Groningen (Netherlands), Montpellier (France), but also cities from the Global South such as Cachoeira (Brazil) and Delhi (India) – now experience new and unexpected realities of poverty, segregation, neglect of the poor, racial and ethnic strife. To date planners, academics, and policy analysts have paid little attention to the connections between this drive in these cities to be more creative and the inequalities that have followed. This book, keenly making these connections, highlights the limited visions that have been applied in this planning drive to make these cities more creative and ultimately more globally competitive.

It is not possible to ignore the fact that cities are not only moving, vibrant and flourishing spaces, promising hope for better quality of life, but that they also accumulate and reflect significant problems. This book explores the relational and dynamic nature of urban inequalities, including their visible and invisible forms. By using the rather elusive term of ‘uncertainty’, the authors zoom in on specific aspects of urban inequalities that are difficult to measure, yet are acutely sensed and experienced by people and, more and more often, perceived as unfair. Here, in the recognition of inequalities as unjust and in the disagreement with the status quo, lies a positive aspect of uncertainty, which can lead to a social awakening and more active citizenship.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

In striving to become cosmopolitan, global cities aim to attract highly-skilled workers while relying on a vast underbelly of low-waged, low status migrants. This book tells the story of one such city, revealing how national development produces both aspirations to be cosmopolitan and to improve one's class standing, along with limitations in achieving such aims. Through the analysis of three different groups of workers in Singapore, Ye shows that cosmopolitanism is an exclusive and aspirational construct created through global and national development strategies, transnational migration and individual senses of identity. This dialectic relationship between class and cosmopolitanism is never free from power and is constituted through material and symbolic conditions, struggles and violence. Class is also constituted through 'the self' and lies at the very heart of different constructions of personhood as they intersect with gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality.