alternative perspectives on ‘urban inequality’

Geoforwn, Vol. 15. No. 1, pp. 75-82.1984. 0016.718JixJ $3.rx,+o.tn

Printed in Great Britain. Pergamon Press Ltd.

Alternative Perspectives on ‘Urban Inequality’

DAVID M. SMITH,* London, U.K.

Abstract: Three main alternative perspectives make claims to elucidate inequality in living standards as manifest spatially within the advanced capitalist city. The first is that of area1 differentiation, with its emphasis on pattern identification and its roots in the ecological approach of the Chicago school of urban sociology. As an explanatory theory, this perspective is now largely discredited, though there are still contributions to make at the descriptive level (e.g. in social indicators research). The second perspective is that of spatial organization, which emphasises the role of location, space and distance in the generation of inequality, e.g. via facility location and the residential arrangement of the population. This perspective reveals something of the inequality inherent in the built form of the urban environment, but fails to penetrate far into process. The third perspective is that of political economy. which sees urban form as the outcome of broader economic- social-political processes arising from the nature of the prevailing (capitalist) mode of production. Marxism provides insights into macro-level structural forces, while not thus far taking sufficient account of the role of human individuality and of locality. The practice of urban planning and its interpretation may be related to the particular perspectives that inform the analysis of urban conditions. The intellectual challenge posed by planning is the same as in attempting to understand inequality in cities: to identify the general dynamics of the prevailing mode of production, to observe their operation in historically and locally specific circumstances, and to try to comprehend the role of individual human agency within the constraints of broader structural imperatives.

Introduction

Recent years have seen the emergence of spatial inequality as a major theme in human geography. This paper outlines and explores alternative perspectives that have a bearing on the understanding of inequality in urban areas. To refer to these perspectives as alternatives is not to suggest that they are mutually exclusive; indeed, there is much com- plimentarity and overlap, and any typology is bound to be a simplification. Geography, like other fields of inquiry, display continuity of development, with few if any revolutions. Similarly, the implicit time- sequential change in emphasis should not be interpreted too rigidly: some elements of earlier approaches have merged with later ones, some have been reconstituted, eclipsed or discredited, while

*Department of Geography and Earth Science, Queen Mary College, University of London, Mile End Road, London El 4NS, U.K.

others have become dormant only to reassert themselves later.

Urban analysis is necessarily a multi-disciplinary endeavour, to which all social sciences have some relevance. What follows focuses on approaches that have an explicit spatial component, or some claim to address the issue of ‘spatial’ inequality within cities. That these have, for the most part. originated outside geography underlines the derivative nature of much of what might be claimed to be spatial theory.

While the emphasis will be on approaches to the understanding of urban spatial inequality as an empirically observable phenomenon, the paper con- cludes by relating the discussion to the practice of planning. Attempts to reduce or eliminate urban inequality rest on theories of causality, implicit or explicit. If the theories are flawed, or of dubious scientific status, planning activities will reflect this.

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The production of knowledge and the sociology of

its purveyors (academic or applied) is an important part of the totality of human practice, whereby inequality arises and is perpetuated or aleviated.

A final point at the outset: what is reviewed here is largely the product of the Anglo-American world, developed within the context of the advanced capitalist city. The perspectives discussed have also emerged in an intellectual milieu where the attrac- tion of certain ways of viewing the world is to be found more in their ideological role (i.e. support of capitalism) than in their scientific contribution. The relevance of what follows to socialist experience is

an open question, though the conclusions may have some bearing on the socialist city - including those of the Soviet Union.

Three major themes can be identified in approaches to spatial inequality in cities. The first is that of area1 differentiation, which involves the established geographical practice of pattern identification. The second theme may be referred to as that of spatial organization, and concerns the role of location, space, distance and the spatial arrangement of the city in the generation of inequality. The third theme is that of contemporary political economy, which seeks to reveal the structural origins of inequality in the nature of the prevailing (capitalist) mode of production. What follows is an attempt to outline

the basic features of these three perspectives, with some references to their strengths and weaknesses. Implicit in the discussion is the question of whether what has been described as urban inequality is an intrinsically urban condition - the answer to which will be found to depend on the perspective adopted.

Areal Differentiation

The study of area differentiation or of the variable character of the earth’s surface would define the field of geography to the satisfaction of many of its practitioners. Yet it was from Robert Park and his associates of the Chicago school of urban sociology that the strength of pattern-identification in urban studies traces its origin. The Chicago school’s ecological perspective is too familiar to require elabora- tion here. Suffice it to say that they recognize a specific spatial form to urban social differentiation (the concentric rings), which was interpreted via the analogy of an ecological system. The city was viewed as an organism; competition was the ‘natural order’, from which arose a specific spatial form. The

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approach was a reflection of its origins in time and

space, responding to a need to give both meaning and legitimacy to the forms that a particular city was adopting in a particular phase of the development of American capitalism. “Conceptualization of the city as an ecological community enabled Park to present the new metropolis as an orderly entity in which both community and freedom were realizable” (MELLOR, 1977, p. 216). If gross inequalities existed, this was a consequence of natural forces in contemporary urban life, rather than an outcome of capitalism.

The Chicago school’s ecological perspective is thus

a classic case of knowledge produced to meet the ideological needs of the day. It did draw attention to new feature of life in the fast-forming American city: “At its worst the approach consisted of a crude form of social Darwinism, but at its best, especially in the studied neighbourhoods, it led to a body of empirical studies sensitive to spatial variations, rich in detail and sympathetic to local conditions” (BAS- SETT and SHORT, 1980, p. 11). But locality was separated from its broader context. Just as the locality-based community became the primary empirical focus, so the city became an independent unit of analysis isolated from the wider society.

Despite the obvious shortcomings of this approach, its influence continues to be felt today. There have,

however, been some extensions and refinements of the actual practice of pattern identification, accompanied by changes in the associated form of

explanation. The first developments focused on the urban geometry of the Chicago school, questioning the generality of the concentric zones as a pattern of social differentiation. Alternatives were proposed, notably Homer Hoyt’s sector arrangement. The search for more precise description created the field of social are analysis, in which patterns of residen-

tial differentiation were distilled from census-tract data. The three indexes of social rank, urbanization and segregation provided a basis for initial selection

of the variables involved, based on what were held to be general features of urban life.

The 1960s brought a proliferation of new studies, in

what became known as factorial ecology. The a priori structuring of the input data adopted in social

area analysis was largely abandoned, in favour of the indiscriminate use of whatever information the census volumes happened to contain. The con- sistency with which factorial ecology revealed cities in the U.S.A. differentiated according to the three

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dimensions of economic status, ethnicity and stage of life cycle may be as much an outcome of what the census actually measures as of real similarities in urban spatial structure. Explanation, if pursued at all, was sought within the data matrix that yielded the patterns themselves, thus reinforcing the autonomy of the urban area or city as a unit of observation. Pattern identification degenerated into a spe- culative form of empiricism that has done little to elucidate inequality within cities.

Meanwhile, the actual conditions in the slums of the American city were provoking threats to social order, and new influences came to bear on urban studies. The social relevance movement in geography at the beginning of the 1970s brought a critical reaction to much of the output of the Quan- titative Revolution. It was shown that factor- analytical methods could produce different dimensions of variability if measures capturing more social problem conditions were introduced. Attention shifted back to the selection of the input data, and the pattern recognition tradition gained a new lease on life with the application of territorial social indicators.

The social indicators movement began in the mid- 1960s as a reflection of growing unease concerning the exclusively economic nature of the conventional indicators of ‘development’ or ‘progress’. Unpre- cedented material affluence accompanied by such negative side-effects as environmental pollution and by the persistence of poverty led to the search for numerical measures more sensitive to social conditions. Composite indicators of ‘quality of life’, ‘social well-being’ or ‘level of living’ were developed and mapped. Description in human geography was revitalized and given a convincing appearance of social relevance. However, little attempt was made to explain the patterns described. Some formal extensions of input-output models from economics were proposed, but operational application proved virtually impossible. Social indicators can identify those parts of the city where levels of living are low, but the approach gives further reinforcement to the notions of urban and local autonomy, and places primacy on the spatial dimension of inequality to the exclusion of its class manifestations.

The pattern recognition tradition contributed to the emergence of certain kinds of explanations for inequality and for the existence of socially deprived or poverty ‘areas’. The empirical association of a particular condition with a territorially defined popu-

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lation aggregate encourages the view that the deprivation or poverty observed can be attributed to some qualities of the local people or culture. Examples of this type of explanation include the ‘culture of poverty’, whereby problems arise from the internal pathology of deviant groups, and the ‘cycle of deprivation’, in which problems arise from individual psychological handicaps and inade- quacies transmitted from one generation to the next. The origins of inequality are thus conveyed as local and individual, or specific to territorially defined groups.

One final approach in the pattern recognition tradition is that of spatial justice, or equity. The original conception was that territorial injustice exists if resources are not distributed according to need, and some interest still exists in the derivation of rules for assigning alternative spatial distributions an order of social preference or level of welfare. But this whole endeavour tends to sink into the ethical quag- mire which enveloped welfare economics some years ago.

These, then, are the principal approaches to have emerged from the tradition of area1 differentiation. Most of them are still influential in urban studies, and also in planning practice. The following broad conclusions may be offered: the Chicago school’s ecological approach seems discredited, at least at the level of explanatory theory; the initial promise of social area analysis has been dissipated in factorial ecology; the social indicators approach risks what has been termed the fetishism of space, yet does offer the basic description of the unequal lives of population aggregates defined by area of residence upon which planned redistribution according to need would depend. Whether remedial action is forthcoming is another question, of course; plans for redistribution according to local indicators of deprivation or need can realise their full potential only in a society planned to satisfy real human priorities - and even this is a necessary rather than a sufficient condition. In any event, the state’s response may be more effectively stimulated by threats to social order than by evidence of unmet human need, whether in the United States of the 1960s or the Poland of the early 1980s.

Spatial Organization

This perspective sees inequality arising from the spatial arrangement of employment and service fa-

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cilities in relation to population residence. Facilities occupy discrete locations, and the friction of distance means that some people in some places will find it easier than others to get to jobs and various sources of need satisfaction. Residential location carries with it not only a particular quality of environment but also a set of advantages/ disadvantages arising from accessibility/proximity to sources of benefits/nuisance. Some inequality is thus an inherent feature of the urban fabric, under socialism as well as capitalism.

Just as the area1 differentation perspective has its roots in a certain tradition of geographical inquiry but its primary inspiration from outside (i.e. from sociology), so the spatial organization perspective was closely bound up with ‘new’ geography of quan- tification and model building, which itself was fed from other disciplines (mainly economics or regional science). Two sub-themes may be recognized, concerned respectively with the distributive impact of facility location and with patterns of residential choice.

Analysis of the distributive impact of facility location is an extension of conventional location theory. A facility distributes benefits or penalties according to some distance decay function. Human interaction over distance in the process of utilizing facilities has been found subject to empirical reg- ularities, described by the gravity model. The spread of a nuisance such as smoke from a factory chimney is also capable of accurate measurement with appropriate instrumentation. The economic concept of externalities can be extended into the space dimension, via the device of the externality field. The concept of the public good has been modified by recognition that geographical space can create impurity by restricting freedom of access. Recent developments in time geography have broadened consideration of accessibility. Thus there are numerous operational and conceptual devices available to handle spatial distribution problems arising from facility location.

Despite the sophistication surrounding location analysis, there is one serious deficiency. The distributive impact is easily conveyed as something mechanical, an impression fostered by the neat curves and formulae of distance decay. However, there has been some recognition of the conflict implicit in the wishes of people in different places to acquire the same facility, or to avoid it if noxious, and of the use of political power to enable some

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people to manipulate facility location and the built form of the urban environment to their (local) advantage.

The second sub-theme of the spatial organization perspective concerns how people themselves are arranged in space. Initially this question was addressed by simple extensions of the neoclassical theory of consumer behaviour: residential choice became an exercise in utility maximization, subject to a budget constraint. As in the general theory, the outcome of consumer choice could be shown to maximise community welfare, thus providing ideological support for the existence of what could, of course, be highly unequal housing opportunities. The origins of the economic constraints on choice were largely ignored.

The rigidities of Homo economicus introduced from neoclassical economics were subsequently relaxed by a behavioural approach, which allowed individuals to make sub-optimal decisions and to hold

different perceptions of the utility attached to the same residential location. Much was made of the behavioural approach, and the associated concern with environmental perception, during the 1960s and 1970s. However, this approach shares with other individualistic interpretations the basic defect of overlooking broader structures generating constraints and moulding preferences.

The spatial organization perspective has, however, drawn attention to the role of particular individuals and institutions responsible for spatial distribution, and on the action of local groups of people with competing and possibly conflicting interests. There has been recognition of the importance of certain individuals in local government or private institutions, acting as ‘gate-keepers’ who exercise control and some personal discretion with respect to, for example, access to council housing and mortgages. They can exacerbate inequality, e.g. by allocating ‘problem’ families to the same residential area thus creating a self-perpetuating ‘problem’ estate. The main difficulty with this argument is the degree of autonomy that the urban managers or gatekeepers are thought to possess: they may allocate scarce resources, but they do not themselves create scarcity. This approach has now generated a broader interest in the operation of institutions such as building societies, insurance companies, banks and property developers, and their role in the production of the built environment.

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On the consumption side, an influential approach was initiated in the recognition of ‘housing classes’. Differentiation according to the kind of housing occupied hardly justifies the use of the term class, even in the Weberian sense, but it does help to reveal different interest groups among consumers of housing and other services. There is now consider- able overlap between this approach and those of conflict resolution, community power and urban managerialism.

The spatial organization perspective and the extensions just described all have the capacity to reveal something of the origins of urban inequality. They can serve to inform the examination of specific patterns and events, showing that space, location and distance do matter. What they lack is a broader framework tying them together, and revealing the forces influencing individual decisions, institutional strategies, and the grounds on which conflicts arise and struggles for advantage are engaged.

Political Economy

In political economy, there is a perspective that transcends the urban condition as an object of inquiry and sees inequality in cities as a reflection of the wider society. This is exemplified by Friedrich Engel’s well-known description of 19th century Manchester. Engel observed a pattern to urban differentiation similar to the concentric rings of the Chicago school, but he went further than spatial form, and indeed further than the city itself: “He presents the city as symbolic and tangible space, and as a vantage point from which to capture the larger social whole. By charting the connection between the new class-structure and the topography of the city (an analytical social topography that both pre- sages and is more trenchant than the Chicago School’s ecological analysis), he indicates on the one hand how the city’s spatial arrangements visibly reveal capitalist social relations and yet, on the other hand, how the segementation of the city into distinctive class and functional areas masks and mystifies the relational nature of class patterns” (KATZNELSON, 1979, p. 227). Karl Marx had provided the analytical framework within which such observation could be set.

The perspective of political economy subsequently became subdued for many decades. Neoclassical theory eclipsed Marxism, to become the economic orthodoxy of the capitalist world. In the 1920s and

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1930s when the Chicago school was giving pattern identification and the ecological perspective its greatest impetus, political economy had virtually ceased to exist as a force in Western intellectual thought. And the Quantitative Revolution that helped to bring in the spatial organization perspective was well underway before the contemporary revival of interest in Marxism had any impact on geography or urban analysis. The term political economy has two current usages: one refers to a holistic social-science perspective that stresses the interre- latedness of economic, social and political conditions; the other implies explicity adoption of the categories and analysis of Marxism. It is this second sense of political economy that concerns us here.

The focus of Marxism is on economic structure and its attendant social relations. The economic base of society is viewed as the foundation on which arises the superstructure of legal, political and ideological forms. The economic structure comprises a mode of production, made up of social relations of production corresponding with a particular stage in the development of the forces of production (i.e. labour and the means of production in their various forms). The social relations of production are class relations; the basic class dichotomy of the capitalist mode of production is between owners of means of production (capitalists and landlords) and non- owners (workers) who sell their labour power to the owners. Subdivisions or ‘fractions’ of classes may be recognized, usually arising out of internal divisions of interest. A particular form of society will have a tendency to reproduce itself - its means of production, social relations, institutions, and so on. Con- tradictions within a mode of production generate conflict and class struggle, which produce social change and, ultimately, transformation of one mode of production into another (e.g. feudalism into capitalism, capitalism into socialism).

The primary concern of Marxism is with the capitalist mode of production. The exploitive class relations are revealed by the labour theory of value: ownership of the means of production enables the capitalist to appropriate, as surplus value, that part of the product of labour not required for its reproduction. Capital is thus accumulated in the hands of a particular class. It may be spent on luxury consumption, and/or fed back into the next round of production to reproduce (or expand) the means of production along with the prevailing institutions, ideology and social relations. The dy-

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namics of the accumulation process are responsible for particular events in time and space, including the opening or closing of factories and service facilities in cities and the consequent impact on local levels of living.

The examination of the role of the state has been an important recent feature of Marxism, with special implications for urban analysis and planning. Instead of being a neutral guardian of the general welfare, the state is seen as supportive of specific class interests. The state acts to facilitate the process of social reproduction, and to reconcile conflict among fractions of capital if this threatens the per- petuation of capitalism itself. City government, as part of what has been called the local state, per- forms these functions within individual urban areas. The outcome of local state policies, with respect to housing, service provision and so on, has an important bearing on distributional inequality.

In the Marxist critique of orthodox approaches to urban inequality, the area1 differentiation perspective is criticized on a number of grounds, some of which have been hinted at in earlier comments. Pre-occupation with spatial forms diverts attention from broader economic-social-political considera- tions and from forces that do not originate within the areas under investigation. The ecological interpretation of the Chicago school substitutes a biolo- gical analogy for social reality; a naturalistic explanation is offered in place of recognition of antagonistic class relations. The mathematization of the search for spatial patterns gives a spurious precision and scientific status to an essentially diversion- ary, ideological purpose. The search for measure of level of living characteristic of the social indicators movement places primacy on the realm of consumption, while production is the key to social understanding. The derivation of rules for equity or welfare judgments on spatial distributions is pointless in capitalist society, where the exploitive social relations are inherently unjust. Explanations of urban inequality that evoke characteristics of the local people as the independent variables ignore the question of how people get into areas of multiple deprivation on cycles of poverty in the first place.

The critique of the spatial organization approach rests largely on exposure of the defects of neoclassical economic theory, as this body of knowledge feeds in to both conventional facility location theory and the orthodox analysis of residential choice.

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Neoclassical economics obscures class reiations by focusing on market mechanisms dealing with exchange relationships; relations between things are substituted for relations between people. The distribution of income is attributed to a mechanical, market-generated return on factors of production supplied, instead of to unequal class power arising from property ownership. The welfare-maximizing model of free markets working perfectly bestows some kind of democratic legitimacy on distributive outcomes, however unequal, thus serving the ideological purpose of supporting the capitalist system. Explanations that emphasize the role of individual urban managers or gatekeepers, or even public institutions, miss the differential class power expressed in the operation of the (local) state.

Three principal advantages may be found in the Marxist approach when compared to other perspectives on urban inequality. The first is that of seeing the economic-social-political system as an intergr- ated whole, with particular historic forms (in~Iuding uneven spatial development) that can in principal be attributed to some general dynamics or laws of motion of the system. The second is that the city is not seen as an autonomous unit of analysis. The third is that individual preference is understood to be greatly constrained, as is individual control over his/her destiny (whether it be to a place in affluent suburbia or the inner-city slums).

However, difficulties arise from those features of Marxist analysis that promise most with respect to understanding urban inequality. If the economic sub-structure does not determine the superstructure, how much autonomy may social process or culture possess and how is this expressed? To define class as a relationship to the means of production gives precision to this concept, but there are other bases for human association, common interest and consciousness that have a bearing on social action. The recognition of fractions of classes helps to address the problem of diversity of interest, but it can come perilously close to the conventional plur- alistic perspective, The labour theory of value clar- ifies the operation of a capitalist economy, but merely to evoke ‘the law of value’ or ‘the logic of the accumulation process’ as explanation of specific events is inadequate. Recognition of the partiality of the state is an advance on notions of government promoting ‘the national interest’, but if the state is not a tool of monolithic capitalist class hegemony, how much autonomy does it possess? Some argu- ments as to the effectiveness of the state in further-

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ing capitalist interests and suppressing the working class seem to give the state credit for more power than it actually possesses, and to “a degree to consciousness, intentionality and foresight which is

totally unrealistic” (SAUNDERS, 1980, p. 83).

Two final points of particular relevance in urban affairs concern the role of human individuality and of locality. The danger of economic determinism runs deep in Marxism: some accounts of the skill with which capital extracts the last unit of surplus value from labour bestow on Homo h&rrxicus a degree of skill and rationality reminiscent of economic man in neoclassical theory. If the basic features of social change are guided by the accumulation process and the reproductive imperative, what is the role of individual volition, ingenuity, creativity and so on, or what is now referred to as human agency? As to locality, the question may be summarized as follows:

Is there not some substance to the sociologist’s claim that size of social groupings affects its mode of organization, and that the urban environment does fore- close some aspects of experience whilst opening up others? Even from a Marxist standpoint, steadfastly hostile to an “u&an” interpretation of the sources of social change, it would be hard to escape the conclu- sion that men’s consciousness of social reality is in some way mediated by his experience of his community (MELLOR, 1977, p. 203).

Locality, along with spatial element in human interaction, thus seems intrinsic to the discovery and bonding of common (class) interest. If the full potential of Marxism is to be brought to bear on the question of urban inequality, a more sustained con- frontation with reality via empirical analysis is required. The necessary approach would appear to be along the following lines:

. . . actions in any particular situation are not deriv- able from any abstract propositions about the nature of society in general, or even the capitalist mode of production in particular, although the latter is clearly important. Explanations of such actions can only be given if attention is paid to the specific level of development of political, economic and ideological relations manifested in the class struggle in the situation being examined (HARLOE, 1977. p. 6).

In short, historically and geographically specific circumstances must be analysed, within the general framework of contemporary political economy.

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Urban Planning

The discussion of planning must be brief, but sufficient to bring it into the context of alternative perspectives established above. The theory of causality that informs planners will have an important bearing on how they proceed. Alternative perspectives on urban inequality will also cast the role of the planner in different lights. as part of the set of causal connections responsible for area1 differentiation in levels of living.

Of all the perspectives outlined above, it is the ecological tradition of the Chicago school which has had the most pervasive influence on the conceptualization and practice of urban planning. “There is a strong case for seeing town planning as heir to human ecology either as taught by Park, or by his contemporary Geddes” (MELLOR, 1977, p. 231). Robert Park Iaid the foundation for the pattern identification and local community studies that have subsequently dominated urban analysis. Patrick Geddes was a persuasive visionary who strongly influenced both geography and planning, holding an ecological view of the city as an organic whole con- ditioned by the natural environment. (In passing, it might be noted that the theme of physical- environmental determinism which characterized traditional geography has been significant in helping to perpetuate the ideology of local determination of human conditions.) Just as Park separated locality from wider social reality in urban sociology, so Ged- des did the same for urban planning.

The subsequent development of planning practice has reinforced the ecological/localized perspective. Lines are drawn around cities on maps, and patterns of proposed land-use laid down. Conditions external to the city itself are taken as given, or subject to prediction rather than control. The introduction of elements of the spatial organization perspective from the 1960s onwards has done little but give traditional practice a veneer of sophistication and a spurious legitimacy as applied urban and regional science. The elaborate land-use/transportation models and location/allocation algorithms, seized upon with such enthusiasm by the new generation of technocratic methodologists in planning, usually generate efficiency rather than equity solutions, and still have to weather the political process before implementation. The systems view of planning does little more than reconstitute the view of the city as an organism in the jargon of contemporary cyberne-

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tics. And throughout the era of superficial changes in planning promoted by these and other refinements, from the rebuilding of the old slums to present plans to combat inner-city deprivation, shines a continuing faith in the efficacy of local environmental improvement in upgrading the lives of the poor.

The implication for current strategies to combat urban inequality, for example via inner-city revival in Britain and the United States, are obvious. The ecological perspective attributes locally manifest problems such as poverty to some intrinsic qualities of place or of the people occupying the territory in question (e.g. their race). Remedial programmes are initiated within the ‘problem area’ that has been identified. The external forces that drive, for example, the national and international capital flows responsible for new jobs in some places and unem- ployment in others, are not addressed. Even if observed and understood, they are, in a literal geographical sense, beyond control. It is not therefore surprising that poverty areas in cities persist, in situ or simply relocated by a process dignified as ‘urban renewal’ or ‘redevelopment’.

Let us turn, finally, to the question of how the practice of urban planning may be viewed, as a contribution to the process of intra-urban differentiation. In a sociological examination of the town-planning profession, MELLOR (1977, p. 133) makes an important distinction as follows: “Plan- ning has not resolved the tension in aims evident from its earliest days as an activity of government and as a social movement. As the former it was concerned with landuse, property interests and environmental planning, as the latter with community betterment”. The outcome appears to have been that, despite some notable achievements in rehous- ing slum dwellers, for example, the former role tends to dominate and constrain the latter: “In the first instance planning has been conspicuously unsuccessful in controlling private initiatives in development; in the second it has collaborated with government in imposing an alien environment on those with least power of resistance” (MELLOR, 1977, p. 135). The idealism of Geddes and the early planning movement has been largely replaced by pragmatism in the guise of rational urban manage- ment, operating primarily in support of existing

property (class) interests.

If this is fair comment, it suggests that the proper conceptualization of town or city planning is a part of the local state, within the perspective of a neo- Marxist political economy. The role of the local planning process is, then, to facilitate the manipula- tion of the built form of the environment in such a way as to promote capital accumulation, to reproduce the capitalist mode of production (its means of production, workforce, social relations and so on) and to regulate the activities of fraction of capital competing for advantage from the development of urban land. This is not to say that the outcome is always (or ever) optimal, with respect to the objec- tives of capital. Individual planners must be con- ceded the capacity to misunderstand and miscalcu- late, as must the capitalists themselves. Idealism may still flourish, to inform and affect actual practice. And those who see their interests threatened by urban renewal and the like may respond with sufficient vigour to alter outcomes.

The intellectual challenge posed by the practice of planning thus seems the same as that in attempting to understand the condition of inequality as manifest spatially in cities. This is to identify the macro- level forces generating the ongoing dynamics of the prevailing or predominant mode of production, to observe their operations in historically and locally specific circumstances, and to try to comprehend the role of individual human agency within the constraints of broader structural imperatives.

References

BASSETT, K. and SHORT, J. (1980) Housing and the Residential Structure: Alternative Approaches. Rout- ledge & Kegan Paul, London.

HARLOE, M. (1977) Captive Cities: Studies in the Poli- tical Economy of Cities and Regions. John Wiley, New York.

KATZNELSON, I. (1979) ‘Community, capitalist development and the emergence of class’, Politics and Society, 9, 203-37.

MELLOR, J. R. (1977) Urban Sociology in an Urbanized World. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

SAUNDERS, D. (1980) Urban Politics; a Sociological Interpretation. Penguin (Hutchinson), New York.

alternative perspectives on ‘urban inequality’

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