Urban inequality revisited: From the corrugated city to the lopsided city

Abstract

In this forum paper, I revisit the rich and coherent literature on inequality from the 1990s, immersed in radical urban studies and Marxist political economy, and apply it to recent transitions in city fabrics, that is the built environment and the social worlds around it. Some city fabrics reflect powerful interests, while others are more everyday and mundane. Recently, there has been the sense that powerful fabrics have increasingly encroached upon or erased everyday ones. I use urban vignettes to visualize the shift from the corrugated city, where there was a rough balance between powerful and everyday fabrics, and the lopsided city, where powerful fabrics seek to displace and dominate. This transition requires a more robustly class-driven analysis than what is currently used in urban studies, itself fragmented. In response, I articulate a focused yet balanced analysis of the lopsided city in conversation with certain key legacies of the 1990s literature on inequality: studying the extremes, building theory on empirical richness, paying attention to the city fabric, a concern for social justice, the importance of formal mechanisms in the city (e.g. the state and developers), and balancing fragmented and totalizing views of the city. However, certain aspects of the 1990s literature have aged less well, such as the obsession with the dystopic, the narrow focus on global cities of the Global North, and the ‘all-or-nothing’ (universalistic) notions that class should dominate urban analysis.