Spatial inequality is an increasingly vital concept in urban sociology, capturing the inequitable allocation of resources across space. But it omits an important and often overlooked form of inequality that takes place at a more immediate and direct level, inhering not in the relationship between spaces, but within the fabric of place itself. This paper argues for “emplaced inequalities”—power imbalances that are manifest in the material, symbolic, and institutional frameworks that guide behavior in a specific urban setting. Drawing on a diverse body of research, I suggest an analytical vocabulary useful in describing and explaining emplaced inequality. At the center of this argument is the concept of the program—a pattern of social action that is endorsed or constrained by the social architecture of place. I then apply this vocabulary to an empirical case drawn from research on downwardly mobile suburbs in the New York Metropolitan Area.
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