Changing urban fabrics: Thinking through the lopsided city

Abstract

In response to DeVerteuil's recent article in this forum, “Urban Inequality Revisited: From the Corrugated City to the Lopsided City,” I offer a generally positive appraisal—considering his call to re-focus class in urban studies and providing further context to his arguments about uneven spatial development and inter-city relationality. I also offer something of a critique, or what might be read as a clarification, which serves to further complicate the notion of class inequality and its representation in “lopsided” city fabrics. Perhaps we should pay mind not only to powerful, extreme architectural verticality as a manifestation of growing class inequality, but also to powerful, less spectacular, horizontal built environments that nevertheless prove to be likewise significant reflections of this expanding divide.

Since approximately 1980, we have witnessed an astonishing intensification and entrenchment of inequality across the globe in absolute terms. The top 1% of the population now owns more wealth than the bottom half of the entire planet. Inequality has grown most dramatically in advanced economies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Italy, and in emerging economies such as China, Russia, Brazil, India, and Mexico (Qureshi, 2023). As global wealth inequality has increased, so too has the sociomaterial character of the world's cities. Now, urban fabrics—understood as “…the social and material world that lives and landscapes are made from” (Knowles and Harper, 2009: 10)—exhibit an increasingly “lopsided” makeup (DeVerteuil, 2023).

In his recent piece, “Urban Inequality Revisited: From the Corrugated City to the Lopsided City,” using six urban vignettes (Cairo, Mumbai, São Paolo, New York City, Shanghai, and London), DeVerteuil (2023) calls attention to the transition from so-called “corrugated” city fabrics—those where the looming, powerful, vertical architecture of towers and skyscrapers are in rough balance with everyday, horizontal built environments such as low-rises—to “lopsided” ones, meaning city fabrics increasingly dominated by powerful, vertical architecture that, as it is continuously erected, stamps out the everyday horizontality of the working-class and poor. This observation of inequality prompts DeVerteuil to argue for a more class-driven analysis of the city and inter-city relationality. Drawing on radical theorization from the 1990s—the period of “the last explosion of inequality in the city” (DeVerteuil, 2023: 11)—he excavates insights that he argues are applicable to understanding contemporary urbanism(s): namely, focus on inequality, strategic examination of extreme urban exemplars, attendance to city fabrics, reliance upon empirical richness, an eye toward social justice, and an investigation of the significance of formal mechanisms of city development, particularly, the state and developers. However, he also departs from some traditions of 1990s radical political economy: these being purely dystopic visions of the urban condition, predominating attention to Global North “global cities,” and certain Marxist perspectives that overly relegated or discarded subject positions beyond economic class. Here, I offer a generally positive appraisal of DeVerteuil's piece in this forum—considering his call to re-focus class in urban studies and providing further context to his arguments about uneven spatial development and inter-city relationality. I also offer something of a critique, or perhaps what might be read as a clarification, which serves to further complicate the notion of class inequality and its representation in lopsided city fabrics.

DeVerteuil's attendance to inequality and its advancement by capitalist uneven spatial development provides a ready lens through which to examine critical inter-urban relations across scales—local, regional, national, and global. Moreover, it serves as the basis for a social justice paradigm attendant to class as a fundamental, shared frame across geographies within the capitalist mode of production and its relationship to social identity (race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, [dis]ability, etc.). A re-centering of class to examine the contemporary urban condition seems entirely sensible. Our cities and capitalism are conjoined to one another, as urban agglomerations function as critical spaces of production and innovation helping to meet capitalism's demand for ever-expanding growth. Because class division is essential to the capitalist mode of production which envelopes all contemporary cities, and because this class division is being demonstrably exacerbated as manifested in expanding chasms of wealth inequality, the shared global reality of capitalist class relations is a fruitful site of inquiry. Yet, as DeVerteuil reminds us, we understand that capitalism's concrete, sociospatial manifestations interact with, and indeed rely upon, a vast array of subject positions (Acker, 2004; Bohrer, 2018; Knopp, 1992; Robinson, 2000) that must not be overlooked as we attempt to uncover important dynamics of present capitalist urbanism(s).

It is hardly debatable that academic focus on global cities, especially global cities in the Global North, has meant widespread scholarly neglect of comparatively “ordinary” landscapes (DeVerteuil, 2023: 16); yet we know that these spaces are inextricably connected. Uneven development is a condition endemic to capitalism characterized by see-sawing disparities in development across space as capital is invested and disinvested in search of accelerating rates of accumulation (Smith, 2008). Uneven development is a process that can be observed on multi-scalar levels as investment in one place occurs at the expense of disinvestment from another: at local and regional scales (Kemeny and Storper, 2020), the national scale (Pike & Tomaney, 2009), and the global scale (Agnew, 2001; Sheppard, 2012; Werner, 2019). Unevenly developed geographies are bluntly, visually exhibited in the world's major cities, increasingly characterized by high-rises and skyscrapers, and the relative horizontality of other locales. Notably, the domination of economic output by a select group of large metropolitan areas has meant that many other locales have struggled to capture community-sustaining capital investment and skilled labor in these neoliberal times, typified by privatization and the rolling back of community funding from state and federal coffers.

Indeed, the growing divide across the world between “superstar” cities and “left-behind” places has been the topic of much discussion and debate among urban scholars, including urban economists (Gyourko et al., 2013; Kemeny and Storper, 2020; MacKinnon et al., 2022). A testament to the relational impacts of urbanization to which DeVerteuil alludes, the persistent ascendance of superstar cities and their powerfully built environments—representative of elite capital interests—is intimately connected to the decline of comparatively “ordinary” cities, towns, and rural areas in superstars’ hinterlands and beyond. This is because superstar cities so impressively continue to capture high-skilled workers and capital, depriving other geographies and exacerbating sociospatial inequalities (Kemeny and Storper, 2020). Furthermore, it is within the largest, most productive cities where inequality is most starkly displayed: spectacular high-rises, towers, and skyscrapers overtake city skylines in New York, São Paolo, Hong Kong, London, Shanghai, and other global cities, deeply contrasting with “low,” everyday fabrics below and on the peripheries of urban centers to produce a “lopsided,” unbalanced impression (DeVerteuil, 2023; see also Chatterjee, 2016; Davis, 2006a, 2006b).

As we venture to understand cities across the Global North, East, and South, DeVerteuil urges us to take a cue from the radical urban scholarship of the 1990s by paying attention to the formal mechanisms of city development, namely, the role of the state and real estate developers (2023: 16). DeVerteuil may appreciate that much headway is being made on this very subject, work which takes on a largely class-oriented mode of analysis. Surely, the transition from corrugated city fabric to lopsided city fabric has been facilitated by the rise of what scholars (including some in this very journal) have recently identified as an ascendant formation of parasitically conjoined elite real estate interests, city planning, and policymaking (Kirk 2023b; Lauermann and Mallak, 2023; Stein, 2019; Wilson and Wyly, 2023). Indeed, Stein's (2019) popularly received notion of the “real estate state” attests to the now “outsized power of real estate interests in the capitalist state” (p. 5) wherein policymakers and planners are leveraged by private real estate interests to make decisions resulting in appreciated land values.

Critical outcomes of this parasitic relationship are gentrification and displacement, including the demolition of working-class space and the construction of powerful, affluent-catering built environments overtop older, everyday configurations, achieved even via social housing demolition (Crump, 2002; Goetz, 2000; Kallin and Slater, 2014). We therefore observe the rapacious production of urban palimpsests which attempt to invisibilize the necessarily destructive force of capital—that is, its selective devalorization, destruction, and redevelopment of built environments along fractured classed lines, intersecting too with ethnoracial, religious, gender, and sexual identities, among other subject positions—causing displacement and fundamentally altering the character of cities. This creative destruction, DeVerteuil illustrates through his vignettes, emplaces powerful, spectacular architectural verticality “out of touch with the vernacular, exclusionary, exuding the power of the ‘blank slate’, the tyranny of the straight line, seeing the city as a totality, people-less” (2023: 3)—but most importantly, that is amenable to capital accumulation. Crucially, this “elite capture” of government so implicated in the transition to lopsided city fabrics, as Lauermann and Mallak (2023) write in a compelling synthesis of recent literature, “should be read as a systemic process in twenty-first century cities—not an aberration from ‘normal’ urban governance, but rather as a chronic condition influencing contemporary urbanization, across a wide geography of cities in Global South, East, and North” (p. 13).

Powerful horizontal urban fabrics

DeVerteuil's emphasis on the visual representations of inequality represented in extreme edge cases, i.e., “global cities,” appears to be a perfectly reasonable method. He explains, “by focusing on the extremes, I am tapping into a longstanding interest, particularly among urban sociologists, of approaching the social world through its edges, making ‘…sharply visible what might otherwise remain confusingly vague’ (Sassen, 2014: 1)” (DeVerteuil, 2023: 4). As I write from Los Angeles and consider its much-written-about urbanism, as well as that of the San Francisco Bay Area, it is unsurprising that I find resonances in DeVerteuil's explications of uneven spatial development and inequality—yet I wish to note major, I think illuminating, differences between these and the vignettes DeVerteuil provides.

Perhaps a focus on architectural character in the way DeVerteuil endeavors is an oversimplification (of course, I readily admit that all academic work is necessarily oversimplified). Certainly, contemporary extreme, spectacular verticality is a representation of class power reflecting the avaricious financialization of space—and the proliferation of this verticality is illustrative of growing class-driven inequality. Yet, I submit that a vignette of Los Angeles or Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay area suggests an additional fact: sometimes, powerful landscapes are not so extremely vertical, but horizontal. Considering the prototypically sprawling nature of the Los Angeles metropolis (the urban fabric of which must be understood to extend well beyond its municipally defined borders) and its skyline populated only meagerly by powerful vertical architecture relative to low- and mid-rises, Los Angeles serves as an “extreme” counterexample to the vignettes offered by DeVerteuil. Los Angeles has imposed rather stringent limitations on building height that have resulted in its much less imposing, “powerful” skyline as compared to other notable cities across the world. However, no one can deny that a significant amount of capital circulates in and out of Los Angeles, and that it still represents a global city, a “superstar” city. Currently, in 2023, the median home price in Los Angeles is a staggering $1.2 million, and in San Francisco, the median home price is an even higher $1.4 million. This is compared to the US median 2023 home price of $436,800. Homeownership itself therefore increasingly reflects an ever-widening disparity in class power as the ability to own a home is more and more restricted to the very affluent, a phenomenon echoed in major metros throughout the world. Further, Silicon Valley is the largest technology agglomeration on earth, the locus of enormous capital investment, yet it is quite flat and unspectacular. While tall, spectacular architecture is an often-utilized means to accumulate capital via the maximal financialization of space, it is of course not the sole manifestation of class inequality in the built environment, as DeVerteuil would doubtlessly agree (see Chatterjee, 2016; Kirk, 2023a; Sklair, 2010).

The great problem of class inequality and its critically important intersections with race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and so forth is not adequately rendered by a simple examination of architectural aesthetic “lopsidedness” represented in extreme verticality. Rather, the ruination of working-class, often minoritized space is yet more dramatic, as even horizontal, everyday spaces are increasingly transformed into powerful, horizontal features of city fabrics bespeaking an ever-widening polarization between the bourgeois and the rest, advanced by the elite capture of government and urban space by influential capital interests. This is not to fall into the trap of pessimistic, dystopic thinking DeVerteuil rightly chastises; it is simply a recognition of the changing nature of urban fabrics and the widening sociopolitical-economic polarization reflected in them.