Globalisation, Social Change and Minorities in Metropolitan Paris: The Emergence of New Class Patterns

Abstract

This paper deals with two intertwined issues linked to social strata analysis, namely social fragmentation and spatial polarisation within metropolitan/global cities. It aims at pointing out the missing link in the analysis of changes in job structures and their impacts upon social strata in large metropolitan areas. Although there was no apparent process of polarisation in the metropolitan employment structures, an in-depth analysis of social strata and of the school-age population provided supportive evidence that a double process of social polarisation and of spatial concentration of foreign households has been at work in metropolitan Paris during the 1982-90 period.

Advantage and Disadvantage across Australia's Extended Metropolitan Regions: A Typology of Socioeconomic Outcomes

“…He suggests that outcomes such as these are the result of London's global role and its specific industrial, occupational and social structure. Similar arguments are presented for other cities and regions in Europe with research such as the collection by Musterd and Ostendorf (1998) and the research by Rhein (1998) and Wessel (2001) pointing to the ways in which processes of socio-economic change have come to impact on the sociospatial structures.…”

“…Within the international literature reference to these types of concerns can be seen in research by Marcuse (1997;, van Kempen (2000a, 2000b), Soja (2000), Dear (2000), Mikelbank (2004) and Walks (2001) in North America and by Hamnett (2003), Wessel (2001), Rhein (1998) and Musterd and Ostendorf (1998) in the United Kingdom and Europe. Marcuse (1997, p.228-229) talks about changes in space and race which have contributed to new processes of exclusion that are part of 'a broad pattern that makes up the post-Fordist city', while Soja (1997, p. 193) talks about forces altering the urban social structure in a way that has seen the form of the city explode 'to an unprecedented scale, scope and complexity'.…”

Losing Control? Inequality and Social Divisions in Oslo

“…Reports on polarization as well as reports on service production, poverty and segregation (cf. Hamnett, 1996;Kloosterman, 1996;Burgers, 1996;Hamnett & Cross, 1998;Musterd & Ostendorf, 1998;Rhein, 1998;Preteceille, 2000;Wessel, 2000) are very different. In these reports, divergence prevails.…”

Ethnic and Class Clustering through the Ages: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Urban Neighbourhood Social Patterns

“…French federal policy aimed at the socio-spatial assimilation of highly clustered immigrant groups has been largely ineffective, distorted by the ways in which municipal levels of government interpret and implement such policies. Laws preventing the legal recognition of minorities have been cited to explain increasing patterns of ethnic clustering in suburban public housing estates (Simon, 1998;Rhein, 1998). In the US, Supreme Court cases opened the housing market to non-Whites, yet local institutions and norms-such as mortgage and insurance discrimination by the public and private sectors-reduced the ability of minorities to purchase homes in White neighbourhoods (Gotham, 2002).…”