UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Friday 17 February  2:30 – 4:00: Panel F1:  The Excluded

Michaela Šuleřová (Masaryk University, Brno): ‘Social exclusion and urban segregation: are there European ghettos?’

My work focuses on changes occurring since 1970´s in economics, politics, culture and other spheres of social life, that affect exclusion and its spatial manifestation – segregation – on the urban level, as they lead to greater socio-spatial differentiation. Even though these changes began primarily in the western part of the world with the oil crisis, they affect not only Central and Eastern Europe but, together with the globalization processes, the whole globe.

Restructuring of the economy, its increased globalization together with new informational technologies gave new role to cities. They became less bounded with their nation states and more independent actors in the global competition, creating new highly open and creative spaces (Sassen, 2001). At the same time, changes in the organization of labor, diminution of the welfare state, shift to post-fordist mode of accumulation and post-modern work ethic produced strengthened social polarization (Sassen, 2001, Castells, 1989). New managerial class, other highly paid professionals, as well as new poverty and low paid unqualified labor all have their spatial manifestations that change the urban structure and in turn can influence and intensify the boundaries in the social structure (gentrification, suburbanization, separation etc.). Segregation and/or isolation of groups of population reinforces their exclusion, with the lack of all kinds of capital needed to improve the situation and thus creates a spiral, difficult to reverse.

Cities more than before represent a set of qualitatively different areas with different activities and actors and with various kind of boundaries between them (Thorns, 2002, Bauman, 1995 etc.), creating a dual (Castells, 1989), polarized (Sassen, 2001) or fragmented (Soja, 1989) space. The most extreme forms of spatial differentiation are gated communities (Thorns, 2002) and at the other end of the spectrum ghettos, apparent in an intensified form in American cities (Wilson, 1990, Lash, Urry, 1996).

There are increasing concerns about the future of European cities – are they in danger of such fragmentation, leading to ghettoization? Or are their histories, welfare states (Hamnett´s argument) and social policies strong enough to prevent these processes? I work with supporting as well as opposing literature proposing empirical evidence (Marcuse, van Kempen, 2000, Dangschat, 1994, Hamnett, 1998 and others), and add my observation from a Central European city of Brno.

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