Cities of Europe

Changing Contexts, Local Arrangement and the Challenge to Urban Cohesion

Yuri Kazepov

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405121323, 9781405121330
• eBook ISBN: 9781444399493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cities of Europe is a unique combination of book and CD-ROM examining the effects of recent socio-economic transformations on western European cities.

• A unique combination of book and CD-ROM examining the effects of recent socio-economic transformations on western European cities.
• Focuses on the interplay between segregation, social exclusion and governance issues in these cities.
• Takes a comparative approach by highlighting the specifics of European cities vis-à-vis other urban contexts and analysing the intra-European differences.
• The CD-ROM features a series of 2, 000 photographs from seventeen cities (Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Berlin, Birmingham, Brussels, Bucharest, Helsinki, London, Milan, Naples, New York, Paris, Rotterdam, Tirana, Turin, and Utrecht).
• Also features 126 thematic maps, interviews with established scholars, and literature reviews.
• The book and the CD-ROM are linked through an extensive cross-referencing system.

Part I

The Changing Concept of European Cities

3 Urban Social Change: A Socio-Historical Framework of Analysis

Enzo Mingione

4 Social Morphology and Governance in the New Metropolis

Guido Martinotti

5 Capitalism and the City: Globalization, Flexibility, and Indifference

Richard Sennett

6 Urban Socio-Spatial Configurations and the Future of European Cities

Christian Kesteloot

3

Urban Social Change: A Socio-Historical Framework of Analysis

Enzo Mingione

Introduction

In this chapter I will look at the problem of interpreting current urban social change starting from two theoretical and methodological assumptions. The first concerns the overall meaning of change viewed as a major transformation within a succession of long historical cycles (Pirenne 1948; Braudel 1977; Arrighi 1994). In interpreting the indicators of change, more importance is given to factors of discontinuity with respect to the preceding phase and the attempt is made to identify the rationale underlying the current historical cycle (post-industrial or global or fragmented capitalism) compared to the previous one (organized or welfare capitalism or, more commonly, Fordism) (Offe 1985; Lash and Urry 1987; Mingione 1991, 1997). The second assumption is that although it is characterized by similar trends on a global scale, social change is giving rise to different forms of adaptation in diverse contexts, both at the local and national level (Esping-Andersen 1990, 1999). The two assumptions can be subsumed within the hypothesis that we are moving from social regimes that are differentiated but all grounded in the goals and directives of welfare capitalism and standardized organizations, to ones which are still differentiated but centered on more unstable, fragmented, flexible, and non-standardized rationales.

Cities are windows on the transformation of social regimes. In fact, it is in cities that the trends of social change take place first, and in more intensive and visible forms. It is here that the tensions and difficulties of social integration and exclusion are predominantly localized and it is here that the complexity of the new organizational forms has its core (see Chapter 4; Sassen 1991, 1996; Martinotti 1993), independently of the population's residential distribution. Here we will focus mainly on West European cities with some comparative reference to US cases and with a few observations on the urban transition in East European countries. The trends of change operate on a global scale and so our capacity to understand phenomena on a partial scale is imperfect. However, the full story is too complex for a single piece of work and author. Contemporary change in other societies will remain in the background and be referred to only generically and sporadically.

In the following section, the main trends in social change are identified and interpreted as constitutive factors in the transition from one historical phase to another. The focus will be on the ways in which change is undermining the standardized welfare capitalism regimes¹ and how present-day urban societies are variously adapting to different social patterns. The third section focuses on the different configurations assumed in the diverse social contexts by the development of organizational features typical of the welfare capitalism phase (Esping-Andersen 1990), and on how different models and variants adapt to change in diverse ways. The conclusion opens discussion on how the current transition is being translated into the construction of varied models of fragmented societies (Mingione 1991). As this process is ongoing and still, at least in part, indecipherable, our conclusions will be open-ended and predominantly of a methodological nature: what needs to be looked at and what significance to attribute to the differences noted in current processes of change.

The Main Trends of Change

The 1970s were the years of the oil crises and consequent decline in the rate of economic growth in the industrialized countries, which in turn speeded up industrial restructuring and qualitative changes in productive organizations, consumer habits and technological innovation. The transformational trends began to erode the social regimes that had been consolidated in the "thirty glorious years" (Trente Glomuses) following World War II (1945–75). At the nub of these regimes lay three dominant factors:

1 The diffusion (going some way towards full employment) of stable familywage occupations for adult males (generally, permanent employee labor contracts with legal and trade union guarantees, particularly in large manufacturing and service industries and predominantly located in large cities and metropolitan regions).

2 The centrality of the nuclear family with married parents, functioning as an institution for redistributing resources, rights, and duties.

3 The regulatory monopoly of the nation-state, committed to expanding forms of protection (welfare state) complementary to the balance between breadwinner and nuclear family and essential to developing high-productivity systems based on large organizations and economies of scale, as well as engaged in promoting social homogeneity and keeping local, regional, and particularistic divergences under control.

The synergy between the three areas of social regulation (stable breadwinner employment, standard nuclear family, and welfare-oriented nationstate) fashioned true social regimes, within which industrial growth, the expansion of public and private welfare programs, standardized consumerism structured on a class basis, gender role division, and female specialization in care activities fed on one another. Matching these welfare capitalism regimes, there were also specific territorial configurations and dynamics: an advanced phase of industrial urbanization with relatively segregated working-class quarters and shopping centers favoring standardized mass consumerism, and the intensifying of a culture revolving around the motor car, though within a transport system centered on working commuters (2281, 6625, 2790, 4518). It is the organized and divided metropolis at its height, both in the North American version delineated by the Chicago School (Park et al. 1925; Wirth 1928) and the European versions with their working-class peripheries, dormitory suburbs, banlieues, etc.²

From the 1970s on, the trends of change in employment, population and the state's regulatory capacity have undermined, though in different ways and time spans, the fundamental institutions of welfare capitalism. Let us briefly look at the most evident aspects of these trends.

On the employment front, permanent stable jobs with standard contracts have begun to diminish, first in large-scale manufacturing industry and subsequently also in the big organizations in the traditional tertiary sector (commerce, banking, insurance, etc.). What initially seemed to be a short-term trend later turned out to be a structural transformation. At the same time, there has been an increase in "flexible" forms of employment: temporary, part-time, homeworking, teleworking, external collaboration and consultancy, and self-employment in the leading-edge sectors. Even more importantly, this transformation is also based on the development of new technologies and what is called the knowledge-informational societies (Castells 1996, 1999).³ This shift has particularly negative and discriminatory consequences for people lacking educational and professional skills. In this sense, while the Fordist cities were able to integrate, even if in a highly divided way, masses of unskilled male immigrant workers, and through them the members of their nuclear families, poorly educated and unskilled new migrants and children of minorities, are now at the center of social exclusion processes (Saraceno 2002). Furthermore, the number of married women in paid employment is rising everywhere. In the space of a generation, the typically Fordist coupling of the lifecycle and working career has been abandoned whereby most women stopped working on the birth of their first child and possibly started again when all the children had reached school age. However, this does not mean that the emphasis on the "maternal" and specialized quality of care work has been dropped, which had made possible the reproductive balance of a society based on high productivity. Women's involvement in work has moved in the direction of various contradictory combinations of paid employment and high care responsibilities, from the spread of part-time jobs to the division between working mothers and career-oriented women and to real forms of "double shift" work.

It is not a matter of the end of work (Rifkin 1995) or of a sharp decline in the centrality of work in social life – on the contrary, work is more important than ever in women's lives – but undoubtedly of a change such as to disrupt the social, cultural and ideological equilibrium of the welfare capitalism regimes. The level of long-term unemployment has been rising, above all because large numbers of young people are no longer able to find sufficiently stable and well-paid jobs to meet their needs and expectations. As we will see in the next section, the transformation in employment has different consequences in the different variants of contemporary industrialized societies and cities: unemployment and flexible jobs variously impacting the young or adults, men or women; new waves of migration in which immigrants, asylum seekers and discriminated-against minorities are the most vulnerable to job instability and hence to difficult life conditions and social insertion. In all cases, it is the employment cornerstone of the previous social order that is collapsing: stable standardized high-productivity jobs for low-skilled adult males that supported the lives of millions of working-class families and a generation of immigrants, and which triggered the large-scale social mobility and urbanization in Fordist societies. It is in this sense that Sennett (1999) speaks of corrosion of character and Castel (1995) of the crisis of the salariat (wage-earning class) regime.

Also in the 1970s, a new demographic transition set in (Lesthaeghe 1995) that, generally speaking, was barely noted nor, more importantly, was it properly linked with the other changes in society. The transition is made up of many different trends: increase in longevity, divorce, single-parent, separated and recomposed post-divorce families, births out of wedlock, and single-person households; decline in and delaying of marriages, and falling birth rates. All these trends are undermining the centrality of the married couple during the course of life and transforming the hegemony of the "nuclear family" ideology (the importance in life of having children and investing resources in their future) into increasingly self-centered forms of individualism.

These demographic changes are likewise distributed differently across the diverse urban contexts, but in all cases they are upsetting the redistributive balances of the standard nuclear family.⁴ An ever longer period of an individual's life is spent outside of a nucleus of married parents with dependent minors, whereas previously for the overwhelming majority this family condition applied throughout three-quarters of a lifespan. As a result of increasing longevity, parents live on average for more than 30 years after their youngest child has reached adulthood. An effect of delaying the birth of offspring has been to lengthen considerably the period between cohabitation as minors in the family of origin and setting up one's own household with dependent children. Moreover, the share of the population without offspring has risen again and another part spends long periods in the passage from one nuclear family to another. Today, almost everyone spends only a relatively short period of their lives in a "traditional" nuclear family with dependent minors. However, the other equally important aspect is the fact that households with dependent minors are more and more heterogeneous. Single-parent and recomposed families are increasing in numbers and also those made up of married couples with their own or adopted children vary greatly in terms of age and number of children. The latter are today more likely to have relatively old parents (first child around the age of 35) and to be an only-child family, but there is no longer any social standard to which the majority conform as in the previous phase.

The combination of employment and demographic change is undermining all the variants of the breadwinner regime as regards available economic resources (the adult male family wage clearly predominant), responsibility for care within the family (the wife-mother is the one who does the housework and looks after members) and access to social rights directly or indirectly through the husband-father's working career. In this last respect, the question of the identity of individuals, which was chiefly constructed around the work of the adult male family head, is also becoming more complex. From this standpoint, the theory of the decline in the centrality of work is tenable: employment now no longer provides a reliable fixed reference point for the building of the adult male identity and, consequently, it is less and less likely that wives and offspring will refer to the husband-father's work in constructing their own identities.

The twin instability of work and family structure has spilled over onto the protection capacities of the welfare state, the fiscal crisis of the state being in the front line of discussion already in the 1970s (O'Connor 1973; Gough 1979). The transition has destroyed the synergy between rising public spending and economic growth in a situation in which the further expansion of welfare intervention has come up against a creeping historical crisis in the monopolistic regulation exercised by nation-states. This crisis is impacting on legitimacy, the availability of resources and, above all, the effectiveness of intervention and the capacity for control. It is worth summarizing briefly the rationale underlying these changes. The legitimation of public programs tends to diminish as the social fabric becomes more fragmented: class and charitable solidarity are replaced by positions aiming for an equitable relation between contributions to the state and a direct return in public services. The tax revolts in the USA in the 1980s are a clear sign of this trend, which, however, affects all social contexts in different ways. At the same time, globalization is siphoning off resources from the nation-states because economic interactions take place on an international financial scale and by computer link-ups that are too fast to control. The effectiveness of national public operations is conditioned by the global scale of the controlling financial markets and the local fragmentation of the population's needs and demands.

The wave of privatizations and neo-laissez-faire has not removed the basic welfare guarantees in any industrialized country (but in some cases, like in the UK, it has been particularly disruptive and created long-lasting difficulties in crucial sectors such as health, education and public transport); however, the era of the complementary relation between expanding public intervention and growth of the "organized" economy is over everywhere. In this case too, welfare reforms differ in the various contexts, as we will see shortly. Nonetheless, they all reflect the weakness of national regulation and growing specific and local structures in any attempt to deal with the heterogeneous situations of need. The decline in effective national regulation has revived the importance of regional and local differences that had been suppressed in the previous period by national standardization.

At the territorial level, the tendencies towards change are signaled by deurbanization (there is the beginning of a fall in the concentration of the resident population in the big urban areas of industrialized countries) and by global cities (the development of nodes of financial, cultural and ideological control on a global scale) (Sassen 1991; Beauregard and Body-Gendrot 1999; Castells 1999) (1542, 6282, 1221, 2758). What is most important is that urban social life is moving beyond the patterns and divisions typical of the industrial era. Beyond the classic tension between the specific interests of resident citizens and those of commuters, a crucial role is being assumed by the need to attract visitors, organize large-scale cultural and sporting events, be at the center of worldwide financial operations, promote vast economic innovations with a capacity for global control and, in any event, be inserted (in terms of rapid transportation and communication) in the major innovatory networks (1944, 4981). The maps of segregation, exclusion, and gentrification are becoming more and more complicated and unstable. On one side, forms of hyperghettoization (Marcuse 1996; Wacquant 1996) are appearing that no longer have much in common with the traditional working-class residential quarters and segregated locations for disadvantaged minorities (1613, 5728, 1608); on the other side, the neighborhoods where the rich and powerful reside are being continually and rapidly transformed, without the consolidation of specific and lasting traditions and residential styles (4133, 4983, 4201). The locations of standardized consumption are becoming less important and being shifted to the margins of social life (also because in this area of consumption it is easier to use computers in the home) in order to leave room for a new wave of specialized shops and restaurants, places of entertainment and technological centers (5979, 2450, 6291, 2586). The territory has an increasingly symbolic value⁵ and under these conditions the industrial forms of social control and urban policies lose their effectiveness and significance. On the one hand, the link between nation-state and citizen is weakened, and on the other urban governance (instead of the clear hierarchical organizations of local governments) is tending to move beyond the patterns of control because the relation between population and territory is increasingly ambiguous (think of the homeless youth, the influx of illegal immigrants, but also businesspeople with many domiciles and consultants with several jobs), and the interplay of political interests and actors around the city increasingly complex.

At the time of the maturity of welfare capitalism regimes in the West, the Eastern European socialist societies were also pushing towards the development of high productivity in manufacturing but keeping under control consumerism and the expansion of mass consumer industries in favor of heavy industrial production, large collective infrastructures, and basic welfare services. In a way we could speak of a welfare socialist model centered on heavy industrialization, high employment rates at standardized low incomes and controlled levels of mass consumerism, and the diffusion of basic public provision of welfare services. In the cities this process meant a trend towards under-urbanization⁶ (Szelenyi 1983), low investments in urban growth, concentrated in the expansion of social housing in new peripheries, and a less divided and dynamic city kept under control by the limitation imposed on the private housing market and on consumerism (2286, 2362, 5306). However, this asset was also overthrown by social change in the following decades and here, much more explicitly than in the West, the economic deadlock of socialist industrialization swept away the political regimes. Under these conditions, urban social change became turbulent and double-faced: on one side urban renaissance and dynamic expansion of consumerism and physical renovation of the cities (5319, 2965, 2366, 5350); on the other side the uncontrolled growth of social inequalities, poverty, unemployment, and homelessness (2461, 5426, 1574). As we shall see briefly in the conclusions, the two faces of the Eastern European transition have different aspects in different regions and cities and consequently also here social change is producing diversified itineraries of adaptation to the new trends of the fragmented global age.

Welfare Capitalism Regimes and Their Crises

The specific local social systems all differ from one another over time and space (as places with different cultural heritages and social and institutional path dependency systems) – it is impossible to find two that are similar and this also goes for the periods of greatest standardization. At the same time, it is true that in the last two centuries societies have "modernized" along similar lines of transformation and that it is now difficult to recognize a city from a photograph that is not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents of the CD
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Foreword
• Introducing European Cities
• Part I: The Changing Concept of European Cities
• Part II: The Spatial Impact of Ongoing Transformation Processes
• Part III: Social Exclusion, Governance and Social Cohesion in European Cities
• Index