(.) Inequality is the fundamental impediment to upward mobility, economic growth, poverty alleviation and reduction of violence. No country or city can afford to neglect/ignore the intellectual capital, creative potential, productive capacity or purchasing power of 30 to 40 per cent of its population, the average portion of urban population currently living in slums. ![]() ![]() “Unless nation states and cities make a new social contract with the poor who service their needs, build their cities and homes and produce/consume their products, the pattern of stunted development, missed opportunities, wasteful resource use and mismanaged governance-i.e., non-sustainability-will be self-replication and self-fulfilling. Loïc Wacquant (2005) Guettos Everywhere? Rethinking urban poverty and segregation in European societies As in the ranchos of Venezuela and the poblaciones of Chile, the families that dwell in these squatter settlements span the color continuum and have extensive genealogical bonds to higher-income households.” The favelas of the Brazilian metropolis often portrayed as segregated dens of dereliction and disorganization turn out to be working-class wards with finely stratified webs of ties to industry and to the wealthy districts for which they supply household service labor. They are not ghettos other than in a metaphorical sense, no matter how impoverished-if extreme rates of poverty sufficed to make a ghetto, then large chunks of the former Soviet Union and most third-world cities would be gargantuan ghettos. Midwest and British Midlands, depressed rural towns of the former East Germany and Southern Italy, and the disreputable villa miserias of the greater Buenos Aires at the close of the twentieth century are territories of working-class demotion and decomposition, not ethnic containers dedicated to maintaining an outcast group in a relationship of seclusive subordination. Declining white neighborhoods in the deindustrializing cities of the U.S. “Conversely, not all dispossessed and dilapidated urban districts are ghettos.
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