The Hyper-Polarized City: New Insights from Racial Economy

Cities across the globe have become increasingly splintered and fragmented as wealth disparities dramatically increase. The extremes of wealth and poverty, gentrified enclaves and starkly disinvested neighborhoods, and high culture and abandoned retail districts share city space as the leading edges of this intensified polarization. This set of papers taps the emergent racial economy perspective to shed new insights on the current fracturing reality of cities in the global north and global south. At the heart of our problematizing is the notion that race-class realities sit at the center of these growing divides. In this special forum of papers in Frontiers, we are interested in studies that unearth the impacts of the likes of ever-changing racialized governances, rhetorical formations, neoliberal institutional practices, and austerity mandates in creating this turbulent city.



At issue in this forum is the race-class forces and processes currently at work which continue to create cities of intense wealth and dramatic squalor across the globe. The racial economy perspective, now a vibrant and increasingly used perspective to understand this, has begun to create important insights into this current city. The goal of this forum will be to deepen and nuance present insights from racial economy on this current issue.



Themes Include:

- the new city racial-spatial polarization.

- urban governances as promoters of real-estate capital and their race-class interests.

- emergent infrastructures (physical and human) as race-class instruments of (de)privileging.

- resistance and movements that confront the new racial-spatial polarization.

- new race-class discourses that perpetuate poverty and segregation.