Urban conceptions of economic inequalities

ABSTRACT

Wide economic disparities are the characterizing features of contemporary urban economies. However, very little is known about how economic inequality is perceived and experienced in urban contexts. Reflecting on the current empirical thinking about perceptions of inequality and guided by Antonio Gramsci's framing of ‘conceptions of the world’, the broad meanings of attitudes and perceptions are transferred to an urban level with a view to develop a framework of ‘urban conceptions of economic inequalities’, which will enable a broader understanding of how economic inequality and its ramifications are conceptualized for urban research and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• inequality
• urban
• perceptions
• social attitudes

JEL:

• R00

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author thanks Professor Tim Schwanen, University of Oxford, for comments made on an earlier version of the paper; Professor Danny Dorling, University of Oxford, for an insightful discussion on the topic; and three anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In geographical thought, the ‘world’ refers to the sphere of human concerns, epistemologically entailing a particular mode of distanced abstraction and a sense of direct experience of the sphere of human concerns (McCormack, 2017). The concept of the world therefore entails both an objective totality, the entirety of human concerns and an experiential and personal sense of the same set of concerns. While this might be inherently contradictory at first, it indeed points to the transformative nature of defining the ‘world’ as a concept that stems from changing individuals, whereby changes are coherent and integrative, and create a unity. The search for alternative economies, such as the community and diverse economies framed by Cameron and Gibson (2005), is a good example of this: by providing alternatives to a market economy, their model entails changing the units of analysis at the individual level, which eventually make up an alternative totality. Drawing on a wide range of projects, they point to a range of possibilities that are alternatives to market-led economies (Roelvink, St. Martin, Gibson-Graham, & Gibson-Graham, 2015).

2. The immediate physical space might also entail digital spaces, which act as a significant platform for social interactions enabling physical encounters in city contexts. For the purposes of this paper, the urban space defined by the practicality and relationality is left as broad as possible to enable a wide range of conceptual possibilities in studying urban conceptions of inequalities.

3. See Appendix A in the supplemental data online for details of the variables, the final sample and the clusters.