Speakers
Description
Over the last twenty years, inequalities within cities have started to grab increasing attention among scientists and policymakers (Nijman and Wei, 2020). In fact, evidence suggests that cities across the world are again witnessing growing socio-spatial disparities due to new driving forces for urban development, often deriving from uncontrolled global processes (OECD, 2018). The reason of this trend must be associated to the impact of the crises that have repeatably affected urban economies in the last decades (from the 2007-8 financial crash to the Covid-19 pandemic), but also to the limited effectiveness of public policies in securing a more equal distribution of opportunities and welfare, even in the developed countries. From a policy perspective, Southern European cities are characterized by additional complexity (Knieling and Othengrafen, 2016), given the overall fragility of local authorities in regulating development, and the growing disaffection for the public domain manifested by wide social strata.
In this context, the paper provides a preliminary account of a research project (funded by the Italian Ministry of University) that seeks to create new cognitive tools to understand the spatial patterns of inequalities within Southern European cities. Complemented by case studies led into four large cities of that family (Lisbon, Barcelona, Marseille, and Athens), the project is primarily addressed to create a geographical representation of the spatial inequalities emerging within the two largest urban areas of Southern Italy: Naples and Palermo. For these cities, an ‘Atlas of Urban Inequalities’ has been implemented with the help of small-scale indicators belonging to different domains, including income distribution, state of housing, access to basic services and amenities, environmental risks.
The paper illustrates: first, some key features of the Atlas, with a focus on the way indicators have been selected and turned into spatial representations; secondly, with the help of key maps of the two cities, it illustrates the different – sometimes contradictory – forms urban inequalities can take across time and space. The work concludes with a critical reflection about how such a mapping exercise can help bridging the gap between knowledge and action, the policy question that will be approached by the research team in further steps of the project.
References
Knieling J., Othengrafen F. (Eds) (2016), Cities in Crisis. Socio-spatial impacts of the economic crisis in Southern European cities, London-New York: Routledge.
Nijman J., Wei Y.D. (2020), “Urban inequalities in the 21st century economy”, Applied Geography, 117, 102188.
OECD (2018), Divided Cities: Understanding Intra-urban Inequalities, OECD Publishing, Paris.
| Keywords | Socio-spatial inequalities; Southern Europe; Urban change; Urban policy |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
