ABSTRACT
What is happening to the occupational class structure of London and to other global cities such as New York and Paris-and does it matter? The answers to these questions have kept social scientists, planners, social reformers, politicians and journalists busy for the last hundred years, if not longer. In particular, there is a recurring question of whether the social-class composition of such cities is shifting upwards or downwards. As the quotes of Ascherson and Glass indicate, there are markedly divergent views on this issue. Put simply, there are three principal interpretations. The first is that the class structure of London (and other world cities) is becoming increasingly proletarianised, with a large and growing population of low-skilled service workers. The second can be termed professionalisation, and argues that the class structure of London and other global cities
has been marked by the growth of professional, managerial and technical occupational groups and a decline of manual workers. The third interpretation (social polarisation) can be seen as a combination of the previous two and argues that there is growth at both the top and the bottom ends of the occupational and incomes structure with decline in the middle. Marcuse nicely summarised the polarisation thesis as follows:
The best image…is perhaps that of the egg and the hour glass: the population of the city is normally distributed like an egg, widest in the middle and tapering off at both ends; when it becomes polarised the middle is squeezed and the ends expand till it looks like an hour glass. The middle of the egg may be defined as intermediate social strata… Or if the polarisation is between rich and poor, the middle of the egg refers to the middle income group… The metaphor is not structural dividing lines, but of a continuum, whose distribution is becoming increasingly bi-modal.
