ABSTRACT
The city is a landscape of racial and social inequality. Our urban society is divided by differences of socioeconomic class, race/ethnicity, and residential status. The dominant elite members of our society occupy the prime spaces of the central business district and affluent districts and neighborhoods such as Chicago’s Gold Coast, New York’s Upper East Side “silk stocking district,” and the Hollywood hills of Los Angeles. The poor and the homeless inhabit the marginal spaces of the ghetto, the barrio, and skid row in places such as South Central Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, and New York’s Bowery. These marginal spaces proliferate in the “inner city” and the “zone in transition” in the interstitial spaces surrounding the dominant spaces of the central city. The slums, skid rows, and other urban “badlands” of the cities both constitute and reproduce social inequality. There is a dialectic interaction between space and society. Segregation of the poor in deteriorated places disadvantages these people from access to good jobs, housing, schools, and hospitals. The poor and the homeless do not have opportunities for better life-chances in the marginal spaces of the city. This social isolation reproduces poverty through the generations. Spatial immobility acts as a barrier to social mobility.
