ABSTRACT
In this chapter I want to examine the relationships between urban social polarisation, economic restructuring and the role of the welfare state. The existence of polarisation or dualisation – the growing division in society between the haves and the have-nots; the socially included and the excluded; and a shrinking of the size of the middle groups – has become almost a conventional wisdom regarding social change and divisions in western cities. I want to problematise the notion of polarisation, which is accepted uncritically. As Fainstein et al. pointed out:
The images of a dual or polarised city are seductive, they promise to encapsulate the outcome of a wide variety of complex processes in a single, neat and easily comprehensible phrase. Yet the hard evidence for such a sweeping and general conclusion regarding the outcome of economic restructuring and urban change is, at best, patchy and ambiguous. If the concept of ‘dual’ or ‘polarising’ city is of any real utility, it can serve only as a hypothesis, the prelude to empirical analysis, rather than as a conclusion which takes the existence of confirmatory evidence for granted.
(1992: 13)