ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the social and cultural processes fracturing a Third World urban center and examines the forces underlying these processes. Kingston, to quote one researcher, became "the most murderous city in the Caribbean" with one of the highest murder rates in the world. At the same time, it became the source of one of the most globally influential and politically progressive expressions of popular culture emanating from the Third World. The chapter explores the fracture Uptown/Downtown, which, along with others, is regarded as one of the main sources of social and political division in Kingston and the wider Jamaica, typical of the Third World. The development of New Kingston—the third moment in the wounding of Kingston—was the development of a new business district in the 1960s, under the aegis of the same nationalist regime, but conceived and executed by other wealthy families, some of them economically and politically at the very heart of the nationalist anti-colonial movement.
