We begin this essay by briefly describing these socioeconomic shifts. With the increasing centrality of place in distributing economic and cultural rewards and opportunities, these urban concentrations constitute important emerging structures of inequality production and reproduction. Others are between these agglomerations and less-favored areas outside these economic cores. Some of these are within these agglomerations, as their rapid development disrupts established social patterns and communities. The shifting spatial distribution of economic activity has generated growing social and political tensions in both North America and Europe. As a result, favorably situated cities become vital centers for both attracting and generating human capital, radically reshaping the spatial structure of advanced capitalism. 4 Ideas emerge, spread, and can be exploited more easily in dense urban settings. While a number of forces drive this trend, including the search for safe havens among global economic elites, the primary factor is the increasing value of density in a knowledge economy. Simultaneously, modern political econ omies are producing extraordinary agglomerations of wealth in key urban centers well placed to benefit from the rise of new technologies, services, and finance. Those living there – especially young, white, working-class men – are facing social decline and a sense of loss. Working-class manufacturing cities are dying, along with their hinterlands. These spatial transformations are central to the creation of new inequalities, as evidenced by the decline of older, once prosperous industrial centers, major cities and small towns alike, from Detroit and Milwaukee in the American Rust Belt, to Northern England, Coventry, Liege, Lille Roubaix Tourcoing, Leipzig, large chunks of Southern Italy, and the nonmetropolitan parts of Eastern Europe. Mobile capital is reinvested in new places, cities, or states offering the highest rates of return. 2 Some cities and regions – their institutions, culture, economy, and political organizations – are made obsolete and marginalized. The Marxist geographer David Harvey described “the spatial fix” of capitalism and the increasing use of land and property as financial assets to be traded like any commodity. The economic processes of creative destruction, long ago defined (and celebrated) by political economist Joseph Schumpeter, have a pronounced spatial dimension. The divide between those who inherit wealth and those who don’t will become more pronounced.” Young people will find it even harder to afford their own home. “Unless we deal with the housing deficit, we will see house prices keep on rising. Hacker, of American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (2017), Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (2010), and Off-Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005). Paul Pierson, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2016, is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and Codirector of the Successful Societies program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is the author of Gobernando la Ciudad de México: Lo que se gobierna y lo que no se gobierna en una gran metrópoli (with Vicente Ugalde, 2018), Reconfiguring European States in Crisis (with Desmond King, 2017), and Globalised Minds, Roots in the City: Urban Upper-Middle Classes in Europe (with Alberta Andreotti and Francisco Moreno-Fuentes, 2015). Patrick Le Galès is Research Professor in Politics and Sociology at Sciences Po and the National Centre for Scientific Research, and Founding Dean of Sciences Po Urban School.
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