Land, Capital, and Race

Inland Shift ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan D. De Lara
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The City

This chapter uses the Skechers megawarehouse development project in Moreno Valley to examine how the public debate about whether to allow megawarehouse development evolved into a much more profound struggle over who had a right to shape the city. The Skechers warehouse became a proxy struggle between groups who represented different lifestyles and approaches to what constituted a valued way of life. More specifically, the warehouse debate pitted a working-class Latinx population against a mostly white suburban middle class. The chapter concludes by interrogating how global capital must sometimes negotiate locally embedded histories of race and class when establishing new territory for development.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

Presumed Mexican Until Proven Otherwise: Identity Work and Intersectional Typicality among Middle-Class Dominican and Mexican Immigrants

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Browne ◽  
Katharine Tatum ◽  
Belisa Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Positive Traits ◽  
Negative Stereotyping ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract Non-Latino natives often conflate “Latino” with “Mexican,” treating Mexican as a stigmatized group. Latinos often engage in “identity work” to neutralize this stigmatized identity. We link these micro processes of identity work with macro structures of stratification through “intersectional typicality.” We argue that the selection of which positive traits immigrants highlight to avoid stigma is systematic and tied to intersecting dimensions of race and class stratification at the macro level. We argue that this process is context-specific. We use the case of middle-class Dominicans and Mexicans living in Atlanta. Our findings show that both groups perceive that the pervasive image of the typical Latino in Atlanta is that of a working-class Mexican. While both groups perceive this image to be low-status, they diverge in their strategies for countering this presumption. Mexicans emphasize their middle-class status and often try to change the typical image of Latinos. Dominicans emphasize that they are not Mexican and highlight their atypicality. Interview data show that Dominicans are concerned about the Mexican label because of embedded working-class assumptions. We argue that although many respondents successfully avoid negative stereotyping, their identity work actually reaffirms the low-status meaning of the typical Latino category.

scholarly journals ENSAIO: Rio de Janeiro paradigma da beleza e do caos

Revista Prumo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 156-160
Author(s):  
Luiz Fernando Janot
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Public Power ◽  
The Public ◽  
Basic Sanitation ◽  
The City

Throughout history, cities have incorporated into their urban context a significant influence of migratory currents. Among Brazilian cities, Rio best reflected racial and cultural miscegenation in welcoming foreign migrants from other states in search of work. The lack of working-class resources led her to occupy hills, river banks, and other vacant areas of the city to raise her dwelling. Living in communities without urbanization and basic sanitation reveals the contempt of the public power towards the poorest sections of the population. This article aims to reflect on this and other issues related to urban development in Rio to level the quality of life in the city.

scholarly journals Trends of Social Polarisation and Segregation in Athens (1991–2011)

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Maloutas ◽  
Hugo Botton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Social Mix ◽  
Spatial Changes ◽  
Social Polarisation ◽  
Spatial Hierarchy ◽  
Surrounding Areas ◽  
The City

This article investigates social and spatial changes in the Athens metropolitan area between 1991 and 2011. The main question is whether social polarisation—and the contraction of intermediate occupational categories—unevenly developed across the city is related to the changing of segregation patterns during the examined period. We established that the working-class moved towards the middle and the middle-class moved towards the top, but the relative position of both parts did not change in the overall socio-spatial hierarchy. The broad types of socio-spatial change in Athens (driven by professionalisation, proletarianisation or polarisation) were eventually related to different spatial imprints in the city’s social geography. Broad trends identified in other cities, like the centralisation of higher occupations and the peripheralisation of poverty, were not at all present here. In Athens, changes between 1991 and 2011 can be summarised by (1) the relative stability and upward social movement of the traditional working-class and their surrounding areas, accounting for almost half of the city, (2) the expansion of traditional bourgeois strongholds to neighbouring formerly socially mixed areas—25% of the city—and their conversion to more homogeneous middle-class neighbourhoods through professionalisation, (3) the proletarianisation of 10% of the city following a course of perpetual decline in parts of the central municipality and (4) the polarisation and increased social mix of the traditional bourgeois strongholds related to the considerable inflow of poor migrants working for upper-middle-class households.

Hurricane Katrina: Was There a Political Economy of Death?

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 163-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory N. Price
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
Parameter Estimates ◽  
Public Provision ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Public ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Rescue Services ◽  
Public Resources ◽  
The City

An empirical implication of egalitarianism in the provision of public disaster relief services is that the probability of surviving a natural disaster should not be conditioned on a household's position in the income distribution, or its racial characteristics. In this paper, we utilize data on deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina in the City of New Orleans to estimate a political economy model of the public provision of disaster rescue services. Parameter estimates reveal that the probability of dying as a result of Hurricane Katrina, at both the census tract and individual level, increased with respect to being black and poor. Our results suggest that there was a departure from egalitarian principles in the provision of public disaster rescue services during Hurricane Katrina, and are consistent with a political economy of race and class governing decisions about the allocation of public resources to ameliorate population environmental risks.

How Middle-Class Kids Want Working-Class Jobs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Ocejo
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The City

This chapter considers how, for young urbanites with hip tastes, the culture of the cocktail world exude cool. To them, visiting the hidden bar for craft cocktails and unique small-batch spirits, the lodge-like masculine barbershop for a classic-looking haircut and an old-fashioned shave, and the local butcher for a rare cut of locally raised meat are fundamental to life in the city. People with certain sensibilities toward what they buy and do for leisure seek out these new urban luxuries among the city's many other options. They represent fun, cool, and urbane alternatives to the more popular sports bars and loud nightclubs, branded booze, cheap and quick haircuts, and shrink-wrapped meat on Styrofoam trays.

Chicago’s Immigrant Working Class and the Rise of Urban Populism, 1867–73

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B. Jentz ◽  
Richard Schneirov
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Control Measure ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
Fire Control ◽  
Real Property ◽  
Labor Reform ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
The City

This chapter examines Chicago's immigrant working class and the rise of urban populism. In January 1872—three months after the Great Fire—Anton Hesing, Chicago's German political boss, organized a protest against the city government's effort to ban new wooden housing in the city as a fire control measure. For Hesing, the fight against the “fire limits” was a battle against the proletarianization of Chicago's workers, whose distinctive independent status was based on the ownership of real property and a house. He fought to preserve a particular kind of working class independent of large-scale capital, and free of alien radicalism, particularly socialism. In leading the movement against the fire limits, Hesing then became the chief architect of urban populism in the city. With labor reform marginalized, urban populism helped politicize the city's immigrant skilled workers and lower middle class.

The Politics of Middle-Class Success in an Inner-City Public School

1982 ◽  
Vol 164 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Timothy Sieber
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Patterns Of Failure ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Political Struggles

Recent ethnography of minority and working-class schooling has shown how wider structural factors like class stratification, poverty, and racism influence observable patterns of failure and under achievement in the classroom. In contrast, ethnography in middle-class schools and classrooms has not seriously probed similar structural bases of middle-class children's success, instead attributing this success to a presumed equivalence between the “middle-class culture” of the children's homes and the culture of the school and its staff. This study traces the history and effects of middle-class involvement in the public elementary school of a gentrifying inner-city neighborhood in New York City. Segregated into their special classrooms with distinctive curriculum and organization, the school's middle-class children were more successful than their poor and working-class peers. Their success was not the result, in Bourdieu's terms, of the “cultural capital” afforded by their middle-class upbringing. The school staff, in fact, disapproved of many elements of the children's class culture. Rather, the children's successful standing within the school had been the object, and achievement, of their parents' long-standing political struggles against the school's staff and other parents. This case illustrates that school success is as much an active social construction—both inside and outside the school—as school failure has been shown to be.

scholarly journals Who Has the Right to Decide? Pula and the Problem of Demilitarized Urban Zone

2019 ◽  
pp. 135-148
Author(s):  
Maciej Falski
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
City Council ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Nongovernmental Organization ◽  
The Public ◽  
Urban Zone ◽  
Historical Center ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

In 2007, the Croatian army decided to close its military base on the Muzil peninsula, which is a part of the city of Pula. Muzil hosts about 20 percent of the city; moreover, it is located in a very attractive area with the view on the seaside and the city’s historical center. After the city received the area, negotiations began to decide about the future of the demilitarized land. This paper discusses the attitudes of two main actors of the public debate: the city council supported by the central authorities of Croatia and a nongovernmental organization established by a number of residents of Pula. The former wanted to transform the demilitarized area intoan elite tourist resort, while the latter proposed opening the peninsula to residents to rei ntegrate the postmilitary area with the city. The two attitudes are related to different ideas of usefulness and the city as a community of residents. The right to space reflects the fundamental question of participation in the public debate. Moreover, Pula can be seen as an example of the city, where extensive and uncontrolled development of tourism violates the interests of the local community.

scholarly journals På vej til at blive mor og far - køn, klasse, etnicitet og race i jordemoderkonsultationer

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bolette Frydendahl Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Heterosexual Couple ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Family ◽  
White Majority ◽  
Minority Ethnic ◽  
The Way ◽  
White Minority

On the way to parenthood - (re)productions of gender, ethnicity, race and class in midwife consultations.The premise of this article is that subject positions, which parents-to-be hold during pregnancy, influence their future parenthood. The article examines how such subject positions are produced in midwife consultations. It shows how the man in a heterosexual couple is positioned as peripheral while the woman is assigned the responsibility for the construction of the family by means of documents, architecture and midwife practices. At the same time, the article illustrates how midwife practices reproduce hierarchies of a superior white, majority ethnic, middle class norm which equals respectability, opposed to inferior non-white, minority ethnic, working class deviations.

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