Postmodern urban redevelopment coincides with deepened inequality and infrastructural decline

Evidence

These two strategies are by no means incompatible; on the con­ trary, a city in which are concentrated corporate headquarters, banks and securities firms is likely to include among its population large numbers of the well-paid white-collar workers who form the main locus of upper-income consumption. The development of this kind of ‘post-Keynesian city’ requires the large-scale transformation of the built environment — the creation, for example, in run-down inner-city areas of up-market shopping malls, the construction of new office buildings, the ‘redevelopment’ of depressed waterside areas as con­ centrations of expensive housing. Such changes are, of course, the story of every major Western city in the 1980s. Mike Davis argues that the ‘urban renaissance’ of downtown Los Angeles refleas the ‘hypertrophic expansion of the financial service seaor’, in which ‘the transformation of a decayed precinct of downtown LA into a major financial and corporate-control node of the Pacific Rim economy … has gone hand-in-hand with a precipitous deterioration of the general urban infrastructure and a new-wave immigration that has brought an estimated one million undocumented Asians, Mexicans and Cen­ tral Americans into the Inner City.’ The abandonment of urban reform is symbolized by the fortress-line charaaer of the new buildings: John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel, treated by Jameson as the acme of Postmodernism (see section 5.2 above), rather marks, with its inclusion of ‘pseudo-natural, pseudo-public spaces within the building itself’, a ‘systematic segregation from the great Hispanic- Asian city outside’. Similar patterns are repeated elsewhere: thus London, a key and expanding international financial centre, had in … 1985 the largest concentration of unemployed in the industrialized world, and greater extremes of wealth and poverty than any other part of Britain. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 581

Categorization

• XREF: Directly rebuts Jameson’s celebratory reading of the Bonaventure Hotel and his postmodernism-as-cultural-break thesis; connects to Davis’s City of Quartz. — connects to: Postmodern urban imagery erases class relations and production from its aestheticized surface — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1998; Urban regeneration discourse conceals racialized inclusions and exclusions; Post-communist neoliberalization widens inequality and targets visible minorities as scapegoats — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 913 (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: Pairs with ‘Grafting & Growth’ in the sense of physical infrastructure as a window into political economy, though the primary resonance is a Jameson riposte.

Broader Connections

• Postmodern urban imagery erases class relations and production from its aestheticized surface #expands (0.78) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1998
• Multicultural city branding can repeat the exclusionary logic of old urban renewal #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2253
• Urban regeneration discourse conceals racialized inclusions and exclusions #expands (0.72)
• Post-communist neoliberalization widens inequality and targets visible minorities as scapegoats #exemplifies (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 913