Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
were often too far from employment sites, and often had inadequate public transit
facilities to connect them to shops, employment and other services, let alone to their
family networks that may have helped modify aberrant behaviour. Recent studies
of public sector tower blocks that were located in more central locations showed
that they were more valued and attracted a wider range of people because of their
proximity to jobs and services (Murie
2005
). To take another example, studies of
the inner areas of large world cities with strong financial services and administra-
tive functions have shown that these areas have become too expensive for working
class households, since they cannot compete with the increasing affluence of the
quaternary and quinary workers, or those with inherited or off-shore wealth who
also desire locations in these areas for social, as much as economic reasons (Sassen
2001
). This results in the effective exclusion of working class residences from the
inner city of prosperous centres, whether office cleaners, domestic servants, or the
social service workers, in teaching, in security, in health care etc. Although these
workers are still needed by the affluent classes and businesses, they face huge prob-
lems, due to their relatively low wages in an expensive metropolis, with long and
often expensive commutes to their places of work, some at anti-social hours. This
type of spatial injustice is not due to the unanticipated effects of deliberate policy as
in public housing estates, but is a consequence of letting only the market control the
distribution of housing and its price. This current problem may be compared to the
situation in eighteenth century London when the rich created large houses around
residential squares in west London, but developers also made sure there were also
smaller housing developments where the local shopkeepers and servants who ser-
viced these areas lived and worked (Summerson
1962
).
A particularly egregious spatial injustice exists in Chinese cities where as many
as 250 million urban residents have no rights to the education and health facilities in
cities because they or their parents are rural migrants, still classified as rural dwell-
ers under the
hukou
system of household registration. New policies announced in
2013 will give urban residence rights to perhaps 100 million of these residents, so
long as they have a stable job and legal residence and live in cities of 5 million peo-
ple or less (TE
2014
). This will solve the problem of less than half of these so-called
illegal residents, many of whom have helped build the cities which deny their rights,
although some do have the right to return to their rural locales and hence farm plots
on retirement. This and other examples show the need to investigate the spatial
dialectics of new developments or the consequences of old policies. The creation of
new spaces often reproduces injustices, because they limit the future opportunities
of people who are affected by the spatiality involved.
3.6.3
Inter-Generational Equities
In a similar vein it can be argued that the focus of most Just City guides or policies
at present relates to the effects of decisions in one particular time. However, the
attainment of equity in particular also needs to be investigated in a temporal sense,
especially in the effects that occur between generations. The obvious example of an
