Scholar, Richard, ed. Divided Cities: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2003.

• Author: Broad, David B.
• Position: Book review

Scholar, Richard, ed. Divided Cities: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2003. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2006. 238 pages. Paper, $24.95.

The world's cities have gone from accounting in 1900 for ten percent of human population to accounting in 2000 for about fifty percent. By 2050 it will be seventy-five per cent. The poor, who will always be with us, are much more with us than ever. The rich have never been richer.

This volume contains scholarly and other views of the worldwide tsunami of urbanization--its causes, effects, consequences, and implications. About the causes there is agreement. They include (uneven) transition to post-industrialism, globalization, and migration. The transition to post-industrialism largely imitates the prior transition to industry, but the character of modern information technology has enabled some leap-frogging, as evidenced by the emergence of India as a regional economic superpower.

Globalization is the accelerated exchange of people, institutions, and economy across political boundaries. Some of those boundaries have virtually vanished. Migration is entirely into cities. In 1950, there was only one megalopolis (a metropolitan area with over ten million inhabitants) and that was the New York City metropolitan area. In 2015, there will be twenty-one megalopolises. According to the United Nations Habitat Report, the world's urban population increased by thity-six percent in the 1990s.

On the effects, consequences, and implications of urbanization, this volume reveals large divergence. Marxist authors Stuart Hall and David Harvey see Western state-sponsored capitalism as the engine of increasing urban impoverishment. Similarly, law professor Patricia Williams, relating the global war on terrorism to the urban divide, "... describes the present crisis as a structural problem masquerading as a personal one" (from Jane Shaw's introduction on p. 53). The United States and its waning coalition of the willing are diverted from persistent global political, economic, and environmental issues by the demonization of evil-doers, many of whom, supposedly, have conveniently gathered in Iraq. Ethnologist and psychoanalyst Patrick Declerck identifies prevailing attitudes toward the most marginalized urban inhabitants, the homeless, as sado-masochistic. Thinking that the homeless mock us for our conformity, we respond by letting them live in squalor and die of hypothermia. Noted architect Richard Rogers (Pompidou Center...