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May 15, 2006
As we know globalization has reorganized the economy of our cities, rewiring it in dramatic ways, with many people were being left behind in the process of de-industrialization and offshoring. Australia's response has been to construct borders designed for total exclusion -- except for a limited, tightly regulated flow of high-skill labor.
A quote from Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, on the new urban slums in what is known as Third World:
Stunningly enough, classical social theory, whether Marx, Weber, or even Cold War modernization theory, none of it anticipated what's happened to the city over the last 30 or 40 years. None of it anticipated the emergence of a huge class, mainly of the young, who live in cities, have no formal connection with the world economy, and no chance of ever having such a connection. This informal working class isn't the lumpenproletariat of Karl Marx and it isn't the "slum of hope," as imagined 20 or 30 years ago, filled with people who will eventually climb into the formal economy. Dumped into the peripheries of cities, usually with little access to the traditional culture of those cities, this informal global working class represents an unprecedented development, unforeseen by theory.
In the First World we have features of a Third World economy in a First World city characteristed by McMansions with 4WD's parked in front. The environmental footprint of this suburban middle-class is a lot heavier than the suburbs of the 1950s.
Is a Dickensian world of Victorian poverty being recreated in our cities?
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