A decade has passed since the outset of the global financial crisis, which has changed the everyday lives of many people living in European cities, and their sense of stability and security. We could say it was bound to happen as the inevitable result of the processes rooted in the era of capitalism, technology and urbanisation. There were intellectual attempts to grasp the global processes and their impact on individual and social identities, institutions and futures just at the end of the twentieth century. While the concepts of reflexive modernisation developed in the 1990s by Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Scott Lash or liquid modernity by Zygmunt Bauman differed in many points, they all claimed the new social ontology of the contemporary world. Robert Skidelsky (2009) distinguishes between epistemological uncertainty and ontological uncertainty. The first, according to the author, could be resolved over time and with more information and knowledge; we associate it, in conventional language, with what we do not know due to the lack of data and knowledge and we identify it with what we can reduce to calculable risk, hence its identification with the concept of “risk”. On the contrary, the ontological uncertainty is irreducible and cannot be eliminated. It does not admit reduction and affects the theories and how social scientists face a reality in which predictability and unpredictability are deeply interwoven (Skidelsky 2009: 110). For Zinn (2006: 282), uncertainty is “a basic experience of modernity” and he interprets uncertainty and risk as “systematically linked to each other because there are different ways beyond instrumental rationality how risk can be managed” (Zinn 2006: 275). Beck, theorising risk society just on the threshold of the twenty-first century, wrote there are “at least three different axes of conflict in world risk society. The first axis is that of ecological conflicts, which are by their very essence global. The second is global financial crises, which, in a first stage, can be individualised and nationalised. And the third, which suddenly broke upon us on September 11th, is the threat of global terror networks, which empower governments and states” (Beck 2002: 41). The turbulences currently observed in Europe and beyond allow us to think that profound and unfolding ideological differences co-create the last axis of a crisis.
This relational and dynamic arrangement of factors has stimulated the transnational and transcontinental mobility of people, changing their personal life, the places they leave and the places where they arrive and where they remain. Thus, for many people “liquid modernity” is the normality now. Bauman associated xenophobic acts with such “liquidity” or fluidity: “Efforts to keep the ‘other’, the different, the strange and the foreign at a distance, the decision to preclude the need for communication, negotiation and mutual commitment, is not the only conceivable, but the expectable response to the existential uncertainty rooted in the new fragility or fluidity of social bonds” (Bauman 2013: 108).
Flows of migrants and refugees have activated political debates on the inequalities that pushed people out of their homes and on the ones forming in the places they arrive at. However, inequality is a multidimensional and long-running problem, very present in urban settings. The reports published by the OECD documented rising inequalities in income and opportunities in the last decades, and also in traditionally egalitarian countries (OECD 2011). The title of the last OECD publication recalls the question of the middle class, which is essentially associated with cities. The report emphasises the status of the middle class as “under multiple pressures”. The statistical data show that the costs of living have increased faster than inflation and “house prices have been growing three times faster than household median income over the last two decades. This happened in the context of rising job insecurity in fast transforming labour markets. One-in-six current middle-income jobs face high risk of automation. More than one-in-five middle-income households spend more than they earn. Over-indebtedness is higher for middle income than for both low- and high- income households. As a result, today the middle class looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters”, conclude the authors who highlight serious social, psychological and political consequences of unstable conditions (OECD 2019: 15–16).
But what is crucial and motivates this book is that all those dimensions of the crisis remain abstract or even elusive when analysed in general terms, whereas all of them are localised and co-create everyday life practices in urban neighbourhoods and public spaces. Saskia Sassen concluded in our last book (Ferro et al. 2018) that “large cities around the world are the terrain where a multiplicity of globalisation processes assumes concrete, localised forms. These localised forms are, in good part, what globalisation is about. If we consider further that large cities also concentrate a growing share of disadvantaged populations (…) - then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions” (Sassen 2018: 27).
Various urban movements and pop-up city forms could be interpreted as the bottom-up response and the path towards more inclusive and equal societies. There are also some “official” answers for the current situation in the strategies and acts assigned by the international organisations, such as the Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals, the Urban Agenda for the EU, Paris agreement on climate and the Kuala Lumpur Declaration on cities 2030 adopted at the 9th World Urban Forum. It is worth mentioning that the UN-Habitat (2016: 180) also proposed five principles in strategic and policy thinking for the New Urban Agenda: (1) Ensuring that the new urbanisation model includes mechanism and procedures that protect and promote human rights and the rule of law; (2) Ensuring equitable urban development and inclusive growth; (3) Empowering civil society, expanding democratic participation and reinforce collaboration; (4) Promoting environmental sustainability; and (5) Promoting innovations that facilitate learning and sharing of knowledge. The common base of the documents above is a belief in the importance of local contexts, both in understanding the reality and in minimising negative social and environmental impact and consequences (since the idea of their elimination appears as purely utopian).
Social theories currently developed emphasise the dynamic and relational nature of social phenomena. The contribution of urban sociology for social knowledge (often neglected in general theories) is the “spatial” and “local” puzzles that let us understand everyday life practices, strategies and social actors that transform and always need a “locus”. What happens in the local contexts, in urban neighbourhoods and districts? Why are (or are not) urban policies and institutions effective in times of crisis? How do people individually and collectively cope with contemporary urban challenges at the neighbourhood level and in public space? What is the role of gender, class, nationality, age, disability, income level and ethnicity as factors of inequalities and uncertainty? And last but not least, how can the “spatial puzzle” shed new insight on a more profound understanding of the world? These are the questions that urban sociology can start answering through intense debates and accurate empirical research, as presented in this book.
Here, we deepen interrogations discussed in Moving Cities—Contested Views on Urban Life (2018), but we also move on to different debates. Our previous book Contested Views concerned the issues of a new geography of centres and margins, boundary making, mechanisms of exclusion, but also of the processes of space appropriation, city making and rebuilding in time of crisis. In this book, we aim to gain a better grasp of the relational and dynamic nature of urban inequalities, their visible and invisible forms (or not shown in statistics). Thus, by using the elusive term of “uncertainty”, we would like to zoom in on particular aspects of urban inequalities that are difficult to measure, but are acutely sensed and experienced by people and, more and more often, perceived as unfair. Here, in recognition of inequalities as unjust and the disagreement with the status quo, lies a positive aspect of uncertainty, which can lead to the social wake-up call and an active citizenship (Taylor-Gooby and Zinn 2006).
Urban Inequalities and Uncertainty as Conceptual Challenges
We start this discussion by focusing on the conceptual aspects of research and intellectual reflection on urban uncertainty and inequalities. How can epistemological perspectives of urban sociology impact our general understanding of inequalities, fear and tensions?
In the second chapter of this book, “Social and Spatial Uncertainty and Inequality: The Re-figuration of Spaces as Today’s Challenge for Cities”, Martina Löw further develops her relational concept of space (2016), arguing that social tensions and conflicts could be interpreted as the result of uncertainty caused by the spatial refiguration observed since the 1960s. The earlier stage of modernity is characterised by the concept of space as the territory and the container which impacted political visions (such as nation-state or colonies) and also their urban realisations of homogenous areas and zones. Increasing technologisation, circulation of people, goods and practices questioned these homogeneous and normative social narratives which, in turn, deconstructed the homogenous vision of space-as-container. The spatial refiguration in late modernity means that “not only have people’s lives accelerated at an unprecedented scale (as findings have suggested for a long time), they also live in more polycontextural environments requiring the constitution of spaces on different scales, following different logics and contexts simultaneously”. This is why, for instance, Löw argues, classical dichotomies “private/public” do not cover a range of urban forms and orders—they are actually processual, relational, mediated and polycontextual. If we agree with Löw’s (2012: 304) idea that in an urbanised world, spatial boundedness is organised essentially through cities as entities of meaning, it means that this ontological transformation of a socio-spatial order makes room for urban sociological research. The concept proposed by Löw shifts our attention from classically understood neighbourhoods or public spaces into new emerging forms of space. Löw formulates essential questions for urban researchers: “who builds trust in which forms of space; which forms of space are constructed for which purpose; and how and when does space become an issue of concern or dispute?”. Other chapters in the book formulate some answers for them.
Complementary to Löw’s proposition is the chapter by M. Victoria Gómez. She analyses the relationships between cosmopolitanism, identity and belonging, which are powerful concepts in current political debates and public discourses, stimulating xenophobic acts, scepticism, distrust in democratic institutions or even radical changes in transnational organisations, as evidenced by EU countries’ ambivalences regarding immigration. Through analysis of the history of the concepts and on the base of qualitative research in neighbourhoods in Madrid and Glasgow, Gomez not only dismisses a simplistic definition of cosmopolitanism as the opposition of place attachment or local identity but also shows its scalar and processual character. It is at the neighbourhood level that “rooted cosmopolitanism” can be observed, which is an active and reflexive combination of opening up to other cultures and the world, and at the same time the connection to place and neighbourhood loyalties. However, Gomez notices that “at the local level, problems such as the history of local communities, the existence of cultural conflicts and existing inequalities become important, especially if these inequalities create borders between different cultural communities. (…) If inequality also has spatial expression, the problem becomes more important because of the possible creation of ghettos or segregation processes linked to people’s incomes and the prices of housing, which hinder interethnic relationship”. Cosmopolitanism practised in places of everyday interactions is often neglected by the elites as they treat it as “an abstract concept and experience of planetary communication in such a way that they have more in common with the elites of other places than with ordinary people with whom they cross paths with on a daily basis”. This, in turn, supports the use of the concept as a discursive tool in the ideological battles. This chapter convinces us that sociological research on cities and neighbourhoods not only stimulates the development of general concepts such as identity, belonging or globalisation but is also a necessary step towards inclusive and just policies.
The paper “Digital Natives and Living in the City of the Future: Contradictions and Ambivalences” by Susanne Frank completes the part on Urban Inequalities and Uncertainty as Conceptual Challenges, and there are two reasons we decided to set it here. Firstly, because it is an original interpretation of the gaps and contradictions between the images of living and dwelling in the city of the future (shaped by the professional trend researchers) and the needs and desires expressed by inhabitants of this future city, especially by so-called digital natives (millennials, generations Y and Z), and secondly, because this paper stimulates critical thinking about the concepts and the way they are used in social policies. Frank presents the message from the futurologists, which is coherent with the vision of the world we know: “Housing and the household of the future are thus portrayed as a flexible, temporary, and decentralised network comprising private, semi-public and public spaces and places. A consequence is that the residential environment (the immediate and wider neighbourhood, the district) will gain major significance”. The future generations, according to these visions, will have less private and more shared, common space. “Rental, sharing, lending and trading options will save money, space and time and enhance urbanites’ mobility, independence and flexibility”—the city will be a perfect place to l...