Globalization & Ghettos

David Wilson, a geography professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, has spent years studying the urban geography of America’s post-industrial cities. He coauthored, with John A. Jakle, Derelict Landscapes: The Wasting of America’s Built Environment, which read America’s ruins for clues about its values and priorities. His Inventing Black-on-Black Violence: Discourse, Space, and Representation examined the 1980s civil invention of so-called “black-on-black violence,” a phrase that allowed politicians, political commentators, and the media to racialize violence. His newest book, Cities and Race: America’s New Black Ghetto, details the continuing marginalizing of low-income black communities, especially within America’s rust-belt cities. He spoke to Next American City by phone.

Can you explain the thesis of your book?

The thesis of the book is that we see the emergence of a new kind of low-income, African-American space in America’s rust-belt cities. For lack of a better term, the book calls it a “ghetto.” The thesis is that the conditions of black ghettos in cities like Philadelphia, Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago have worsened since 1990. They’ve worsened in terms of poverty, and they’ve worsened in how they’re symbolically presented to people. At the core of this, my book argues, is that these cities are being transformed: downtowns are being rejuvenated, gentrification is being encouraged. The book calls that an “affluent restructuring”—it’s a change designed to suit the more affluent.

So material conditions have worsened as an effect of this representational change? Seeing the city as in competition with other cities allows for this kind of neglect?

Exactly. In fact, if you look at the data from 1990 to the present, there’s a higher proportion of people living in intense poverty. In sheer numbers, the population of these neighborhoods has declined. However, if you look at the intensity of poverty compared to 1990, the intensity of poverty is worse. At the same time, local planners and local media often portray these neighborhoods as places of severe pathology. These neighborhoods, these populations, are more pathologized than ever before.