Post-modern Cities in Global Perspective

Guided by Austin Kilroy's "What and how can urban sociology contribute to understanding the interaction of urban growth and public insecurtiy in developing-world cities?" (May 2007), which could be downloaded from MIT's opencourse, I hastened to examineUN-HABITAT's Global Reports on Human Settlements, in particular two issues: Cities in A Globalizing World in 2001 and The Challenge of Slums in 2003. What attracted me most was a six-tiered stratification of post-modern cities (from 2003: 22-23):

1. The luxury city and the controlling city, involving the groups for whom the city is a locus of power and profit, as well as consumption and relaxation.

2. The gentrified city and the city of advanced services, involving income-earning professionals and those involved in the ‘knowledge economy’.

3. The suburban city and the city of direct production of the better paid blue-collar and white-collar nonprofessional workers and their factories and offices.

4. The tenement city and the city of unskilled workers, including the immigrant enclaves, the lower paid wage workers and the ‘respectable poor’.

5. The abandoned city and the residual city, for the very poor and the permanently unemployed ‘underclass’ or ‘ghetto poor’, with income based on marginal or illegal activity, direct street-level exploitation, and denial of the public and private services of other parts of the city.

6. The informal city and the city of illegality, which comprises the slums of the developing megacities and where the informal sector has its base; where services are poor or non-existent; where residents are invisible to legal status systems; and where harassment by authorities is commonplace.

More explanation could be found in 2001: 32-38.

BTW, I have always been curious why the bloody hell environmentalists relentlessly accuse HK of being one of the top waste-producing / polluted cities in the world, and, thus, HKers are being environmental killers. I could never stand by them. First, HK is not an industrial city, not even light industry at best. Second, given vehicle being heavy waste and pollution source, HK's vehicle-ownership rate is far below developed countries/cities. Many more counter examples fill the list endless but most importantly, is it fair to compare a 100% urbanized and densely populated city/territory to a hugh country where rural areas are massive? That's non-sense! What about London? New York? Paris? Tokyo? We HKers waste far too less than them. HK may not be an ideal city, but definitely not a messy one.