Becoming global and the new poverty of cities

Dublin Core

Globalization has had a peculiar impact on cities all over the world, as much in the developed world as in the developing world. Globalization turned out to be an assault on the urban middle class. As the state shrank while the migration into the city continued, competition with the city together with the competition among cities increasingly became a race to the bottom.

The process of a hollowing out of the global urban middle class and the degradation of the working poor was perhaps most visible in Latin America and socialist East Europe, regions in which moderate prosperity had become inexorably linked to the state.

The chapters to follow attempt to tell the story of what this new poverty means for the people involved and for their cities and communities, and to do so through a parallel examination of how these changes have affected the functioning of urban communities in two regions arguably most affected by macro-economic policies imposed from the outside: Latin America and Post-Socialist Eastern Europe.