ancient cities

228 Divided Cities
Thus, as Fraser argues, such spaces that might
seem exclusive at first glance are actually contributing
to, and broadening, wider democratic
discourse.
Cities that are internally divided, however,
reveal a much higher degree of separation than
spaces of fragmented cities. For example, cities
that contain ghettos or barrios constitute divided
cities. Loïc Wacquant had done extensive research
on ghettos and had arrived at a specific definition
of the term for the purposes of social scientific
investigation and for the purposes of distinguishing
ghettos from enclaves, disadvantaged neighborhoods,
or alternate spaces. In his view, ghettoes
exhibit four characteristics: stigma, constraint,
spatial confinement, and institutional encasement.
The ghetto is a place in which the greater society
singles out a particular segment of the population
and sections them off, either through force or
through systematic institutional exclusion. The
result, according to Wacquant, is the growth of
an extreme form of parallel institutionalism.
Accor ding to Wacquant, this urban form existed in
Europe as Jewish ghettoes. Throughout the last
millennium—fifteenth-century Rome, fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century Venice, seventeenth-century
Vienna and Prague, nineteenth-century Frankfurt,
to name a few—many cities across Europe contained
Jewish ghettoes as regions where persons of
Jewish faith were permitted to reside and work. In
the twentieth century, myriad Jewish ghettos were
established under the rule of Adolf Hitler, the most
famous and largest being the Warsaw Ghetto. In
the United States, Wacquant focused much attention
on Chicago and the ghetto of Woodlawn,
whose residents (1) lacked basic public services
such as adequate schooling, health care, transit
services, advocacy, and security—even the police
stayed away; (2) endured a high degree of stigma
and suffered substandard living conditions and life
expectancies; (3) were dominated by a booming
underground economy in weapons and narcotics
trafficking; and (4) identified the world outside the
neighborhood as inaccessible and foreign. Chicago
is therefore a divided city because life inside and
life outside of the ghetto represent two separate
and independent urban systems. Similarly, it has
been argued that American barrios, such as East
Los Angeles, exhibit, although not as severely,
structural and systemic segregation similar to
African American ghettoes. High rates of unemployment
and poverty and low investment in infrastructure
and services lead to patterns of social and
spatial segregation that resemble urban enclaves at
best and ghettoes at worst.
Perhaps the ghetto’s opposite are urban gated
communities that have been emerging throughout
South America over the past 30 years as a result of
socioeconomic changes around the region. Effectively,
these become urban spaces for the rich, whose
lifestyle expectations concerning comfort and security
needed to be met. They are known as “gated
communities” (barrios cerrados), “private urbanizations”
(urbanizaciones privadas), or “gated
condominiums” (condomínios fechados), and are
found in Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Mexico
City, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. The AlphaVille
community of São Paulo is the oldest such development.
It is home to 30,000 residents, it has an
infrastructure that employs 150,000 workers, and
it boasts its own private university and health care
system. Utilities are provided without public assistance
by the AlphaVille Urbanismo corporation.
The community is outfitted with 24-hour surveillance
by armed security personnel, and this is
claimed to protect residents from the urban ills of
São Paulo and its high homicide rates. The cost of
living in AlphaVille is beyond the reach of the
average Brazilian family. Thus, these communities
may be seen as deepening and reinforcing the
socioeconomic divides among the respective urban
populations.
Segregation of elites is by no means a new phenomenon.
The middle-class flight to the suburbs in
North American cities is a twentieth-century example
of this and is said to have exacerbated ghetto
formation inside cities. In earlier times, religion
often played a key role in separating the wealthy,
educated, and powerful from what was viewed as
the profanity of daily urban life. Monasteries,
abbey complexes, and cloistered communities in
the Middle Ages were home to servants of the
Christian faith as custodians and guardians of the
church’s social, political, and economic capital. In
China, the Forbidden City (Zijin Cheng), built to
house the emperor—the earthly counterpart of the
celestial emperor—was also a place that segregated
the wealthy and the powerful from their subjects.
Its construction occupied over a million workers,
and upon completion during the Ming Dynasty, its