XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 13-19, 2014)

July 13 - 19, 2014

JS-38

Too Much and Too Little: Urban Landscapes of Homelessness and Gentrification

WG03 Visual Sociology (host committee)
RC21 Regional and Urban Development

Language: English

This session visually focuses on the intersections of inequalities in urban worlds where the competition for living space has had perverse visual effects. Sociologists have long described how as a consequence of different life chances, groups are distributed differently in space such as in segregation and gentrification. Inequality and social justice are made visible by spatial processes of change. Whether luxurious or humble, dwellings serve important symbolic and practical functions for residents of all social classes and cultural backgrounds. In this regard Ernest Burgess’s classical urban ecological paradigm of neighborhood invasion and succession has served almost a century (1925). Contemporarily, for Sassen and many others it is contradictions of the globalization of capital that concentrate both the more and less disadvantaged in cities where even the marginalized make claims on "contested terrain" (2001). It is also ironic that the concentrations of mobile capital in global cities have simultaneously enhanced “the potential mobility of some, while detracting from the mobility potential of others” (Sheller 2011). In a way we can say the rich get not only richer but also more mobile as the poor get poorer and relatively less so. The papers in this session will critically examine, through the use of innovative visual approaches, urban vernacular panoramas that range from homelessness to gentrification. Immediate contrasts, such as the displaced or the homeless in gentrified or upscale areas, the “slumming” or “poverty tourism” phenomena, and comparative analyses will also be discussed, to critically dramatize issues of Social Justice and the City (Harvey 2010).