Anycity, USA is an idealistic recreation of four distinct socio-spatial sites that are typical of the average American city. These four sites (ghettos, suburbs, central business districts, and inner city neighborhoods) have been the physical result of four distinct yet connected processes (ghettoization, suburbanization, globalization, and gentrification). Furthermore these process are the economic/political expression of four basic and highly questionable immoral characteristics that have been predominant in the history of American cities; racism, isolation, greed, and power, respectively. To simplify the average American city, sites and processes and immoral motives, I will draw examples from four cities (Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York) from four respectively separate regions (South, West, North, East). Anycity, USA represents the enormous control that the few upperclass elite have, and how their selfish desires have shaped the spatial differentiation in the urban form for the majority that inhabit its regions.

The region of Anycity that offers the simplest historical explanation to its method of existence is the ghetto. As a representative city of the USA, racial discrimination and segregation of blacks has a deep history in Anycity. And despite the massive improvement in the legal system from the age of slavery to present day, it is important to acknowledge the fact that “long periods of racial oppression can result in a system of inequality that may persist for indefinite periods of time even after racial barriers are removed” (Wilson 197). During the first half of the 20^th century it was relatively simple for white politicians to “regulate the mobility and control the areas in which this increasing black population could live” (Bayor 54). Segregation laws were continually passed as attempts of confining the blacks. “The first laws designated city blocks by race” (Bayor 54). With time it became more difficult for the white leaders to pass such outright discriminatory laws, but other more creative methods such as construction of transportation routes, mainly “highways were proposed as possible barriers” (Bayor 58). With very little political power at their disposal the black population was ultimately confined to certain areas, ghettos, as the powerful whites had desired. Yet the impact of the racist wills of the elite upperclass did not end here. Despite the goals of equality and freedom that motivated the civil rights movements, an iatrogenic effect was the decrease in economic stability, class heterogeneity, and social organization that the ghetto would soon face. Before “the black middle class professional...resided in the higher-income areas of the inner city and serviced the ghetto community.” After the newly gained freedoms of the civil rights movement “the exodus of black middle-class professionals from the inner city has been increasingly accompanied by a movement of stable working-class blacks to higher income neighborhoods in other parts of the city and to the suburbs.” The devastating result has been the negative and stigmatized perception of this area, because “today’s ghetto residents represent almost exclusively the most disadvantaged segments of the urban black community” (Wilson 194).

Ghettoization was not the only expression of the elite white’s desire for segregation. The other half to keeping the blacks enclosed in specific inner-city areas, was the creation of a space outside that was for the elite only, suburbia. “From its origins, the suburban world...was based on the principle of exclusion” (Fishman 24). Yet this secluded utopia that was initially “restricted to the bourgeois elite alone” (Fishman 32) was soon to be invaded by the middle and working classes. The different suburbs of today are a result of the transformation of the job markets; mainly the growth of service industries and “the relocation of manufacturing industries out of the central cities” (Wilson 194). “The suburb became part of a complex ‘outer city,’ which now included jobs as well as residents” (Fishman 33). The new suburbs, or edge cities, “contain all the functions a city ever has, albeit in a spread-out form that few have come to recognize for what it is” (Garreau 4). With the departure of the middle income blacks from the ghettos, and “the reindustrialization and expansion of industry-related services” (Soja 189), the outer city, formerly suburb, areas have transformed into new types of urban spacing in the past 30 years, edge cities.

With hopes of segregation and isolation being brought to a halt, the elite relied upon market control to further the gap between races. The combination of an “extraordinarily powerful organization of anti-union forces” and “a sizeable pool of cheap, manipulable, minority worker” (Soja 191) has directly led to exploitation. This was similar to past scenarios of large business/employee relations except with the new large and docile workforce, labor “is not only locally competitive but also able to compete with the exploitative enclaves in the Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) of the Third World” (Soja 192). There was a drastic increase in foreign investment, and internationalization occurred “not only by the inflow of labor and capital, but also by expanding global reach of domestic economic interests” (Soja 193). This constitutes the transformation of Anycity, USA into a global city.

Based around the “power of multinational firms” (Sassen 3) whose headquarters are located within Anycity, “it is precisely the combination of the global dispersal of economic activities and global integration- under conditions of continued concentration of economic ownership and control- that has contributed to a strategic role for certain major cities” (Sassen 4). Corporations themselves have grown to be the dominant sites of power, control, and capital, replacing the political and geographic areas in which they are associated with. In a sense CEO’s have as equal influence on urban space if not more than city and real estate officials. Edge cities themselves were much largely influenced by “the locational decisions of transnational and national firms that make the urban peripheries the growth centers of the most dynamic industries” (Sassen 113). Free from political jurisdiction and approval of the public, International Firms have obtained an incredibly dangerous amount of freedom to control urban areas. This power has had drastic effects on the city core areas of Anycity, USA.

“In the face of a sharply declining rate of profit brought on by world overproduction and increasing international competition, industrial corporations began shifting blue-collar production work abroad and automating it at home” (Hill/Feagin 166). So, in order for the corporations to continue to profit it was necessary to decimate the home-base of workers in exchange for cheaper labor over seas. With growing mass communications it was easier to plan everything from a small central location, and have others elsewhere do the actual work. Anycity, USA saw “greater centralization of coordination activities in a control center and greater decentralization of execution activites to peripheral branches. Each step further elongated the corporate hierarchy of dominance and subordination” (Hill/Feagin 158).

It is not just the idea of power that is in play here, but also the act of greed is present in this sense that a corporation’s only concern is making money, and there is virtually no concern for the community in which it exists in. These elite are different from those of the political world, they view workers and citizens as a dispensable means with no power. The direct result of this CEO decision for Anycity, USA: “massive job losses, substantial reductions in social services, major union concessions and a declining standard of living” (Hill/Feagin 164). Although harmful to a great deal of businesses and citizens in the surrounding region, it was also another significant blow to the ghetto areas and black community due to the fact that “black residential sections were placed near the central business district (CBD), near industry”(Bayor 55), where the closing plants were located. The combination of expansion to edge cities by businesses and middle class alike, and the closing of factories in the industrial districts had left the city core in utter abandonment.

Not to be outdone by the corporations Anycity, USA’s real estate and political elite would soon flex their power and selfishness by transforming these areas of poverty. This would entail the further abuse and displacement of the minorities, and a reinforcement of the ideas that were the foundations of the racial segregation and creations of ghettos prevalent in the first half of the 20^th century, namely that “white city leaders planned to guide and segregate the black population and maintain a majority white city” (Bayor 54). Although now it would be associated with class segregation rather than race itself; there is still a very correlation between these two categories.

Gentrification is the rebuilding of declining central city areas for a wealthier class than those that previously inhabited the region. It is closely related to the original ideas of suburbanization, the migration of the upper class whites into their own area, just in the opposite direction this time. And why not? The original suburbanites moved for isolation, but when suburbs became the new cities, a great deal of isolation and attractiveness that was associated with these areas was lost. Suburbanization itself also helped to fuel gentrification in a sense; these areas were “largely abandoned to the working class amid postwar suburban expansion...the terrain of the inner city is suddenly valuable again, perversely profitable” (Smith 6). Just like how suburbia had an image that the upper class sought, so to did these inner city regions. The image was and is to be urban and hip. “Gallery owners and artists, designers and critics, writers and performers...converted urban dilapidation into ultra chic” (Smith 18). This image was all apart of the ultimate plan by which “anonymous management companies...offered artificially low rents in the early 1980's in order to attract galleries and artists whose presence would hype the area and hike rents” (Smith 19). Real estate succeeded when “Good art and good locations become fused. And good location means money” (Smith 20).

In order to hike rents there must be obvious rebuilding of the areas, but foremost a rent gap. This gap is the difference “between the actual ground rent capitalized from the present (depressed) land use and the potential rent that could be capitalized from the ‘highest and best’ use” (Smith 346). It is not the apartment building itself that is of value before gentrification, it is the land potential. The area is already in decline and the buildings can no longer make a profit due to poor conditions, inadequate maintenance is part of the profit making strategy for the real estate owners. The site is then rebuilt into a much nicer setting, and hence capital is invested, “real estate values soar; yuppies consume” (Smith 13).

The power and selfishness behind gentrification are displayed in the displacement that results from the process. In order to move in somewhere, someone must move out. In this case it is the upper class whites moving in, and the lower class minorities moving out. “Gentrification portends a class conquest of the city” (Smith 26). While in many ways a form of segregation and control similar to that of ghettoization, it is often viewed with more sympathy. “Insofar as gentrification infects working-class communities, displaces poor households, and converts whole neighborhoods into bourgeois enclaves, the frontier ideology rationalizes social differentiation and exclusion as natural, inevitable” (Smith 17). The poor evicted families and individuals are left with very few options of where to go. As was the situation with ghettoization: “No plans were made for housing the displaced blacks; they were simply evicted and forced to move” (Bayor 58), so to was the result of gentrification: “government has never proposed a plan for relocating evictees” (Smith 27).

The same motives have driven the same powerful elite to use different city regions for personal gains, regardless of the consequence. The “withdrawal of capital...disinvestment and abandonment” (Smith 21) has worked to advantage the few and disadvantage the majority. The growing gap between the classes has helped to stigmatize the minorities as poor, and low income residents, which in a sense intensifies the gap to an even greater extent. This growth has occurred within only the past 40 years. There was a turning point here when, “ethnic minority unemployment, inner city poverty, decaying neighborhoods and violent unrest came to symbolize the urban crisis of the 1960s” (Hill/Feagin 162). The causes of this crisis lie within the same processes and desires of the elite that created the specific current areas of Anycity, USA: “Suburbanization, institutionalized racism and uneven urban growth set the terms of political discourse” (Hill/Feagin 162).

There has been no solution to the crisis that was prevalent 40 years ago. The relocation of capital was exactly that, a relocation. Instead of attacking the problems of the struggling working-class, the powerful elite simply avoided the problems altogether by moving. The resulting types of urban areas, and inter-connected processes that have created and maintained such areas, are direct outcomes from the immoral traits of racism, desire for isolation, greed, and selfish power that the few elite whites have exerted upon the large and poor working-class minority communities that have come to America for the same ideas of freedom, equality and enterprise that the founding fathers established and desired as a retreat from a dominant small aristocracy that ruled over the masses. Anycity, USA embodies this contradiction.