Editing City (section)

=== Social structure ===
[[Urban sociology|Urban society]] is typically [[social stratification|stratified]]. Spatially, cities are formally or informally [[Geographical segregation|segregated]] along ethnic, economic, and racial lines. People living relatively close together may live, work, and play in separate areas, and associate with different people, forming [[ethnic enclave|ethnic]] or [[lifestyle enclave|lifestyle]] enclaves or, in areas of concentrated poverty, [[ghetto]]es. While in the US and elsewhere poverty became associated with the [[inner city]], in France it has become associated with the ''[[banlieue]]s'', areas of urban development that surround the city proper. Meanwhile, across Europe and North America, the racially [[white people|white]] majority is empirically the most segregated group. [[Suburb]]s in the West, and, increasingly, [[Gated community|gated communities]] and other forms of "privatopia" around the world, allow local elites to self-segregate into secure and exclusive [[neighborhood]]s.{{sfn | Latham | McCormack | McNamara | McNeill | 2009 | pp=131–140}}

Landless urban workers, contrasted with [[peasant]]s and known as the [[proletariat]], form a growing stratum of society in the age of urbanization. In [[Marxism|Marxist]] doctrine, the proletariat will inevitably [[proletarian revolution|revolt]] against the [[bourgeoisie]] as their ranks swell with disenfranchised and disaffected people lacking all stake{{clarify|date=May 2022|reason=Unusual wording – is it supposed to be "any stake" perhaps?}} in the [[status quo]].<ref>{{cite book |author1=[[Karl Marx]] |author2=[[Frederick Engels]] |title=Manifesto of the Communist Party|url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180724053228/https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ |archive-date=24 July 2018 |date=February 1848 |language= German |translator=Samuel Moore |quote=But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.}}</ref> The global urban proletariat of today, however, generally lacks the status of factory workers which in the nineteenth century provided access to the [[means of production]].<ref name="Davis2004">{{cite journal | last=Davis | first=Mike | title=The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos | journal=Social Text | publisher=Duke University Press | volume=22 | issue=4 | date=2005-01-18 | issn=1527-1951 | pages=9–15 | doi=10.1215/01642472-22-4_81-9 | url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/article/177068/summary |quote= "Although studies of the so-called urban informal economy have shown myriad secret liaisons with outsourced multinational production systems, the larger fact is that hundreds of millions of new urbanites must further subdivide the peripheral economic niches of personal service, casual labor, street vending, rag picking, begging, and crime. <br> This outcast proletariat—perhaps 1.5 billion people today, 2.5 billion by 2030—is the fastest-growing and most novel social class on the planet. By and large, the urban informal working class is not a labor reserve army in the nineteenth-century sense: a backlog of strikebreakers during booms; to be expelled during busts; then reabsorbed again in the next expansion. On the contrary, this is a mass of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to the global accumulation and the corporate matrix.<br> It is ontologically both similar and dissimilar to the historical agency described in the ''Communist Manifesto''. Like the traditional working classes, it has radical chains in the sense of having little vested interest in the reproduction of private property. But it is not a socialized collectivity of labor and it lacks significant power to disrupt or seize the means of production. It does possess, however, yet unmeasured powers of subverting urban order."| url-access=subscription }}</ref>