Professor of Urban Planning and Policy Development
Rutgers University

Global city-regions incorporate extremes of wealth and poverty. They are structured by labor markets with a tendency toward polarization and spatial structures, and with a tendency toward segregation of social groupings by class and ethnicity. Social and spatial structure reinforce each other, resulting in a heightening of social difference. These tendencies, as described in a number of recent studies, have become exacerbated by an increasingly integrated world economy. Globalization has stimulated growth in immigration, with a clustering of new migrants within global city-regions; it has simultaneously produced extreme concentrations of wealth that have likewise located within these regions. Nevertheless, such regions do vary substantially in the extent of intraregional inequality and spatial segregation. This variation points to the role of public policy in accounting for higher and lower levels of equity. This paper first describes the factors which produce social and spatial inequality in these global city-regions. It then briefly compares the social characteristics of the London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Randstat regions. They present a spectrum of degrees of inequality, with New York at one extreme and the Randstat at the other. Finally, it examines the differences in policies at the local, regional, and national level that may explain why some regions enjoy greater equity than others and recommends approaches to dealing with intraregional inequality.