Metropolitan studies - Essay Example

Mass production of manufacture requires that not only machines are concentrated in specific locations but also the labor force. In turn, the creation of the proletariat led to the creation of the middle class in the cities. Soon the services sector emerged as a market, for services were created due to the concentration of labor. Urban centers are actually centers of concentration of labor residents and the middle class. It is both a system for rule and a result of the division of labor, natural flow of development, and a phenomenon brought about by technological factors.

A city can be created through myths and violence but basically it is “an agglomeration of productive forces built by labor employed within the temporal process of circulation of capital” (Harvey 214-228, 229). For the first case, we can cite the work by W.E.B. Dubois of 1899. Du Bois reported that during the year American Blacks had been segregated, unlike other social groups of Philadelphia, in that “they do not form an integral part of the larger social group” (117). According to Du Bois, unlike other social groups, the segregation of the American Blacks was “conspicuous, more patent to the eye, and so intertwined with a long historic evolution, with peculiarly pressing problems of poverty, ignorance, crime and labor, that the Negro problem far surpasses in scientific interest and social gravity most of the other race or class questions” (118).

Du Bois hinted that the growth of the Black American slum district of the Philadelphia is somehow linked with the development of the working class. He noted that many alleys are “haunts of noted criminals, male and female, of gamblers, and prostitutes, and at the same time of many poverty-stricken people, decent but not energetic” (122). Du Bois also noted an “increased restriction in the employments open to the Negro men since 1880 or even