The city of the third world is a city of fragments…
Marcello Balbo, 1993
Inequality Matters
Socioeconomic inequality has increased in all regions of the world since the 1980s (Piketty, 2020). While inequality among countries is declining in relative terms, inequality within countries has increased in many high, middle and low-income countries (UN DESA, 2020). Highly unequal societies grow more slowly, are less successful at sustaining economic growth, and less effective at reducing poverty.
Why Urban?
More than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. The proportion of people living in cities has been rapidly expanding, and by 2050, the global population living in urban areas is expected to increase to 68% (UN DESA, 2018). This dramatic urban transformation has been accompanied by concerning patterns of inequality, fragmentation, and heightened socioeconomic and environmental vulnerability. While there are uneven levels of development between rural and urban areas, cities exhibit high levels of inequality characterized by extremes of wealth and poverty.
Economic, political, and social factors play crucial roles in shaping how inequality manifests in cities, and spatial patterns point to the outcomes of these factors. The location of services and infrastructure reveal that the resources necessary to support economic and human development are unevenly distributed. Factors like the built environment, city planning, and topography can shed light on settlement patterns and inequality within cities.
Visualizing Urban Inequality
Though inequality within cities occurs across the world, there is limited research on inequality throughout regions of the Global South. The VU Inequality research team sought to create a better understanding of urban inequality across the Global South by identifying spatial patterns and differences in urban form in areas like access to land, housing, and transportation. VU Inequality presents a series of comparative maps to visualize the ways that inequality manifests across cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.