Title:	The Middle Classes and the City
Authors:	Marie-Hélène Bacqué Gary Bridge Michaela Benson Tim Butler Eric Charmes Emma Jackson Lydie Launay Stéphanie Vermeersch
Keywords:	Middle class France Paris
Issue Date:	2015
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	The impact of the middle classes on the city has been a focus of considerable academic and political attention, most recently concerning the spread of gentrification through cities across the world. Yet the middle classes are increasingly occupying a diverse range of neighbourhoods across the urban system. Through a comparison of such neighbourhoods in Paris and London, this book seeks to explore the dynamics of these forms of territorialisation and the consequences for understanding the sociology, politics and geography of the contemporary city.In France and Britain, the question of the “middle classes”, their definition and their social role is currently a significant topic in both the social scientific and the political domain. A number of publications, news articles, essays and research articles (Burrows and Gane, 2006; Butler and Lees, 2006; Chauvel, 2006; Donzelot, 2004; Lojkine, 2005; Savage et al., 2005) have recently analysed their decline and downward social mobility, their secessionist logic (into exclusive neighbourhoods, opting out of public services) or their problems in grappling with the financial crisis. Debates around the nature and composition of the middle class have continued since the Industrial Revolution but most concentrated discussions have concerned the expansion of the middle classes since World War II. These discussions increasingly accorded a powerful role to the middle classes in terms of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production (Baudelot et al., 1974; Lipietz, 1996) – in the UK and the US, the group was discussed as the professional-managerial class (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 1979), the new class (Gouldner, 1979) and the service class (Goldthorpe, 1980, 1982). More recent commentary has involved a discussion about the fragmentation of the middle class into the middle classes (Butler and Savage, 1995), a term “used to define social groups whose income can vary by a factor of four” (Bidou, 2004; Chauvel, 2006; Dagnaud, 1981). They are increasingly detached from upper-class lifestyles and aspirations and, in certain fractions, there is increasing emphasis on the relations with working-class trajectories which themselves are no longer part of a solidaristic bloc (Ehenreich, 1989). It is now increasingly evident that these different trajectories and experiences of the middle classes and their relationship to other classes are being registered in the different settlement patterns of the middle classes in the city (Butler, 1997; Préteceille, 2007; Webber, 2007). For instance, the current urban research literature tends to depict the middle classes as striving to safeguard the urban and educational enclaves they have managed to carve out for themselves (Bridge, 2006; Butler and Robson, 2003; Reay and Ball, 1998).
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53778
ISBN:	978-1-137-33260-8
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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