Divided cities have existed for centuries. While the divisions are not two-part ('dual'), but more nearly four- or five-part ('quartered'), even such divisions are not in themselves new. While specific patterns of course vary from place to place and period to period, certain underlying divisions have long been common to cities in capitalist economies, and other are significantly different in the present phase of development, since perhaps 1970. These patterns (focusing on their spatial aspects) include the nature and extent of homelessness: 'advanced homelessness'; the growth in the size of certain quarters - notably, the gentrified city and the abandoned city - and the shrinking of others, notably the tenement city; the dynamic nature of the quarters, in which each grows only at the expense of the others: displacement as the mechanism of expansion; the importance which the identity of the quarter has in the lives of its residents: the intensity of turf allegiance; the walls created between quarters: tur barricades; the role of government, not only acceding to but promoting the quartering of the city: the subsuming of the public interest under the private; and the nature of the lines of political conflict and coalition-building: reoriented political cleavages.
