Introduction: Social Change, Political Discontent, and Urban Movements in Southern European Cities
Since the beginning of the economic crisis of 2008, social inequality in the European countries of the Mediterranean has grown significantly. In Italy, Greece, and Spain, the differences in the general distribution of income have increased, as well as the
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Introduction: Social Change, Political Discontent, and Urban Movements in Southern European Cities Laura Fregolent and Oriol Nel·lo
1.1 T he Evolution of the Mediterranean Metropolis: Inequality, Segregation, Expansion, and Diversity Since the beginning of the economic crisis of 2008, social inequality in the European countries of the Mediterranean has grown significantly. In Italy, Greece, and Spain, the differences in the general distribution of income have increased, as well as the population living below the poverty line and the distance between the most affluent and the most vulnerable social groups. The ratio between the percentage of income perceived by the most favored quintile of the population and the most disadvantaged, for example, has passed between 2007 and 2016 from 5.6 to 6.0 in Greece, from 5.2 to 5.9 in Italy, and from 5.2 to 6.5 in Spain. These are notable increases, especially in the Spanish case, much higher than the average of the OECD countries (OECD 2019). Thus, with the notable exception of Portugal, the Mediterranean countries are today among the most unequal in the European Union. In urban areas, this dynamic has had the effect of deteriorating the living conditions of an important part of the population and aggravating residential segregation (Tammaru et al. 2016). As is well known, the ability of each individual or household to choose a place of residence depends essentially on their disposable income and on real estate prices. In a context of raising inequality, the ability to choose social groups with higher resources, as is logical, increases with respect to the rest of the population. The evolution of the real estate market, from the financial bubble of the first years of the twenty-first century to the subsequent depression and the sinking L. Fregolent Department of Architecture and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia, Venezia, Italy e-mail: [email protected] O. Nel·lo (*) Geography Department, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Fregolent, O. Nel·lo (eds.), Social Movements and Public Policies in Southern European Cities, Urban and Landscape Perspectives 21, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52754-9_1
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of the possibilities of accessing credit (Burriel 2008; Fregolent and Torri 2018; Seixas et al. 2019; Cecchini et al. 2019), has favored this dynamic. Thus, in the Mediterranean metropolis, social groups with lower incomes are increasingly confined to those parts of urban areas where prices are relatively lower whereas the more affluent sectors concentrate in areas with better services and higher quality of life. In this way, residential segregation becomes a factor that contributes to reproduce and expand social inequalities (Oberti and Preteceille 2016). The rise in social inequality and urban segregation has coincided with another particularly striking dynamic: the mutation of the physical form of Mediterranean cities. Throughout history, these had bee
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