City postmodern gentrification and the social production of fragmented space

Abstract

A new type of city has undoubtedly been taken shape in latest decades which, by convenience and lack of better wording, we call postmodern city. The compact city, of sealed social zoning and precise limits, whose centre shows a relative social homogeneity is torn in a group of distinct fragments where the effects of cohesion, continuity and urban readability give way to more complex and discontinuous territorial formations, which are socially and spatially enclaved. We will focus on theoretical formulations whose claims are that the gentrification tendency, as a specific process of socially selective recentring in the city’s central areas, has contributed to a social and residential fragmentation of contemporary urban space.