Capitalist urbanization affects your life chances: Exorcising the ghosts of 'neighbourhood effects'

In this chapter Tom Slater explores an alternative narrative for the neighbourhood effects thesis: your life chances affect where you live, and not the other way around. The role that capitalist processes have played in urbanisation and the formation of our cities is examined, and in particular the role of private property rights as a means to exclude low income individuals from central locations is explored. Using Harvey's Social Justice and the City as a lynch pin, neighbourhood effects become an extension of neo-classical theory promoting private property rights, land rent and exclusion of the poorest groups in society from the places that they need to be the most. The rise and decline of neighbourhoods is inevitable with the mobility of capital identifying and flowing to the greatest returns and leaving neighbourhoods when maintenance becomes costly. Neighbourhood depreciation and disinvestment then closely follow behind. The Chapter concludes by pin-pointing some of the flaws in the current neighbourhood effects literature that occur when the underlying assumptions are not challenged. As a consequence, the literature often appears to blame the most vulnerable in society for their outcomes leading to solutions that require the disadvantaged to learn from the advantaged suggesting that information and education are the only barriers between the groups. The chapter concludes by calling for researchers in the neighbourhood effects literature to pay far more attention to the structural issues that prevent individuals from accessing services or employment, citing the many real and substantial barriers that some individuals have to overcome to enter the labour market.