Global processes take concrete and localised forms in large cities around the world. In order to measure how much cities' crises have changed, the author reflects on the causes that generated them in the 1960s and on the shape that they then took, taking the US and France as illustrations. He takes public space as a kind of laboratory for current claims, protests and cultural insubordination. Forms of resistance in public space are currently boosted by the use of social media. Yet public space remains determinant in the disorder process; it is a political resource. The author argues that horizontal protest movements are not enough to change the neoliberal system which has met little opposition in the last fifty years. A transformation of institutions is needed as well. Cities offer an alternative path for progressive change to take place.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book illuminates how teenagers growing up in Belfast construct, produce, perceive and experience place. It focuses on 'location' and outlines the evolution and development of interface locations as segregated spaces. The book outlines a range of spatial practices that young people engage in to sustain, reclaim or reappropriate local spaces. It moves to the city centre of Belfast, further illuminating that young people's sense of place is not homogeneous but multi-dimensional as they demonstrate their spatial and embodied attachment to different landscapes. The book shows how social relationships are inherently spatial and how identities, while multiple and shifting, are influenced by place and impact on it. The interactional processes which give identity meaning are often embodied and spatially emplaced.

In this chapter, the authors describe in detail how the developers get together with lawyers and construction companies, with financiers, landowners and state officials. They also describe how to launch fantastic megaprojects that require masses of cement even as they spark protests from evicted homeowners and tenants. China absorbed a massive amount of labour by launching a huge urbanisation and infrastructure development programme, building whole new cities, more strongly connecting southern and northern markets, developing the interior so that it was much better linked to the coast. The Chinese camp effectively rescued capitalism from a threat of deep depression through massive urbanisation and investment in infrastructure. The crisis of over-accumulation of both capital and labour in the period after 1848 was solved by transformations in lifestyle as well as transformations in the built environment.

For musicians, the sense of touch defines the physical experience of art: lips applied to reed, fingers pushing down keys or strings. A pianist or violinist has constantly to explore resistance, either in the instrument or in the playing body. This effort says something also about 'being in touch' in everyday life. There are many kinds of vibratos, some slow and liquid which colour long notes, some which last no more than an instant. The musical analogy to 'user-friendly' appears in one method for teaching beginning cellists to play in tune. It consists of plastering little bands of tape across the fingerboard, so that kids know exactly where to put their fingers. Romanticism provided a misleading vocabulary for the divide; musical notations such as innerlich or geistlich suggest that the musician's soul will at a particularly expressive moment withdraw to an immaterial, higher realm.

In this chapter, the author looks at the long-term evolution of diverse models of territorial marginalisation and social exclusion and provides a general interpretative framework. She utilizes this theoretical background against the case of Naples in order to test its application in the context of southern European countries. The author begins with a historical look at the broad patterns of ethnically and class-defined spatial concentrations of poverty. She focuses on the historical timescale described by Enzo Mingione in Fragmented Societies. The author provides a description of different combinations of social polarisation and residential isolation in different urban contexts and of how they could affect social cohesion. She also focuses on the case of Naples, which both condenses aspects of other (south) European cities and is a rather peculiar case.

This chapter illustrates the social foundations of capitalism and puts forward the argument that there is a constant tension between dis-embedding and re-embedding mechanisms of economic activity into a less commodified society. It deals with the transformations that Western capitalist societies are undergoing, and how the double movement operates. The chapter highlights how the socio-economic and institutional complementarities that characterised postwar capitalism created relatively integrated socio-economic regimes, which have been inherently challenged since the 1970s. It addresses the relevant role played by the increased mobility of capital, labour and goods in this process, underlining their crucial destabilising impact on contemporary fragmented capitalism. Finally, the chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book reconstructs the debate about capitalism and its transformations within the urban tradition. It shows how social policies have undergone important reforms, partly undermining their sheltering capacities.

This chapter focuses on to the impact of place on teenagers' social relations within and between the localities in which they reside. It discusses the young people's perception and experience of sectarianism, including how, for some, identifying who is a Catholic and who is a Protestant remains a practice engaged in by some teenagers from both communities. The chapter describes more negative aspects of territoriality and young people's perceptions of the presence and persistence of sectarianism. The term 'sectarianism' was used repeatedly by young people writing essays to describe the 'bad aspects of growing up in Belfast'. Many young people recounted how they often brought more general cues into play in order to distinguish between Catholics and Protestants. During the research carried out in 2004-2005 many teenagers discussed how the areas where they lived were deprived of recreational facilities.

This chapter argues that the transformation of social structures and that of welfare-state regimes have to be considered together. It discusses the relevance of social class analysis in the face of the fragmentation produced by changing work relations, the growth of the service sector, the expansion of the middle classes, and changes in the gender and ethno-racial composition of the workforce. The chapter also discusses the effects of urban segregation first on the cohesion of social groups and the relations between them, secondly on urban inequalities. Particular attention is paid to issues of education inequalities linked to segregation. The chapter debates the transformation of welfare regimes, showing that the analysis of the present movement of neoliberalisation has to take into consideration the complexity of scales and social forces beyond the different levels of government.

Few would dispute that the spatial concentration of poverty reinforces constraints that keep people in deprivation. In this chapter, the authors explore the relationship between space and inequality at the level of the small area and discuss the extent to which spatial interventions can contribute to greater equity. They specify a typology of perspectives on spatial causality that can be distilled from the current urban studies literature; these are cultural, political-economic and institutional. The authors interrogate these three perspectives by analysing the two strikingly disparate cases of capitalist housing markets in the United States and public housing in Singapore. They use these extremely different examples as a natural experiment to illustrate the equity implications of two dramatically different approaches to dealing with the issue of spatial inequality.