Sociospatial segregation and consumption profile of Ankara in the context of globalization

Abstract

The ‘’Global City Hypothesis’’ argues that the economic restructuring of the new global economy produces highly uneven and polarized employment structure in urban society (1). Today, large global cities are marked by unusually high levels of income inequality. The significant increase in foreign investment and the arrival of the multi-national corporations along with the major accounting, advertising, and marketing firms and the fashion, design and entertainment industry caused changes both in spatial and demographic configuration and the internal structure of large metropolitan cities. The consequence of the economic restructuring is ‘class polarization’ characterized by a number of high income professionals and managerial jobs, and a vast population of low income causal, informal and temporary forms at the bottom. The effects of liberalization policies resulted in unprecedented fragmentation and polarization within the ‘middle class’ with the worsening public sector functionaries as some employees of the multinational firms had become wealthier (Kandiyoti, 2002, 5). This new wealth has engendered new social groups characterized as ‘young professionals’ or ‘new job elite’ with an increasingly educated cohorts of leading business with affluent lifestyles and consumption patterns similar to their global counterparts. Though such changes and processes occur to some extent in most developed world cities, the approach by the global city theorists seems to be accepted as the valid and elucidative pattern in general, and imposes a kind of generalization that in reality there are more counter evidences even in leading world cities and other metropolitan areas of the world which reveal different pattern (Maloutas, 2007, 734).