New class structure, a territorial view

Abstract

The territorial distribution of different socio-economic groups allows us to accurately characterize the class structure of the 21st century in Spain. Socio-spatial segregation occurs in parallel with the development of capitalist society and was one of the first evidences that a class society was emerging. Although forgotten in some disciplines, new theoretical proposals recover the importance of the socio-spatial distribution not only to descriptive purposes, but also to understand and analyze societies of advanced capitalism. Based on a constructivist and multifactorial notion of social classes, the separation and distribution of the different groups in the urban territory is used to analyze in detail the main factors of the contemporary class articulation. From a case study, the main components of the socio-spatial hierarchy in the large Spanish metropolis are identified. The result is an inverted trident joint. At the top are homogeneous upper classes, while the other positions are fragmented according to three related, but not equivalent, axes: the socioeconomic inequalities, the differences in between insiders and outsiders (mainly characterized by nationality) and the inequalities between rural / urban populations. As a proposal for future research, a link is stablish between the configuration of groups "in itself" and the discursive construction of political groups "for itself" –taken the left / right axe as example-.