Consequently, a definition of the inner city
cannot be limited to location and age ofhous-
ingalone (seehousing studies). In the past
150 years or more, the inner city has experi-
enced a spoiled identity. The grotesque
nineteenth-century imagery of Dickensian
London, Engels’ poignant depictions of life in
industrial Manchester, the later portrayals of
Inner London by the Booths (Charles and
William) and of Inner Montreal by Herbert
Ames, and the photo-documentary essays of
Jacob Riis in New York all consolidated a highly
stigmatized image of both need and menace. In
many respects, the social sciences were born
into theproblemof the inner city, with William
Booth, the Pittsburgh Survey and the Chicago
School all concerned with the mapping of
various personal and social pathologies in
inner-city districts. Not surprisingly, the influ-
ential verdict of the Chicago School was that
the inner city was the natural habitat of indi-
vidual and social disorganization. Such a
judgement led easily to a view that demolition
and rebuilding would effect social as well as
urban renewal, and the nascent welfarestate
engaged in widespread clearance in older inner
districts, beginning in the 1930s.
In the aftermath ofdeindustrialization,
the inner city remains a site of social problems:
Margaret Thatcher’s infamous, deprecating
allusion to ‘those inner cities’ in 1987 (Rob-
son, 1988) revealed not only an abiding social
construct but also a social reality in many
declining industrial centres. Indeed, in the
same year as Mrs Thatcher’s declaration,
William Julius Wilson (1987) published his
celebrated text on concentrated and racialized
urbanpovertyin American inner cities. His
underclassthesis, drawing attention both to
macro-economic employment trends as well
as a culture of poverty in the inner city, estab-
lished an urban research agenda. In Western
Europe, an explosive literature emerged in the
1990s on multidimensionalsocial exclusion,
targeted on (but not limited to) inner-city dis-
tricts, some of it importing American under-
class language (Mingione, 1996; Madanipour,
Cars and Allen, 1998). Addressing social ex-
clusion and deprivation in the inner city and
priming urban regeneration have become sig-
nificant policy directions in many European
states.
However, the fusion ofplaceand identity
that sees only social problems in the inner city
is too rigid. For one thing, as the French ‘ban-
lieu’ riots of 2005 revealed so clearly, depriv-
ation and exclusion may be even sharper in
suburban sites (see suburb). Second, the
view of the inner city as a problem is an over-
simplified fabrication (Ley, 2000). Just as the
Chicago School displayed a patronizing sub-
urban perspective on the inner city, so middle-
class policy-makers and politicians through
the urban renewal era and later have sustained
the same stereotype. In her famous polemic
against urban renewal, Jane Jacobs (1992
[1961]) contrasted the detached view of the
urban bureaucrat with the view at ground level
of urban residents in medium-density older
neighbourhoods, extolling an insider’s per-
spective of local vitality, diversity and self-
help. Her 1961 message was prophetic and in
the next decade the beginnings ofgentrifica-
tionindicated an equally sympathetic view of
the inner city by young urban professionals.
Inpost-industrial citiessuch as London,
New York, Toronto or Sydney, gentrification
has led to a massive middle-class make-over
of many inner-city districts (Hamnett, 2003),
sometimes as an objective of regeneration pol-
icies (Cameron, 2003). Frequently, gentrifica-
tion has diffused outwards from the real estate
anchor of existing upper middle-class districts,
whose longevity over several generations also
reinforces a more accurate view of inner-city
diversity rather than homogeneity. dlSuggested reading
Ley (2000); Wilson (1987).innovation The introduction of a new phe-
nomenon or the phenomenon itself (which
may include concepts and objects, practices
and systems, variously combined in products,
and processes). Inhuman geographyan early
stream of work focused on the origin and
spread of innovations, particularly incul-
tural geography, and it was the study of
innovations that provided the mainspring for
Torsten Ha ̈gerstrand’s development of the for-
mal study of innovationdiffusioninspatial
science(itself an example of an intellectual
innovation that combined new concepts
such as themean information field, new
objects such as the computer that enabled
Ha ̈gerstrand to construct his model, and
new practices such as the algorithms that
powered his Monte Carlosimulations: see
Ha ̈gerstrand, 1967). A more recent stream of
work ineconomic geographyhas focused on
the research and development processes in
which commercial innovations are embedded,
on spillover effects (seeclusters) and on the
spatial variations in productivity that may
result from differential geographies of inn-
ovation (Feldmann, 2000). Taken together,Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_I Final Proof page 384 31.3.2009 7:05pmINNOVATION