Urban Inequalities offers a masterful and critical introduction to key issues and processes shaping contemporary cities, drawing on a whole host of economic, social, spatial, legal, environmental, and planning and design perspectives. In addition to the continuing power of ‘older’ bases of urban inequality – racial and cultural discrimination, gender inequity, legal exclusions, informality and shelter deprivation – it examines significant emergent patterns, including the increasing polarization and concentrations of wealth at the top of urban economies.

Moving across diverse urban settings, the book considers how urban inequality is organized and lived not only in terms of income, wealth or property, but also in consumption inequalities, uneven access to urban goods and legal protections, spatial segregation and disparities, environmental risks and injustices, and patterns of health, safety and vulnerability. The text concludes by exploring design and planning interventions to address forms of inequality in a range of urban contexts.

Blending theoretical acumen with engaging empirical illustrations, Urban Inequalities will be necessary reading for students and scholars across the social sciences studying this hugely consequential phenomenon in an increasingly urbanized world.

Fran Tonkiss is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science