Spatial Mismatch

Definition

The spatial mismatch is William Julius Wilson's location-theory explanation for the concentrated urban poverty of the postindustrial city: new technologies and cheap land accelerate the suburbanization of industry and jobs, leaving African Americans in particular "anchored" in the deindustrialized inner city, "socially trapped and isolated from mainstream society in a process others have called 'hyperghettoization'" — with the shift to knowledge-intensive industries adding "a related educational and skills mismatch that further marginalizes and isolates the underclass" (Soja 2000, pp. 270–271). Soja presents it as one of three "intrinsic causality" explanations of the surge in inequality (alongside Harvey's normal workings of the urban system and the conservative entrepreneurialism-plus-immigration account), and credits Wilson — "an African American sociologist who… spent most of his academic career at that wellspring of urban studies, the University of Chicago" — with re-spatializing urban sociology when the discipline had abandoned space.

Soja's critical application is Los Angeles-specific: the eastern spatial-mismatch model has "some resonance" but "the metropolitan geography of jobs and housing has always been more complex and polynucleated than in eastern cities" — the westward shift of black Los Angeles brought it closer to the LAX and Santa Monica/Culver City job concentrations, so "simple models of Inner versus Outer City employment patterns do not work as well in Los Angeles as they might do in Chicago" (p. 255). What Los Angeles adds: the jobs–housing imbalance as the Exopolis's revealing mismatch (the downtown archipelago's extremes, Lennox's concentrated worst-of-both, the Toy Town sprinklers), the Latinoized working poor against Wilson's welfare-dependent underclass, and the off-the-edge cities (Moreno Valley, Palmdale) where the mismatch is not absence of jobs but the "costs involved in maintaining established income levels" — two-hour commutes as "a class struggle" (Nazario, quoted pp. 261–262).

Key Thinkers

• William Julius Wilson (referenced, not paged — see log) — The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), When Work Disappears (1996): the spatial mismatch, the underclass and its co-optation problems, "When Work Disappears."
• John Kain (implicit lineage; referenced in the literature, not paged — see log) — the original spatial-mismatch hypothesis.
• Edward W. Soja — the concept's Southern Californian complication: polynucleation, the working poor, the jobs–housing imbalance, the off-the-edge implosions.
• William Julius Wilson's critics (referenced, not paged — see log) — Charles Murray's culture-of-poverty co-optation; Soja's caution about "spin-doctored" misuse.
• Sonia Nazario (referenced, not paged — see log) — the Antelope Valley reportage: "Class Struggle Unfolds in Antelope Valley Tracts."

Related Concepts

• metropolarities — the inequality system the mismatch explains in part.
• fractal-city — the discourse the concept anchors.
• exopolis — the jobs–housing imbalance as the mismatch's exopolitan form.
• spatial-justice — the Bus Riders Union's litigated response ("the fight against racism, class oppression, sexism, and the oppression of immigrants," p. 257).
• postmetropolis — the fourth discourse's causal heart.
• housing — the affordability pole of the mismatch.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — Wilson's mismatch and the spatial-stranding thesis (pp. 270–272); the Los Angeles complications — the westward ghetto shift, the working poor, the Lennox/Pomona/Moreno Valley/Palmdale cases (pp. 254–263, 278); the commuting pathology statistics (pp. 261–263).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Soja's LA complication (the ghetto's westward shift toward jobs; the polynucleated geography defeating the simple model) — has the spatial-mismatch literature absorbed the polycentric correction, or does the east-coast mononuclear model still structure policy?
• The mismatch has a time dimension (the two-hour commute, the dawn van pool, the twelve-hour daycare day) — is the concept temporal as much as spatial, and should it be paired with the wiki's time-geography register?
• What is the mismatch's interior: Soja notes in Lennox "not so much a mismatch between jobs and housing but an immiserating concentration of the worst of both" (p. 258) — does the concept need a register for the concentrated worst-case, and what does it imply for the domestic interior of the stranded commuter?