Social scientists have conceptualised urban divisions in a variety of ways. Most of these notions have been taken up in common perceptions and policy-making as rallying themes, used to mobilise public institutions and urban inhabitants (Le Goff, 2006). This is why they are polysemous and ambiguous. The notions of urban segregation and its ultimate form, the ghetto, are not new, but new concepts and approaches appeared in the 1980s. Many new qualifiers have been coined, from the ‘dual’ city (Mollenkopf and Castells, 1991) to the ‘quartered’ city (Marcuse, 1993), via the ‘shattered’1 city (Haumont and Lévy, 1998) and, of course, the ‘divided’ city (Fainstain et al., 1992; Fourcault, 1996; Low, 1996). Works have tackled the issues of ‘division’, ‘fragmentation’, ‘polarisation’, ‘break-up’ or ‘disaggregation’. This range of terms shows how difficult it is to refer to urban complexity (Navez-Bouchanine, 2002, 31). The problem is that these concepts refer as much to descriptive as to interpretive categories. They describe a spatial repartitioning of social groups within urban space, but they are also interpretive when they are used to assume that undesired social effects could be fought by a reverse policy (Rémy, 2002). This is why I will first critically review studies of ‘divided cities’, before examining the three main concepts used to designate urban divisions: segregation, polarisation and fragmentation.
1.1.1 Divided cities
Skopje is usually regarded as divided upon ethnic and religious grounds. This division, mirrored at the state level, leaves its mark on urban space. It is also said to induce social segregation: minorities often claim that they are poorly integrated in the state due to their ethnic status. Based on these aspects, the Macedonian capital seems to fit in the
1 The notion of ‘shattered’ city is a translation from the French ‘ville éclatée’. The authors using this term also refer to the larger process of ‘éclatement’ which refers to a ‘break-up’ of urban space. Given that I did not find any official translation of these notions in English, I acknowledge that my translation may be considered not totally exact, but I tried to stay as close as possible to the theoretical meaning of ‘ville
category of an ethno-nationally divided city – a specific type of urban divisions which I examine here.
The category of the divided city, used by social scientists to refer to cities such as Belfast or Nicosia, is quite recent. In this section, I offer a review of literature on divided cities. Engaging with this literature, I offer further conceptual reflection on the notion of the divided city. The criteria upon which a city is seen as ‘ethno-nationally divided’ are quite precise and not all divided cities fall into this category. I will first attempt to define the divided city, before focusing in particular on the ethno-nationally divided city and analysing its place in the larger society.
Studies of divided cities lack a clear definition of the concept they use to analyse their case-studies. As argued by Anderson (2008:6), the notion of divided city is not ‘a ready-made category with an established general literature’. Most works focus on one case-study, and only a few draw comparisons between different cities and different urban conflicts (Bollens, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2006; Kliot and Mansfeld, 1999; Anderson, 2008; Murtagh et al., 2008). To Anderson (2006), each case is seen as unique and the category lacks a research literature examining common causal processes and features. The author distinguishes phenomena of divisions in ‘undivided’ cities from ethno-nationally divided cities. Urban studies generally focus on ‘normal’, more or less peaceful cities, marked by social or ethnic segregation, such as New York or Istanbul. Yet, these cities may be considered as divided, but not by nationalism. This is what makes them different from the ‘truly’ divided cities that are ethno-nationally divided cities. The latter are indeed ‘both victims and protagonists, or part and parcel of longstanding and pervasive conflicts, and more specifically national territorial ones’ (Anderson, 2008:7).
This definition marks a rupture with another, more inclusive, understanding of the concept of divided city, as a ‘culmination form of social, economic and political segregation of cities’ (Kliot and Mansfeld, 1999:167). For example, in both American black ghettos and Belfast’s gated neighbourhoods, the principle of exclusion guides segregation between ethnic communities. To refine this definition, the authors added the concept of partition which implies control over territory and resources. Referring to state sovereignty, a partition is defined as ‘a division into territorial units having separate political status’. The partition, as a social construct, is ‘the attempt by an
individual or group to affect, influence or control people, phenomena and relationship by delimiting and asserting control over geographical area’ (Sack, 1986:19). The divided city addresses the issue of partition as an outcome of contest and conflict on control of territory and resources within the context of segregation (Kliot and Mansfeld, 1999). Whereas spatial separations between groups – based on ethnic, linguistic, religious and/or social and economic differences – are typical of all societies, divided cities are an ultimate form of segregation, in which all the forms of urban livelihood are segregated and where the issue of territory is central. They are, to Kliot and Mansfeld (1999:196), ‘the unfortunate final form of group conflict’.
This analysis of the divided city has the merit of linking different elements and emphasising the issue of group control at the urban level. However, this definition only distinguishes divided cities by a matter of degree: New York is as much a divided city as Belfast is. The reference to a ‘partition’ as a political and institutional process of physical divisions also better fits the cases of cities in which divisions are physically materialised by concrete internal borders which oppose two different institutional, economic and social systems that share the same space. The term ‘partitioned city’ therefore designates cities such as Berlin or Nicosia, and not New York or Chicago.
Hepburn (2004:2) distinguishes ‘a smaller number of cases, [where] animosity has been sharpened by the additional factor that neither group will recognise the political and/or cultural sovereignty of the other.’ He uses the notion of ‘contested city’ to refer to an urban centre ‘in which two or more ethnically-conscious groups – divided by religion, language and/or culture and perceived history – co-exist in a situation where neither group is willing to concede supremacy to the other.’ Anderson (2008) further refines this understanding, underlining that New York or Chicago may be ethnically divided, but they are not nationally divided. They may host strong ethnic divisions, but these divisions are not associated with any wider national contestation over the state. Here enters the notion of ‘contested state’, a state whose territorial sovereignty is contested. Divided cities are a place of nationalist conflicts over statehood. Gaffikin and Morrissey (2011:7) also distinguish two types of divided city:
the first where the conflict is centred on cleavages of class, race, religious affiliation and ethnicity; and the second, where these fractures and frissons and the state’s role in addressing related issues of pluralism and equity, are interpenetrated with durable disputes about sovereignty and the legitimacy of the state itself.
To Anderson (2008:6), the ‘ethno-nationally divided’ city combines these issues of ‘ethnically divided’ and that of ‘state-divided’ cities by ‘confront[ing] the added problems and causations of ethno-national division over state’. Compared with multicultural cities in which national sovereignty is not a subject of contention, ‘territory and space in “divided cities” are subject to a politics of resistance and dominance’ in which ‘the control of space reproduces the ongoing struggle over the legitimacy of the state’ – a condition Skopje meets (Nagle, 2009a:133). Bollens (2002:3) further defines the divided city as one in which ‘ethnic identity and nationalism combine to create pressures for group rights, autonomy or territorial separation’. Anderson (2008) draws a parallel between the location in space of divided cities and their on-going process of ethno-national conflict. The situation of the city in a wider ethnic interface area might account for its divisions. Yet, while there are many cases of ‘ethnically divided cities’ that are located in areas of ethnic interaction, the combination of such divisions with the national factor is not that frequent.
Anderson (2008) excludes the case of Berlin, which is not ethnically divided, and apartheid cities of South-Africa, in which state sovereignty was not contested. He argues that ethno-nationally divided cities all have in common their past belonging to an empire. Also, all were located at the periphery of empires. Wilson and Donnan (1998:10) suggest that ‘the relationships of power and identity at borders and between the borders and their respective states are problematic precisely because the state cannot always control the political structures which it establishes at its extremities’. Anderson goes further by pointing out the causal interaction between imperialism and nationalism in the failure of state- and nation-building processes, at the edge and during the endgames of empires. He argues that empires created political entities out of pre- existing ethnic difference, and that politicised and hierarchised ethnicities have later tended to become the basis for competing nationalisms. This argument can be applied to the Balkan case, where ‘divided cities’ appear as the historical by-product of the application of the nation-state principle in the region. Different and overlapping claims on territory inevitably led to clashes between ethnic groups, a process analysed in the Balkans by Cole (1981:127-128) who analyses the problem of ‘ethnic shatter zones’ where no ‘state boundaries could be drawn without leaving substantial numbers of one’s own people on the far side and including equally substantial numbers of the neighbouring state’s people on the near side.’ The break-up of Yugoslavia was the last stage of this transition, with Macedonia being a prime example of this process.
Anderson’s analysis – which he justifies by stressing the role played by cities in nation – enables a link to be made between the literature on ethnicity and nationalism and that on urban space and state-building. The place of divided cities may actually be central to wider societal processes. The ‘ethno-nationally divided city’ may become a focal point for unresolved nationalistic ethnic conflict. Rather than being the primary cause for intergroup conflict, it may also be a platform of expression of conflicting sovereignty claims and tensions between groups. In the first case, urban space is seen as a battleground between ‘homeland’ ethnic groups, each proclaiming the city as its own (Bollens, 1998). The centrality and symbolism of the city, as well as the close juxtaposition of antagonistic groups in the same space, exacerbate intergroup tensions and the probability for violent actions. As a flashpoint, the city worsens ethnic conflict at the national level.
The divided city may be a mirror to larger societal patterns. The level of urban divisions may be an indicator of the inequity of power relations within the whole society. In Nicosia, Jerusalem, Derry or Belfast, internal divisions reflect larger national pattern: Turkish/Greek Cypriot, Palestinian/ Jewish, and nationalist Irish Catholic/unionist Protestants divisions. Bollens (2006:75) refers to the notion of ‘conduits’ to characterize the divided city as reflecting ‘larger societal patterns’ – the conduit running ‘from society at-large to the city’. Cities are here ‘channels between larger governing ideologies and on-the-ground lived experience (Bollens, 2006:75). In some cases, as in Belfast or Mostar, local urban borders ‘act as proxies in the political fight over disputed state’ (Anderson, 2008:19). However, this approach restricts the city’s role to being merely a ‘victim’ of the state divisions (Anderson, 2008). To Bollens (2006), cities are not simple reflectors of larger societal dynamics, but have causal influences and exert independent effects running in the other direction – from the city to the larger society. It is more relevant to see them as ‘catalysts’ or ‘prisms’ (Bollens, 1998a, 1998b and 2002).
Cities have their own spatial, political and social dynamics, certainly influenced by extra-urban forces, but never fully controlled by them. This suggests that a city’s capacity to address issues of group identity can run at different speeds than a society’s at-large. (Bollens, 2006:75)
The physical and political structure of the city (social interactions, economic interdependence and intergroup proximity) modifies the relationship between the broader causes of community strife and the forms and levels it takes on the ground. This
relationship can anticipate or stimulate broader societal progress. When there is a disjunction between urban and societal trajectories, it can also impede national attempts to reconcile groups (Bollens, 2006). Depending on the perspective, urban space may be a key protagonist in the way divisions express themselves and evolve.
While the above studies provide valuable information regarding urban divisions, caution must be advised before applying their results to the case of Skopje. While urban divisions may increase or decrease over time, depending on a variety of factors, using a static concept to describe them may undermine a dynamic understanding of these phenomena. Brand and Fregonese (2013), identifying a lack of studies on the early and late stages of division, emphasise the need to study polarisation and the attempts of de- polarisation, rather than polarised situations. Moreover, as underlined by Allegra et al. (2012:563), a static approach may often rely on ‘single-factor explanations’ of urban divisions: a number of studies mainly focus on ethnicity and religion as the main divisive element in urban space – along with nationalism in the case of the ethno- nationally divided city. Yet, this approach is problematic since it diminishes the importance of other factors and implies to perceive divided groups as homogeneous, stable and incompatible, as are the perceived identities on which they are based. Even when hegemonic practices are critically analysed, as in Sorkin (2005), or urban resistance to hegemonic powers studied, as in Yacobi’s (2007; 2009) work on Lod, the reality of collective identities is not much discussed, nor are alternatives to ethno- national cleavages examined. Analysing everyday social relations which challenge both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms in the ‘mixed town’ of Jaffa, Monterescu (2007:174) underlines that such processes have largely gone unnoticed in studies of Israel/Palestine, ‘a field dominated by “methodological nationalism” and [with a] tendency to equate the nation-state with society’. Sa’ar (2007) similarly writes that critical research may have examined situations of domination and resistance in ‘mixed towns’, but the issue of cooperation across ethnic and class lines has been far less studied. Finally, the concept of divided city, and in particular that of ethno-nationally divided city, leads researchers to exclusively study cities where divisions are already materialised in space, through a wall or a peaceline, and therefore miss cities where divisions are not so visible or materially symbolised – this being in particular the case of Skopje. In order to understand the processes at work in the Macedonian capital, I turn to
critical urban theory, which examines urban divisions as dynamic, complex and multidimensional processes, and which I will present here.
1.1.2 Urban division: which terms for which reality?
Referring to segregation is not neutral and the ideas associated with the term are manifold (Roncayolo, 1994). To Nightingale (2012), segregation is not a mechanical, but a complex, ‘messy’ process. The term was first forged to explain phenomena of ethnic neighbourhoods, in a wider interpretation of – what was then understood as – racial or biological differentiations. It carries strong negative connotations. Le Goff (2006) shows its violent dimension, by reminding us of the Latin etymology of the word
grex, gregis, ‘herd’: segregatio designates the ‘act of ostracizing from the herd’. This
etymology is a source of ambiguity for two main reasons (Brun, 1994). First, segregation refers to a process of pushing something or someone outside of a group. This has two dimensions: a static dimension, purely descriptive and empirical – as in the observation of a spatial separation of different categories of people – and a dynamic dimension which explains the processes of segregation, and whose diachronic perspective may appear useful for urban research (Le Goff, 2006). Brun (1994) stresses the common shift from an analytical meaning of segregation to a value judgment. The idea of a spatial separation between groups is taken as an indicator – and a cause – of the different aspects of injustice undergone by disadvantaged people. Second, this etymology implies an intentional practice. It opposes an agent who is responsible for segregation to one who is subject to it (Brun, 1994). This second aspect is more problematic. ‘Segregation’ here implies a deliberate practice that aims at relegating a part of a wider population outside of the areas occupied by other parts of this population. We get here on to the notions of differentiation, separation and discrimination – and their ultimate urban concretization, the ghetto. The notions of segregation and ghetto are often alternatively employed to designate ultimate forms of separation between social groups (Le Goff, 2006). I will now show that the ghetto is more than an extreme form of segregation.
The ghetto designates a part of the city where members of a minority group live. It comes from the Italian ghèto, ‘slag’ or ‘waste’, and was first used in the 16th century Venetian Republic to refer to an area of the city, Cannaregio, where Jews were compelled to live by force of law, and where slag was stored. The notion then came to
designate any Jewish quarters in European cities, which were often the outgrowths of the bounded area instituted by the surrounding authorities. The notion took a negative connotation in the following centuries, implying social segregation and poor conditions of life in a deteriorated urban environment. Traditional Jewish ghettos, however, were not always places of poverty: in Venice, for instance, it was home to an affluent Jewish population.
Wacquant (2006) reminds us of the universality of the ghetto, by listing the terms used in different languages to designate places stigmatised by a society and ranked lowest in the urban hierarchy. Peach (1996:379) defines the term in a static way, as ‘an end in itself’. There is a ghetto when, first, the whole population of an area is composed by one specific group, and, second, when most of its members are settled in such areas (Peach, 1983, cf. Le Goff, 2006). Wacquant (2006) opts for a more dynamic definition, which I favour, emphasising the processual dimension of the ghetto, an area characterised by a worsening of social problems. In a more recent article (2012), he argues that the ghetto, as a sociological concept, is not merely synonymous with poverty, segregation and ethnic gathering. It is also part of a functional and structural logic which seeks to minimise contacts with a stigmatised community, while maximising its material profits. What results are both a place of closure and control, and a space of protection and integration.
Wacquant (2006:281) also underlines that the notions of ‘discrimination and segregation should not be confused with ghettoisation’. He argues that these different forms of domination may be combined or may support each other, but they are distinct and irreducible to one another. While it is possible to speak about a ‘ghetto’ in the case of Afro-American areas in American cities such as Chicago, the term is not appropriate to designate suburban neighbourhoods in Europe. According to him, four elements characterize the ghetto: stigmata, constraint, spatial confinement and institutional