2 - Urban Communities

Summary

‘I never go downtown, at least not alone. It's too dangerous, part of Kingston that scares me.’

The quotation above from Kwame Dawes’ story ‘Foreplay’ in A Place to Hide and Other Stories (2003) is spoken by a middle-class female character who lives in the uptown area of Mona. The socio-spatial division of Kingston referenced in her comment is a central concern in anthropologists and geographers’ studies of Kingston. Colin Clarke observes that the ‘dichotomy between uptown and downtown – associated as it is with class polarization, the material distinctions involving jobs and homes, and the creation of two commercial centres since independence – is inscribed in most aspects of social life’. His study demonstrates that the colour-class stratification in Kingston decreased in the post-independence period due to the migration of ‘whites and racial minorities’ out of Jamaica, and the movement of ‘socially mobile blacks’ into ‘middle class and elite positions’. However, it also shows that ‘class stratification remains steeply hierarchical’, and that ‘downtown Kingston has become even more markedly black since independence’. Clarke comments that in the 30 years following independence in 1962, due to the processes of urbanisation and ghetto formation, ‘uptown and downtown developed into even more polarized and excluding social spaces’.

Don Robotham explores what he describes as the ‘fracture of Uptown/ Downtown’, which he sees as ‘one of the main sources of social and political division in Kingston’. He argues that Jamaica's anti-colonial nationalist movement, culminating in the country's independence in 1962 and led by the emergent black and brown middle class, did not reduce the city's social and economic divisions. Robotham explains how this growing middle class first moved out of downtown Kingston and then created a new commercial centre uptown (the New Kingston business district and the American-style shopping plazas in Liguanea) which rendered movement between uptown and downtown unnecessary, leading to the development of two distinct social spheres within Kingston. Writing in 2005, David Howard describes how the city's uptown/downtown division is ‘[socially] and economically etched on the urban landscape’, creating ‘two seemingly separate cities’.

Clarke, Robotham and Howard present the uptown/downtown divide as an aspect of the city's lived reality, generated by social and economic factors. This chapter explores the role of representation in the shaping of urban space.