Professor Rowland Atkinson - How wealth produces urban inequality: ‘Dark’ cities, bright capital flows, and social harm

Date: 28 October 2026
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker:  Professor Rowland Atkinson
Talk Title: “How wealth produces urban inequality: ‘Dark’ cities, bright capital flows, and social harm"
Location: Ramsden room, St Catharine's College

Talk Overview
In this presentation I want to consider how the presence of the rich might, in diverse ways, present damaging effects. Going further, can we locate mechanisms that help us to explain the ways in which the rich may have the combined effect of eroding wealth and wellbeing in the wider city? Four regressive mechanisms of wealth expansion and wider social contagion effects are identified. These highlight processes of wealth hoarding; the control of political, legal and corporate institutions; the creation of socially insulating built environments, and the recruitment of political priorities and networks of agents to the priorities of the wealthy. To understand these mechanisms we need to consider the distinctive milieu of urban life in dark cities. These are cities characterised by the ‘bright light’ of a wealth-finance economy, and its refraction through an urban political economy devoted to capital flows and the presence of the rich. Such an urban economy brings benefits to a narrow set of actors and asset holders, while degrading or suspending life in the wider ‘social’ city. These four mechanisms (of extraction; oligarchic formation; money power and social-physical insulation) help us to conceptualise the nature and possible responses to the challenge of the urban rich and allied institutions. 
 

Speaker Overview
Rowland Atkinson is Chair in Inclusive Societies at the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on the urban-spatial consequences of social divisions, housing problems and social harm in city settings. These interests have led to a series of research projects linked to questions of household displacement from gentrification, social exclusion and housing policy interventions, and the rise of gated communities. How most recent work has examined the impact of wealth and the wealthy on urban life. He is the author of Alpha City: How London was captured by the super-rich (Verso).