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The terminner city (also calledthe hood) has been used, especially in the United States, as aeuphemism formajority-minoritylower-income residential districts that often refer to rundown neighborhoods, in adowntown orcity centre area.[1]Sociologists sometimes turn the euphemism into a formal designation by applying the term inner city to suchresidential areas, rather than to more geographically central commercial districts, often referred to by terms such as downtown, city centre, orcentral business district.
The term inner city first achieved consistent usage through the writings ofwhite liberal Protestants in the U.S. afterWorld War II, contrasting with the growing affluentsuburbs. According tourban historian Bench Ansfield, the term signified both a bounded geographic construct and a set of cultural pathologies inscribed onto urbanblack communities. Inner city originated as a term of containment. Its genesis was the product of an era when a largely white suburbanmainline Protestantism was negotiating its relationship to American cities. Liberal Protestants' missionary brand of urban renewal refocused attention away from the blight and structural obsolescence thought to be responsible for urban decay, and instead brought into focus the cultural pathologies they mapped onto black neighborhoods. The term inner city arose in thisracial liberal context, providing a rhetorical and ideological tool for articulating the role of the church in the nationwide project of urban renewal. Thus, even as it arose in contexts aiming to entice mainline Protestantism back into the cities it had fled, the term accrued its meaning by generating symbolic and geographic distance between white liberal churches and the black communities they sought to help.[2]
Urban renewal (also called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and urban redevelopment in theUnited States[3]) is a program of landredevelopment often used to addressurban decay in cities. Urban renewal is theclearing out of blighted areas in inner cities to create opportunities for higher class housing, businesses, and more.
In Canada in the 1970s the government introduced Neighbourhood Improvement Programs to deal with urban decay, especially in inner cities.[4] Also, some inner-city areas in various places have undergone the socioeconomic process ofgentrification, especially since the 1990s.[5]
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