Humanities desk
< August 14	<< Jul \| August \| Sep >>	August 16 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 15[edit]

Inner city[edit]

As already noted at Talk:Inner city, the "Etymology" section of Inner city is at drastic odds with the pictures. The section talks about inner cities as slums for poor people, yet each one of the pictures shows the inner city as a wealthy prosperous area. Is this because the section seems to be written from a US perspective, yet all of the pictures are from Europe (the UK, Finland and Estonia, respectively)? Should the section "Etymology" be rewritten or removed? JIP | Talk 17:55, 15 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

In the US calling the high crime part the inner city or vice versa has a grain of truth but it's clearly perpetuated by car drivers who live really far from downtown and think their deserted suburbs are part of the city. Geometrically it's pretty inaccurate. Unless the city's small the innermost part is usually a downtown that's lower crime than the bad neighborhoods, there might even be office skyscrapers, like New York, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles(which are the locations of some of USA's highest crime neighborhoods). If the city is not that big sometimes what the locals call their worst neighborhood or their "inner city" or "ghetto" is not even that rundown looking or different from the good part, it's like they can't tell the difference between a place with some poor people and/or minorities and one that's actually iffy or worse. Other cities are high crime even if they are small and the center of the (small) metro area. Like Flint, Michigan I think. Not sure. Their drinking water was poisoned with lead recently. Sometimes the bad neighborhoods are not even in an inner ring, i.e. Chicago. Chicago's rich all the way from the suburban north to the downtown and gets poorer as you go counterclockwise. The bad part of the city is the south half, I think everywhere in the Loop (downtown) is fine (and full of tall skyscrapers). Also places get gentrified, crime everywhere was much worse in the 1970s to early 90s, unhip places with no attractions leftover from before the 1970s crime boom get gentrified slower than others. In Los Angeles the part south of downtown is the worst (combat medics treat gunshot wounds there before they go to Iraq), East of downtown (but not too east) is also crimey. But downtown is skyscrapers. In Detroit everything is bad except downtown and the suburbs. It's like the city equivalent of a failed state. A long time ago it announced that it will no longer provide streetlights, police, ambulances and firefighting to the emptiest parts because the government was bankrupt or nearly so, too many people fled and the rest are poor. There's a small part that's getting better instead of worse by newcomers from the Middle East, they elected a politician who "gets a calming feeling when she thinks of the tragedy of the Holocaust". In New York City "inner city" is particularly geometrically inaccurate, the innermost square mile or two is supertall skyscrapers and has billionaires, everything north/northeast for a few miles is filthy rich and the gangy areas are mostly in Brooklyn or the Bronx which aren't very inner and extend over 10 miles away. If you know the gangsta rapper 50 Cent (I think he was the most popular rapper around 2005) he was once convicted of having heroin and 0.3 kilos of crack cocaine to sell but this part of the "inner city" is 11-12 miles from the center of New York City, which is further than most of the city's safe neighborhoods. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:53, 15 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And sometimes a railroad line is a town's most prominent division and any slight drawback of one side would make the other slightly poorer which would add another slight drawback and so on till all the unskilled workers lived on one side and those who could afford on the other. Sometimes the east to northeast part is poor cause slaughterhouse stink or smokestacks etc. blew downhill. If the river was polluted or more so downstream then the poor might live there. If part of the city is in shadow more often the poor might live there. The poor in New Orleans live where it might flood which is everything except the innermost part. Even in New York City it seems like most of the blocks that might flood are poor and distant, with only a small area near the center being so chic that the rich will live in a flood zone. Saint Louis, Missouri is another city with a tons of crime in the outer city and the center is for tourists and office tower workers from the suburbs. Baltimore often competes with St. Louis for highest murder rate of a big city and the inner part is fine. Atlanta has a lot of crime too and the center is corporate skyscrapers up to 1,000 feet tall. In Washington, DC the crime is in the outer east half and thousands of acres in the middle is full of tourists and government buildings. But if you come in on a bus from Baltimore/Philly/New York/Boston it leaves the motorway, traverses miles of run-down surface streets and enters the bad architecture/poor end of the building while the surroundings still look poor. You debus and walk to the rich/rail half of the massive building as that's the way to the "inner city". The further you walk the nicer it gets (i.e. glass office towers in the windows) till you pass a massive neoclassical cavern then the train station's traffic circle with an unobstructed view of USA's Capitol a mile down the boulevard, it's pretty cool. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:23, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Is your locality suffering from a temporary paragraph-break shortage, SMW? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.197.27.112 (talk) 11:53, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that the etymology section is right but it's the images that are wrong. Certainly in the UK "inner city" is understood to be a deprived residential and industrial area, rather than a prosperous central business district. I will have a bash at finding some down-at-heel photos tonight. Alansplodge (talk) 11:51, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Of the interwiki links, at least sv:Innerstad and de:Kernstadt seem to make no mention of any deprived area, on the contrary, the Swedish article seems to agree with the images that it's a central business district. It seems that the English article was written from a completely different viewpoint from all the others. JIP | Talk 12:16, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The inner city is the central area of a major city or metropolis. In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, the term is often a euphemism applied to the lower-income residential districts in the city centre and nearby areas... Sociologists in these countries sometimes turn this euphemism into a formal designation, applying the term inner city to such residential areas rather than to geographically more central commercial districts. [1] Alansplodge (talk) 13:56, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I bet most Southern US cities both big and small have trailer parks even in the suburbs and exurbs, do sociologists call that "inner city"? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:29, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No. "Inner city" means urban and all the connotations that come with it, such as ethnic background (i.e. non-white). The lead to our trailer trash article states outright that it largely refers to white people in that situation. Matt Deres (talk) 18:04, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

So if there's an urban population density "trailer trash" area in an urban area (maybe near the river where it floods) would that be inner city? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 19:46, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Then this confirms that the English article is written from a completely different viewpoint than the others. JIP | Talk 14:11, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Phrases can mean different things in different countries, Far Rockaway is mentioned in the talk page as an example of inner city and it is 16 (straight line) miles from the center of New York City and Google Maps says it is 1.1 hours from the center by car and 1.65 hours by train. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:29, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This raises the question if "inner city" should be linked to "innerstad" or "Kernstadt" at all, as it seems to be drastically different from them. JIP | Talk 15:19, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The phrase "inner city" is a pejorative euphemism and is meant to be understood idiomatically and not strictly literally. That is, the meaning of the phrase is not revealed by strictly defining its component parts. A classic example is the English phrase "kick the bucket", which is an idiom that means "to die", which cannot be understood by merely trying to pick apart the meaning of words like "kick" and "bucket". In the case of inner city, it does NOT mean "the place at the center of a city". It means "the place in a city where the poorest people live." Sometimes that is the dead center (especially in places where white flight occurred) the center parts of a city were abandoned by affluent people, and as property values plummeted, these areas became places where poorer people moved to live. In recent decades, the process of gentrification, where middle-class people have moved into formerly blighted areas and bought up cheap housing, that has raised the cost of living again so that poorer people have been forced to move to other areas, often formerly industrial areas on the edges of cities (i.e. exurbs). Regardless of where they have been forced to move to, the place where the poorest people in an urban area are living is just called "the inner city". --Jayron 32 15:59, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And when a U.S. downtown dies completely so many downtown-type things had already been built elsewhere that anyone who can afford a car has little or no need to ever go downtown. They might be able to get every good and service that exists in the metro area without ever leaving suburban sprawl, so long as it isn't only useful to non-drivers (i.e. buses). And according to sociology this environmentally unfriendly sprawl was sometimes started by a few of the most racist whites fleeing just because 1 white sold to 1 African-American which creates an accelerating negative feedback loop of whites selling and home price deflation till even the non-racist leave. Then the U.S. economy was almost always bad from 1970-92 (stagnant inflation) and the high-wage blue collar manufacturing jobs (the lifeblood of some areas) have been leaving USA for over 50 years, the teens become up to several generations removed from the ancestors who remember the good times, dealers start fad(s) of crystal meth/cheaper cocaine (crack), some users who are far from sociopathic are given draconian prison terms just for having small amounts and can't find a job cause felon so they're forced to steal to live. What was once a thriving downtown in like World War 2 becomes poor and high crime by the 1980s to 2020s. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 19:46, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

We're not really addressing the question here. "Inner city" clearly has a different meaning in most European countries except the UK and Ireland. So do we stick with the accepted English language meaning (euphemism or not) and change the images, or try to bring the English Wikipedia article into line with the other Wikipedias as User:JIP seems to be suggesting? Note that we already have articles called City centre and Central business district, which may be closer to the Continental European understanding of "inner city". Alansplodge (talk) 20:30, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

WP:SOFIXIT. This is a place to get answers and references, not really an article talk page. If the article needs fixing, fix the text. If someone wants it fixed, but doesn't have the resources or the skills to do so, the article talk page is a good place to have the discussion to decide what needs fixing. --Jayron 32 11:26, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly. And as I wrote above, if "inner city" pretty much means the opposite of "innerstad" or "Kernstadt", the articles shouldn't even be linked. JIP | Talk 21:34, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a Wikipedia guideline, policy, style manual, essay or something with any guidance? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:46, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I note that for French Wikipedia bookstore links to librairie and library links to bibliothèque (one meaning of the Greek is book store), which is logical, it links to what it is, not what it looks like (false cognate). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:24, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Both City centre and Central business district already have interwiki links, some of them to the same languages as inner city has. I don't understand all of the languages that inner city links to, but at least the Swedish and German articles are more about a city centre or a central business district. The problem is that both of the suggested articles already have a German interwiki link and one has a Swedish one, to different articles. The simplest solution would be to simply de-link inner city and leave it as an English-only article. This might require input from people who understand the remaining interwiki languages. JIP | Talk 01:34, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Well at least the Danish article da:inner city seems to be about the English usage of the term "inner city". I don't understand Minnan, Indonesian, Malay, Japanese or Turkish, so I don't have any idea what those articles are about. JIP | Talk 01:40, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

A machine translation of Indonesian, Malay, Japanese and Turkish show that they seem to be the foreign article on the English term, due to obscurity Min Nan might require translating a lot of the words one by one with a dictionary. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:16, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The Malay article seems to have been translated from the English one. See also the top post which is English at ms:Perbincangan pengguna:BukanTeamBiasa for info about some controversy about the work of the translator. Nil Einne (talk) 04:52, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Parts of the article seem to indicate that it is specifically about conditions in the US. Perhaps the right solution is to eliminate or relocate the content related to other places, and change the title to "Inner city (United States)". I'm not interested enough to pursue the point. I do see there is already an article on urban decay in general, and I wonder if there might be some redundancy. --184.144.99.72 (talk) 07:02, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]