From Company Town to Post-Industrial

This paper considers what effects a universal basic income could have on disrupting social and economic inequality in the tensions of urban/rural divide. She frames her inquiry on the political economy of land and labor in the collapse of coal industry “company towns” and its structural aftermath in Central Appalachia. According to an analysis of US census data by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service of the University of Virginia, by 2040 close to 70 percent of the US population will reside in only sixteen states with the vast majority of the population centralized in and around major urban areas. A study by Bloomberg found that while urban centers are growing by close to a million acres each year, they still only comprise 3.6 percent of all land mass on the continental US. Yet, despite their small size, urban spaces are home to four out of ve Americans and contribute to the majority of the country’s GDP wealth. Meanwhile, income inequality across urban and rural areas has been stratifying at a rapid pace for the past 40 years. The 2008 nancial crisis and subsequent recession has not tempered the growth of income inequality; rather, it has intensi ed it. In The German Ideology, Karl Marx argues that capitalism has naturalized a hierarchical division in the social and economic order with the “separation of town and country and to the con ict of their interests.” Urban cities are treated as the valuable center of capitalist and intellectual labor, and rural areas are relegated to the peripheral, lesser valued physical labor. Thus, urban studies scholarship within the Marxist tradition has provided important contributions to address the issues of growing inequality in urban spaces including the rapid privatization of public spaces, gentri cation, and rising housing costs, as well as the devastating environmental consequences of urban living. Geographer Neil Smith asserts that tackling the expansion of capital and inequality is not solely a social project but a “geographical project,” grounded in the appropriation of labor and land. Through Marxist analysis, Smith examines what constitutes the “geography of capitalism” and its uneven development of geographic spaces of poverty and wealth, town and country, industry and agriculture. He posits that the uneven development of capital is not random or inevitable; rather, it “is the systematic geographical expression of the contradictions inherent in the very constitution and structure of capital.” Capitalism was built upon the social and economic divisions that proceeded it, but it has also continued to reshape our social and economic world systematically to suit its needs and interests for growth and pro t on a global scale. Urban living requires access to surplus products that make speci c demands on the extraction of resources from the land and labor in its periphery, which David Harvey 1