Urban Outcasts

Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse andconventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the readerinside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializingbanlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is noteverywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, surveyand historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involutionof America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergenceof an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and statefostered by public policies of racial separation and urbanabandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread ofdistricts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos.It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories underthe press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and theethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urbanformations akin to 'anti-ghettos'.
Comparing the US 'Black Belt' with the French 'Red Belt'demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisiverole in the articulation of class, race and place on both sides ofthe Atlantic. It also reveals the crystallization of a new regimeof marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, theretrenchment of the social state and the concentration ofdispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collectiveidiom of identity and claims-making. These defamed districts arenot just the residual 'sinkholes' of a bygone economic era, butalso the incubators of the precarious proletariat emerging underneoliberal capitalism.
Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix ofmounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violenceresurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying thedifferent causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegationin the American and the French metropolis, this book offersindispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and forreinvigorating the public debate over social inequality andcitizenship at century's dawn.