Wacquant, Loic. 2007. Urban Outcasts

23) Wacquant, Loic. 2007. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.

Wacquant makes a critic o media characterization of spaces of urban marginality as lawless and dangerous. He argues that this discourse is indeed part of what fabricates this marginalization. “Advanced marginality is a novel regime of socio-spatial relegation” (2) he argues. Instead of analyzing contemporary marginalization as a common phenomenon that can be characterized as a “ghettification” of major cities worldwide, and the emergence for an “underclass” (as the media and main stream urbanists have argued) he proposes that marginality is not the same everywhere. He wants to delineate “Social morphology, organizational makeup and functions that neighbourhoods of relegation fulfil for their respective metropolises” (4) For this he takes both the Chicago black ghetto and the Parisian banlieue. The first part of the book offers an alternative to the Chicago School analysis of poverty as a disorganizing force, to follow the connections between racial domination, class inequality, state (in)action, and spatial enclosures. He also critizises the model of the consolidation of the “dual city“ to argue that has been a process of fragmentation of the marginal and unification among dominant groups. He understand this “social fragmentation from below” as the condition of impossibility of articulationg political claims in terms of shared identity, and rather the proliferation of a variety of fragmented strategies of subsistence socialization. The second part is a comparison made on the base of structure, experience and political economy of urban marginality in the US and France. He combines quantitative and ethnographic analysis in order to historize how both formations have changed over time as result of external causes and what are the implications of this for people living in places of exclusion. He relates the creation of the North American hyper-ghetto with: 1) the deepening inequalities generated by capital concentration, and 2) the withdrawal of state policies of welfare, generating the decay of institutions of the ghetto and a state of social abandonment,3) the strengthening of policies of racial segregation among which there is a growing , 4) of policing and criminalization of the ghettos. The European balineues contrarily rather than being space of racial segregation are constituted from the chronic unemployment and employment precarization, in the ethnically heterogeneous former working-class neighbourhoods. He analyzes how in both cases there is territorial stigmatization that enhances process of de-solidarization, operating in different dimensions in each case: exclusion in France is based in terms of class while in the US is based in racial terms. The general critique we can make is that he follows a too schematic logic of cause- effect and flattens the complexities of He is very about state role in the configuration of space (he does not quote Lefebvre nor acknowledges most of of the theoretical debates over social dimension of space except for some of Bourdieu’s considerations taken form a systemicist perspective) “effects of space turn out to be effects of state projected on to the city”. (6) He emphasises that violence is more a consequence of all these historical processes rather than any sudden “explosion” of ethnic rage, and that ultimately erodes any possibility of citizenship as a category that would even up capitalism’s inequalities.