Urban Change and Citizenship in Times of Crisis

Volume 2: Urban Neo-liberalisation

Bryan S. Turner, Hannah Wolf, Gregor Fitzi, Jürgen Mackert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429557354
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The contributions to Urban neo- liberalisation bring together critical analyses of the dynamics and processes neo- liberalism has facilitated in urban contexts. Recent developments, such as intensified economic investment and exposure to aggressive strategies of banks, hedge- funds and investors, and long- term processes of market- and state- led urban restructuration, have produced uneven urban geographies and new forms of exclusion and marginality. These strategies have no less transformed the governance of cities by subordinating urban social life to rationalities and practices of competition within and between cities, and they also heavily impact on city inhabitants' experience of everyday life. Against the backdrop of recent austerity politics and a marketisation of cities, this volume discusses processes of urban neo- liberalisation with regard to democracy and citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, opportunities, and life- chances. It addresses pressing issues of commodification of housing and home, activation of civil society, vulnerability, and the right to the city.

Part I

Producing urban geographies of crisis

1 Revisiting territories of relegation

Class, ethnicity, and state in the making of advanced marginality

Loïc Wacquant

Introduction

To relegate (from the late Middle English, relegaten, meaning to send away, to banish) is to assign an individual, population or category to an obscure or inferior position, condition or location.¹ In the post-industrial city, relegation takes the form of real or imaginary consignment to distinctive socio-spatial formations variously and vaguely referred to as ‘inner cities’, ‘ghettos’, ‘enclaves’, ‘no-go areas’, ‘problem districts’, or simply ‘rough neighbourhoods’. How are we to characterise and differentiate these spaces, what determines their trajectory (birth, growth, decay, and death), whence comes the intense symbolic taint attached to them at century’s edge and what constellations of class, ethnicity, and state do they both materialise and signify? These are the questions I pursued in my book Urban outcasts through a methodical comparison of the trajectories of the black American ghetto and the European working-class peripheries in the era of neo-liberal ascendancy (Wacquant, 2008a).² In this chapter, I revisit this cross-continental sociology of ‘advanced marginality’ to tease out its broader lessons for our understanding of the tangled nexus of symbolic, social, and physical space in the polarising metropolis at the century’s threshold in particular, and for comparative urban studies in general.

To speak of urban relegation – rather than ‘territories of poverty’ or ‘low-income community’, for instance – is to insist that the proper object of inquiry is not the place itself and its residents but the multilevel structural processes whereby persons are selected, thrust, and maintained in marginal locations, as well as the social webs and cultural forms they subsequently develop therein. Relegation is a collective activity, not an individual state; a relation (of economic, social, and symbolic power) between collectives, not a gradational attribute of persons. It reminds us that, to avoid falling into the false realism of the ordinary and scholarly common sense of the moment, the sociology of marginality must fasten not on vulnerable ‘groups’ (which often exist merely on paper, if that) but on the institutional mechanisms that produce, reproduce, and transform the network of positions to which its supposed members are dispatched and attached. And it urges us to remain agnostic as to the particular social and spatial configuration assumed by the resulting district of dispossession. In particular, we cannot presume that the emerging social entity is a ‘community’ (implying at minimum a shared surround and identity, horizontal social, and common interests), even a community of fate, given the diversity of social trajectories that lead into and out of such areas.³ We should also not presuppose that income level or material deprivation is the preeminent principle of vision and division, as persons with low income in any society are remarkably heterogeneous (artists and the elderly, service workers and graduate students, the native homeless and paperless migrants, etc.) and form at best a statistical category.

Urban outcasts is the summation of a decade of theoretical and empirical research tracking the causes, forms, and consequences of urban ‘polarisation from below’ in the United States and Western Europe after the close of the Fordist–Keynesian era, leading to a diagnosis of the predicament of the post-industrial precariat coalescing in the neighbourhoods of relegation of advanced society. The book brings the core tenets of Bourdieu’s sociology to bear on a wide array of field, survey, and historical data on inner Chicago and outer Paris to contrast the sudden implosion of the black American ghetto after the riots of the 1960s with the slow decomposition of the working-class districts of the French urban periphery in the age of deindustrialisation. It puts forth three main theses and sketches an analytic framework for renewing the comparative study of urban marginality that I spotlight to help us elucidate the relations of poverty, territory, and power in the post-industrial city.

From ghetto to hyperghetto, or the political roots of black marginality

The study opens by parsing the reconfiguration of race, class, and space in the American metropolis because the foreboding figure of the dark ghetto has become epicentral to the social and scientific imaginary of urban transformation at the turn of the century.⁴ On American shores, the abrupt and unforeseen involution of the ‘inner city’ – a geographic euphemism obfuscating the reality of the ghetto as an instrument of ethno-racial entrapment imposed uniquely upon blacks – was the target of a fresh plank of policy worry and scholarly controversy. Across Western Europe, vague images of ‘the ghetto’ as a pathological space of segregation, dereliction, and deviance imported from America (with rekindled intensity after the Los Angeles riots of Spring 1992) suffused as well as obscured journalistic, political, and intellectual debates on immigration and inequality in the dualising city.

The first thesis, accordingly, charts the historical transition from ghetto to hyperghetto in the United States and stresses the pivotal role of state structure and policy in the (re)production of racialised marginality. Revoking the trope of ‘disorganisation’ inherited from the Chicago school of the 1930s and rejecting the tale of the ‘underclass’ (in its structural, behavioural, and neo-ecological variants) which had come to dominate research on race and poverty by the 1980s, Urban outcasts shows that the black American ghetto collapsed after the peak of the civil rights movement to spawn a novel organisational constellation: the hyperghetto. To be more precise, the ‘Black Metropolis’, lodged in the heart of the white city but cloistered from it, which both ensnared and enjoined African-American urbanites in a reserved perimeter and a web of shared institutions built by and for blacks between 1915 and 1965,⁵ collapsed to give way to a dual socio-spatial formation.

This decentred formation, stretching across the city, is composed of the hyperghetto proper (HyGh); that is, the vestiges of the historic ghetto now encasing the precarised fractions of the black working-class in a barren territory of dread and dissolution devoid of economic function and doubly segregated by race and class, on the one hand, and of the burgeoning black middle-class districts (BMCD) that grew mostly via public employment in satellite areas left vacant by the mass exodus of whites to the suburbs, on the other. Whereas space unified African Americans into a compact if stratified community from World War I to the revolts of the 1960s, now it fractures them along class lines patrolled by state agencies of social control increasingly staffed by middle-class blacks charged with overseeing their unruly lower-class brethren.⁶ The encapsulating dualism of the Fordist half-century inscribed in symbolic, social, and physical space, summed up by the equation White:Black :: City:Ghetto has thus been superseded by a more complex and tension-ridden structure White:Black :: City::BMCD:HyGh following a fractal logic according to which the residents of the hyperghetto find themselves doubly dominated and marginalised.

Breaking with the stateless cast of mainstream US sociology of race and poverty, Urban outcasts then finds that hyper-ghettoisation is economically underdetermined and politically overdetermined. The most distinctive cause of the extraordinary social intensity and spatial concentration of black dispossession in the hyperghetto is not the ‘disappearance of work’ (as argued by William Julius Wilson) or the stubborn persistence of ‘hyper-segregation’ (as proposed by Douglas Massey), although these two forces are evidently at play (Wilson, 1996; Massey & Denton, 1993). It is government policies of urban abandonment pursued across the gamut of employment, welfare, education, housing, and health at multiple scales, federal, state, and local, and the correlative breakdown of public institutions in the urban core that has accompanied the downfall of the communal ghetto. This means that the conundrum of class and race (as denegated ethnicity) in the American metropolis cannot be resolved without bringing into our analytic purview the shape and operation of the state, construed as a stratification and classification agency that decisively shapes the life options and strategies of the urban poor.

The ‘convergence thesis’ specified and refuted

The second part – and central thesis – of Urban outcasts takes the reader across the Atlantic to disentangle the same spatial nexus of class, ethnicity, and state in post-industrial Europe. Puncturing the panic discourse of ‘ghettoisation’ that has swept across the continent over the past two decades, crashing into the Nordic countries head-on in the 2000s,⁷ it demonstrates that zones of urban deprivation in France and neighbouring countries are not ghettos à l’américaine. Despite surface similarities in social morphology (population makeup, age mix, family composition, relative unemployment, and poverty levels) and representations (the sense of indignity, confinement, and blemish felt by their residents) due to their common position at the bottom of the material and symbolic hierarchy of places that make up the metropolis, the remnants of the black American ghetto and European working-class peripheries are separated by enduring differences of structure, function, and scale as well as by the divergent political treatments they receive.

To sum them up: repulsion into the black ghetto is determined by ethnicity (E), inflected by class (C) with the emergence of the hyperghetto in the 1970s, and intensified by the state (S) throughout the century, according to the algebraic formula [(E > C) × S]. By contrast, relegation in the urban periphery of Western Europe is driven by class position, inflected by ethnonational membership and mitigated by state structures and policies, as summed up by the formula [(C > E) ÷ S]. It is not spawning ‘immigrant cities within the city’, endowed with their own extended division of labour and duplicative institutions, based on ethnic compulsion applied uniformly across class levels. It is not, in other words, converging with the black American ghetto of the mid-twentieth century characterised by its joint function of social ostracisation and economic exploitation of a dishonoured population.

To lump variegated spaces of dispossession in the city under the label of ‘ghetto’ bespeaks, and in turn perpetuates, three mistakes that the book dispels. The first consists in invoking the term as a mere rhetorical device intended to shock public conscience by activating the lay imaginary of urban badlands.⁸ But a ghetto is not a ‘bad neighbourhood’, a zone of social disintegration defined (singly or in combination) by segregation, deprivation, dilapidated housing, failing institutions and the prevalence of vice and violence. It is a spatial implement of ethno-racial closure and control resulting from the reciprocal assignation of a stigmatised category to a reserved territory that paradoxically offers the tainted population a structural harbour fostering self-organisation and collective protection against brute domination (for elaborations, see Wacquant, 2008b, 2011). The second mistake consists in conflating the communal ghetto with the hyperghetto: impoverishment, economic informalisation, institutional desertification and the de-pacification of everyday life are not features of the ghetto but, on the contrary, symptoms of its disrepair and dismemberment.

The third error misreads the evolution of traditional working-class territories in the European city. In their phase of post-industrial decline, these defamed districts have grown more ethnically heterogeneous while postcolonial migrants have become more dispersed (even as nodes of high density have emerged to fixate media attention and political worry) (Pan Ké Shon & Wacquant, 2012);⁹ their organisational ecology has become more sparse, not more dense; their boundaries are porous and routinely crossed by residents who climb up the class structure; and they have failed to generate a collective identity for their inhabitants – notwithstanding the fantastical fear, coursing through Europe, that Islam would supply a shared language to unify urban outcasts of foreign origins and fuel a process of ‘inverted assimilation’. (Liogier, 2012). In each of these five dimensions, neighbourhoods of relegation in the European metropolis are consistently moving away from the pattern of the ghetto as a device for socio-spatial enclosure: they are, if one insists on retaining that spatial idiom, anti-ghettos.

To assert that lower-class districts harbouring high densities of bleak public housing, vulnerable households, and postcolonial migrants are not ghettos is not to deny the role of ethnic identity – or assignation – in the patterning of inequality in contemporary Europe. Urban outcasts is forthright in stressing the ‘banalization of venomous expressions of xenophobic enmity’ and the ‘cruel reality of durable exclusion from and abiding discrimination on the labour market’ based on national origins; it fully ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on the contributors
• Introduction: urban warfare – neo-liberalism’s assault on democratic life in the city
• PART I: Producing urban geographies of crisis
• PART II: Governing cities in neo-liberalism
• PART III: Everyday experience of urban neo-liberalisation
• Index