In Their Place

The Imagined Geographies of Poverty

Stephen Crossley

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780745336794
• eBook ISBN: 9781786801203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This book critiques how impoverished communities are represented by politicians, the media, academics and policy makers - and how our understanding of these neighbourhoods is, often misleadingly, shaped by these stories. The alleged behavioural failings of 'poor people' have attracted a great deal of academic and political scrutiny. Spatial inequalities are also well documented and poor neighbourhoods have been extensively researched. However, other spaces have been re-imagined in different ways by politicians, academics, journalists and social reformers. These imagined geographies include exoticised slums, cities being reclaimed by nature, the street and domestic spaces like the kitchen, or even the bedroom. In Their Place highlights how these spaces are represented and how these representations are deployed, manipulating political and media discourses around the individuals and communities who live there. These distortions are often used to keep people in their place by making sure everyone knows where 'the poor' belong. This book will reorient those interested in human geography away from 'deprived neighbourhoods' and back to the foundational spaces where political decisions - and poverty - are made in Britain today.

1

Introduction

The Spaces of Others

The idea of difference is at the basis of the very notion of space, that is, a set of distinct and coexisting positions which are exterior to one another and which are defined in relation to one another through relations of proximity, vicinity, or distance, as well as through order relations, such as above, below, or between.

Pierre Bourdieu, 1996.¹

THE OTHERS

Space has been called ‘the fundamental stuff of geography’,² and many influential geographers such as Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, David Sibley and Edward Soja have written extensively on the importance of space and the ways in which it is socially produced and reproduced, shaping and being shaped by our relations with each other. By way of example, in her book For Space, Doreen Massey articulated three ‘opening propositions’: space is the product of interrelations and is constituted through interactions, whether global or intimate; space is the sphere of possibility and represents multiplicity, heterogeneity and plurality – a site where individual trajectories co-exist; and space is always under construction, never finished and never closed.³ There is, then, general agreement that the concept of space as a dead, fixed and immobile place is no longer relevant. Massey stated in For Space that it may therefore be productive to think about space differently. This book attempts to think differently about the spaces associated with people living in poverty. There is, however, no grand narrative, or meta-theory being advanced here. Instead, the intention is to draw attention to the ways in which various groups of people, such as politicians, academics, policymakers, journalists and social reformers use spaces in different ways, doing so, more or less explicitly, to support and augment their arguments and perspectives on poverty.

The alleged behavioural failings and moral inferiority of people living in poverty have attracted a great deal of academic and political scrutiny over the course of the last 400 to 500 years. Researchers have argued that the conflation of poverty with criminality can be traced back to ‘the happy sixteenth-century custom of chopping off the ears of vagabonds, rogues and sturdy beggars’.⁴ Other issues such as poor parenting, drug addiction, a less than enthusiastic approach to work, sexual promiscuity and poor financial management have also been advanced as causes or ‘drivers’ of poverty on a fairly regular basis. These insinuations are examples of how people experiencing poverty are Othered by the rest of society, or those who do not experience such hardship. In this way, the alleged behaviour of ‘the poor’ help to establish them as a distinct group, a separate social entity different and inferior to ‘the non-poor’. Othering has been described as:

A dualistic process of differentiation and demarcation, by which the line is drawn between ‘them’ and ‘us’ – between the more and the less powerful – and through which social distance is established and maintained. It is not a neutral line for it is imbued with negative value judgments that construct ‘the poor’ variously as a source of moral contamination, a threat, an ‘undeserving’ economic burden, an object of pity or even as an exotic species.⁵

Baroness Lister, who has written extensively about poverty and the negative representations of people living on low-incomes, describes Othering as a ‘discursive strategy that magnifies and distorts difference’ and one that has material effects on poor people.⁶ How we refer to people, the names or labels we attach to them, has implications not just for how they are treated by wider society, including its institutions, but also for how those labelled see themselves. Importantly, when powerful groups such as politicians and/or policymakers name something or attach a label to a group, it removes the right or the ability of that group to name and define themselves. The French anthropologist Colette Petonnet, in her book Those People, a study of residents of a French public housing project she called La Halle, highlighted how:

Lumped together under the same scorn and sadly surprised by the names they are called, the residents of La Halle have no alternative but to recognise themselves as the group they form in relation to the outside world.⁷

A contemporary example of the labelling of disadvantaged groups, that also has a long history, can be found in the UK government’s Troubled Families Programme. Following riots that broke out in England in 2011, David Cameron, the then prime minister, sought to blame the disturbances on a small hard-core group of trouble-making families. He launched the Troubled Families Programme shortly afterwards and said:

Let me be clear what I mean by this phrase. Officialdom might call them ‘families with multiple disadvantages’. Some in the press might call them ‘neighbours from hell’. Whatever you call them, we’ve known for years that a relatively small number of families are the source of a large proportion of the problems in society. Drug addiction. Alcohol abuse. Crime. A culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations.⁸

Cameron used research that estimated there were around 120,000 families that experienced ‘multiple disadvantages’ such as poverty, material deprivation, maternal mental health issues, and poor housing in 2004/5 to support his case that there were the exact same number of families involved in crime, anti-social behaviour, truancy from school and where at least one parent was in receipt of out-of-work benefits in 2011.⁹

Labels similar to ‘troubled families’ have been around since Victorian times when there was a concern about a ‘social residuum’ and a ‘submerged tenth’ of the population. The desire to split ‘the poor’ into ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ groups can be traced back to the 1834 Poor Law. Since then, the belief that there is an ‘underclass’ in British society, cut off from the rest of ‘us’ and displaying different norms, values and customs, has been recycled on a fairly frequent basis, with slight changes in emphasis or labels at different times.¹⁰ Not all of these labels have received ‘official’ status from the government, but many have captured the imagination of the wider population. Viewing some people living in poverty as a ‘threat’ to wider society has obvious implications not just for the types of policies that are developed to address poverty, but also for the media headlines that are generated in discussions about poverty and the type of support that is offered to such groups.

The process of Othering people living in poverty and of recycling and reconstructing the ‘underclass’ thesis has continued in spite of a lack of empirical evidence and over a century’s worth of academic research in the UK that suggests that structural and political issues such as low pay, a lack of good quality jobs and low levels of state support for those people out of work are, and pretty much always have been, the main causes of poverty.¹¹

In addition to the causes of poverty, spatial inequalities in the concentration of poverty are also well documented, dating all the way back to Charles Booth’s colour-coded poverty maps of London in the 1880s and 1890s. Today, colour-coded, computer-generated ‘heat maps’ of the UK are often used to highlight the poverty and other assorted problems faced by deindustrialised areas in England’s north-east and north-west, and along the ‘M62 corridor’ between Leeds and Manchester. Poor neighbourhoods have also been extensively researched, with a long history of ethnographic studies, where the researcher immerses themself in the daily life of a district and its inhabitants, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. Friedrich Engels, the German philosopher who worked closely with Karl Marx, famously spent nearly three years living in Manchester in the 1840s and published an account of his observations and experiences in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. From the 1920s onwards, sociologists and students from ‘the Chicago School’ have been encouraged to view their city as a ‘living laboratory’. The sheer output of many of these researchers, keen to ‘better understand’ the daily lives of ‘the poor’ or ‘the disadvantaged’ sometimes gives the impression that the streets of poor or ‘deprived’ neighbourhoods are crammed full of sociologists, geographers and anthropologists lurking on street corners, undertaking participant observation.¹²

Researchers are, of course, not the only non-residents with an interest in these areas. In Victorian times, London’s middle classes went ‘slumming’ – visiting the poorer East End of London – for a variety of reasons, including for entertainment purposes as well as for research, philanthropic and charitable reasons, an interest that has been recreated in a recent BBC television series called The Victorian Slum. Journalists were some of the most active ‘slummers’, often going in search of good copy and keen to tell tales of debauchery and depravity. Contemporary newspaper reports of ‘ghettos of welfare scroungers’ and the investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre’s ‘exposé’ of street mugging in Brixton suggest that some things never change.¹³ Visits by politicians and their ‘special’ advisors to poor neighbourhoods are often used as the political setting for, or precursor to, speeches, policy announcements or think-tank reports about poverty and how best to address it. These visits, and the political rhetoric that accompanies them, purport to ‘tell it like it is’, with the politicians keen to be able to claim that they have seen the effects of poverty ‘first-hand’ and ‘with their own eyes’. And yet, almost without exception, the political (and media) construction of these neighbourhoods, and their residents, ends with them being at least partially blamed, more or less subtly, for the problems associated with them.

Such visits are part of a longer history of the discrediting of entire neighbourhoods, helping to portray them as ‘dreadful enclosures’ or ‘phantasms, which feed on emotional experiences stimulated by more or less uncontrolled words and images’.¹⁴ The geographer David Sibley, in his book Geographies of Exclusion, noted that this history of ‘imaginary geographies’ helps to cast minority groups as threatening Others and ‘polluting bodies or folk devils who are then located elsewhere’.¹⁵ Parts of the East End of London, for example, were likened to ‘darkest Africa’ and its inhabitants likened to pygmies and ‘wandering tribes’ in Victorian times. The American sociologist E.V. Walter, who attempted to expose ‘the myth of the dreadful enclosure’, wrote in 1977 that:

In all parts of the world, some urban spaces are identified totally with danger, pain and chaos. The idea of dreadful space is probably as old as settled societies, and anyone familiar with the records of human fantasy, literary or clinical, will not dispute a suggestion that the recesses of the mind conceal primeval feelings that respond with ease to the message: ‘Beware that place: untold evils lurk behind the walls’. Cursed ground, forbidden forests, haunted houses are still universally recognised symbols, but after secularisation and urbanisation, the public expression of magical thinking limits the experience of menacing space to physical and emotional dangers.¹⁶

More recently, the concept of ‘territorial stigmatisation’, which draws attention to the way in which urban areas and neighbourhoods can come to be associated with problematic groups and behaviour, has been advanced by the urban sociologist Loic Wacquant.¹⁷ He, like Walter and others before him, highlights the way that impoverished areas can become ‘spatially tainted’ by political and media discourses linking them with a wide range of social problems. The stigmatisation of an entire local area ensures that its residents are presented as a homogeneous group and tarred with the same brush. Wacquant reels off a list of neighbourhoods across different countries which are synonymous with disorder and deprivation:

In every metropolis of the First World, one or more towns, districts or concentrations of public housing are publicly known and recognised as those urban hellholes in which violence, vice, and dereliction are the order of things. Some even acquire the status of national eponym for all the evils and dangers now believed to afflict the dualised city: Les Minguettes and La Courneuve or the Mirail housing complex in Toulouse for France; South Central Los Angeles, the Bronx and the project of Cabrini Green in Chicago for the United States; Duisberg-Marxloh and Berlin-Neukölln for Germany; the districts of Toxteth in Liverpool, Saint Pauls in Bristol, or Meadow Well in Newcastle for England; and Bijlmer and Westlijke Tuinsteden in Amsterdam for Holland … Whether or not these areas are in fact dilapida...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Spaces of Others
• 2 Swamps and Slums: Exoticising the Poor
• 3 Tales of Two Cities
• 4 Neighbourhood Effects or Westminster Effects?
• 5 Streetwise?
• 6 The Heroic Simplification of the Household
• 7 Piles of Pringles and Crack: Behind Closed Doors
• 8 Less Public, More Private: The Shifting Spaces of the State
• 9 Studying Up
• Notes
• Index