The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and
experience
of urban relegation in the United States and the European
Union during
the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime
of marginality.
This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither
residual, nor cyclical
or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary
societies insofar as
they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of the wage labour
relationship, the
functional disconnection of dispossessed neighbourhoods from
the national and
global economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare
state in the polarizing
city. Based on a methodical comparison between the black
American ghetto
and the French working-class banlieue at century’s turn,
this article spotlights
three distinctive spatial properties of ‘advanced
marginality’ – territorial fixation
and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution
of ‘place’, and the loss
of a hinterland – and draws out their implications for the
formation of the
