Urban Marginality in the Coming Millennium

This paper sketches a characterisation of the regime of urban marginality that has emerged in advanced societies since the close of the Fordist era, highlighting four logics that combine to produce it: a macrosocietal drift towards inequality, the mutation of wage labour (entailing both deproletarianisation and casualisation), the retrenchment of welfare states, and the spatial concentration and stigmatisation of poverty. The rise of this new marginality does not signal a transatlantic convergence on the American pattern: European neighbourhoods of relegation are deeply penetrated by the state and ethnoracial tensions in them are fuelled, not by the growing gap between immigrants and natives, but by their increasing propinquity in social and physical space. To cope with emergent forms of urban marginality, societies face a three-pronged alternative: they can patch up existing programmes of the welfare state, criminalise poverty via the punitive containment of the poor, or institute new social rights that sever subsistence from performance in the labour market.