Territorial stigmatization in the age of advanced marginality

Abstract

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the main countries of 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 indeed inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of wage labor relationship, the functional disconnection between dispossessed neighborhoods from the national and global economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison of the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century’s turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of “advanced marginality” and their implications for the formation of the “precariat” in postindustrial societies.

Key words: urban marginality, poverty, precariousness, space, stigma, subproletariat, class formation.