The resurgence of extreme poverty and destitution, ethnoracial divisions (linked to the colonial past) and public violence, and their accumulation in the same distressed urban areas, suggest that the metropolis is the site and fount of novel forms of exclusionary social closure in advanced societies. This paper essays an ideal-typical characterization of this new, rising regime of urban marginality by contrasting it with selected features of urban poverty in the postwar era of Fordist growth. Six distinctive features of advanced marginality are proposed: the growing internal heterogeneity and desocialization of labor, the functional disconnection of neighborhood conditions from macro-economic trends; territorial fixation and stigmatization; spatial alienation and the dissolution of place; the loss of a viable hinterland; and the symbolic fragmentation of marginalized populations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the rise of advanced marginality for social analysis and policy, including the need to break out of the market-and-state paradigm and to sever the link between work and subsistence via the institution of a citizen's wage.

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La galère : jeunes en survie

The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on its Nature and Implications

Les quartiers d'exil

This article attempts to deal with various forms of poverty. What do the long‐term unemployed, young people looking for work and on training schemes, single adults eligible for the RMI (guaranteed minimum income benefit), lone mothers, young couples crippled by the impossibility of paying bills and rent, all have in common? The author puts forward the hypothesis that they express a particular mode of dissociation from the social bond: disaffiliation. This is a different condition of misery from that of poverty in the strict sense. The latter can perhaps be read as a state, whose forms can be listed in terms of lack (lack of earnings, of housing, of medical care, of education, lack of power or of respect). By contrast, situations of destitution constitute an effect at the place where two vectors meet: one, the axis of integration/non‐integration through work; the other, an axis of integration/non‐integration into a social and family network. A model of four 'zones' of social life - integration, vulnerability, assistance and disaffiliation - constructed from pre‐industrial societies, may serve as a reference grid against which we can interpret contemporary social circumstances and the rise of social vulnerability. Present‐day insecurity largely results from the growing fragility of protective regulations which were implemented from the nineteenth century onwards in order to create a stable situation for workers: the right to work, extended social protection, coverage of social risks set up by the welfare state. We can describe the specific nature of present‐day insecurity as relating to the structure of wage society, its crisis or its disintegration since the mid‐1970s.

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The Roads to Disaffiliation: Insecure Work and Vulnerable Relationships

Since the 1980s, Latin America has experienced unprecedented violence, which expresses itself in a major increase in homicide rates. After exploring different forms of violence and discussing the i...

Violence and Globalization in Latin America

The authors compare the integration of immigrants in France and Britain in terms of the theoretical models, politics and practice in each country. In France, the tradition of republicanism is emphasised, and thus a legacy of integrating immigrants under this banner is proclaimed; in Britain there is no real analogue to this, and no common myth which is shared across the spectrum of political opinion, though historical conditions have also shaped policy. The political debate in France has centred around the concepts of insertion versus integration, while in Britain debate has revolved around the concept of ‘race relations’. In both countries the practice of integration is threatened by economic dislocation, however, in Britain citizenship and political rights for immigrants have not been challenged and thus are not salient issues as they are in France.

La galère : jeunes en survie

Citations

The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on its Nature and Implications

Les quartiers d'exil

The Roads to Disaffiliation: Insecure Work and Vulnerable Relationships

Violence and Globalization in Latin America

Integration in theory and practice: A comparison of France and Britain

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