The American ghetto, the British inner city, and the French urban periphery are widely known, to outsiders and
insiders alike, as the �problem districts,� the �no-go areas,� the �wild� precincts of their metropolis --territories
of deprivation, dereliction, and danger to be shunned and feared. But the monochrome portraits, drawn from afar
and from above, of the destitute families, dishonoured minorities, and disenfranchised immigrants who dwell in
them hide the varied social structures, strategies, and experiences of the precarious fractions of the new urban
proletariat emerging in advanced societies.
Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, this book takes the reader inside
the black ghetto of inner Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of outer Paris to discover that urban marginality
is not cut of the same cloth everywhere.
Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution
of America�s urban core after the 1960s is due, not to the emergence of an �underclass,� but to the joint withdrawal
of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities,
by contrast, the spread of quarters of �exclusion� does not herald the formation of ghettos, but stems from the
decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass joblessness, the casualization of work, and
the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated. This reveals that neighborhoods of urban relegation assume
a range of functions --as reservoirs of low-skill labor, warehouses forsurplus populations, or spatial containers
for undesirable social categories and activities--depending on the history and shape of urban relations and on
the degree and type of state penetration.
Comparing the US �Black Belt� with the French �Red Belt� demonstrates that state structures and policies play a
decisive role in the articulation of class, race, and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also points to the
crystallization of a new regime of marginality fueled by the fragmentation of wage labor, the retrenchment of the
social state, and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom
of identity and claims-making.
Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence, and street violence
resurging in unison in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential
forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this bold book offers indispensable tools
for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship
at century�s dawn.