Banlieues, the Hyperghetto and Advanced Marginality: A Symposium on Loïc Wacquant’s Urban Outcasts

Abstract

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance for urban and social studies of Loïc Wacquant’s work (and indeed its relevance to political debate). As a contribution to bringing out and following up the importance of his most recent book, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality, we have already published eight assessments (11:3, pp. 357–421), to which we now add Sako Musterd’s paper, ‘Diverse Poverty Neighbourhoods: Reflections on Urban Outcasts’. We intend to publish Wacquant’s response in 12.2.

Diverse urban marginality

Urban Outcasts is a piece of work that will soon be remembered as a major work on marginality and the city (Wacquant, 2008). It is major for various reasons, but to me the most significant reasons include the following: it clearly sets out the differences we may encounter if we are looking at urban marginality; it positions the urban marginality debate outside of a just ethnic‐ or racial‐based debate and stresses that most of the problems in marginalised districts have to be understood with other logics, such as the protest against ethno‐racial discrimination and stigmatisation, resistance to social inequality related with unemployment and flexibilisation of the labour market; it stresses the major importance of the impact of state interventions at local city and neighbourhood level, while embedding this in historic transformations; it clarifies the danger of political, ‘public’ and media attention to poverty neighbourhoods, because this may contribute to stigmatisation and subsequent avoidance of these neighbourhoods by outsiders, or because this may attribute to red‐lining practices by financial institutions, and to commercial disinvestments in the areas.

While the author asked for attention to such a wide variety of—mainly structural—conditions for the development of urban marginality, he succeeded in clarifying not just much of the difference between the Black Belt and the Red Belt, between the American black ghetto and the French banlieues, but also provided a conceptual framework that may help to understand other forms of urban marginality in a range of other cities and contexts. In fact, his fantastic sketch—’in broad strokes’—of the social construction of ‘la banlieue’ (p. 139 and further), in which he refers to the roles played by journalists, politicians, planners and intellectuals in the construction process, highly resembles the social construction of ‘poverty neighbourhoods’ or ‘problem neighbourhoods’ or ‘disadvantaged neighbourhoods’ in many other European contexts, without arguing that these constructions are exactly similar.

In this regard, also his description of the commonalities between the cases he is focusing upon on both sides of the Atlantic (both are hard hit by de‐industrialisation, ethnically marked, characterised by high unemployment, a concentration of households with low incomes, a very negative stigma, bleak atmospheres and both are at the bottom of their neighbourhood hierarchies), and of the differences (scale, level of socio‐spatial isolation, level of institutionalisation, organisational density, ‘presence of the state’, homogeneous black versus heterogeneous ethnic, relative connectedness to the labour market, black versus youth, segregated blacks versus assimilated immigrants, poverty level, level of criminality, state of the housing stock) between the ghetto and the banlieues are very insightful and ought to be obligatory reading for all who are involved in urban social issues.

In short, this is a study that may make people think more deeply about the mechanisms and structures that produce urban marginality, perhaps even in an advanced form.

Critical reflections

My personal life experience includes visits to and walks in South Central Los Angeles (shortly after the riots in 1992), in Harlem in New York, in the black ghetto of Washington, DC and in the inner city of Detroit, as well as a couple of visits to the banlieues of Paris, including La Courneuve, and Lyon as part of European comparative research projects. Even though these visits were short stays and my colleagues arranged the trips, they have helped me to interpret the crucial messages sent out in Urban Outcasts. Yet, these experiences were, although impressive, highly superficial compared to what Wacquant was able to do in his in‐depth studies in Chicago and Paris. Therefore, I decided that a critical reflection on the book by me would perhaps be most valuable if I tried to connect the content to the European cases I am most familiar with through several comparative studies I was involved in.

The geographical and related dimensions in the debate on urban marginality, that is, the states, cities and neighbourhoods, and their political, economic, cultural and social characteristics, produce a wide variety of contexts in which various social outcomes should be expected. For that reason I organise my commentary roughly by these geographical levels. First, attention will be given to the relative impact of various welfare regimes that operate in different contexts. This will be followed by some comments with regard to the comparison between cities, within welfare states. This enables us to see more intra‐welfare state variation that must be attributed to other mechanisms than state involvement. Subsequently, the neighbourhood will be addressed as a unit that has taken centre stage in the debates on urban marginality. While referring to other studies and findings I will also provide some essential comments to Urban Outcasts.

The welfare state

The welfare state, both at a general level as a set of institutions that shape a certain model of interventions in various spheres of life and more specifically as an institution on its own that is capable of realising a certain level of services and organisation at the very local level of the neighbourhood, is rightly addressed as a major force shaping forms of inequality and urban marginality. In a frequently cited volume: Urban Segregation and the Welfare State (Musterd and Ostendorf, 1998) we and a range of experienced authors from both sides of the Atlantic argued that indeed it is not just economic restructuring (Wilson, 1987), nor ethnic segregation itself (Massey and Denton, 1993) but that it is in particular the type of welfare state that plays a major role in shaping urban marginality and inequality. Social inequality and redistribution, access to good quality schools, health care, housing, employment and social infrastructures all differ substantially between welfare states, and this plays a vital role in the life chances and levels of (non)participation in the wider society. These findings support Wacquant’s plea, in the final part of the book, for a dramatic change in social policy to fight the dominant social, economic and political threats that will probably create more advanced marginalisation. He argues that welfare states should be generative (and not remedial). This comes close to support for redistributing welfare states (like the former Scandinavian and Dutch models). At the same time, what we see is ongoing retrenchment of most of the welfare states, certainly in Europe.

However, even if the welfare state should play a major role in reducing inequality and marginality, it makes sense to look at other dimensions that impact upon economic integration as well. I must apologise for presenting yet another reference to work we did in the European context, a 4‐year in‐depth comparative research project, called URBEX. The focus of that programme was on the spatial dimensions of social exclusion and modes of integration in six European countries, 11 cities (except one case, we focused on two cities per country) and 22 neighbourhoods (two per city). Comparisons were based on over a thousand interviews and other sources. Following classic work done by Polanyi (1944), we distinguished between three modes of economic integration, the first being the welfare state, with a focus on the character and level of redistribution in a country through welfare and unemployment benefits, income taxes and minimum income levels, social housing, individual rent subsidies, education and health care. These condition the financial, housing and health care positions of people. The second mode of integration is through the labour market (‘market exchange’), which is also dependent on urban economic histories of cities and development paths, as well as on regulations with regard to labour market entry or exit. Finally, a mode of integration through social networks and reciprocity relations was distinguished, which also conditions opportunities to get attached to the wider society.

The welfare state type is predominantly operating at the state level, but also has local city variants, depending on the type of government and governance at local level. Economic opportunities merely manifest themselves at the metropolitan level. Social networks are assumed to vary at the neighbourhood level in particular.

This is not the right place to go into a wide range of interesting outcomes of the study (for those who are interested, see Musterd et al., 2006), but some of the results deserve brief attention. A crucial finding, which is described in detail, supports Wacquant’s findings that there is more difference than commonality between the various local contexts. We found neighbourhoods in contexts where integration was supported by strong welfare states, well‐functioning labour markets and strong local social support networks (Hoogvliet, Rotterdam); neighbourhoods where the welfare state was still trying to redistribute affluence, but where the labour market failed; however, where local social networks did offer opportunities (St Pauli, Hamburg) or cases where local social networks hardly offered support (La Courneuve, Paris). We also found examples of deprived neighbourhoods, where the role of the state was almost absent, but where the labour market still offered chances (Pool Farm, Birmingham).

Incidentally, we even found examples of neighbourhoods that come close to the experiences in the black ghetto in the USA, since there appeared to be no welfare state intervention, no labour market opportunities and no local support networks (Scampia, Naples). Another interesting finding was that local social networks did not function for all categories of households in a neighbourhood in the same way. In some neighbourhoods the networks functioned for single mothers, but neither for immigrants nor for native males (Osdorp, Amsterdam); in other neighbourhoods networks helped for single mothers and native males, but not for immigrants (Neukölln, Berlin); etc. This shows that the differentiation is not only context related, but also category specific.

I noticed that Urban Outcasts pays ample attention to the welfare state and to labour market opportunities, as well as to life in the ghetto and banlieues, but there seems to be a relative lack of focus on the role of local social networks and reciprocity relations, whereas it is the interrelation between all of these that shapes the level of urban marginality.

Having said that, the author is highly aware of the impact of different contexts. This could for example be derived from his interpretation of the fact that the territorial stigmatisation weighs more heavily upon the residents of the declining French banlieues than on their counterparts in America’s dark ghetto, even though the latter is much more desolate and oppressive, as Wacquant argues. He refers, among other things, to the French ideology of unitarist citizenship and open participation in the national community. I think this interpretation may be generalised a bit further. In several European research projects we learned that, surprisingly, the more states are characterised by a focus on redistribution, full societal participation of all citizens and on social equality, the stronger the debates on social and spatial segregation and integration are. The implication is that in cities like Amsterdam and Helsinki firmer discussions on rising levels of segregation (which hardly exists in international comparative perspective) can be found than in state contexts that are characterised by much more liberal and unequal regimes.

Differentiation between cities

Wacquant convincingly argues and explains why the socio‐spatial formations of the black ghettos differ so much from the declining French banlieues. He describes that in the situation of the Black Belt it is first race, then class positions, as well as a lack of urban policies, that produced exclusionary social closure. In the French case, more specifically the Red Belt, it is first class, then ethnic origin, partly attenuated by the state, that produced urban marginalisation. I agree with the author that difference is a stronger character of advanced marginality than similarity. However, it still may help to search for similarities, or at least more moderate differences, within the European context. If we combine the insights about differences and about similarities, we may be able to find more support for political strategies that could help tackle urban marginality.

Where he contrasts the homogeneous black ghetto, forced to develop its own institutions in response to failure of the state, with the heterogeneous French banlieues, where we can find a strong presence of public institutions and state interventions that try to mitigate social isolation, Wacquant’s findings can easily be generalised to a large number of other European contexts. This can be illustrated with a comparison between the black ghetto of Chicago, where, in 1980, over two‐thirds of the city’s 1.2 million blacks lived in homogeneous tracts with over 95 per cent blacks, and immigrant concentrations in Amsterdam, where in 2006 40 per cent of the population was labelled as immigrant from non‐Western origin, and only 17 per cent of these immigrants were living in—still heterogeneous—concentrations with at least 75 per cent non‐Western immigrants. A negligible share of less than 0.5 per cent of all non‐Western immigrants are living in concentrations with at least 90 per cent immigrants; and since concentrations were constructed starting from six digit postcode areas, these concentrations even include very small areas (see Figure 1). Would we try to approximate a comparison between ‘black’ populations, and select those residents in Amsterdam who originate from Surinam and the Antilles, which is not a really accurate approximation because many Surinamese are originally of Hindustani descent, the comparison is even more striking. Roughly 10 per cent of the population of Amsterdam belongs to that category, yet slightly over 3 per cent of them are living in a concentration of at least 50 per cent Surinamese/Antilleans.

Figure 1 Concentrations of non‐Western immigrants where at least 75 per cent of the population is an immigrant of non‐Western origin; 17 per cent of all immigrants of non‐Western origin are living in these concentrations; Amsterdam, 2006.

As argued in the section before, it is wise to point at crucial differences between welfare states and their impact upon urban marginality. However, here too it makes sense to investigate the different situations within a welfare state because that offers insight in the impact of other dimensions as well. This was not really possible in Urban Outcasts, since the predominant focus was on two states and one city per state. However, cities are not similarly developing, even if they are embedded in the same welfare state or are exposed to the same sort of economic restructuring. This can only become clear if more cities within a welfare state are being compared. Then it will become clear that some cities do better than others in terms of avoiding urban marginality. In the aforementioned European comparison it could be shown that cities with a development history that gave them a relatively stronger service sector oriented profile, had relatively less social problems than cities with a relatively strong manufacturing profile (compare Amsterdam with Rotterdam; Milan with Naples; London with Birmingham; Brussels with Antwerp).

Neighbourhood targeting

In Urban Outcasts the focus of attention is, as in many other studies, on neighbourhoods or city districts that are characterised by various types and degrees of urban marginality; these areas run from the institutionalised black ghetto to the heterogeneous banlieues. The ghetto is the most extreme and also unique in the sense that it is characterised by exclusionary social closure, in which a kind of city‐in‐the‐city has developed with its own institutional structure and where interaction with the outside world is the exception rather than the rule.

Although few urban researchers do so, in my view it makes sense to raise the fundamental question why there should be such a focus on the local neighbourhood? This question has a research component and a policy component. I do not object to a research focus, because we have to do research to figure out whether it makes sense to target neighbourhoods. But on the basis of research outcomes so far I already have some doubts about the value of policy strategies that are particularly targeted at local areas, neighbourhoods or city districts. While addressing this general issue I also comment upon Wacquant’s view on neighbourhood effect research (2008, p. 284). I will explain that such research is vital for the judgment whether an area targeting intervention strategy may or may not help and that it is far from de‐politicised, as the author argues.

The strongest, if not the, argument for an area‐based intervention strategy aimed at reducing social marginality would be that the concentration of poverty in an area creates extra negative effects on top of the sum of individual social marginality that is experienced in these areas. This is called the neighbourhood effect. It is in the work by Wilson (1987) and Massey and Denton (1993) where we find strong support for the view that neighbourhood effects exist. Massey and Denton even argued that segregation is the most important cause for further segregation, and Wilson pointed at negative socialisation processes in the black ghetto due to a loss of the middle‐class black to suburban areas. Others have pointed at the quality of local social networks and to stigmatisation as dimensions that would indeed produce extra negative weight to the neighbourhoods. If there were evident neighbourhood effects, there would be good reasons for area‐based interventions, because then a change of population composition in the area could already result in positive effects. However, before such an area‐targeted strategy is applied, we first have to know whether the neighbourhood effects really occur. This is especially a relevant question in the European context, where the concentration of urban marginality is much more moderate, and where many welfare states so far have been able to provide essential services and resources for those who find themselves in a marginal position.

We have only just begun to do research aimed at unravelling neighbourhood effects. What is needed is in‐depth qualitative research, combined with large‐scale longitudinal quantitative research, driven by politically relevant questions—in fact the questions Urban Outcasts is dealing with—and then see whether an area‐targeting is helpful. I recall that area targeting, the assignment of ‘problematic’ neighbourhoods, also has risky sides, which are partly accurately described in the book. Journalists, politicians and intellectuals will all contribute to the further stigmatisation of the area when it is assigned as a problematic area. In addition, a policy of neighbourhood‐based targeting of social marginality implies per definition a selective policy, since there will also be many problems outside the neighbourhood, again especially in the European context, where poverty is much less concentrated compared to the US situation; if state intervention, in such circumstances, will be directed to only a subset of urban neighbourhoods, which is currently a major line of thinking in almost all European countries, then these policy interventions are missing substantial proportions of those who are in need of extra support. We calculated that the current Dutch 40 neighbourhood policy strategy implemented by the state, which had as objective the reduction of problems of marginality and liveability, only reached at the maximum 8 per cent of the marginalised population; a similar analysis in Sweden revealed that their area‐based policies only reached 4 per cent of poor households. This is an argument to abolish area‐based initiatives. However, a political counter‐argument is and was that the problems in these neighbourhoods not only cumulate (this still would not require area‐based policies, since sector policies across the country would also cover the different sector problems in these neighbourhoods) but that the concentration of poverty in the areas would create extra negative effects.

Based on these kinds of political debates, it makes a lot of sense to me to evaluate these kinds of assumptions and—when the suitable individual longitudinal and geographical accurate data are available—a helpful contribution to the discourse could be delivered by carrying out these complicated analyses. Even though these research projects require some technical insights, that does not make them apolitical or ‘objective’ analyses. Yet still they may help to fuel the debate. I am aware of the methodological complications and self‐selection effects that frustrate many neighbourhood effect analyses; I am also aware of the risk to de‐politicise urban research when neighbourhood effect studies take the form of contextual or ecological studies, disconnected from political debate. Yet, these problems can be overcome to a large extent as we have shown in analyses of Swedish longitudinal data of unprecedented quality (Andersson et al., 2007; Galster et al., 2007). Although we could not dig deep in the mechanisms of exclusion—that would require in‐depth qualitative research of the type Wacquant has done—we were able to apply individual longitudinal information for the entire population over a long period of time, including the richest individual and geographical information one can imagine, allowing for practically all analyses and controls people ask for in the most critical debates in which the elimination of neighbourhood effects is central. Our findings so far reveal that neighbourhood effects are rather small in strong welfare state contexts, such as Sweden, although they were not absent. To what extent the effects that were found are a function of the media driven and wider political and public discourses remains to be seen.

Some final comments

I agree with the strong focus on ‘difference’ and on the role of the state. Wacquant states that effects of place are essentially effects of state projected onto the city (2008, p. 6). This may be true to a large extent, yet I would not rule out the potential impact of labour market access opportunities due to the historically grown economic conditions; neither would I rule out the potential impact of the segregated environment itself.

Although I appreciate the focus on institutional and structural mechanisms, such as the type of welfare regime, I wonder whether there is any place left for the role of parents and daily education in the realm of the household as an institution. This may sound ‘behaviourist’ to Wacquant, but there are examples of very strong welfare states that have done almost everything the author is asking for in the final part of the book, which are characterised by a huge level of redistribution, where housing is of high quality and available to everyone, where social benefit systems are extremely general and generous, where no one in fact lives in poverty, where state intervention is omni‐present, where the labour market offers plenty of jobs, but where there still are serious problems. I am aware of the fact that these problems are relative problems and that a comparison between these neighbourhoods and the black ghetto of Chicago would perhaps be ridiculous. But isn’t there also a tiny little role in the play for the individual him/herself?

Having said all this, I found the book highly stimulating and a trigger for further comparison, also within Europe and perhaps other continents. There are many questions to be answered still. What are the basic backgrounds for differences between semi‐high‐rise poverty neighbourhoods in other European cities versus those in the French banlieues? Why do we see so much turmoil in banlieues and so little in Scandinavian cities? Is a stronger developed corporatism in France perhaps a barrier for access to the labour market of young immigrants, even of higher educated young immigrants? How about the role of the police?

In some European contexts the relationship between young immigrants and the police is rather good, in the sense that the police, even of the large cities, know who is involved in processes that are regarded to have negative effects upon the liveability in some neighbourhoods. In the French banlieues there seems to be more repression and a more hostile relation between the parties. What is the impact of these differences in relationships? Finally, we will have to know more about the dynamic, with regard to individuals and with regard to the residential areas. In many European cities, concentrations of immigrant populations appear to be unstable, due to housing career processes, some of which appear to be very comparable with processes we see with inhabitants who are not labelled as recent immigrants. It seems helpful to know more about these processes, because it could provide other images, other discourses, and finally, other realities in the sphere of urban marginality.