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URBAN MARGINALITY AND THE STATE: THE PRODUCTION AND MANAGEMENT

OF PRECARITY IN THE CITY

An International Conference

Paris, France: 20-21 June 2012 Organisers: the International Network for the Study of

Advanced Urban Marginality,

Funded by The Leverhulme Trust

Venue : Collège de France, 3 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris

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This conference brings together urban scholars from several disciplines (sociology,

geography, social policy, anthropology and political science) - and representing 5

continents and 12 countries - to explore the history, structure, and experience of

marginality in varied urban settings, with a special focus on the manifold roles of the

state as both generator and manager of inequality and precarity in the city. How is the state implicated in the genesis and distribution of urban marginality across social and physical space? How do state policies aimed at poor urban districts and their residents influence the frequency, form, and intensity of precarity? How do state structures act to expand or curtail the objective and subjective implications of social insecurity in the metropolis? Inquiry into these questions

entails a methodical analysis of a number of key theoretical, empirical and political

issues, including (a) the changing global and national parameters for urban

development under post-1980s capitalism; (b) supranational, national and subnational

political strategies to influence the trajectory of urbanization; (c) the form and

function of social welfare states both historically and in the contemporary context of

fiscal crisis and regression, but also the gamut of other public policies impacting

urban poverty, including housing, educational, and penal policies; (d) changing

patterns of class and ethnic stratification in the context of widening intra-urban

disparity; (e) the concentration of social suffering in peripheral districts in which

symbolic defamation warps everyday social interaction, skews urban policy, and

curtails the capacity for collective action of residents; (f) and the emerging strategies

of resistance from below against social precarity.

Guiding this conference is collective conviction that we cannot grasp the

determinants, makeup, and implications of urban marginality today without (1)

investigating its many different national gyrations and local contexts; (2) elucidating

the role of the state in simultaneously generating and diminishing poverty, thus

affecting the fate of urban precariat from many sides. Correspondingly a comparative

and historical analysis of the relations of the state to urban marginality is (3) needed

to specify political possibilities available to reduce inequality, stem destitution, and

improve the prospects for social justice in the city.

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URBAN MARGINALITY AND THE STATE is made possible by the generous

support of The Leverhulme Trust’s International Network scheme.

Organizers: Tom Slater, Franck Poupeau, Virgílio Borges Pereira, Loïc Wacquant,

Justus Uitermark, Eduardo Marques, Alfredo Alietti, Kennosuke Tanaka.

The conference is FREE and open to all.

Participation requires registration by 1st June 2012.

Please register by e-mailing Mr. Paul Kirkness at

urbanoutcasts@gmail.com

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PRELIMINARY PROGRAM

Wednesday 20th June 2.00pm Welcome and Introduction (Tom Slater, University of Edinburgh)

2.15pm OPENING KEYNOTE LOÏC WACQUANT, University of California-Berkeley, Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique-Paris.

The state as producer of urban marginality

[3.30pm BREAK]

4.30-6.00pm 1) ETHNOGRAPHIES OF URBAN MARGINALITY Chair: Virgílio Borges Pereira, University of Porto What does the ethnographic craft teach us about the role of the state in shaping the life

chances of the urban precariat? What are the epistemological, theoretical and political

lessons to be learned from ethnographic research in marginal urban districts? How

does one link the minutiae of everyday experience and practices in neighborhoods of

relegation to the broad shifts in the macrostructures of the economy and polity?

4.30 JAVIER AUYERO, University of Texas at Austin The state of the poor

5.00 KATE SWANSON, San Diego State University From the streets of Guayaquil to the streets of New York: the ironies of “zero

tolerance” policing in the Americas

5.30 FRANCK POUPEAU, Cultures et Sociétés Urbaines (CNRS, UMR 7217) All along the (reflexive) watchtower: from “global ethnography” to multi-level

analysis

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Thursday 21st June 9.30-11.00am 2) URBAN MARGINALITY IN COMPARATIVE AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Chair: Justus Uitermark, Erasmus University, Rotterdam

How do processes of urban marginalization vary through time and across space?

From scholarship in a wide range of different urban contexts in Europe, the Americas

and Asia, what can we learn about struggles over the naming and framing of policy,

and over the distribution and appropriation of public goods in cities?

9.30 EDUARDO MARQUES, University of Sao Paolo Latin American metropolises in comparative and historical perspective

10.00 CATHARINA THÖRN, Gothenburg University “The Gaza Strip of Gothenburg”: advanced marginality and the politics of neoliberal

engineering

10.30 FULONG WU, University College London Marginalization in urban China: the role of the state

[11.00 BREAK]

11.30am-1.00pm 3) URBAN MARGINALITY, WELFARE REGIMES AND PENAL POLICIES Chair: Alfredo Alietti, University of Ferrara National states and their local extensions have long exerted a powerful influence over

the nature and scale of inequalities and the sociospatial distribution of poverty (for

example, through in/action in the realm of housing, education, health care and formal

and informal employment). Yet the degree to which the welfare state is a remedial or

generative force in respect of urban marginality varies widely across different

societies. To what extent does the state act as both (co)producer of and remedy for

urban marginality, and to what extent do its actions and policies (such as in criminal

justice policy) help to explain variations among countries and cities in levels of

deprivation, social inequality and urban dereliction?

11.30 SONIA ARBACI, University College London (Ethnic) residential segregation in European cities: are welfare regimes making a

difference?

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12.00 ROBERT FAIRBANKS, University of Chicago The Illinois prisoner re-entry imperative: reform or redistribution?

12.30 SUSAN PARNELL, University of Cape Town The key elements to constructing an urban welfare agenda for the Global South

2.30-3.30pm 4) MARGINAL ZONES AND THE STATE Chair: Kennosuke Tanaka, Hosei University, Japan The regime of urban marginality has given birth to a wide variety of spatial forms,

from stigmatised housing estates deeply penetrated by state agencies to isolated zones

which have seen the near-total withdrawal of the state. The purpose of this session is

to begin forging a conceptually and analytically rigorous approach towards explaining

these divergent forms and assessing the fate of the urban precariat residing in them.

2.30 TOM SLATER, University of Edinburgh, UK “Welfare ghettos”? The neighbourhood effects basis of punitive welfare reforms in

the UK

3.00 JÁNOS LÁDANYI, Corvinus University of Budapest Urban and rural ghettos in Hungary

[3.30pm BREAK] 4.00pm CLOSING KEYNOTE

TALJA BLOKLAND, Humboldt University Berlin

Mothers and morals in the making: African-American single mothers

negotiating the moral landscape of motherhood, care and child

behavior in the American ghetto

5.15pm CLOSE -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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ABSTRACTS LOÏC WACQUANT, University of California, Berkeley and Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris The state as producer of urban marginality

To grasp the form and dynamics of urban marginality in the advanced societies, we

must revoke the conventional conception of the state as an “ambulance” that rushes to

the scene of social problems or a “service counter” that delivers nostrums

downstream, after inequality and insecurity have set in. Instead, we must construe it

as a stratifying and classifying agency that acts upstream to determine the incidence,

persistence, intensity, and the social and spatial distributions of poverty by setting the

basic parameters of symbolic space, social space and physical space and by anchoring

the structural homologies between them. I mate insights from Pierre Bourdieu and

Gösta Esping-Andersen to sketch the ways in which the neoliberal Leviathan has both

produced and managed dispossession and dishonor in the neighborhoods of relegation

of the United States and Western Europe over the past three decades by the

simultaneous rolling out of restrictive social policy and expansive penal policy. JAVIER AUYERO, University of Texas at Austin The state of the poor

Based on 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a violence-ridden, low-income

district located in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, this article examines the

state’s presence at the urban margins and its relationships to widespread de-

pacification of poor people’s daily life. Contrary to descriptions of destitute urban

areas in the Americas as either governance voids deserted by the state or militarized

spaces firmly controlled by the state's iron fist, this article argues that law

enforcement in Buenos Aires' high-poverty zones is intermittent, selective, and

contradictory. By putting the state's fractured presence at the urban margins under the

ethnographic microscope, the article reveals its key role in the perpetuation of the

violence it is presumed to prevent.

KATE SWANSON, San Diego State University From the streets of Guayaquil to the streets of New York: the ironies of “zero

tolerance” policing in the Americas

Over the last fifteen years, indigenous Kisapincha from Andean Ecuador have used

rural-to-urban migration as a key strategy for overcoming diminishing agricultural

returns and to meet rising cash demands. Migrating to beg and sell on the streets of

the nation’s largest cities has enabled impoverished community members to pay for

their children’s educations and to improve their material conditions. Yet, as growing

poverty pushed increasing numbers into the urban informal sector, cities in Ecuador

responded by importing punitive neoliberal urban policies (such as “zero tolerance”

policing from New York City) to cleanse and sanitize the streets of informal workers,

beggars, street children, and other urban undesirables. In this paper, I argue that these

policies are highly problematic. For one, in nations with deeply entrenched racial and

social inequalities, they produce a particularly punitive city. Secondly, in response to

increasingly harsh urban policies, young Kisapincha have chosen to engage in a much

more dangerous strategy in order to get ahead: undocumented transnational migration

to New York City. Quite ironically then, the very same policies originally devised to

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cleanse the streets of New York City may have unwittingly resulted in pushing

undocumented, indigenous Ecuadorian migrants to New York City.

FRANCK POUPEAU, Cultures et Sociétés Urbaines (CNRS, UMR 7217) All along the (reflexive) watchtower. From “global ethnography” to multi-level

analysis

This presentation is an attempt to present an “epistemic reflexivity” upon the

fieldwork I realized in Bolivia from 2006 to 2010, where I studied inequalities of

access to water in urban contexts. I will expose the difficulties of investigating in

marginalized and peripheral parts of the city of El Alto: the ambivalence of my own

position led me to abandon provisionally the ethnographical approach to for a

plurality of methods: cartography, statistics and questionnaires. My project of “global

ethnography” finally turned into the elaboration of a multi-level model integrating not

only different scales (local, national, international, etc.) but also an original

conception of their articulation in the production of “global”.

EDUARDO MARQUES, University of Sao Paolo Latin American metropolises in comparative and historical perspective

Latin American cities represent a broad field for comparative studies. Traditionally,

however, the region was the subject matter for ample 'universalizing comparisons'

which used Latin American metropolises to exemplify broad processes or structures

such as in development theory, dependence theory or in Marxism. But is there really

something we should call the "Latin American city" in the sense of a universalizing

comparison? The development of comparisons which depart from a deep analysis of

the particularities of each city and at the same time contribute to broader theoretical

dialogues depends on the full consideration of the similarities and differences present

in the region. This paper aims at contributing to this task by discussing the

heterogeneities of Latin American metropolises. On one hand, the exercise involves

discussing differences in their historical formation processes – mainly two different

colonial projects occupying several geographical contexts, marked by diverse ethnic

presences, distinct state structures and policies, as well as quite heterogeneous

economic activities. On the other, the parallels include historical key processes – in

independence, during economic modernization in the 1930s, in the emergence of

authoritarian regimes since the 1930s and in the return to democracy after 1980.

These processes led to similarly high levels of urbanization and large agglomerations,

which house unequal and informal urban labor markets. Urban spaces are marked by

urban and housing precarity, low levels of public service provision and intense

segregation. Recently, these spaces have been transformed by intense demographic

changes, by heterogeneous religious and associated fields and by the dissemination of

urban violence.

CATHARINA THÖRN, Gothenburg University “The Gaza Strip of Gothenburg”: advanced marginality and the politics of neoliberal

engineering

In this paper I argue that Gothenburg, the second largest city in Sweden, has

responded to the economic crisis in the 1970-80s through a class remake of the city

that not only displace working class housing from its central parts but also privileges

and normalizes whiteness. Through an analysis of a particular case of displacement I

will reveal how this politics can be understood as a specific form of neoliberal urban

development in Gothenburg – a hybrid of Social democracy and neoliberalism that

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ends up in a neoliberal engineering. The case of Kvillebäcken (partly former

industrial land) shows how an area formerly defined as remote (even though spatially

central) became of economic interest during the remake of the central city. By an

imaginary redrawing of the city map that changed the boundaries for what is defined

as 'the central city', the local economic elite decided to exploit and invest in this area.

I will also argue that there are strong (post)colonial dimensions in this – the city

center expands over the river into an area mainly used by immigrant groups, but

which in official discourse is constructed in the terms of “an unexploited area”. This

discursive strategy also involved territorial stigmatization as it, in order to legitimize

its demolition, was officially defined ”the Gaza strip of Gothenburg” - a dangerous,

no-go area. Through a close cooperation between the municipal authorities and

private investors (as well as lawyers and police) a takeover of the area was possible

and the former users of the land who had invested money, resources and time was

displaced. Even though it was former industrial land it was by no means empty.

Instead it was an area with mosques, immigrant associations and small businesses -

functioning as the most central meeting point for people from the poor suburbs. Even

though the area is still under construction it is branded as a window for sustainable

urban development and the imagined new inhabitants of Kvillebäcken are portrayed

as the opposite of the former ones – white, middleclass, environmentally conscious,

healthy, proper - and as pioneers/saviors of this former wasteland. In conclusion I will

develop my arguments on neoliberal engineering in relation to advanced marginality

in Gothenburg.

FULONG WU, University College London Marginalization in urban China: the role of the state

This paper analyses the process of marginalization in China since it embarked on

market-oriented reform. We argue that the pattern of marginalization is built upon the

preconfigured social structure and its inequality under state socialism, namely outside

the core industrialized and organized state workplaces was a vast peripheral rural area

where the peasants had limited access to state welfare. This pattern of social

inequality has been ‘urbanized’ through fast rural to urban migration. We examine the

role of the state in defining the ‘right to the city’ in urban China. So, along with

globalizing Chinese cities and turning them into the world workshop, the peripheral

rural population becomes the mainstream workers. But their rights are seriously

constrained. Therefore, the marginal status of Chinese urban poor is not due to their

withdrawal from economic activities. But rather the marginalization process is caused

by their boarder claim for citizenship constrained by growth-oriented local

governments that favour capital and land-driven urban development. Finally the paper

discusses the manifestation of marginality in space, namely the lack of affordable

rental housing in accessible and industrialized urban area and the emergence of so-

called ‘urban villages’ as informal settlements. In these places, the provision of public

services is minimum, and private governance by villagers is the norm. Moreover,

state-led urban renewal and village demolition have led to the disappearance of

affordable rental housing, which pushed rural migrants into further peripheral areas.

SONIA ARBACI, University College London (Ethnic) residential segregation in European cities: are welfare regimes making a

difference?

This paper examines the relationship between welfare regimes and (ethnic) residential

segregation across 16 Western European countries until the mid-1990s, including for

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the first time Southern Europe. It investigates the ways in which the diverse housing

systems, embodied in wider welfare regimes, shape and reflect different principles of

stratification. Consequently, it reveals the different ways in which the resulting

mechanisms of differentiation crucially influence the scale and nature of patterns of

ethnic residential segregation, particularly among low-income and vulnerable groups.

Spatial and social dimensions of segregation are disentangled in each welfare/housing

regime (four ideal-typical clusters - social-democratic, corporatist, liberal, and

familiarist), as are their roots in the state-market relationship and entrenched

distributive arrangements.

The emphasis on welfare regimes, as an ideal-typical analytical tool, has proven

instrumental in building an overarching comparative framework to explore the large

diversity of patterns across European cities. It shows that the redistributive

arrangements embedded in the housing system and land supply are making the

difference. In each welfare cluster, the combination between tenure policies

(unitary/dualist systems) and modes of housing provision (promotion, production,

land supply), whilst reflecting different principles of stratification, shape different and

distinctive mechanisms of social and spatial differentiation, thus of segregation. This

study contributes to further expansion of the current European debate on production

of inequality, bearing on the renewed focus on the state-market nexus also in

segregation studies. It opens further investigative lines towards planning realms,

hardly regarded in segregation studies, reinforcing the importance of land in the social

and spatial division of urban societies.

ROBERT FAIRBANKS, University of Chicago The Illinois prisoner re-entry imperative: reform or redistribution?

The State of Illinois incarcerates more than 49,000 inmates annually, and 36,000 are

released each year. Two-thirds (roughly 25,000 annually) of this number return to just

five zip codes located on the West and South sides of Chicago, where black male

unemployment exceeds 45% even before ex felons return home. This paper explores

selective state measures by which policy and practitioner elites have responded to the

re-entry imperative in an era of unprecedented fiscal austerity. From George Bush’s

2008 Second Chance Act, to The 2009 Illinois Crime Reduction Act, to numerous

municipal policy and practice initiatives at the Cook County (Chicago) Jail, the re-

entry question operates across multiple scales. The paper maps the historical roots and

contemporary expansion of the re-entry imperative, in part by tracing the convergence

of disparate ideological positions and the formation of novel political coalitions

among policy elites. A central component of the Illinois re-entry initiative is the

Sheridan Correctional Center, a medium security prison housing 1700 inmates that is

devoted entirely to substance abuse treatment. Opened in 2004, Sheridan has been

designed and planned with an eye toward the pathways and channels to successful

community reintegration in urban contexts, both in terms of neighborhoods and social

service delivery systems. Using Sheridan as a site of ethnographic analysis, I explore

the ways in which drug and alcohol recovery and intensive monitoring of sobriety on

parole works as an ancillary modality of poverty management to resolve the prison

crisis and to reinvent welfare regimes in the 21st century.

SUSAN PARNELL, University of Cape Town The key elements to constructing an urban welfare agenda for the Global South

The paper is structured in three parts designed to explore the shifting terrain of city

scale poverty, redistribution and welfare in the rapidly evolving global urban

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landscape. To start, I review the imperative of having a pubic policy emphasis on

urban poverty, welfare and redistribution that takes cognisance of local histories

institutions, resources and social, economic and political realities. Recognising the

paucity of critical engagement with city scale debates on welfare and redistribution

(especially relative to the fairly well developed analysis of urban poverty), the second

part of the paper makes a case for engaging welfare at the city scale, especially in the

Global South where public policy debate is embryonic. The final and most substantial

section of the paper sets out an argument that welfare and redistribution would gain

from a more nuanced and reflective assessment in which the state may be one of

many welfare actors. If grounded in the experiences of cities of the South new urban

public policy formulations would of necessity consider contexts where fragile welfare

regimes are under threat, but contexts where the city is a site of increased and

innovative welfare provision.

TOM SLATER, University of Edinburgh, UK “Welfare ghettos”? The neighbourhood effects basis of punitive welfare reforms in

the UK

The “cottage industry” (Sampson et al, 2002) of neighbourhood effects research stems

from an understanding of society that adheres to one overarching assumption, that

“where you live affects your life chances”. The striking simplicity of this line of

thinking in a complex world has led to the emergence of analytic hegemony in urban

studies: neighbourhoods matter and shape the fate of their residents, therefore, urban

policies must be geared towards poor neighbourhoods, seen as incubators of social

dysfunction. This is now the dominant paradigm amongst policy elites, mainstream

urban scholars, journalists, and think tank researchers. In this paper I assess the

political implications of neighbourhood effects arguments by tracing the current

punitive welfare reforms taking place in the UK back to the emergence of the Centre

for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank, founded in 2004 by current Work and Pensions

Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith following his short visit to a deeply stigmatised district

of Glasgow in 2002. Despite wide-ranging social scientific evidence challenging the

punitive welfare reforms heavily influenced by the CSJ, a familiar litany of place-

based social pathologies (family breakdown, worklessness, idleness, anti-social

behaviour, personal responsibility, teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock childbirth,

welfare dependency) is relentlessly invoked by conservative politicians in a deliberate

activation of the neighbourhood effects thesis. A “broken society”, the catch-all

government ‘explanation’ for the English urban riots of 2011, is seen by political

elites as a creation of the welfare state; correspondingly, “mending our broken

society” has become the justification for massive welfare retraction and retrenchment,

with serious consequences for people living at the bottom of the class structure in

neighbourhoods of relegation.

JÁNOS LÁDANYI, Corvinus University of Budapest Urban and rural ghettos in Hungary

The pattern of ethnic ghettoization in Hungarian cities is in rapid change. The ethnic

ghettoes of the cities near to jobs are fragmented and replaced by a higher number of

scattered but more homogeneous ethnic ghettoes. Many Roma and non-Roma people

in long-term poverty are pushed out these cities. As a result parts of or entire villages

are ghettoized in increasing numbers, in fact, region-sized areas of the country have

become ghettoized. The spatial segregation of the poorest and most excluded parts of

the population cannot be analyzed in the context of conventional geographical

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inequalities within Budapest or conventional differences between urban and rural

areas any more. These structural advantages and disadvantages can only be discussed

in the context of Hungary’s entire social and settlement system.

TALJA BLOKLAND, Humboldt University Berlin Mothers and morals in the making: African American single mothers negotiating the

moral landscape of motherhood, care and child behavior in the American ghetto

This paper starts from the perspective that ghetto is a relational concept that develops

there where residents of severely marginalized areas leave their neighborhood and are

confronted with state institutions and their street level works in daily life. In

particular, it looks at the experiences of young single mothers who in various

institutional contexts (department of families and children, hospitals, schools and

juvenile court) negotiate the moral landscape of motherhood: how do their construct

their public identities as mothers what moral categories do they construct in relations

to the street workers with whom they deal as worthy and unworthy, and how do they

create congruence between these processes of making morals and the actual life

situation they face in their private lives? In doing so, this paper aims to show, first,

what treating ghetto as a relational concept means for research strategies and, second,

how making morals is a relational process as well, where discrepancies between a

public moral transcript and private practices of situational normalcy create tensions

and block possible resources for the women involved. Empirically, this paper draws

on a 2.5 year ethnographic research project in a college town in New England, USA