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URBAN POVERTY AND THE UNDERCLASS URBAN POVERTY AND THE UNDERCLASS A READER Edited by Enzo Mingione 1996 Contents List of Figures vii List of Maps ix List of Tables X ... Preface Xlll Part I What is ,-,an Poverty 1 1 Urban Poverty in the Advanced Industrial World: Concepts, Analysis and Debates 3 Enzo Mingione 2 Downdrift: Provoking Agents and Symptom-formation Factors in the Process of Impoverishment 41 Giuseppe Micheli 3 Service Employment Regimes and the New Inequality 64 Saskia Sassen 4 The Excluded and the Homeless: the Social Construction of the Fight Against Poverty in Europe a3 Antonio Tosi 5 Culture, Politics and National Discourses of the New Urban Poverty 105 Hilary Silver vi Contents Part I1 The Underclass Debate in a Comparative 139 Approach: Ethnicity, Class and Culture 6 From ‘Underclass’ to ‘Undercaste’: Some Observations About the Future of the Post-industrial Economy and its Major Victims 141 Herbert J. Gans 7 A Note on Interpreting American Poverty 153 Norman Fainstein 8 Dangerous Classes: Neglected Aspects of the Underclass Debate 160 Lydia Morris 9 Space and Race in the Post-Fordist City: the Outcast Ghetto and Advanced Homelessness in the United States Today 176 Peter Marcuse 10 Minorities in Global Cities: New York and Los Angeles 217 John Logan, Richard D. Alba and Thomas L. McNulty 11 Red Belt, Black Belt: Racial Division, Class Inequality and the State in the French Urban Periphery and the American Ghetto 234 Loac J. D. Wacquant Part 111 The Poor in Europe: Marginality, 275 Exclusion and Welfare 12 Social and Economic Change in Contemporary Britain: the Emergence of an Urban Underclass? 277 Nick Buck 13 The Social Morphology of the New Urban Poor in a Wealthy Italian City: the Case of Milan 299 Francesca Zajczyk 14 Exclusion from Work and the Impoverishment Processes in Naples 325 Enrica Morlicchio 15 Urban Poverty in Germany: a Comparative Analysis of the Profile of the Poor in Stuttgart and Berlin 343 Hartmut Haussermann and Yuri Kazepov 16 Conclusion 370 Enzo Mingione Bibliography 384 Index 422 Figures 1.1 The social transition hypothesis: features of change 16 1.2 Models and variants of welfare systems 21 2.1 Chronicity as: (a) a non-linear trajectory on the wellbeing-invested resources plane, and (b) fluctuation over time of the state of need 50 2.2 Modifications to trajectories due to: (a) intensification of initial shock, and (b) structural reduction in the usable investment surplus 52 9.1 A model of the process of victimization 206 12.1 Long-term unemployed and inactive households 289 13.1 Resident population of Milan and its province 302 13.2 Resident population by sex and age 303 13.3 Number of members per family in Milan, 1981 and 1991 304 13.4 Social assistance recipients (UAD and SAM-Caritas) and total Milanese residents by area of birth (percentage) 309 13.5 Social assistance recipients (UAD) with imprisonment exveriences bv acre and area of birth (Dercentacre) 31 1 I" \1 "1 ... vm List of FigureJ 15.1 Households dependent on social assistance (HLU) in Stuttgart, according to the main cause of the condition of need 354 15.2 Households dependent on social assistance in Berlin, according to the main cause of the condition of need 360 16.1 Production of areas of social exclusion in general and also independently of individual downdrift caused by negative events within different social contexts 379 9.1 The distribution of the black non-Hispanic population in New York City 184 9.2 The distribution of the white population in New York City 185 9.3 The distribution of the Asian population in New York City 186 13.1 Municipality of Milan: location of hostels and working-class housing; concentration of minors in need of assistance 307 14.1 The neighbourhoods of Naples 336 15.1 Stuttgart: social-assistance-dependent (HLU) persons as a percentage of the resident population, 1992 356 15.2 Berlin: social-assistance-dependent (HLU) persons as a percentage of the resident population, 1992 362 Tables 1.1 Population under the poverty line taken as 40 per cent of the median income in the early 1980s 24 1.2 Overall unemployment rate (1970-1990) and long- term unemployment rate (1975-1989) as a percentage of the total labour force 25 1.3 Percentage of all poor households lifted out of poverty by tax and transfer programmes 35 1.4 Trends in poverty rates in New York City and Los Angeles County 40 2.1 Twenty predictors of specific criticalness 48 2.2 Strategies for dealing with a crisis according to social segment of population 55 5.1 National comparison of ideological influences on new poverty discourses 110 7.1 Economic inequality in the United States, 1979-1993 157 9.1 Indices of segregation for major US cities 20 1 10.1 The racial and ethnic composition of the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, 1980 and 1990 218 List of Tables xi 10.2 Indicators of socio-economic status of racial and ethnic group members in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, 1990 22 1 10.3 Economic sectors in which various racial/ethnic groups are over-represented as owners (or as owners and workers), New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas in 1980 223 10.4 Median income (in dollars) of census tracts where the average group member lives, New York and Los Angeles metropolitan regions in 1980 226 10.5 Estimated median income (in dollars) of place of residence for racial/ethnic group members with given characteristics, New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, in 1980 229 12.1 Household activity status by household type, 1993 (for households with reference person aged 16-59) 286 12.2 Households in poverty, that is, below 50 per cent of the median equivalent income (working-age households only) 288 12.3 Change in household inactivity rates by household type, 1990-1993 (for households with reference person aged 16-59) 290 12.4 Logistic regression on probability long-term unemployed or economically inactive, 1989-1993 292 13.1 Loneliness rate by sex and age (percentage) 304 13.2 Social assistance recipients (UAD, SAM-Caritas, RN) by age 308 13.3 Social assistance recipients (UAD, SAM, RN) by sex 309 13.4 Social assistance recipients (UAD and SAM-Caritas) by job condition and age (percentage) 31 1 15.1 Unemployment rates in Germany (new and old Lunder) 1990-1994 by sex (year average) 347 15.2 Labour market policy effects on the labour force in the new Lunder (in thousands and percentages) 1990-1995 (year average) 348 xii List of Tables 15.3 People living below the 50 per cent income threshold in Germany (East and West), 1990-1994 (percentage of the population) 350 15.4 Persons depending upon social assistance (HLU) as a percentage of the resident population, western and eastern Lander, 1990-1992 35 1 Preface The story of this book begins in Los Angeles three days before the Rodney King riots in 1992, when many of its authors took part in a round-table conference on urban poverty at UGLA. In the US the debate on the urban underclass was then at its peak, and in Europe the question of social exclusion was emerging. Here the focus was particularly on the neighbourhoods in crisis and the decaying peripheries with their segregated minorities and immigrants, but also on poorly educated long-term unemployed young people and families in serious economic difficulty. AS SO often happens, after having discussed and analysed worsening ghettoization and racial tensions, the participants in the conference were taken by surprise by the violence of the riots. It confirmed the correctness of the analyses but was in fact unforeseeable. Anyone who studies poverty knows that even the most intolerable forms of hardship and discrimination are not synonymous with conflict and rioting. This gives rise to a first interpretative signpost, also applicable to this volume: the big cities of the industrialized countries are to a growing extent factories of heightened social privation, often concentrated among discriminated social groups segregated in decaying areas, the effects of which cannot be predicted either in the short run or, even less so, in the long run. The contributions to the UCLA round table, supplemented by a few other articles, were published in a special issue of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in 1993. However, we held the xiv Preface debate to be of such importance as to merit a practically new and updated publication. Apart from Herbert Gans and Loic Wacquant, the contributors to the special issue - Fainstein, Marcuse, Mingione, Morlicchio, Morris and Silver - have all written entirely new chapters for this book. At its hub lies a problem that is crucial for the understanding of contemporary societies: the existence of a growing area of great social privation, even in the opulent societies, and its increasing concen- tration and radicalization in the big cities, in certain decaying neighbourhoods and to the detriment of disadvantaged groups such as minorities and immigrants. The numbers and percentages involved or the rising trend are in themselves not so important as the fact that an important qualitative transformation is firmly believed to be taking place. For example, with regard to Italy, Nicola Negri and Chiara Saracen0 (Lepolitiche contro la poverta in Ztalia, Bologna, I1 Mulino, 1996) have analysed the most recent data elaborated by the Government Commission on Poverty for the years 1993 and 1994. They note that there was only a slight increase in those under the poverty line but big variations in the economic condition of different typologies of poor people.
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