Abstract

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are produced by the ongoing fragmentation of wage labor relation­ship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighborhoods from the national and global economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison of the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century’s turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of “advanced marginality”—territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of “place,” and the loss of a hinterland—and draws out their implications for the formation of the “precariat” in postindustrial societies.