Loïc Wacquant: why the ghetto is not an accident

Loïc Wacquant argues that the ghetto is neither an accident nor a leftover of poverty, but a form of organising space produced by the market and the state. In Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (2008; French edition 2006), the French sociologist compares the Black ghetto of Chicago with the banlieues of the Paris periphery to explain what he calls advanced marginality: the exclusion characteristic of post-industrial cities, which combines economic, social and political factors and which the neoliberal state has turned into a new and lasting form of poverty.

Advanced marginality grows out of deindustrialisation and the collapse of traditional urban economies. Wacquant insists that it is not a residual phenomenon, destined to disappear with growth, but a structural feature of advanced capitalist cities. The fragmentation of the working class and the disappearance of industrial jobs left whole neighbourhoods unable to join the formal economy, and unemployment, precarity and violence concentrate in them. Unlike the poverty of earlier eras, this one is not cured by the next phase of the economic cycle.

American ghetto and French banlieue

His comparison introduces a key distinction. In the United States, the communal ghetto of the mid-twentieth century — segregated by race but with its own institutions, shops and middle class — became from the 1970s a hyperghetto: a territory abandoned by capital and institutions, where only the poorest remain. The French banlieues are not ghettos in that sense: Wacquant calls them anti-ghettos, because their population is heterogeneous in origin and class, and their marginality stems from the dissolution of the old working-class territories under mass unemployment and precarious work, with ethnic and economic exclusion intertwined.

Hence his critique of the simplistic view that equates the American ghetto with the European banlieue. That equation ignores the historical particularities of each context: in the United States marginality is rooted in the history of racial segregation; in Europe the dominant factor is economic exclusion, which affects diverse groups. Understanding those differences matters because policies that work in one case fail in the other, and because the discourse of the ghetto applied to France feeds the territorial stigma that Wacquant sees as part of the problem.

The role of the state in marginalisation

The state is central to his analysis. In the United States and in Europe, neoliberal policies have combined disinvestment in public services with more policing, instead of attacking the structural causes of poverty. It is what Wacquant calls the shift from the social state to the penal state — and what Neil Smith, in another register, called the revanchist city: public intervention aimed at containing and controlling marginalised populations rather than integrating them.

Urban Outcasts thus offers a framework for understanding contemporary urban marginality: neoliberalism has generated new forms of exclusion and poverty, and the ghetto and the banlieue are two different answers, with different histories, to the same withdrawal of capital and the state. Reading them separately, as Wacquant asks, is the first step towards not repeating in one city the mistakes made in another.