The American ghetto, the British inner city, and the French urban periphery are widely known, to outsiders and insiders alike, as the "problem districts," the "no-go areas," the "wild" precincts of their metropolis --territories of deprivation, dereliction, and danger to be shunned and feared. But the monochrome portraits, drawn from afar and from above, of the destitute families, dishonoured minorities, and disenfranchised immigrants who dwell in them hide the varied social structures, strategies, and experiences of the precarious fractions of the new urban proletariat emerging in advanced societies. Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, this book takes the reader inside the black ghetto of inner Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of outer Paris to discover that urban marginality is not cut of the same cloth everywhere. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loic Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due, not to the emergence of an "underclass," but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of quarters of "exclusion" does not herald the formation of ghettos, but stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass joblessness, the casualization of work, and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated. This reveals that neighborhoods of urban relegation assume a range of functions --as reservoirs of low-skill labour, warehouses for surplus populations, or spatial containers for undesirable social categories and activities-- depending on the history and shape of urban relations and on the degree and type of state penetration. Comparing the US "Black Belt" with the French "Red Belt" demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation of class, race, and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also points to the crystallization of a new regime of marginality fueled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the retrenchment of the social state, and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom of identity and claims-making. Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence, and street violence resurging in unison in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this bold book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship at century's dawn.

Loic Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie europeenne-Paris.