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This book demonstrates how the various legal efforts employed to eradicate global urban poverty also play a significant role in shaping it.Urban poverty has been widely examined as a social problem that requires attention and social commitment. Law is often seen as both an important contributor to the problem as well as a source of crucial tools to overcome it. In spite of this, however, poverty is surprisingly disregarded within legal scholarship. This book counters this by drawing on legal theory, legal history, and legal geography to inquire how urban poverty is made visible and invisible as a problem across global cities. More specifically, it investigates the mechanisms and networks through which global urban poverty has been conceptually and materially shaped in a way that fits the remit of global corporate philanthropy and the development aid agenda. By following law's circuitous interactions with poverty knowledge and antipoverty interventions, the book demonstrates how it plays a historical role in making poverty seen, known, and remedied. As a result, the book argues, law consolidates a stable image of poverty as an essential ‘problem'– to be uniformly found worldwide and so reasonably fixable with the appropriate legal reforms. Taking poverty to be a fundamental manifestation of social injustice, the book thus raises key questions about the role of law in the achievement of social justice.This innovative and insightful account of the relationship between law and poverty will appeal to scholars in critical and socio-legal studies, as well as others working in poverty studies, urban studies, development studies, geography, sociology, and social policy.

The contributors respond to the absence of critical debate surrounding the ways in which spaces of the city do not merely contain, but also constitute, urban poverty. The volume explores how the spaces of the city actively produce and reproduce urban poverty.

Baltimore was once a vibrant manufacturing town, but today, with factory closings and steady job loss since the 1970s, it is home to some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in America. The Hero's Fight provides an intimate look at the effects of deindustrialization on the lives of Baltimore's urban poor, and sheds critical light on the unintended consequences of welfare policy on our most vulnerable communities.Drawing on her own uniquely immersive brand of fieldwork, conducted over the course of a decade in the neighborhoods of West Baltimore, Patricia Fernández-Kelly tells the stories of people like D. B. Wilson, Big Floyd, Towanda, and others whom the American welfare state treats with a mixture of contempt and pity—what Fernández-Kelly calls “ambivalent benevolence.” She shows how growing up poor in the richest nation in the world involves daily interactions with agents of the state, an experience that differs significantly from that of more affluent populations. While ordinary Americans are treated as citizens and consumers, deprived and racially segregated populations are seen as objects of surveillance, containment, and punishment. Fernández-Kelly provides new insights into such topics as globalization and its effects on industrial decline and employment, the changing meanings of masculinity and femininity among the poor, social and cultural capital in poor neighborhoods, and the unique roles played by religion and entrepreneurship in destitute communities.Blending compelling portraits with in-depth scholarly analysis, The Hero's Fight explores how the welfare state contributes to the perpetuation of urban poverty in America.

What do we know about the urban impoverished areas of the world and the living environment of its inhabitants? How did the urban poor cope with their surroundings? How did they interpret and adopt urban space in order to fight against their position at the periphery of society? This volume takes up these questions and investigates how far approaches of cultural sciences can contribute to overcome the »exoticization of the ghetto« (Loïc Wacquant) and instead to look at the heterogeneity and individuality behind the facades. It opens new perspectives for the research of poverty and inequalities that do not stop at collective categories.

Cities are perhaps one of humanity's most complex creations, never finished, never definitive. They are like a journey that never ends. Their evolution is determined by their ascent into greatness or their descent into decline. They are the past, the p

In this ground-breaking study, Sophie Body-Gendrot provides a comparative analysis of the growing problem of new forms of poverty and social marginalisation in contemporary advanced societies.

Over the last two decades'poverty'has moved centrestage as an issue within the social sciences. This volume, edited by one of Europe's foremost sociologists, aims to assess the debates surrounding poverty and the responses to it, exploring the ways in which the various socio-political systems and welfarist regimes are being radically transformed. The essays examine how such change is effected by failing welfare programmes and enervating social structures such as family and community which once would have provided mechanisms of social stability. The first part of the book provides reflections on urban poverty; the second part discusses the widely debated idea of an'underclass'and its meanings in Europe and in the USA, and the final part draws on concrete empirical analyses to examine the patterns of poverty thoughout Western Europe. This volume will be of first-rate importance to all serious students of politics, sociology, geography, public policy, youth and community studies, social policy and American studies.