Volume 33.

3 September 2009 848–53 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00923.x

Marginality, Again?!
TERESA P.R. CALDEIRA

Abstract
This essay critically engages with the book Urban Outcasts — A Comparative Sociology
of Advanced Marginality by Loïc Wacquant. In this book, studying poor neighborhoods
in the United States and France in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wacquant argues that
a new socio-economic configuration marked by dualization and polarization of the city
and of the class structure has been formed in these metropolises as a result of structural
shifts resulting from the breakdown of the Fordist regime and the recoiling of the welfare
state. He calls ‘advanced marginality’ the new regime marked by a new form of urban
poverty that makes part of the working classes ‘redundant’. This essay highlights the
similarities between Wacquant’s arguments and those of the theory of marginality of the
1960s and 1970s, which has been criticized and abandoned in Latin America. It also
interrogates Wacquant’s argument that advanced marginality is what will represent the
future of metropolises everywhere, by introducing the case of Brazilian peripheries and
asking questions about the increase of violence in poor neighborhoods.

Urban Outcasts — A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality is a provocative

book. It presents a comparative analysis of the American (Chicagoan) ghetto and the
French (Parisian) banlieue that indicates the shared roots of their transformations in the
1980s and 1990s and simultaneously highlights their substantially different social,
spatial and political dynamisms. On the basis of this analysis, Loïc Wacquant argues that
the ‘neighborhoods of relegation of the postindustrial metropolis’ (p. 247) point to the
emergence of a new ‘distinctive regime of urban poverty’ (p. 232) that makes a
significant part of the working classes ‘redundant’ (p. 266). He calls this regime
‘advanced marginality’. This language of marginality and redundancy is certainly not
new: it last flourished in the 1960s/70s in what was called the ‘marginality theory’. This
theory was highly criticized and vanished from academic references in the following
years. Its refashioning by Wacquant leads us to problematize the ‘novelty’ both of the
phenomenon and of the way to conceptualize it and opens space for comparison and
critique.
In Urban Outcasts, Wacquant argues that the recent deterioration in the
‘neighborhoods of relegation’ he studied both in France and in the United States is
associated with structural shifts in the socio-economic configuration of contemporary
advanced capitalist societies that have broken down the Fordist regime and generated
‘the deterioration and dispersion of basic conditions of employment, remuneration and
social insurance for all wage-earners save those in the most protected sectors’ (p. 266).
The new configuration is, according to Wacquant, marked by dualization and
polarization of the city and of the class structure (p. 24). It also has a crucial political
dimension. It is the result of the ‘recoiling of the social state’ that chooses to abandon the
areas in which the new poor live. In what amounts to a strong anti-neoliberal argument,

© 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell
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Debates and Developments 849

Wacquant concludes that a crucial explanation for the considerably worse conditions in
American ghettos compared to French banlieues is to be found in political action and the
role of the state and public policy. Finally, advanced marginality has an important spatial
dynamics. While in the past poverty would be more dispersed in the city, ‘advanced
marginality displays a distinct tendency to conglomerate in and coalesce around “hard
core”, “no-go” areas’ (p. 270).
Wacquant’s analysis focuses on new regimes of inequality and poverty in the
developed world. He demonstrates that the American ghetto and the French banlieue are
institutionally and historically different social entities and result from different logics.
He convincingly argues that the thesis of the convergence of these two types of socio-
spatial formation to the American model cannot be supported by available evidence.
However, they have a great deal in common. Wacquant insists that the forms of
marginality he describes are not a result of backwardness, but rather ‘an effect of the
uneven, disarticulating mutations of the most advanced sectors of Western economies’
(p. 232, original emphasis). They are ‘advanced’ both because they are rooted in the new
economy and because they stand ‘ahead of us: they are etched on the horizon of the
becoming of contemporary societies’ (p. 232, original emphasis). Although in most of
the book Wacquant articulates his arguments only in relation to France and the United
States, in the Postscript he claims that symptoms of advanced marginality are becoming
clear ‘everywhere’ (p. 286).
It is clear that Wacquant is analyzing new processes. Nevertheless, some of his
arguments are exactly the same as those used in the 1960s and 1970s by the authors who
developed the old theory of marginality. The most striking coincidence is the thesis that
‘a significant fraction of the working class has been made redundant and constitutes an
“absolute surplus population” that will likely never find stable work again . . . even
miraculous rates of growth would not suffice to absorb back into the workforce all those
who have been deproletarianized’ (p. 266, original emphasis). This is very nearly
identical to the thesis of authors such as José Nun (1969) and Anibal Quijano (1971),
who theorized about the appearance of a ‘marginal mass’ in the Latin American countries
that industrialized under a condition of dependency. In the same way as Wacquant, the
1960s/70s theory of marginality assumed that the societies that generated a ‘marginal
mass’ — this was the language then — were characterized by dualism. They would be
split between a modern capitalist sector and a marginal sector. This theory has been
repeatedly criticized. The main counter-argument was that the dualist argument made no
sense since the ‘irrelevant’ population excluded from the formal labor market was
nevertheless highly functional for the reproduction and expansion of capitalism (de
Oliveira, 1972; see also Kowarick, 1975 and Perlman, 1976). The population who
performed all types of badly paid tasks under uncertain conditions might be called
informal. But it was not marginal to the needs of the modern core.
Thus, very similar arguments now make their return to academic debate but,
ironically, to explain the fate of ‘advanced’ societies. It is interesting to observe that both
Wacquant’s arguments about contemporary advanced marginality and the Latin
American theory of marginality are based on a similar anxiety: the need to theorize
deviance from a standard. In both cases, the model is industrial capitalism in its Fordist
incarnation as developed in North Atlantic industrial societies. In the case of Latin
America’s marginality theory in the 1970s, the underdeveloped or dependent societies
deviated from the norm because their industrial and modern capitalist cores were small
and unable to absorb all the available workforce, forcing a significant part of it into the
condition of ‘irrelevance’. In Wacquant’s case, deviance from the Fordist model is
described as the historical process that takes it apart, unraveling the conditions for the
reproduction of a certain model of labor relations and working-class politics and culture.
What comes after Fordism is described in terms of loss. In both cases, there is a desire
for that ideal model. In the Latin American versions, the desire was for a complete
modern industrial capitalism, not a dependent one. Since the countries were
industrializing, there was hope. Some versions of marginality theory even attributed to

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850 Debate

the ‘marginal mass’ the role of the revolutionary class in situations of dependency. But
in Wacquant’s version, since what is described is a loss, nostalgia prevails: a certain
longing for the old times both of the effervescent American ghetto of the postwar period
and for the Communist working class banlieue of yesterday, where communal ties and a
sense of collective destiny supposedly prevailed.
Yet Wacquant insists on the newness of advanced marginality. What is revealed as new
in his strong and indignant descriptions is always negative: the massive scale of
contemporary inequality, deterioration, redundancy, precariousness, stigmatization,
impoverishment, violence and so on. Moreover, this new negative configuration is
presented not only as the present, but also as the future, as what stands ‘ahead of us’. But
readers of this book may wonder, as I did, what sustains this permanence? Are there not
other kinds of formations pointing in other directions that might be described in other
terms?
The sense that the new conditions of advanced marginality are enduring is partially
produced by the way in which Wacquant engages historical evidence in his book. His
historicization of the transformations in the Chicago ghetto and in the Parisian banlieue
is problematic, given the way he approaches the historicity of his data. His research was
done mostly during the period 1986–91. I can sympathize with his disclaimer in the
Postscript that academic research has its own timing and should not be measured by
journalistic standards of immediacy. Thus, I may accept his use of dated information and
bibliographic references. However, he does not construct his text in such a way as to
convey that he is talking about what happened two decades ago. He uses the
ethnographic present to frame his analysis, that ‘vague and essentially atemporal
moment’ whose usage has been extensively criticized by ethnographers since the early
1980s (see Fabian, 1983; Stocking, 1983). The use of the present tense to convey events
documented in the past has the effect of crystallizing their description in a kind of eternal
time that dehistoricizes them and makes them look like what continues to be. This is
arguably Wacquant’s intention, since he presents advanced marginality as the present and
the future and affirms in the Postscript that ‘the decade that has elapsed since the
completion of this research programme has largely confirmed its main findings and
validated the analytical blueprint of the new regime of marginality’ (p. 282, original
emphasis). However, he frustrates his readers twice. First, he does not cite additional
evidence to support his thesis of validation. Second, by writing in the ethnographic
present instead of in the past, he keeps his readers wondering about the meaning of
significant events that happened in the two decades that followed his fieldwork and that
might have affected the conditions he describes. Let me discuss one example. Wacquant
mentions that in 1990 there were 849 homicides in Chicago (p. 210). It is well-known
that homicide rates have gone down in the US since then: in 2007, the number of
homicides in Chicago was 468 according to FBI Crime Reports. This means that
homicide rates dropped by half during the time that separates the end of Wacquant’s
research and the present (from 30.49 per 100,000 population in 1990 to 15.68 in 2007).
Assuming that the vast majority of these homicides happened in the ghetto, one cannot
help wondering what this very significant decline meant for the everyday life of exactly
the places that are especially affected by violence. Are Wacquant’s descriptions of
deterioration and despair still accurate or do they reflect a particular moment in the
history of the ghetto and of the disarticulation of a system of class reproduction that
started to be rearticulated in other terms in subsequent years? What is the new local
dynamics in a context of diminishing violent crime rates?
Thus the question I posed above about the possibility that there may have been new
phenomena shaping the conditions of urban poverty. Two reasons may be suggested to
explain their absence in Wacquant’s description. First, they may have become clear after
1991. Second, they may not be describable in terms of the paradigm of class and racial
analysis put forward by Wacquant. Let me now bring the case of the Brazilian urban
peripheries to suggest another possibility of comparison that may talk back to his cases
and open other lines of inquiry.

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Debates and Developments 851

Brazilian urban peripheries have always been poor but heterogeneous. Although there
has been a tendency recently to identify peripheries in general with their poorest and
more precarious spaces, the favelas, peripheries are not favelas. Basically, what
distinguishes the two are claims to ownership of house lots. Although there is a complex
typology of illegal and irregular residence in São Paulo that I cannot discuss here, the
overwhelming point is that the majority of the residents of the peripheries have bought
the land where they built their houses and have claims to ownership. Residents of favelas
do not have claims to the ownership of the land, which typically has been invaded.1
Remarkably, in São Paulo homeownership is generally higher throughout the peripheries
than in the wealthy central districts. In many of the poorest neighborhoods, it is more
than 80%, a percentage that indicates that the ‘build-it-yourself’ process is probably the
main mechanism of engagement with the city. Moreover, although deindustrialization,
structural adjustment and the ‘recoiling of the social state’ have had serious
consequences in Brazil as well, worsening the levels of poverty and the inequality in the
distribution of wealth, the peripheries themselves as urban spaces have improved
significantly since the 1970s. The peripheries today have much better infrastructure and
their residents have much greater access to consumption markets, the media and
communication technologies, in spite of their poverty and of persistent unemployment
rates. However, the violence in everyday life is much more accentuated, making life feel
more difficult and unpredictable.2
One could argue that in the peripheries of Brazil, as in the American ghetto and the
French banlieue, the working classes have lost an old mode of reproduction, the full
meaning of a culture anchored on the value of labor, and even some of the basis on which
to anchor their sense of dignity. But this does not mean that other modes of reproduction
and sense of dignity cannot be built and that one should keep longing for the past model.
In fact, the ‘post-Fordist’ urban peripheries of São Paulo have shown exactly the
articulation of a new solid sense of citizenship rights brought about by the
democratization process. This new articulation not only erodes old patterns of class
subservience but also anchors a new sense of dignity on urban experience, claims of
homeownership, and democracy itself. The ‘redundants’ of Latin America became
organizers of social movements in the 1980s and 1990s, articulators of NGOs from the
1990s on, and rappers, artists and writers in the 2000s, people who use notions of rights
(rights to the city or human rights) to legitimate their public interventions and the
reconstitution of their identities, despite poverty, violence, stigmatization and abuse.
Thus, the disarticulation of an old mode of reproduction of the working class centered on
the value of labor was followed not by a void but rather by the emergence of several other
forms of organization and sociability. NGOs and associations of all sorts dot all the
peripheries and include a heterogeneous spectrum of organizations, from religious
organizations (especially Pentecostal), neighborhood associations and human rights
groups to groups engaged in organized crime, which have recently learned to express
themselves in the language of rights. It is true that the peripheries have been described by
their own residents as ‘spaces of despair’ and that the rates of homicide and police abuse
have been absurdly high for many years. However, it is also true that in most parts of the
peripheries of São Paulo murder rates have gone down significantly in the last few years
and that residents have been able to articulate powerful expressions to counter the images
of their own stigmatization and to denounce racism in a society that liked to believe in
racial democracy.
These expressions do not occur in any of the forms that could be recognized by Fordist
scripts. Nevertheless, they put together the residents of the peripheries. Especially
interesting are the artistic and cultural expressions such as rap, literature and video. They
appear unexpectedly but aggregate impressive numbers of people — such as the

1 For an extension of this contrast of favelas and peripheries and a critique of the tendency to reduce
complexity to the worse element, see Holson and Caldeira (2008).
2 For a description of these contradictory processes, see Caldeira (2000; 2006).

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852 Debate

hundreds of people who get together weekly in a distant part of the Southern Zone of the
city to read poetry in the headquarters of the NGO Cooperifa. If one observes the various
and common forms of association, one concludes that we are far away from the ‘state of
symbolic derangement afflicting the fringes and fissures of the recomposed social and
urban structure’ (p. 245, original emphasis) that Wacquant argues characterizes the
spaces of advanced marginality and that ‘accentuates the objective fragmentation of
today’s urban poor’ (ibid.). These are not people ‘deprived of a language, . . . through
which to conceive a collective destiny and to project alternative futures.’ (ibid., original
emphasis). Moreover, they do not resemble an amorphous ‘precariat’ that ‘remains in the
state of a simple conglomerate . . . made up of categories negatively defined by social
privation, material need and symbolic deficit’ and who would require ‘an immense,
specifically political work of aggregation and re-presentation . . . to accede to collective
existence and thus to collective action.’ (pp. 246–7, original emphasis). It is rather that
their language and collective existence is not given by trade unions, political parties, or
intellectuals who might be able to judge their proximity or distance from the ‘right’
parameter of class consciousness.
The urban peripheries of Brazil — like many other metropolises of Latin America
and the developing world — are spaces inscribed with contradictory experiences of
transformation, autoconstructed growth, class formation, status ambition, modern
consumption, land conflict, residential illegality, violence, citizenship mobilization and
constant recreation of their own representation. To reduce these complex processes to a
condition of marginality is to miss the strength of their inventiveness and the signs of
emergent articulations that take them (and us) beyond the entrapments of ‘advanced
marginality’.

Teresa P.R. Caldeira (tpcaldei@uci.edu), Department of City and Regional Planning,

University of California, Berkeley, 228 Wurster Hall #1850, Berkeley, CA 94720–1850, USA.

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Debates and Developments 853

Résumé
Ce texte examine sous un angle critique l’ouvrage de Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts –
A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Parias urbains – Ghettos,
banlieues, État). Dans son étude des quartiers pauvres aux États-Unis et en France entre
la fin des années 1980 et le début des années 1990, Wacquant affirme qu’une nouvelle
configuration socio-économique marquée par une dualisation et une polarisation de la
ville et de la structure de classe s’est formée dans ces métropoles du fait de
transformations structurelles issues de l’effondrement du système fordiste et du recul de
l’État-providence. Il désigne par ‘marginalité avancée’ le nouveau régime caractérisé
par une forme nouvelle de pauvreté urbaine qui rend ‘inutile’ une partie de la classe
ouvrière. Ce texte souligne les similarités entre les arguments de Wacquant et ceux de la
théorie de la marginalité, développée dans les années 1960–1970 puis critiquée et
abandonnée en Amérique latine. Il revient aussi sur l’argument de Wacquant selon
lequel, partout, la marginalité avancée constituera l’avenir des métropoles, en
présentant le cas de périphéries au Brésil et en posant la question de l’accroissement de
la violence dans les quartiers pauvres.

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