New Urban Poverty

The urban concentration of deprived masses is the basic mechanism for the reproduction of social disadvantage: space matters indeed. Although large areas of chronic rural poverty exist, especially in the less developed countries, it is the urban environment that has mostly attracted academic as well as political attention to poverty in industrialized countries. Moreover, it was in the urban context that the concept of absolute and relative poverty had been set as a universal standard by which to estimate the extension of the phenomenon. Social and economic transformations during the past few decades have led to the reemergence of severe forms of impoverishment in practically all cities of the industrialized world, helping to maintain this focus.