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’s the urban character that has mostly attracted the 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 to estimate the extension of the phenomena. Furthermore, the social and economic transformation of the last few decades has led to the reemergence of severe forms of impoverishment in practically all cities in the industrialized world helping to maintain this focus