Misspeaking Truth to Power: A Geographical Perspective on the "Underclass" Fallacy

Underclass has become a defining concept of contemporary research on urban conditions and a pervasive feature of ongoing discussions of urban policy. The literature built around the concept, however, has been characterized by an empiricism that has been unable to withstand culture-of-poverty interpretations and by aspatial analysis that has failed to conceptualize many aspects of the problem. This paper argues that the isolated deprivation of the provides a more meaningful framework for studying contemporary urban problems. It operationalizes this framework using a measurement strategy that helps to identify metropolitan areas with significant neighborhood restructuring and hypothesizes the relation between the emergence of this impacted and structural changes in the economy, in particular, the intermediate outcome of changes played out in the process of metropolitan deconcentration. The results demonstrate the inability of aspatial analysis to account fully for changes in the ghetto during the 1970s.