Excluded Places: The Interaction Between Segregation, Urban Decay and Deprived Neighbourhoods

In the research literature deprived urban neighbourhoods are understood largely as spatially concentrated pockets of poverty and their emergence is explained as a result of increasing social inequality in the cities. There is evidence, however, to indicate that the relationship between the general social and economic development of cities and the emergence of deprived neighbourhoods is not so simple. This article refers to studies that show how self-perpetuating processes of social and physical decay occur in these areas and have a strong and separate importance for deprivation and segregation. The character of such processes is illustrated with empirical evidence based on a Danish study of 500 deprived social housing estates. It is argued that a new understanding of deprived neighbourhoods is required and that it is appropriate to regard them as "excluded places" that become increasingly isolated from the rest of the city.