Revisiting territories of relegation

In the post-industrial city, relegation takes the form of real or imaginary consignment to distinctive socio-spatial formations referred to as 'inner cities', 'ghettos', 'enclaves', 'no-go areas', 'problem districts', or simply 'rough neighbourhoods'. In this chapter, I revisit the cross-continental sociology of 'advanced marginality' I pursued in Urban outcasts to tease out its broader lessons for our understanding of the tangled nexus of symbolic, social, and physical space in the polarising metropolis at century's threshold in particular, and for bringing the core principles of Bourdieu's sociology to bear on comparative urban studies in general.