Intrigues in a Slum House

Zhou Enlai tried but failed to protect Jack, and so in 1969, Jack and Yuan-tsung were evicted from their apartment and forced to live in a corner room at a slum house on Sheep Market Street. Most of their neighbors came from the urban underclass; among them were a retired prostitute, a semireformed thief, a laundress who doubled as a bed playmate to her employer, and an old witch who practiced black magic. They were purveyors of gossip and became new sources of information for Yuan-tsung. A Japanese woman named Noriko, punching bag to her Chinese husband, became Yuan-tsung’s best friend and played a key role in her fight against the Red Guards.

Urban Underclass

The term urban underclass is often invoked to describe the urban poor, and particularly those who have allegedly become detached from mainstream society. One recent example is China, where it has been claimed that marketization reforms and rapid economic growth have been accompanied by rising social inequality and new forms of urban poverty. Yet it is also important to note that the underclass has been a contested concept for over 140 years, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. Its members have been seen as a class below the working class, as a lumpenproletariat, or lower class, with allegedly different lifestyles and values. The concept has appealed to both Left and Right, to the former as those left behind by economic progress and technological advancement and to the latter as those with different values and behavior. The concept has also often been linked with theories of intergenerational continuities in experiences and behaviors. Drawing on older notions of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, it has been successively reinvented in the modern period. While various ideas appeared in the period before 1880, anxieties about a “social residuum” emerged in a more coherent form in the United Kingdom from 1880. Debates on the “unemployable” in the early 1900s were followed by those on the “social problem group” in the 1920s. The Eugenics Society played a critical role in propagating the concept as well as its successor, the influential, though equally flawed, concept of the “problem family” of the 1950s. In the United States, the 1960s were characterized by debates over the “culture of poverty,” while the 1970s in the United Kingdom saw discussion about a “cycle of deprivation” or “transmitted deprivation.” The equivalent concept for the 1980s was the “underclass,” initially in the United States and subsequently in the United Kingdom. “Social exclusion” originated in France, but it was taken up by New Labour in the United Kingdom from 1997, though continuities with the underclass discourse were also apparent in specific policies linked to Anti-Social Behavior and Family Intervention Projects. The final construction surveyed here is that of “troubled families,” proposed by the coalition government in 2011. Overall, then, the concept has been contested, and it has remained unproven, despite repeated attempts to demonstrate its empirical existence. For many social scientists, therefore, the concept is seen as socially constructed and with no empirical validity. However, despite this, the concept has a fascinating history, and it is the focus of this article.

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL AND INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS IN THE ALLEVIATION OF EXTREME POVERTY AND SPATIAL SEGREGATION OF ROMANI PEOPLE IN SZEGED

Even more emphasis is set on social capital in understanding, analyzing and planning poverty alleviation measures and policies. However, our understanding of the role of social capital in alleviating extreme poverty, enhancing social mobility and fighting spatial segregation, is still inadequate. Within the present study, we aim to examine and understand (1) the mechanisms that relate to social capital in the case of the segregated urban underclass and (2) the potential interventions for poverty alleviation concerning social capital. In order to examine the dynamics of poverty alleviation measures related to social capital, special attention is paid to the experiences of a cooperative network aimed at creating artificial bridging capital through the introduction of interpersonal relations locally between the middle class and underclass, the patronage network, which was initiated within a broader participatory action research (PAR) process. Our results show that bonding ties and related specific norms as tools for everyday survival easily overwrite system integration efforts for poverty alleviation and social mobility with long-term and uncertain benefits for the segregated urban underclass. In order to overcome this failure, social institutions should place more emphasis on developing meaningful interpersonal relations with the underclass since these might be able to provide personalized help, facilitation, and approximation of perspectives - all being vital for poverty alleviation and social mobility.

From the Classical Soup Kitchen to the Irish Famine

This chapter describes how the soup kitchen, based on an Elizabethan model but subsequently scaled up to meet the vast needs of a new urban underclass, became a standardized technology of relief by the middle of the nineteenth century. It returns to Alexis Soyer as well as a man called Count Rumford, who brought the soup kitchen into the modern age. Count Rumford's commitment to everyday reform generated a new word, “rumfordizing,” which meant improving and refining something in accordance with natural laws. In the 1790s he started to rumfordize the soup kitchen. With Rumford's help, the soup kitchen developed to meet the scale of need in urban areas, culminating in Alexis Soyer's “soup-shop of soup-shops” in Dublin. Rumford's vision of the soup kitchen, however, acted as a pivot between the classical and modern periods, before nutritional science emerged onto the scene.

Waste work and the dialectics of precarity in urban Ghana: durable bodies and disposable things

What can the dialectics of waste work tell us about the urban underclass in the flux of late capitalism? What might waste reveal more broadly about the contradictions and uncharted possibilities of material accumulation in urban Africa? Utilizing a relational optic, these issues are explored from the perspective of young men working in the rubbish dumps of Ghana's ‘edge city’ of Ashaiman, a space where the detritus of local and global markets and struggles for urban survival converge. Here, day-to-day entanglements with city dwellers’ discarded items muddy the expected terms of economic dispossession and attainment. At Ashaiman's dump, the perils of social and bodily breakdown are matched by the promise of expanded reproduction via waste work, invigorating the economic prospects of the region's footloose underemployed. Relevant well beyond Ghana, such inversions point to an insistent underside of late-capitalist overproduction: namely, in this dense space of discard and decay, those on the lowest rungs of the urban economic ladder meld bodily expenditure, social aspiration and material breakdown to forge fragile futures and to format urban space. Blending materialisms new and old, a view from Ashaiman's dump bridges the insights of relational ontologies focused on the agency of things and labour-based renderings of capitalism's transformation.