Includes bibliographical references.

1. Urban Poverty in the Advanced Industrial World: Concepts, Analysis and Debates / Enzo Mingione -- 2. Downdrift: Provoking Agents and Symptom-formation Factors in the Process of Impoverishment / Giuseppe Micheli -- 3. Service Employment Regimes and the New Inequality / Saskia Sassen -- 4. The Excluded and the Homeless: the Social Construction of the Fight Against Poverty in Europe / Antonio Tosi -- 5. Culture, Politics and National Discourses of the New Urban Poverty / Hilary Silver -- 6. From 'Underclass' to 'Undercaste': Some Observations About the Future of the Post-industrial Economy and its Major Victims / Herbert J. Gans -- 7. A Note on Interpreting American Poverty / Norman Fainstein -- 8. Dangerous Classes: Neglected Aspects of the Underclass Debate / Lydia Morris -- 9. Space and Race in the Post-Fordist City: the Outcast Ghetto and Advanced Homelessness in the United States Today / Peter Marcuse -- 10. Minorities in Global Cities: New York and Los Angeles / John Logan, Richard D. Alba and Thomas L. McNulty -- 11. Red Belt, Black Belt: Racial Division, Class Inequality and the State in the French Urban Periphery and the American Ghetto / Loic J. D. Wacquant -- 12. Social and Economic Change in Contemporary Britain: the Emergence of an Urban Underclass? / Nick Buck -- 13. The Social Morphology of the New Urban Poor in a Wealthy Italian City: the Case of Milan / Francesca Zajczyk -- 14. Exclusion from Work and the Impoverishment Processes in Naples / Enrica Morlicchio -- 15. Urban Poverty in Germany: a Comparative Analysis of the Profile of the Poor in Stuttgart and Berlin / Hartmut Haussermann and Yuri Kazepov -- 16. Conclusion / Enzo Mingione.

Over the last two decades 'poverty' has moved centrestage as an issue within the social sciences. This volume, edited by one of Europe's foremost sociologists, aims to assess the debates surrounding poverty and the responses to it, exploring the ways in which the various socio-political systems and welfarist regimes are being radically transformed. The essays examine how such change is effected by failing welfare programmes and enervating social structures such as family and community which once would have provided mechanisms of social stability. The first part of the book provides reflections on urban poverty; the second part discusses the widely debated idea of an 'underclass' and its meanings in Europe and in the USA, and the final part draws on concrete empirical analyses to examine the patterns of poverty throughout the Western Europe. This volume will be of first-rate importance to all serious students of politics, sociology, geography, public policy, youth and community studies, social policy and American studies.