POVERTY, SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND SPATIAL SEGREGATION

Abstract

The author analyses a case study -Parque Ansaldo, a suburb in the metropolitan area of Alicante-. In the beginning it was a public enterprise and it was planned as a middle-class neighbourhood, but because a series of reasons -spatial isolation, low quality construction, lack of equipments- houses were first occupied by working class families, and then for ethnic minorities like gipsies and north-africans. A process of succession, that's to say of ethnic substitution, has developed, as members of certain minorities have left, looking for better conditions. People living in that suburb are stigmatized in the face of employers, and so they have difficulties for getting a job. And a neighborhood that's inhabited by poor people has a general problem for getting decent equipments and public services. Starting with this case study we will pose the general problem of poverty in Spain, and we will review an academic discussion on the related problems of urban poverty, spatial segregation and social exclusion. We don't think that such processes are neither an entirely new phenomenon nor a question of auto-organization. In the contrary we argue that Spanish state and labour market (connected as they are with global processes) ha ve a lot to do with the reorganization of local relations between poverty and urban segregation.