Service not Included: Private Services Restructuring, Neighbourhoods, and Social Marginalisation

Abstract

The authors argue that research and policy debates on urban social marginalisation have largely neglected important restructuring trends in a range of essential private services, for example, food retailing, energy, telephony, and personal financial services. Using the case of the United Kingdom, they focus on two case studies carried out in the marginalised neighbourhoods of Benwell, in Newcastle upon Tyne, and Netherly Valley, in Liverpool. It is argued that parallel restructuring trends in these services are having compound exclusionary effects in places of concentrated social exclusion. A model of such compound exclusion effects is presented with supporting ethnographic evidence from residents of both case-study areas, to explore how the affects of marginalisation from financial services, food retailing, energy, and telephony interact in place. The authors finish the paper by exploring the implications of restructuring in private consumer services for urban social theory, for debates about urban marginalisation, and for policies which attempt to address such marginalisation.