Deindustrialisation and Dispossession: An Examination of Social Division in the Industrial City

Abstract

This article reviews the arguments about the possible existence of a spatially segregated underclass in urban industrial contexts in Britain, with reference to the propositions about the nature of the `ghetto poor' advanced in the United States by W. J. Wilson. Data from censuses of population and employment, and from the annual Cleveland Social Survey, are used to explore the nature of changes in the socio-spatial structure and the character of households in a Northern English industrial conurbation. The pattern of socio-spatial division identified for the 1990s is distinguished from that existing in an earlier era of full employment and related to data about school examination success for young people resident in different areas. The study concludes that there has been a major increase in socio-spatial differentiation in this locality which is the product of interaction between deindustrialisation and urban development policies over the postwar period. The product is not an `underclass', but a social formation which looks much more like the sort of industrial reserve army which is particularly suited to the needs of a `post-fordist' system of production.