Poverty and Marginality

This chapter covers all three key themes of social geography: the social (class, race), inequality (poverty), and social (in)justice (marginality). The common denominator is the drive to survive in the face of numerous obstacles at the intersections of class and race. Class and race are approached intersectionally across a variety of places, usually those ignored and invisible within larger society. The encounters are, therefore, rather elusive, with few meaningful spaces between larger society and those who live at its racialised and classed margins. The second half of the chapter is largely a photo-essay of where the scale of encounter becomes, like in chapters 4 and 5, a variety of urban neighbourhoods which struggle with race, poverty, and marginality, and the services that sometimes cater to them. This reflects a fledgling infrastructure of care comprised largely of a local voluntary sector. But more likely, the encounters are the domain of the people who inhabit these areas, so often marked by precarity and even desperation but also ingenuity and hustle, with little intervention by the state or the voluntary sector. This social and geographical distancing can be surmounted, however, by focusing on the social justice strands of distribution, recognition, and procedures around the management and experience of marginality in cities.