Abstract
With Britain as its primary focus, In Their Place dwells on the representation of spaces of poverty and people associated with those spaces, by the media, politicians and policy-makers. It explores representations of a variety of marginalised places, moving between different periods over the last 200 years and examining a range of spatial scales, from urban neighbourhoods, to streets, to spaces within homes.
The book begins by exploring the historical representations of urban working-class communities. It identifies similarities between middle-class narratives about poor urban populations in the 19th century, which reproduced wider imperialist and racist discourses of the time, and contemporary ‘poverty porn’ representations, particularly ‘reality TV’. This is followed by a chapter examining the aestheticisation of urban decline in representations of places such as Detroit, which involves the effacement of lived experiences of local people, alongside the displacement and segregation practices entailed in the ‘regeneration’ of certain urban spaces in order to make them appear and ‘feel’ affluent, vibrant or global. Subsequent chapters develop this further by examining state initiatives under New Labour and Conservative governments focused on urban renewal or regeneration, and the academic studies focusing at the scale of neighbourhoods or streets. Crossley shows how these locate the causes of poverty in local areas, buildings and people themselves, obscuring the effects of wider social forces and state actions. His book then examines dominant representations of families and individuals in poverty: for instance, through the increasingly vicious representations of working-class identities in contemporary media and political discourse and the changing spatial contexts of state services aimed at ‘intervening’ with marginalised populations.
In Their Place is particularly good at critiquing state policy under neoliberalism. It explores not only how urban regeneration policy since the 1980s has consistently marginalised and displaced impoverished communities, but also how the current ‘austerity’ programme has led to a new phenomenon with many community-based services being cut while there has been an increase in interventions focusing more narrowly on individual families. In the penultimate chapter, Crossley examines the ‘Troubled Families’ Programme and makes a convincing argument about increasingly stigmatising, punitive and intrusive state interventions into the lives of people in poverty.
The book uses Loic Wacquant’s work on territorial stigmatisation as a framework to understand how dominant representations, government policies and the actions of practitioners intervening with individual families work to locate the causes of poverty in local places and people and, in so doing, re-enact marginalisation. It complements work on urban regeneration (e.g. Lees, 2013) territorial stigmatisation (e.g. Wacquant et al., 2014) and evolving interventionist approaches to family and parenting (e.g. Edwards et al., 2016), adding to these a detailed analysis of the Troubled Families Programme, which the author has recently undertaken work on (Crossley, 2018). It is written in an accessible style and therefore would work well as an introduction to these topics for students in sociology, social policy and social work. Despite being fairly short, the book is wide ranging, and inevitably some themes are touched on only briefly (gentrification, for example, is not discussed in detail). The discussion about orientalism and representations of poverty is fascinating, but it raises a lot of questions that the book lacks the space to explore fully. Relatedly, the significance of ‘race’ in recent representations of urban poverty, more generally, is under-explored. Nevertheless, In Their Place is an engaging, stimulating book which particularly furnishes valuable discussion on current state initiatives.