Abstract
This article is a critique of the myth of “concentrated poverty,” that blames urban ills on spatial morphology, presenting the city as a reified entity. Spatial fetishization neglects to consider the political economy that creates poverty and inequalities. Through the evolution of a ghetto in the Spanish Mediterranean coast, the article addresses spatial segregation, social isolation and territorial stigmatization of the urban poor. Three different contingents of residents—Spaniard, gypsies and Moroccan—are analyzed in their mutual relationships and in their dealings with local and regional governments that produce their neighborhood as a wasteland. Although these groups are strongly segregated among them, the space they inhabit carries a stigma that they share and sets them apart from the larger society. However, they are not isolated from but, on the contrary, fully embedded in the basic elements that constitute capitalism.
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Notes
The Euro does not appear as a currency until January 1, 1999, and fully replaced the peseta in 2002.
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Martinez Veiga, U. What tourists don’t see: housing, concentration of poverty and ethnic conflict in a Spanish migrant ghetto. Dialect Anthropol 38, 59–77 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9329-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9329-2