ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s European cities were trying to come to terms with the changes imposed by a new post-industrial economy. Many urban centres were riddled with decaying former industrial areas from Barcelona’s El Raval, to London’s Hoxton or Manchester’s Castlefield. Imagine for a moment that you are walking through one of these neighbourhoods. You are almost certainly a lone tourist; the reputation is such that few outsiders dare enter. This is a no-go area, a desolate place; its streets are narrow, littered with rubbish and overgrown with weeds. You are in Castlefield, walking through the empty shells of ruined buildings covered with grime. It is a barren space whose residents left a long time ago when the wharfs stopped functioning, when the factories stopped producing. You are in El Raval, avoiding prolonged eye contact with those on the margins of society: the poor, the old, the prostitutes and the drug addicts. Breathing in the stale air, you wander through a scattering of family-run grocery shops and worksheds, outnumbered now by the barricaded doors of businesses that have been unable to make ends meet. These are Sassen’s (1991, 1998) geographies of marginality, places of persistent public and private disinvestment.
