ABSTRACT

This chapter presents the ambiguous, complex and 'messy' relationship between care and control in landscapes of urban poverty management. The political spaces of urban poverty management are multifaceted and their complexity defies attempts to reduce them to mere expressions of social control. From a poverty management perspective, 'service-dependent gettos' are understood as spatial expressions of a powerful and pervasive logic of social control. Cloke et al. argue that poverty management is better seen as a 'messy middle ground' that epitomizes the re-working of social welfare by multiple rounds of neoliberalization. The initial description very much presented Skid Row as a messy middle ground, a field of articulation and contestation of neoliberal imperatives as expressed in the city of Los Angeles. The analytic value of assemblage theory is the way it allows one to rethink how a 'unity' or 'whole' acquires its coherence.