ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 focuses on the ways in which the past 40 years of transformations of the state affect the social workers’ attitude and evaluations of the neighbourhood and its residents and discusses the processes of spatial (de)alienation and de(stigmatisation) inherent in the state-on-the-ground practices that contribute to the making and remaking of the place and people of the North West. Increasingly, welfare is carried out in and governed by a bureaucratic system trying to embrace business-like models of service. Still, contrary to neoliberal paternalism, the social problems of the North West are, to a large degree, to be handled by pedagogical measures. Summing up the process of pedagogisation, the chapter argues that in the context of changing welfare and politics of urban marginality that increasingly demonise the poor populations, welfare workers of the North West struggle to hold up high the ethos of being a defender of the poor and to remedy the effects of the alienated system.
