Housing, Ethnicity and Advanced Marginality in England

This chapter argues that two key, overlapping, fields of political and public discourse have tended to obfuscate the shared social reality of urban marginality in England in recent years: housing and migration. We suggest that the noisy public space of “race talk” and heightened anxieties over migration serve to obscure the socio-spatial reshaping of urban housing systems and deflect attention from the policy moves and longer-term processes that produce insecurity and precarity at the bottom of the class structure, regardless of race or ethnicity. We argue for the preeminence of social class as an explanation socio-spatial reshaping of urban systems in England and suggest that the specificity and complexity of national housing systems is a neglected aspect in the understanding of advanced urban marginality.