"The Damned of the City takes us deep into the black ghetto in the heart of Chicago and into the deindustrializing suburbs of the outer zones of Paris, revealing that urban marginality is not the same everywhere. Based on field, statistical, and historical data, Wacquant demonstrates that the decline of inner-city areas in the United States following the 1960s cannot be explained by the emergence of an underclass, but rather by the simultaneous withdrawal of both market and state, which was fueled by a state policy of racial segregation and the abandonment of cities. In contrast, the spread of problem neighborhoods in European cities does not herald the emergence of American-style ghettos. Instead, it stems from the disintegration of working-class areas, mass unemployment, and the precarization of employment.".