Urban Outcasts and A World of Gangs are both books about urban inequality. Urban Outcasts analyzes such inequality in terms of the physical and social underdevelopment of urban spaces, while A World of Gangs treats urban gangs, and the culture that surrounds them, as a consequence of urban inequality. The books speak to broader questions regarding the determinants of marginality and the mechanisms of segregation, with a particular focus on the exclusion of young males from productive political and socioeconomic opportunities. They are similar in method, employing comparative and qualitative designs for street-level access to marginalized places and people. And they are similar in terms of politics, offering a bleak picture of the contemporary urban landscape.

Urban Outcasts studies the connections among race and ethnicity, inequality and poverty, and space and political economy. Part One is a historical/sociological overview of the evolution of America's Black ghetto, focusing on the transition of concentrated Black residential spaces from the “communal ghetto” of the 1950s to the “hyperghetto” of the 1990s. If one is familiar with William Julius Wilson's books The Truly Disadvantaged or When Work Disappears, Part One will seem staid and conventional. Wacquant clearly envisions Part One as a broad narrative that might be called “When Government Withers.” Yet his consideration of political economy in relation to the creation and endurance of the Black ghetto is oversimplified and insufficiently clear. He raises repeatedly the idea that the contemporary ghetto is primarily the product of the retrenchment of public institutions, but his actual analysis concentrates mainly on the conventional topics of “depopulation, deproletarianization, and organizational folding” as the catalysts of the hyperghetto (p. 57). While Wacquant points towards neoliberalism as the true culprit in the crime of ghetto creation, his account of what distinguishes neoliberalism as a regime of public policy could be much sharper and deeper.

Part Two compares the U.S. “Black Belt”—a longstanding euphemism for the sprawl of the Black ghetto, especially during the age of the communal ghetto—with the French “Red Belt” of working-class peripheral cities that were the bastions of Communist Party organization and mobilization. Wiquant's purpose is to demolish the notion that the concept of the “ghetto,” as well as the “demi-savant concept of the ‘underclass’,” is portable from one advanced society, the United States, to another one, France. He develops this point through ethnographic research in the West and South sides of Chicago and in the Parisian banlieue of La Courneuve during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He deploys findings from inside Les Quatre mille, a 50-acre estate of high-rise concrete buildings packed with “black, blanc, beur”—West African, European, and North African—working-classes to argue that the banlieue is not the equivalent of a ghetto like North Lawndale, Chicago. As Wiquant writes: “Unlike the black American ghetto, the French banlieue is not a homogenous social formation, bearing a unitary cultural identity, endowed with an advanced organizational autonomy and institutional duplication, based on a dichotomous cleavage between races (i.e., fictively biologized ethnic categories) officially recognized by the state” (p. 160, emphasis in original).

In the banlieue, the classes and connections of residents are more heterogeneous, the space is less stigmatized and violent, and there is still an adequate presence of the welfare state and the market as compared to the American ghetto. Thus, Wacquant demonstrates that “urban marginality is not everywhere woven of the same cloth” (p. 1). In addition, in Chapters 5 through 7 he confirms Giovanni Sartori's point that “conceptual stretching” creates theoretical and methodological problems that give birth to feeble empiricism and misleading claims about the world (“Concept Misinformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review 64 [December 1970:1033–1053)—in this case simplistic claims about urban marginality.

Part Three is a thoughtful inductive consideration of urban/advanced marginality that is derived from his comparison of the American and French cases. It addresses “the novel regime of sociospatial relegation and exclusionary closure” that influences the opportunities of the working classes and racial and ethnic groups recognized as minorities within advanced societies (p. 2). In other words, Wacquant examines the ways state retrenchment as a response to neoliberalism may influence the ability of some marginalized groups and places to get ahead while others fall behind. While his case material does not provide the strongest evidence for his claims, and it is less persuasive than more recent studies (e.g., see Helga Leitner et al., Contesting Neo-Liberalism: Urban Frontiers 2006; Jason Hackworth, Neoliberalism and the City 2006), Wacquant's analysis is nonetheless incisive. This is especially true of his account of “structural logics” in Chapter 9, where he analyzes the complex ways that the government fosters poverty while separating classes of the impoverished from one another across and within the urban trenches. Wacquant remarks, for example, that “States do not only deploy programmes and policies designed to ‘mop up’ the most glaring consequences of economic transformations and to cushion (or not) their social and spatial impact downstream. They also act upstream by helping to determine who gets relegated, how, where and for how long.” (p. 268).

While Wacquant attempts to derive broader conceptual and empirical lessons from the comparative study of urban inequality, Hagedorn uses A World of Gangs to try to answer two small empirical questions related to urban inequality that nonetheless have serious consequences on the ground: Why are gangs everywhere and how may they become nonviolent instruments of and for progressive politics? He derives his answers from primary and secondary research on gangs in the ghetto of Chicago, the favela of Rio de Janeiro, the townships of Cape Town, and contested neighborhoods in cities such as Mumbai, Brazzaville, Karachi, and San Salvador.

Part One looks at the globalization of gangs, both in terms of the presence of gangs and the common forms and practices of gangs across the globe. We learn that gangs, best described as social groups of armed young men unaffiliated with legitimate armed forces and militias, have always existed. Gangs in the present, however, differ from gangs in the past by their growth, institutionalization, violence, and increasing association in the developing world with politics.

In explaining why gangs are everywhere, regardless of the stage of societal development, Hagedorn provides a basic equation: migration + cities + poverty + slums + discrimination + youth = gangs. Like Wacquant, he identifies the “retreat of the state” as a factor in gang proliferation (p. 6). In addition, he identifies gentrification and political conflict as routine causes of gang formation. The political conflict argument that gangs today are “working for political spoils and or acting as thugs for ruling powers” will appeal to many political scientists interested in the themes of conflict and contention (p. 33). Hagedorn offers a sound theoretical argument and empirical illustrations of the political connections between gangs and government authority in Chapter 4. In sum, gangs emerge and spread as results of rapid urbanization, intense and uneven spatial redevelopment, social exclusion, and political conflict.

According to Hagedorn, it makes more sense for us to see gangs as “social actors, reacting, sometimes destructively, to conditions of poverty, racism, and oppression” than simplistically to conceive of them as social pariahs preying on their fellow class members and communities (p. xxx). On this view gangs can be seen as resistance movements. Indeed, Hagedorn deems much of their violence legitimate, a perspective he shares with Wacquant. Both explain the violence of the youth in outcast urban places such as the American ghetto and relegated spaces like the French banlieue as a response to what Hagedorn calls “state retreats” (p. 7) and Wacquant calls the “violence from above” (p. 24). As Wacquant argues in Chapter 6 of Urban Outcasts, the violence of les jeunes de cites is a reaction to the structural violence of the state, which reduces their gainful employment, social security, and entitlements and benefits, and treats them as second-class citizens if not as aliens. In the end, for both Wiquant and Hagedorn, policy choices that sustain inequality, coupled with maltreatment and repression by police forces, begets urban violence, be it horizontal violence between the lower classes or vertical violence between the lower classes and the elites.

Part Two of Hagedorn's book is less satisfying as scholarship than Part One. He argues, in my view unsuccessfully, for a redemptive consideration of gangs. He sees in gangs “the capacity to change in many ways” (p. 137). He suggests that we can and should bring gang members into “broader social movements, while demanding they take steps to shed their violent, antisocial skin” (p. xxxi). He posits that hip hop culture, which is a global force and influence on armed young men, is a plausible means of linking gangs to social movements. He spends much of the second half of the book revisiting the origins of hip hop in the United States and searching for its progressive attributes and restorative attitudes that might be the catalysts for gangs renouncing violence and reacting to political decisions as democratic citizens. Hagedorn's faith in hip hop to connect disaffected and disconnected youth to social movements and to serve as a vehicle for their incorporation into politics is admirable. Yet Hagedorn has not persuasively determined the alchemy of material, solidary, and psychological incentives for transforming gang members consistently and broadly into good citizens of the urban world. In the end, he concedes, “there are regrettably few examples of successful, long-term gang transformations” (p. 137).

In conclusion, both Urban Outcasts and A World of Gangs are good books that add to our knowledge of urban marginality and its underlying social and political conditions. In their common topic, and in their creative use of qualitative methods, both books should be of broad interest to scholars of racial and ethnic politics, comparative politics, urban politics, and qualitative research methods. Rightfully, neither book paints an inspiring picture of our urban present and likely future. Instead, both remind us of the “unnecessary suffering” that is legion across the contemporary urban landscape (Hagedorn 2006, p. xxi). They also illustrate that the shifting geographies and political economies of our increasingly globalized world present challenges and opportunities for our understandings of urban living and the meanings of citizenship.