Social exclusion and urban policy in European cities. Combining Northern and Southern European perspectives

Social exclusion The chapter examines various aspects of research methodology in the study of social exclusion in urban Europe, and policies aimed at overcoming it. It focuses mainly on Southern European cities (stressing Naples) and their neighbourhoods. It shows how over the last few decades, social exclusion analysis has gone through significant methodological transformation. Originally centred on the observation and classification of poverty and types of poor, and on the construction of appropriate indicators of poverty and deprivation, the focus shifted from the late 1980s,towards the analysis of social exclusion as a multidimensional process, occurring at a variety of spatial scales. The chapter criticizes the tendency to generalize observations concerning the mechanisms of exclusion in “Northern” European countries to Southern countries of Europe