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Poverty and social exclusion in

European cities: diversity and
convergence at the local level
Enzo Mingione
Published online: 21 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Enzo Mingione (2004) Poverty and social exclusion in European cities: diversity
and convergence at the local level, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action,
8:3, 381-389, DOI: 10.1080/1360481042000313482

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 CITY, VOL. 8, NO. 3, DECEMBER 2004

Poverty and social exclusion in

European cities: Diversity and
convergence at the local level

Enzo Mingione
Taylor and Francis Ltd
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In the paper that follows, Enzo Mingione identifies five different models of postwar welfare
capitalism. The models were all based around “full” employment, the nuclear family and
the regulatory monopoly of the nation-state. He argues that as a result of economic and
demographic change, the very foundations of each model are eroding. As a result certain
groups not previously catered for in traditional welfare systems (particularly migrants,
single parents, the young, the poorly skilled and low income nuclear families) are now
facing social exclusion. Mingione’s analysis has abroad European focus, but also looks at the
cases of specific cities (Rennes, Milan and Bremen among others) which demonstrate pres-
sures on welfare services of a varied nature. The variety of local scenarios requires a loca-
lised response; though Mingione states that these should include: “three main ingredients:
the development of forms of partnership between private and public agencies; activation
and professionalisation of new and old institutions in the third sector [and] professional and
coordinating abilities on the part of local authorities”.

Introduction: The international division of opportunities and rights enjoyed by the

labour and social exclusion other socially integrated members of their
communities. Here I will focus on this

F
rom the 1970s on, the trends in social
and economic change have under-
mined the fundamental institutions
of welfare capitalism in industrialized
countries, thereby opening up new areas to
the risk of poverty. The political and intel-
lectual agenda, which had ignored poverty
for many decades, has suddenly become
interested in the phenomenon and begun
to insist on the new threat of social exclu-
sion, that is the possibility that specific
groups of people trapped in economic diffi-
culties, no longer offset by high rates of
growth and industrial expansion, and also
affected by various forms of discrimination
are subject to permanent exclusion from
problem in industrialized countries, but it
is important to mention that what under-
lies this question are the changing relations
between development and underdevelop-
ment on a global scale, which play a signifi-
cant role in shaping the conditions of life
and social integration in both the devel-
oped and the underdeveloped world.
Among the various features of what is
called “globalisation” are transformations in
the international division of labour, in partic-
ular the passage in developing countries from
specialization in the production of raw mate-
rials to the new logic of manufacturing relo-
cation. The fact that a large part of the
manufacturing goods consumed today are

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/04/030381-09 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1360481042000313482
 382 CITY VOL. 8, NO. 3
made in less developed countries does not
mean that development and wealth is being
spread evenly over the globe. This transfor-
mation is generating losers (particularly the
regions that are unable to profit from indus-
trial relocation and raw materials price
control, like most African countries and
many in South America and Asia) and big
winners (global financial speculators but also
the educated populations in industrialized
countries, able to master technological inno-
vation processes and benefit from savings in
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consumption and high returns on financial
investments). Moreover, the changing inter-
national division of labour is setting in
motion large-scale economic migration from
all the less developed countries to the whole
of the industrialized world. This flow is
reshaping the labour market for personal
services and creating new polarized social
divisions and standards of life. Hence,
poverty and social exclusion on a global scale
is even more concentrated and worse than in
the past in the less developed countries, even
in those like Argentina, Nigeria and Indone-
sia that during the fordist age had nurtured
high hopes of profiting from their abundant
raw materials. However as will be seen
below, the risk of social exclusion is expand-
ing also in the industrialized countries even
though it certainly does not concern the
poorest of the poor, and this also has to be
borne in mind.
The pillars of social integration and the
diversity of welfare capitalism
In the 1970s the oil crises and consequent
decline in the rate of economic growth
speeded up industrial restructuring and qual-
itative changes in productive organisations,
consumer habits and technological innova-
tion. It was more or less from then on that the
transformational trends began to erode the
social regimes that had been consolidated in
the three decades (les trente glorieuses)
following the Second World War (1945–75).
These regimes rested on three supporting
pillars: 1) the diffusion (going some way
towards full employment) of stable family-
wage occupations for adult males (generally,
permanent employee labour contracts with
legal and trade-union guarantees); 2) the
centrality of the nuclear family with married
parents, functioning as an institution for
redistributing resources, rights and duties;
and 3) the regulatory monopoly of the
nation-state, committed to expanding forms
of protection (welfare state) complementary
to the breadwinner-nuclear family balance
and essential to developing high-productivity
systems based on large organisations and
economies of scale.
The synergy between the three areas of
social regulation gave rise to true social
regimes, within which industrial growth, the
expansion of welfare programmes, standard-
ised consumerism structured on a class basis,
gender role division and female specialisation
in care and maternity activities fed on one
another. Welfare capitalist societies were
characterized by sharp social inequalities,
marked class conflicts and extreme gender
division of labour (at the very time of the
decline in patriarchal culture and legal
discrimination against women). But, under
the conditions of the time, the social integra-
tion mechanisms worked and marginalisation
and poverty were perceived as temporary
events that economic growth and the expan-
sion of the welfare state would rectify or at
the very least keep under control. Welfare
capitalism was also diversified in different
models, all based on the same pillars but in
different mixes.
The development of high productivity
capitalism led to the formation of five differ-
ent models of welfare capitalism (Esping-
Andersen, 1990, 1999; Mingione, 1991). The
rationale behind the diversification of the
models was that, under the specific conditions
(in large part produced by historical processes
of path dependency) of each cluster of coun-
tries, different factors played a decisive role in
the organisation of society, the formulation of
guaranteed protection against exposure to
market competition and the configuration of

the breadwinner regime. These different
factors were the market under the control of
powerful industrial conglomerates (the US),
the market controlled by an interventionist
state (the UK at the time of Beveridge and
Marshall, and Canada, Australia and New
Zealand), systematic public regulation aimed
at spreading universalistic services and social
intervention (the Scandinavian model), a
complementary combination of strong legiti-
mate public regulation and family responsi-
bility (the countries of central Europe and, to
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some degree, Japan), and the familial and
kinship system as established in a sizeable
number of small firms complemented by a
nation-state beset by the historical difficulty
of having to face persistent localism (the
southern European countries).
Here is not the place to analyse in depth the
various welfare capitalism regimes, but it is
important to mention that the present trans-
formations and, consequently, the features of
social exclusion depend on the different ways
in which previous diversified characteristics
have adapted to the current common trends
of change. Path dependency factors are again
at work though under changed historical
conditions. In other words, we expect to find
everywhere the pillars of welfare capitalism
being eroded and social exclusion on the
increase, but in different forms depending on
the specific social context which is now,
moreover, a less homogeneously national one
and, as a result, more local than during the age
of welfare capitalism.
The present trends undermining social
integration balances
From the 1970s on, the trends of change in
employment, population and the state’s regu-
latory capacity have eroded the pillars of
welfare capitalism, though in different ways
and time spans. Let us briefly look at the
most evident and important aspects in these
trends.
On the employment front, permanent
stable jobs with standard contracts have
MINGIONE: POVERTY AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION 383
begun to diminish, first in large-scale manu-
facturing and, subsequently, also in the big
organisations in the traditional tertiary sector
(commerce, banks, insurance, etc.). At the
same time, there has been an increase in
“flexible” forms of employment: temporary,
part-time, homework, teleworking, external
collaboration and consultancy, and self-
employment in the leading-edge sectors.
Furthermore, the number of married women
who work has risen everywhere. In the space
of a generation, the typically fordist coupling
of the life cycle and working career whereby
most women stopped working on the birth
of their first child and possibly started again
when all the children had reached school age
has been abandoned. This does not mean,
however, a lessening of the emphasis on the
“maternal” and specialised quality of care
work, which had made possible the repro-
ductive balance of a society based on high
productivity. Women’s involvement in work
has moved in the direction of various contra-
dictory combinations of paid employment
and high care responsibilities, from the
spread of part-time jobs to the division
between working mothers and career-
oriented women and to real forms of “double
shift” work.
It is not a matter of the end of work
(Rifkin, 1995) or of a sharp decline in the
centrality of work in social life - on the
contrary more important than ever in
women’s lives - but undoubtedly of a
change such as to disrupt the social, cultural
and ideological equilibrium of welfare capi-
talism regimes. The transformation in
employment has different consequences in
the different contexts: unemployment and
flexible jobs involving to a greater extent in
one place the young, in another adults or
here men and there women; and new waves
of migration in which immigrants, asylum
seekers and discriminated minorities are the
most exposed to job instability and hence to
difficult life conditions. In all cases, it is the
employment pillar of the welfare capitalism
regimes that is being corroded: stable
standardised high-productivity jobs for
 384 CITY VOL. 8, NO. 3
low-skilled adult males that supported the
lives of millions of working-class families
and a generation of immigrants, and which
triggered large-scale social mobility and
urbanisation in fordist societies. It is in this
sense that Sennett (1999) speaks of corro-
sion of character and Castel of crisis of the
salariat (wage-earning class) regime (1995).
The new employment equilibrium is centred
on double-earning households where both
the man and the woman are in less tenured
paid employment, but the diffusion of this
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combination comes up against the increas-
ing instability and heterogeneity of nuclear
families.
Also during the 1970s, a new demographic
transition set in (Lesthaeghe, 1995). This
change is made up of many different trends:
increases in longevity, divorce, single-parent,
de facto and recomposed post-divorce fami-
lies, births out of wedlock and single-person
households, and a decline in and delaying of
marriages and a falling birth rate (but also a
growing spread in the number of offspring
and childbearing age). But all these trends are
undermining the centrality of the married
couple during the course of life and trans-
forming the hegemony of “nuclear family”
ideology (the importance in life of having
children and investing resources in their
future) into increasingly self-centred forms
of individualism.
The demographic changes are likewise
distributed differently in the diverse
contexts, though in all cases they are upset-
ting the redistributive balances based on the
nuclear family. An ever longer period of an
individual’s life is spent outside of a nucleus
of married parents with dependent minors,
whereas previously for the overwhelming
majority this family condition applied
throughout three quarters of a lifespan. As a
result of increasing longevity, parents live on
average for more than thirty years after their
youngest child has reached adulthood. An
effect of delaying the birth of offspring has
been to considerably lengthen the period
between cohabitation as minors in the family
of origin and setting up own households with
dependent children. Moreover, the share of
the population without offspring has risen
and another part spends long periods in the
passage from one nuclear family to another.
Today, almost everyone spends a smaller part
of their life in than outside of a nuclear
family with dependent minors.
The combination of employment and
demographic changes is undermining all the
variants of the breadwinner regime as regards
available economic resources (the adult male
family wage is clearly predominant), respon-
sibility for care inside the family (the wife-
mother is the one who does the housework
and looks after members) and access to social
rights directly or indirectly through the
husband-father’s working career. An increas-
ing number of combinations of family and
paid employment (or income) is now vulner-
able in terms of resources, care or access to
rights (or identity and self-confidence) or,
what is worst, on all these fronts put
together.
The twin instability of work and family
structure has spilled over into public welfare:
the transition has destroyed the synergy
between rising public spending and
economic growth in a situation in which the
further expansion of welfare intervention has
come up against a creeping historical crisis in
the monopolistic regulation exercised by
nation-states. This crisis is impacting on
legitimacy, the availability of resources and,
above all, the effectiveness of intervention
and the capacity for control. The legitimation
of public programmes tends to diminish as
the social fabric becomes more fragmented:
class and charitable solidarity are replaced by
positions aiming for an equitable relation
between contributions to the state and the
direct return in public services. At the same
time, globalisation is siphoning off resources
from the nation-states because economic
interactions take place on an international
financial scale and by computer link-ups that
are too fast to control. The effectiveness of
national public operations is conditioned by
the global scale of the controlling financial
markets and the local fragmentation of the

population’s needs and demands. The, until
now, unsuccessful demand for a form of
international taxation of financial transfers
(the Tobin tax) is a sign of how complex and
beyond national control the welfare econ-
omy has become.
The wave of privatisations and neo-laissez-
faire has not led to the eradication of basic
welfare guarantees in any industrialised
country (but in some cases, like the UK, it
has been particularly disruptive). Neverthe-
less, the era of the complementary relation
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between expanding public intervention and
growth of the “organised” economy is over
everywhere. In this case too, welfare reforms
differ in the various contexts. The decline in
effective national regulation based on the
standardized expansion of the welfare state
(centred mainly on health, education and
pensions) has revived the importance of
social assistance programmes and the possi-
bility to effect different regional and local
combinations of public and private agencies
able to deal with an increasingly diversified
demand for social support and social integra-
tion interventions. As we will see next, the
question of social exclusion involves a diver-
sified mix of subjects who are the losers in
the present transition processes and various
combinations of agencies promoting social
policy responses at the local level.
The losers in the present trends of change
and social exclusion
Immediately after the Second World War the
majority of the poor in the industrialized
countries were elderly people. At the time,
pension schemes were still rudimental and
there was no policy to support old people
who, for different reasons, had not matured a
right to a pension and that, due to their age,
were no longer able to work. Still today, in
many industrialized countries old people are
over-represented among the population with
low incomes, but the development of the
welfare state has learned to respond to this
problem first with income support and
MINGIONE: POVERTY AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION 385
pension schemes and now with the diffusion
of home assistance. Thus poverty among the
elderly is declining and even if many elderly
women, particularly if socially isolated and
not physically autonomous, survive in diffi-
cult conditions they are not generally
included among the group of losers in the
present transition.
These introductory remarks on the elderly
provide some general parameters that can be
used to identify the social groups that may be
considered at risk of social exclusion. There is
a combination between persistently insuffi-
cient resources and certain forms of institu-
tional discrimination. Contrary to the case of
the elderly, instead of an automatic bias in their
favour built into the welfare tradition, the
populations at risk of social exclusion find
obstacles to the solving of their problems for
subjective or objective reasons. The most often
mentioned cases involve: minorities or immi-
grants; the long-term unemployed who have
persistent difficulty in finding a job; single-
parent households with dependent children;
people trapped in decayed areas where there
are no employment opportunities and inferior
welfare services; the homeless; and individuals
with a history of imprisonment, drug depen-
dency or mental illness. In all these cases, we
are dealing with able-bodied adults (and often
their dependents) who for different reasons
have insufficient access to the labour market to
provide for a minimum normal standard of
life. Nearly always, it is not only a problem of
insertion in the labour market but also of addi-
tional difficulties in raising enough support to
be able to lead a normal life. The ghetto poor
literature (Wilson, 1996), for instance, has
insisted on the aggravating factor of being
highly segregated in poverty-stricken areas.
This is certainly true even if segregation has
less severe consequences in European cities
when compared to some cases in the US
(Mingione, 1996).
For analytic purposes, we can group the
above-mentioned cases into four typologies
of risk of social exclusion and then check the
extent to which they are present and vulnera-
ble in different national and local contexts.
 386 CITY VOL. 8, NO. 3
A → Migrants, minorities, asylum seekers →
malign circuits of racism and discrimination
affecting also housing, conditions of life,
educational and occupational qualifications
→ access only to flexible, poorly tenured,
low-paid and informal jobs.
B → Isolated individuals, particularly the
young and poorly skilled → the long-term
unemployed → “UNEMPLOYABLE”:
trapped by the fact that low-grade flexible
jobs are not compatible with economic self-
support.
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C → Single parents with dependent children
or other households where the combination
between paid work and high care require-
ments is problematic.
D → Nuclear families with dependent minors
and a single low income (or no income)
particularly in areas or for population groups
where employment opportunities are meagre.
Obviously this list is only a preliminary step
that has to be checked specifically against
national and local conditions in order to
bring to light real vulnerability. Let us briefly
take, as an example, the case of single moth-
ers. There are countries and regions where
this form of household is widespread as a
consequence of high levels of divorce and
births out of wedlock, like the UK and Scan-
dinavian countries, and others where it is on
the increase but still at low levels (southern
European countries). If we look at national
data, we see that single parents households
have a high chance of being in poverty in the
UK (where the combination of precarious
low-paid part-time jobs and insufficient
public services for children creates difficul-
ties) and a lower-than-average one in the
Scandinavian countries (where the combina-
tion of relatively well paid part-time jobs and
universalistic services works well for the
indigenous population, but less well for
migrants though this is offset by the fact that
it is unusual for them to live in this form of
household). Similar considerations can be
made for all the other groups at risk of social
exclusion but if we want to go deeper into the
question, beyond a general picture of the
impact of the corrosion of welfare capitalist
social integration, we have to examine the
micro reality of local systems. This is what I
intend to do briefly in the concluding section.
The empirical evidence presented there, diffi-
cult to collate due to the wide local diversifi-
cation of the phenomenon, is drawn mainly
from the results of the European research
ESOPO (Evaluation of Social Policies at the
Local Urban Level: Income Support for the
Able-Bodied) on income support policies in
13 cities in six European countries (Sweden,
Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal)
(Saraceno, 2002).
The local diversification of welfare models
and of social policy responses
As anticipated, the impact on welfare systems
of the current social and economic change in
terms of risk of social exclusion is producing
an interwoven trend. Social assistance
programmes, based in particular on reinser-
tion itineraries and on personal assumption of
responsibility by the individuals receiving
aid, are becoming increasingly important and
the locally varied modes of implementation
of such policies is crucial. The local level is
highly diversified in two different respects:
the populations that are at risk of social exclu-
sion and the local structuring of social poli-
cies. These two sets of variables are not
automatically interconnected since the local
structuring of social policies depends on vari-
ous factors, in part independent from the
specific features of those receiving social
assistance at any specific time.
The predominance of one or the other of
the above-mentioned typologies in a specific
configuration of need and risk at the local
level is now subject to diversification also
within the same country. Among the Esopo
cities, for example, Milan is the case where the
rate of unemployment is lowest and, as a
consequence, the labour market as such has
created the least difficulties, while Cosenza in
southern Italy lies at the opposite end of the

spectrum. But we already knew this from the
comparison traditionally made between
poverty in Milan and Naples: in the former
the vulnerable population is chiefly
composed of individual cases with sociability
and employability problems while, on the
contrary, in Naples a much larger population
with persistent economic difficulties is
mainly made up of nuclear families in which
the able-bodied cannot find reasonably well
paid jobs. The German cities of Bremen and
Halle stand at opposite poles in terms of
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immigrants and asylum seekers at high risk of
social exclusion. In the first city, the decline
of employment opportunities in traditional
large industries has severely hit a working
class composed largely of immigrants. The
situation has been further aggravated by a
wave of asylum seekers. In the space of a few
years foreign-born recipients of social assis-
tance have become the (increasing) majority.
In Halle, an East German city hard hit by
deindustrialization and the impact of reunifi-
cation, the presence of foreign-born residents
is limited and in starting up new small entre-
preneurial ventures, the small immigrant
community of Vietnamese origin has adapted
well to the new opportunities offered by the
free market. Here, as in southern Italian
cities, tensions resulting from social exclusion
are based on the labour market transforma-
tion and its impact on the local population
(mostly the young and women). However,
unlike in southern Italian cities, the crisis of
the labour market has coincided with a more
fragmented and fragile family structure where
single-person and single-parent households
are numerous and most at risk of social exclu-
sion. Great differences have been recorded
also in France where the RMI (income-
support) programme is a national social
policy with standard centralised rules. In
Rennes, an administrative, industrial and high
technology centre where unemployment is
low, those receiving income support are
predominantly young and educated individu-
als who sign insertion contracts and use the
programme to have a softer entry into a
dynamic labour market. In Saint Etienne, a
MINGIONE: POVERTY AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION 387
deindustrializing city where a large number
of the children of workers of North African
origins who settled here during industrial
expansion in the 1950s and 1960s have little
chance of finding a job, few insertion
contracts are signed and the programme is
highly discriminatory.
These examples provide us with only a
partial picture, but one that is sufficient to
demonstrate two important points: the vari-
ety of local scenarios of social exclusion and
the fact that, whatever the situation, the defi-
cit of social integration requires innovation
in social policies. Even cities like Milan and
Rennes, where social exclusion does not
reach high levels, need to implement social
policies aimed at keeping the risk of it under
control. Moreover, the relative success or
failure of such policies is not only an imme-
diate function of the effectiveness of the poli-
cies themselves but also of important
independent variables, particularly the
economic opportunities created by the adap-
tation of local economies to new vistas (see,
for instance, the different stories of British
cities equally penalized by deindustrializa-
tion, like Manchester and Liverpool).
To conclude, let us see what the main ingre-
dients are in the local responses to social
exclusion. So as to be brief, I will return to a
general level of discussion even though the
range of diversity is here even greater as it
encompasses local traditions, cultures and
institutions and how they adapt differently to
social change. At this point we also touch on
a controversial question: the assumption that
every resident (not only citizens) should be
granted a standard of life sufficient to be
included in her/his life community is a univer-
salistic idea since, unlike many other welfare
benefits, it is independent from any form of
contribution or contractual agreement. The
fact that this right can be effectively imple-
mented only at the local level is an example of
the principle of subsidiarity (priority
accorded to the lower, more effective levels of
intervention); although standards can be set at
the national or supranational (European
Union) level, cognisance of what is needed in
 388 CITY VOL. 8, NO. 3
the field to fill the gap and activate individual
insertion programs, as opposed to simply
handing out monetary income support, has to
be developed locally. This may mean risking
further fragmentation and inequalities in
present-day societies but it also has some
positive side effects, and I will end by under-
lining their significance.
Local responses to social exclusion and the
activation of social insertion programmes
require three main ingredients: the develop-
ment of forms of partnership between private
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and public agencies; activation and profes-
sionalization of new and old institutions in
the third sector; professional and coordinat-
ing abilities on the part of local authorities.
Going beyond easy optimism, it is the case
that these ingredients produce new resources
for social integration, poorly developed in
the age of welfare capitalism.
Let us take as an example the operational
change taking place in a social assistance
office that from bureaucratic means-tested
income support intervention on a relatively
homogeneous population (for which the rules
and packages are fixed nationally) is going
over to a social insertion programme shaped
according to the needs of an individual or a
family at risk of social exclusion. The office
will now develop professional abilities in
order to evaluate the situation beyond stan-
dardized means tests. To be able to offer a
social insertion package, what is required are
agreements with both market-oriented and
third-sector private agencies and the formula-
tion of training, health, housing, employment
and other suchlike programmes. As demand
is heterogeneous, there is a need for interme-
diate agencies (voluntary groups, associa-
tions, etc.) that record and represent specific
interest groups (cultural minorities, different
immigrant communities and so on). These
usually exist already but the new forms of
incorporation in the local welfare set-up
produces at the same time both expansion and
professionalization (in Italy, for instance, it is
impressive how old Catholic charity institu-
tions, like Caritas, have been transformed
through their involvement in supporting
mostly Islamic, immigrants). Finally, the
office will rely on the local authority devel-
oping a capacity to install and control the
complex machinery of agreements, subcon-
tracts and relations with welfare associations.
Obviously, the above picture is an ideal
one and the real adaptation of local welfare
systems to deal with social exclusion is a
varied and chaotic process. For instance,
wealthy Milan City Council is finding it
difficult to coordinate innovations in social
assistance in agreement with powerful and
dynamic Catholic agencies. In contrast,
although the problems are more difficult
because of a higher rate of unemployment
and traditional divisions between inhabitants
(southern, and now foreign, immigrants
opposed to indigenous locals), Turin City
Council is showing a more effective leader-
ship capacity. In the same direction, the city
of Rennes is going it alone in trying out a
special social insertion programme for the
under-25s (in France, only the over-25s come
within the RMI scheme). Other examples
could be given relating to this topic or to the
diversity and difficulties in the areas of
professionalization, representation of inter-
ests, creation of non-speculative or business-
oriented partnerships and so on, but I hope
to have made clear my position on the long-
term consequences of this transformation in
social welfare systems and resources.
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