Social exclusion in a post-industrial city: Towards a critical urban social work perspective

Many cities around the world have been radically transformed by deindustrialisation, neoliberalism, and globalisation. While these processes have marked progress in various aspects of urban life, they have also generated inequality and social exclusion especially in already marginalised communities. The purpose of this article is threefold: to address community exclusion in a post-industrial city, to identify mechanisms and practices that propel it; and to move towards a preliminary conceptualisation of post-industrial urban marginalisation for social work. We build on data from a qualitative study in a post-industrial city in Israel that applied interviews (N =30) and focus groups (N =63), documents, walking tours and observations. The findings confirm the progressive deterioration of the communities under study and identify multiple institutional practices in three main mechanisms: service erosion, spatial deterioration, and political disempowerment. These mechanisms manifested urban policies reflected at the local level, while sustaining a dynamic that spiralled community marginalisation. Study implications suggest that social work practice and research in post-industrial cities should (a) be informed by the urban context affecting communities (b) critically re-examine services and programmes to identify their possible effect on urban mechanisms of exclusion (c) adopt a multidisciplinary approach to confront the varied aspects of urban community marginalisation.