Disadvantaged by where you live? offers a major contribution to academic debates on the neighbourhood both as a sphere of governance and as a point of public service delivery under New Labour since 1997.

This text offers a major contribution to academic debates on the neighbourhood both as a sphere of governance and as a point of public service delivery under New Labour since 1997.

This major new book provides, for the first time, a detailed evaluation of policies on poverty and social exclusion since 1997, and their effects. Bringing together leading experts in the field, it considers the challenges the government has faced, the policies chosen and the targets set in order to assess results. Drawing on research from the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, and on external evaluations, the book asks how children, older people, poor neighbourhoods, ethnic minorities and other vulnerable groups have fared under New Labour and seeks to assess the government both on its own terms - in meeting its own targets - and according to alternative views of social exclusion.

"This book directly addresses the economic development issues central to neighbourhood renewal, drawing on the authors' original research and wide-ranging analysis of recent academic theory and policy practice. Their critical examination of the economic problems of deprived areas, and the range of employment and enterprise-related policy initiatives and governance arrangements that have attempted to address them, offers informed insights into what does and what does not work."--BOOK JACKET.

Social housing appears to offer a solution for the housing of poor and disadvantaged people. The French "right to housing" offers poor and disadvantaged citizens priority in social housing allocation, and even a legal action against the State to obtain a social home. Despite this, France is suffering a long-lasting housing crisis with disadvantaged people having particular difficulties of access, often despite the efforts of local housing actors. This situation is affected by the European Court of Human Rights and EU decisions limiting diverse national housing and rental policies. Between historic French revolutions and the modern riots, negotiated solutions to social dilemmas emerged. Despite progress in constitutional principles, complex local negotiations still ultimately determine who is housed. Local social landlords, mayors and employee and tenant representatives use their privileges to house their insiders: existing tenants, locals and employees, with rent insufficiently subsidized. ‘Insider Outsider’ theory is used for an economic analysis of exclusion in social housing allocation: its processes, institutional context, and stigmatizing effects. This highlights the spatial effects of nimbyism, excluding disadvantaged outsiders, and concentrating them in deprived areas. Simultaneously, urban regeneration reduced affordable housing stock and ‘social mix’ became a reason to refuse a social home. History, comparative law, economic theory and local interviews with housing actors give a detailed picture of what happens in and around French social housing allocation for an interdisciplinary housing policy audience. Constitutional principles appear in an unfamiliar guise as negotiating positions, with the "right to property" supporting landlords and the "right to housing" supporting tenants. French debates about the function of social landlords are echoed across Europe and reflected in European policies concerning rights, and the exclusion of disadvantaged minorities.

This book is a guide to understanding the important issue of stigma - `associated disadvantage' - which affects not only those who are excluded from society, but also family members and friends. Social Work and Disadvantage explains the impact of stigmatization on siblings, families and workers in the caring professions and its consequences for the people it affects and for society as a whole. Contributors provide evidence from research and professional practice on transferability of health and social problems in, for example, dementia care patients, drug users and looked after children. Providing key messages for practice, they outline a range of protection measures to reduce the risk of stigma and victimization. Social Work and Disadvantage provides valuable advice and guidance for social work and health care practitioners, educators and students.

This ethnography takes the reader into the Australian suburbs to learn about food, eating and bodies during the highly political context of one of Australia’s largest childhood obesity interventions. While there is ample evidence about the number of people who are overweight or obese and an abundance of information about what and how to eat, obesity remains ‘a problem’ in high-income countries such as Australia. Rather than rely on common assumptions that people are making all the wrong choices, this volume reveals the challenges of ‘eating healthy’ when money is scarce and how, different versions of being fat and doing fat happen in everyday worlds of precarity. Without acknowledgement of the multiple realities of fatness and obesity, interventions will continue to have limited reach.