Spatializing poverty: Media representations and perceptions of poverty in Lille,France

Abstract

This article draws together literature on the geographies of poverty and Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power, investigating the relationship between a rhetoric on poverty portrayed by media and its spatialization within the urban fabric of the French city of the Lille metropolis, an area in which a large amount of people have – both historically and currently – experienced economic difficulties. Using qualitative methodology, we analyze articles written at the national and local scale after a major policy speech on poverty held in 2018 by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and integrate the results with semi-structured interviews to inhabitants of the metropolitan area. Results showed that the political and mediatic discourse on poverty reflects neoliberal ideologies prevailing in the modern capitalist system, (re)producing asymmetrical relations between social actors. In addition to this, our core purpose is to showcase the ways in which such effects influence the production and negotiation of physical and mental spaces, effectively “spatializing poverty” within the metropolitan city texture.