Anthony Miro Born – författare

Social Ladders offers a new understanding of a core ideal in political, public, and academic discourses on low-income neighbourhoods: that of promoting upward mobility. It explores the contradictions between the lofty promises of social mobility in marginalised areas, its ambivalent politics and its complex manifestations in people's lived experiences. The analysis put forward in this book invites readers to fundamentally question upward mobility as an effective strategy for enhancing social justice in marginalised neighbourhoods. Drawing on international case studies as well as in-depth fieldwork in Germany, the book depicts the ideal of social mobility from multiple perspectives. Social Ladders, then, is not only an account of how the language of social mobility is used and abused as a way of ignoring the primary needs and problems of disadvantaged communities. It also argues that to understand its divisive nature and hidden costs, we need to hear from more than just the few who have 'made it' up the ladder to social and economic success. We must also include the voices of those commonly seen as having been 'left behind'.

This book combines intersectional perspectives and urban research to demonstrate the importance of intersectionality as a concept that can complement “refigurational” understandings of social change as the outcome of spatial conflicts. Showing how intersectionality enables us to grasp the intersecting categories of inequality in these spatial tensions, it remains attentive to the role of social difference and power in these processes, as well as to modes of normativity and resistance. With case studies gathered from a range of national contexts, it provides rich empirical insights into the relationship between urban spatialities, power dynamics, and embodied social inequalities, addressing the manner in which different conflicts are made manifest intersectionally in and through situated urban spaces. The chapters consider issues such as the gendering and racialization of urban spaces; urban marginality and environmental pressures; intersectional power dynamics in research; heteronormative and cisgender- centric structures in the city; aging in the city; young people, control, and insecurity; police violence; migrant emplacement and activism; racialized gentrification and commoning, and pandemic safety and protest, to explore the uneven outcomes of spatial planning and urban development. As such, it draws attention to the interplay of various forces in the production of exclusion and injustice and will therefore appeal to scholars of sociology, geography, and urban studies with interests in inequality, social change, and resistance to exclusion.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution (CC-BY)] 4.0 license.