Loïc Wacquant’s essay argues that contemporary urban poverty is not a temporary residue of economic crisis but a durable feature of advanced capitalist societies. He identifies advanced marginality as a new regime produced by fragmented wage labour, weakened welfare protection, and the disconnection of poor neighbourhoods from national and global economies. Unlike older working-class districts, today’s relegated spaces are marked by territorial stigmatisation: places such as the American ghetto or the French banlieue become publicly imagined as zones of danger, disorder, and moral failure. This stigma damages residents’ identities, restricts their opportunities, and legitimises punitive state intervention. Wacquant further argues that these districts lose their character as meaningful places of belonging and become insecure spaces of survival, fear, and social fragmentation. His comparison of Chicago’s Black Belt and French working-class suburbs shows how poverty is intensified when residents lack both stable work and collective institutions capable of defending them. The essay concludes that the emerging precariat remains politically unfinished: it is too fragmented, unstable, and symbolically degraded to form a coherent class movement. Wacquant therefore presents urban marginality as both a spatial and political crisis of the contemporary city.