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This chapter sketches the broad context of increasing settlement by outlining the policy regime towards Gypsies and Travellers in the post war period. Its key argument is that the overall aims of postwar have been to halt nomadism and enforce assimilation into the general population. The first part of the chapter delineates the cumulative impact of progressive waves of legislation on the ability to live a nomadic life or to reside on caravan sites. The remainder of the chapter sets out three important theoretical accounts for explaining these policy trends and the position and status of Gypsies and Travellers in contemporary societies. These theoretical insights form the underlying assumptions and framework within which the empirical data in later chapters is situated.

This chapter reflects on the outbreaks of COVID-19 among migrant workers in Singapore, describing how the first phases of the pandemic constituted the vast majority of infections in Singapore. It explains how the infections are attributed to a pre-existing political economy that both spatially contains and socially marginalizes migrant workers. It also looks at a complex picture of migrant worker infection clusters that connected to a structural and institutional history of socio-spatial exclusion and economic marginalization. The chapter reviews the racial/migrant context of Singapore and policies aimed at the spatialization of difference. It examines the living and working conditions of migrant workmen in Singapore, which increases the prevalence of COVID-19 infections among the sub-population.

Focusing on hospitals and lunatic asylums, this chapter shows how both the British authorities and the Indian philanthropists created a divided public realm, a fractured landscape, through their dividing practices. It examines two types of social dividing practices or modes: stylistic marking and spatial exclusion. Drawing on Michel Foucault's work, the anthropologist Paul Rabinow defines “dividing practices” as “modes of manipulation that combine the mediation of a science (or pseudoscience) and the practice of exclusion—usually in a spatial sense, but always in a social one.” The European sick, for example, were distinguished from the native sick in Bombay; they were housed in different hospitals, located in different spaces in the city. When similar architectural styles were used for European and native hospitals, then other elements, such as location or the name (such as “European” or “native” hospital), were necessary to distinguish between groups.

The introductory chapter sets the scene for the book and in it context is given to the main participants, Juan and Julia, and how we came to know them. Thus, we reflect on the relatively little research which exists on Valdemingómez, its location with regard to the city, give some clues to its spatial and social aetiology and present our case for a new form of empirical, theoretical and methodological analysis. We reflect honestly and openly about our methodology and offer the reader a concise description of structure of the book’s chapters.

Here we explore how and why macro ideological and commercial processes produce a place such as Valdemingómez by contextualizing how the political and economic changes over the last 40 years have crippled the urban poor in places like Madrid. We firstly show that these are global processes are linked to structural undercurrents of deindustrualisation which have produced greater inequality, unemployment and poverty before showing how a politics of distraction dilutes our collective consciousness to these issues. Both these elements are reflected in how social planners and politicians have engaged in urban cleansing programmes which relegate problem groups like drug users to the city margins; out of sight, out of mind. We show the consequences of this in the final part of the chapter when we discuss the implications this has for the city and its urban outcasts.