The institutions, structural arrangements and policies that influence, if not determine, transitions from ‘childhood’, through ‘youth’ and into ‘adulthood’ have been fundamentally reshaped and redefined through the 1980s and 1990s. The cumulative impact of radical change in relation to employment, education and training opportunities; welfare services; housing and domiciliary arrangements; health profiles; social security benefits; family forms; and criminal justice interventions has meant that the processes of ‘growing up’ and passing into ‘adulthood’ have become more hazardous and insecure for identifiable constituencies of young people. For working-class and disadvantaged children and young people, such change has invariably been accompanied by the experience of systemic and institutionalised forms of exclusion (Goldson, 1997; MacDonald, 1997). In this respect black working-class young people have been especially disadvantaged (Goldson and Chigwada-Bailey, 1999: 56–62). Coles (1995) describes this process as the ‘restructuration of youth'within which the linked economic phenomena of de-industrialisation and structural unemployment have impacted on young people with a particular vehemence. Too many young people are now condemned to what Westergaard (1992) has called ‘outcast poverty’, and for the first time in many generations in the UK defined sections of the young cannot assume that their standard of living will be higher than that of their parents. Indeed, the very terms ‘(workingclass) youth’ and ‘social exclusion’ have almost become interchangeable in contemporary sociological and social policy discourse: the one implies the other.

Children and young people who live in and around the city are particularly, although not exclusively, exposed to such exclusionary processes, and those growing up in identifiable urban regions face especially marked levels of disadvantage.