We could cite, too, the powerful forms of contemporary exclusion that result from
urban segregation, with notable examples in current debate the social and physical
isolation of the banlieues around French towns and cities. Cut off from the urban
centres by poor public transport and the physical obstacles of autoroutes and ring roads,
they perpetuate a cycle of exclusion, poverty, prejudice and marginalization. But
perhaps the most prominent discussions around this issue in recent years have
addressed broader, even existential concerns: whether the individual has been
‘displaced’ from modern life, uprooted and exiled from space and meaningful place.
For if individual identity is rooted in place, the twentieth century saw the undermining
of the frameworks that provided a stable context for the Self. The multiple dislocations
of the modern world demand new ways of understanding our relationship to space, a
new ‘poetics of geography: a site for investigating the metaphors and narrative
strategies that we use to talk about space’ according to Patricia Yaeger (1996: 5).