Lone mothers in European urban contexts. Milan and Berlin: common and diverging elements of impoverishment processes.

Abstract

The comparison of single mothers in an affluent city, Milan (Italy), and another in economic and employment crisis, Berlin (Germany), aims to verify whether a common pattern of urban impoverishment does exist or poverty has contextual features. The dynamic analysis of biographical trajectories allows for the construction of ideal-typical trajectories of impoverishment. Our fieldwork demonstrates how impoverishment processes tend to diverge between local dynamic models. Among lone mothers we find, on the one hand, recurrent poverty in Milan and, on the other, continuous poverty in Berlin.