Abstract This article provides a critical review of debates relating to discursive constructions of low‐income neighbourhoods. Drawing on literature from urban and development studies, it examines these issues in diverse contexts across the global North and South, in order to explore divergent and cross‐cutting themes from different periods and settings. In this way, it aims to show how interrogating apparently diverse and disconnected discourses may help to more clearly reveal their effects on low‐income neighbourhoods, in terms of the reflection and reproduction of marginalisation. It begins with a consideration of the power of discourses in terms of their potential for tangible effects in already marginalised neighbourhoods, including compounding existing spatial and social marginalisation. It then gives a brief relation of the historical context of discursive constructions of low‐income neighbourhoods, drawing on accounts which respond to processes of urbanisation in different times and places, to show how the same discursive tropes recur. This is followed by a section which explores resistance to these discursive tropes, and their enduring nature. The penultimate section examines recent theoretical interpretations which may hold the potential to account for both the place‐specific nature and the structural conditions of such discourses. The article concludes with a suggestion of how such an approach, even while offering a selective and partial view of discursive constructions of urban poverty, may offer the basis from which to contest them.
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