The 4th of August 2011 the police shot Mark Duggan, a black man living in Tottenham – a borough in Greater London. The event created a strong reaction form the local youth. After a march on Tottenham Police station to protest the death of the man, the demonstration turned into a series of violent acts in the streets that quickly developed and spread across London and other cities all over England. A major debate arose about the inner causes of the insurrections and the media and politicians promptly pointed out several hypothesis. The August 2011 events have been primarily interpreted, especially amongst the political class, through a lens that emphasises criminality. ,one prominent argument advocates that the cause of the unrest was the moral decay of ‘a feral underclass’ (Scrambler; Grover 2011) However, many of such explanations tend to be mostly speculative and they often fail to provide a consistent account of the causes of the riots based on solid evidence (the LSE/theguardian, 2011, Solomos, 2011).

Against this background this essay attempts to disentangle the motives of the London 2011 riots, by focusing on the relations of causality between factors and events that led to the burst of the unrest. It argues that urban social inequalities as well as uneven processes of exclusion and inclusion of a marginalised class are the main factor underlying the disturbances. Yet this essay claims that these riots need also to be analysed in the very specific context in which they have arisen: the financial crisis, a society which is becoming increasingly consumerist in its orientation, the disputable role of the police, loss of faith in the political class and hopelessness towards the future amongst the urban youth.
In the first part this essay analyses inequality indicators and trends embracing the multidimensional nature of social inequality (Bradley, 1996).