The Geographies of Poverty and Welfare

Abstract

AbstractThis article provides a critical review of recent geographical work on the themes of poverty and welfare. It begins with a discussion of the historical development of welfare geography and the recent resurgence of interest in welfare geographies within and beyond the discipline. Attention then shifts to the definitional complexities of poverty and, in particular, some of the difficulties associated with conventional labellings of poverty, poor people and poor places. The next section of the paper explores the relations between poverty, space and place with reference to recent work on the changing spatial distributions of poverty, socio‐spatial forms of polarisation and the complex relations between poverty and place. This is followed by a discussion of welfare geographies, within which the spatial underpinnings and impacts of recent programmes of welfare reform are considered. The article ends by pointing to some new geographical agendas for welfare research.