Poverty In Cities Research Articles

Not Only Helpless but also Hopeless: Changing Dynamics of Urban Poverty in Turkey, the Case of Sultanbeyli, Istanbul

This paper is an attempt to understand the changing characteristics of urban poverty in Turkey since 1980. First, it analyses how the urban poor in Turkey had adopted aggressive survival strategies by strengthening their solidarity networks on religious, ethnic and cultural bases until the 2000s. Then it sheds light on how those networks have dissolved later on thanks to a set of internal and external factors and concludes that Turkey now faces deepening poverty levels and engendering new forms and dynamics of poverty. This paper is based on the Sultanbeyli district of Istanbul, a district almost entirely composed of unauthorized houses whose population grew at an unprecedented rate after 1980; and it is a perfect case for the study of issues relating to migration, urbanization and poverty in Turkish cities.

Faith Action on Urban Social Issues

What evidence supports or refutes the claim articulated from various quarters that faith-based organisations (FBOs) have been repositioned as actors for combating social problems like poverty and social exclusion in cities? This paper explores FBOs as agents of social change in contemporary cities in Europe, with a glance at the US. The argument is, first, that we need to conceptualise changing dynamics between religion, politics and post-secular society in the conviction that cities are the pre-eminent loci where these new relations are forming with intensity. While state restructuring and the urbanisation of political action are well-documented processes, far less is known about similar changes in the governance of religious institutions and their consequences for the urbanising relations between religion and the public sphere. Secondly, there are a number of empirical instances of FBOs involving faith-motivated and other people who respond to problems of poverty and social exclusion in various cities across Europe and suggest a changing public role of FBOs in social and political issues. Such repositioning, however, does not relate to the public sphere without tensions and ambiguities and the paper draws out some implications for theory and practice that guide a new international and multidisciplinary research agenda.

A Re-count of Poverty in US Central Cities: Just Who and Where Are the Urban Poor?

Poverty remains a persistent problem in central cities across the US and the government's approach to measuring it is not without shortcomings. This paper applies recently developed innovations in poverty measurement and presents improved estimates of central-city poverty across time. A broader and more comprehensive income concept is employed to measure family resources and important distributional aspects of poverty are incorporated by using the Sen index. In general, Sen indexes for the central city are significantly reduced when comprehensive income is used to evaluate poverty. Motivating these changes are the substantial reductions that occur in the depth of poverty and the relative income inequality among poor central-city residents. Regionally, the results suggest that the elements of comprehensive income have their greatest impact on estimates of poverty in Southern central cities, while the central cities of the West are least affected.

Integrated Approaches to Address the Social Determinants of Health for Reducing Health Inequity

The social and physical environments have long since been recognized as important determinants of health. People in urban settings are exposed to a variety of health hazards that are interconnected with their health effects. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have underlined the multidimensional nature of poverty and the connections between health and social conditions and present an opportunity to move beyond narrow sectoral interventions and to develop comprehensive social responses and participatory processes that address the root causes of health inequity. Considering the complexity and magnitude of health, poverty, and environmental issues in cities, it is clear that improvements in health and health equity demand not only changes in the physical and social environment of cities, but also an integrated approach that takes into account the wider socioeconomic and contextual factors affecting health. Integrated or multilevel approaches should address not only the immediate, but also the underlying and particularly the fundamental causes at societal level of related health issues. The political and legal organization of the policy-making process has been identified as a major determinant of urban and global health, as a result of the role it plays in creating possibilities for participation, empowerment, and its influence on the content of public policies and the distribution of scarce resources. This paper argues that it is essential to adopt a long-term multisectoral approach to address the social determinants of health in urban settings. For comprehensive approaches to address the social determinants of health effectively and at multiple levels, they need explicitly to tackle issues of participation, governance, and the politics of power, decision making, and empowerment.

Social Polarisation and Poverty in the Global City

Unlike the poverty in the developing world which is more likely associated with undevelopment or underdevelopment of industrial capitalism, the new poverty in advanced cities is induced by the development of a new phase of capitalism that goes beyond industrial capitalism and emphasises the role of knowledge, information, global networks and global finance for capital accumulation and profit generation. This new phase of capitalism represents a transformation from country-based economic systems to city-based ones. Hong Kong as a global city is no exception to this trend. Most of the big advanced cities around the globe are witnessing increasing inequalities of income, job opportunities and job securities, and are turning into ‘divided’ or ‘dual’ cities. In these divided global cities, a new group of marginalised urban poor or ‘underclass’ emerges, and new regimes of urban marginality are established. This article is about the poor and the low-income earning marginalised workers in Hong Kong. Following the social polarisation thesis advanced by Sassen, this article will review the current literature and official statistics to portray and examine the trends of poverty and inequalities in Hong Kong. Then we will attempt to explain how low-skilled and less-educated workers are marginalised and trapped in a vicious cycle of low income and poverty. Specifically, we will draw insights from Esping-Andersen's discussion of a post-industrial stratification order, which combines both the Fordist industrial and post-industrial hierarchies in advanced Western countries to analyse the Hong Kong situation. Our article shows that social polarisation, in its narrowest definition of absolute income polarisation and the disappearing middle, does not happen in Hong Kong. However, there are serious problems on income inequality: a low-income-poverty trap against the lower class, and the spatial and economic segregation towards migrant groups.

Three Poverties in Urban China

AbstractRadical economic reform and rapid marketization in the late 1990s could be expected to create new poverty and insecurity in Chinese cities. Accordingly, the extent and nature of poverty in urban China is examined by means of a 1999 cross‐section household survey. Three types of poverty—“income and consumption”, “income not consumption” and “consumption not income”—are distinguished. A large proportion of the poor have income above, but consumption below, the poverty line. The estimated consumption function shows the importance of consumption smoothing, of precautionary considerations, of saving for investment opportunities, and of special needs related to the presence of children or sickness. An exercise is conducted to compare the three types of poverty by decomposing the divergence in the consumption of each poverty group from its benchmark consumption. Unpredicted financial assets and income, and differences in special needs, are important in contrasting and explaining the three poverties.

Cities in Global Context: A Brief Intellectual History

The article presents information on cities and towns in global context. Use of the concept global city did not necessarily figure in the early writings on cities, but international market connections and trade linkages did. In its initial incarnation, American urban sociology was remarkable for its failure to contextualize urban questions in larger political and economic processes be they global or otherwise. This may have owed partly to the peculiar geographical circumstances of their home nation. The extensive size of the U.S. and the decentralized character of American politics meant that scholars who were interested in connecting the growth of cities to trade or market dynamics generally studied them in a regional or even sub-regional context, a set of concerns that were articulated through the development of central place theory, among others. The historical legacies of colonialism do more than shed light on the timing of much of this literature in the period of post-colonial independence; they also help explain why, in contrast to their American counterparts, few European urbanists sought to blame poverty and underdevelopment in third-world cities on personal pathologies or cultural attributes.

The Urban Poor in Latin America

With three quarters of its population living in cities, Latin America is now essentially an urban region. Higher urbanization is usually associated with a number of positives, such as higher income, greater access to services, and lower poverty incidence, and, Latin America is no exception. Today, urban poverty incidence, at 28 percent, is half that of in rural areas; extreme poverty, at 12 percent, is a third. Despite this relatively low poverty incidence, the absolute number of poor people is high, and most studies agree that about half of Latin America's poor live in urban areas. The Bank's own estimates suggest that 60 percent of the poor (113 million people) and half the extreme poor (46 million individuals) live in urban areas. The report reviews what is specifically urban about poor people living in cities, which reveals a number of facts, critical to understanding the challenges facing the urban poor, and the means to address these challenges. Three preconceived ideas are discussed, that tend to cloud judgment about urban poverty. All three spring from the common misperception that urban statistics are representative of the urban poor. However, the relatively low incidence of poverty in cities, combined with Latin America's high inequality, imply urban statistics are almost never representative of the urban poor. Concerning the differences between urban and rural poor, the need for differentiated strategies to tackle urban as opposed to rural poverty is implied, and, the first and most important differential is the greater integration of the urban poor into the market economy. Second, while urban areas are not systematically unequal than rural areas - it depends on the country, and, within countries, on the city - they are much more heterogeneous socio-economically, or with respect to economic activities and processes. Third, heterogeneity notwithstanding, Latin American cities tend to be highly segregated. As a result, social exclusion coexists with (relative) physical proximity to wealth, services and opportunities. This gives rise to negative externalities, or neighborhood effects that result in a lower ability to access jobs, lower earnings, and lower educational achievements. Fourth, social networks are less stable in urban areas, with relationships based more on the quality of reciprocal links between individuals and friends, than on familial obligations. Fifth, urban living also means much greater exposure to organized crime, drugs and gang violence. This is true for the population as a whole, but it has particularly dismal implications for the poor living in the slums of Latin America's large cities, where drug-traffic is now pervasive. Finally, another important characteristic of urban poverty has to do with overwhelmed, rather than absent services. The underlying hypothesis of this report is that, indeed, the causes of poverty, the nature of deprivation, and the policy levers to fight poverty are, to a large extent, site specific.

Poverty and social exclusion in European cities: diversity and convergence at the local level

In the paper that follows, Enzo Mingione identifies five different models of postwar welfare capitalism. The models were all based around “full” employment, the nuclear family and the regulatory monopoly of the nation‐state. He argues that as a result of economic and demographic change, the very foundations of each model are eroding. As a result certain groups not previously catered for in traditional welfare systems (particularly migrants, single parents, the young, the poorly skilled and low income nuclear families) are now facing social exclusion. Mingione’s analysis has abroad European focus, but also looks at the cases of specific cities (Rennes, Milan and Bremen among others) which demonstrate pressures on welfare services of a varied nature. The variety of local scenarios requires a localised response; though Mingione states that these should include: “three main ingredients: the development of forms of partnership between private and public agencies; activation and professionalisation of new and old institutions in the third sector [and] professional and coordinating abilities on the part of local authorities”.

Resisting the Welfare Mother: The Power of Welfare Discourse and Tactics of Resistance

This paper examines the impact of dominant discourses on welfare on the lives of women caught up within the American welfare system, focusing primarily on community differences in levels of stigma and the possibility for resistance to the dominant practices. Based upon interviews with 36 women conducted in 1997, one year after the passage of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, the paper compares women living in concentrated poverty in the inner cities with those living in rural and suburban communities. The levels of stigma vary dramatically between the two areas, with women in mixed class communities experiencing much more negative treatment and internalizing the punitive welfare discourse to a far greater extent. Women experiencing lower levels of welfare stigma are able to enact more resistive practices to counter the effects of the dominant discourse.

Ciudadania, Derechos e Identidad

This paper derives from a LARR-sponsored forum at the LASA 2003 Congress held in Dallas in March 2003. Targeted at younger scholars, a panel of leading researchers whose early work was shaped by marginality and dependency thinking of the 1960s were invited to reflect cross-generationally about how paradigms analyzing poverty in Latin American cities have shifted from that time to the present. Specifically, each of the authors compares as it was construed more than three decades ago with contemporary constructions of poverty and social organization arising from their more recent research. While there are important continuities, the authors concur that the so-called new poverty today is very different, being more structural, more segmented and, perhaps paradoxically, more exclusionary than before. Moreover, the shift from a largely patrimonialist and undemocratic state towards one that, while more democratic, is also slimmer and downsized, thereby shifting state intervention and welfare systems ever more to local level governments and to the quasi-private sector of nongovernmental organizations. If earlier marginality theory overemphasized the separation of the poor from the mainstream, today's new poverty is often embedded within structures of social exclusion that severely reduce opportunities for social mobility among the urban poor.

From Rural to Urban, From Men to Women, From Class Struggle to Struggles for Entitlements

This paper derives from a LARR-sponsored forum at the LASA 2003 Congress held in Dallas in March 2003. Targeted at younger scholars, a panel of leading researchers whose early work was shaped by marginality and dependency thinking of the 1960s were invited to reflect cross-generationally about how paradigms analyzing poverty in Latin American cities have shifted from that time to the present. Specifically, each of the authors compares as it was construed more than three decades ago with contemporary constructions of poverty and social organization arising from their more recent research. While there are important continuities, the authors concur that the so-called new poverty today is very different, being more structural, more segmented and, perhaps paradoxically, more exclusionary than before. Moreover, the shift from a largely patrimonialist and undemocratic state towards one that, while more democratic, is also slimmer and downsized, thereby shifting state intervention and welfare systems ever more to local level governments and to the quasi-private sector of nongovernmental organizations. If earlier marginality theory overemphasized the separation of the poor from the mainstream, today's new poverty is often embedded within structures of social exclusion that severely reduce opportunities for social mobility among the urban poor.

The Metamorphosis of Marginality in Rio de Janeiro

This paper derives from a LARR-sponsored forum at the LASA 2003 Congress held in Dallas in March 2003. Targeted at younger scholars, a panel of leading researchers whose early work was shaped by marginality and dependency thinking of the 1960s were invited to reflect cross-generationally about how paradigms analyzing poverty in Latin American cities have shifted from that time to the present. Specifically, each of the authors compares as it was construed more than three decades ago with contemporary constructions of poverty and social organization arising from their more recent research. While there are important continuities, the authors concur that the so-called new poverty today is very different, being more structural, more segmented and, perhaps paradoxically, more exclusionary than before. Moreover, the shift from a largely patrimonialist and undemocratic state towards one that, while more democratic, is also slimmer and downsized, thereby shifting state intervention and welfare systems ever more to local level governments and to the quasi-private sector of nongovernmental organizations. If earlier marginality theory overemphasized the separation of the poor from the mainstream, today's new poverty is often embedded within structures of social exclusion that severely reduce opportunities for social mobility among the urban poor.

From Marginality to Social Exclusion: From Laissez Faire to Pervasive Engagement

This paper derives from a LARR-sponsored forum at the LASA 2003 Congress held in Dallas in March 2003. Targeted at younger scholars, a panel of leading researchers whose early work was shaped by marginality and dependency thinking of the 1960s were invited to reflect cross-generationally about how paradigms analyzing poverty in Latin American cities have shifted from that time to the present. Specifically, each of the authors compares as it was construed more than three decades ago with contemporary constructions of poverty and social organization arising from their more recent research. While there are important continuities, the authors concur that the so-called new poverty today is very different, being more structural, more segmented and, perhaps paradoxically, more exclusionary than before. Moreover, the shift from a largely patrimonialist and undemocratic state towards one that, while more democratic, is also slimmer and downsized, thereby shifting state intervention and welfare systems ever more to local level governments and to the quasi-private sector of nongovernmental organizations. If earlier marginality theory overemphasized the separation of the poor from the mainstream, today's new poverty is often embedded within structures of social exclusion that severely reduce opportunities for social mobility among the urban poor.

Poverty Regimes and the Constraints on Urban Democratic Politics

Do policy communities designed to manage urban poverty (poverty regime) constrain the democratic opportunities found in cities? Recent investigations have targeted urban civil societies as particularly strategic arenas for generating democratic opportunities. In particular, the associational sector of cities has been viewed as a strategic site for forming citizens in relative autonomy of market and state forces, and for sustaining a plural set of voices; both crucial for generating opportunities for democratic activities such as dissent, debate, and claim making. Moreover, some scholars suggest that the city's placement at the juncture of globalization, transnational migration flows, and alternative identity networks has worked to reinforce the autonomy and radical plurality of urban civil societies. While sympathetic to these views, this article suggests that the emergence of poverty regimes across European cities and their tendencies for incorporating third-sector associations as policy `partners' significantly alters the capacities of associational sectors to generate the opportunities for democratic activities. Using the case of Toulouse, France, the article demonstrates that the particular architecture of the city's poverty regime has significantly constrained the capacities of the local associational sector to generate democratic opportunities. The article goes on to show what the implications of these depleted opportunities have been for social-movement organizations attempting to create general anti-system mobilizations. The article concludes that while poverty regimes are increasingly general across Europe, their particular architectures determine the specific effects they will have in terms of either constraining or enhancing the capacities of local civil societies to generate democratic opportunities.

Planning and Local Economies in Navi Mumbai: Processes of Growth and Governance

The objective of this article is to situate the development of unplanned settlements in the newly planned city of Navi Mumbai (New Bombay) in terms of the increasing contradictions in global interconnectedness experienced by the larger Mumbai (Bombay) metropolitan region. The article distinguishes between a global and a local economy operating in the urban region. Using the governance approach to urban poverty in Third World cities, it highlights the complex spatial patterning of the local economy, which is comprised of nonpermanent shelters of a floating migrant population, permanent slums and shanties and villages that predate the new city. What is stressed is that the "poor" do not constitute a homogeneous interest group but are separated among other factors by their residential status and length of stay in the city. Second, both patron-client relations as well as activism are used as strategies to garner a livelihood and shelter in the new city.

Deprivation, Diet, and Food-Retail Access: Findings from the Leeds ‘Food Deserts' Study

Within a context of public policy debate in the United Kingdom on social exclusion, health inequalities, and food poverty, the metaphor of the ‘food desert’ caught the imagination of those involved in policy development. Drawing from a major cross-disciplinary investigation of food access and food poverty in British cities, the authors report in this paper findings from the first ‘before/after’ study of food consumption in a highly deprived area of a British city experiencing a sudden and significant change in its food-retail access. The study has been viewed as the first opportunity in the United Kingdom to assess the impact of a non-healthcare intervention (specifically a retail-provision intervention) on food-consumption patterns, and by extension diet-related health, in such a deprived, previously poor-retail-access community. The paper offers evidence of a positive but modest impact of the retail intervention on diet, and the authors discuss the ways in which their findings are potentially significant in the context of policy debate.

Should Suburbs Help Their Central City?

Previous arguments for suburb-to-city fiscal assistance have stressed spillovers from city services to suburban residents or the fact that suburban residents (should?) care about their city's poor. We explore the validity of a third possible argument: Suburban residents - even those who never use city services nor care about the city's poor - may wish to support the city's budget if that budget contributes to the productive efficiency of the city's private economy and if suburban residents consume the output of city firms. The analysis here presents first-difference regressions of city and suburban home values, city and suburban population, and city and suburban incomes for 217 MSA's for the decade 1980-1990. We find that weak city fiscal institutions and increases in the rate of city poverty depress both the city's and the suburb's private economies. The econometric results are replicated in a general equilibrium model of an open MSA economy. Our results suggest each suburban family in an average MSA will find it in their economic self-interest to pay from $100 to over $200 per year to cover the added fiscal costs imposed by weak fiscal institutions or increases in the rate of city poverty.

Comment

Should Suburbs Help Their Central City? Andrew F. Haughwout and Robert P. Inman [End Page 45] SHOULD SUBURBS HELP finance their center city’s core public services? This is a long-standing policy question in U.S. urban public finance and an issue of no less importance in other countries. Toronto recently merged its financing and governance with its surrounding suburbs. In configuring its new fiscal system, South Africa opted for a form of metropolitan financing that “twins” wealthy suburbs with less wealthy central cities. What are the arguments for suburb-to-city fiscal assistance, or stronger still, suburb plus city fiscal mergers? Perhaps the most familiar argument is that suburb-to-city assistance corrects for the underprovision of city-produced public goods that benefit suburban residents, such as city subways and buses, airports, and museums.1 When spillovers are significant and suburban residents benefit from city-provided public infrastructure, they should contribute to the financing of such infrastructures. However, efficient financing favors user fees and average cost pricing rather than intergovernmental transfers.2 [End Page 46] A second familiar argument is that city poverty is a metropolitan-wide concern and suburban residents ought to contribute towards meeting the needs of their city’s poor. National programs define a common floor for income support, above which state and local governments can make supplemental contributions. In the presence of redistributive spillover benefits, however, city transfers will be too low relative to the efficient level of redistribution if individuals prefer to redistribute to lower-income households in close geographical proximity.3 While theoretically compelling, this argument lacks a credible mechanism to reveal suburban preferences for redistribution to the inner city poor. To the extent we rely upon the political process to provide a measure of these preferences, current state funding for city poverty may be efficient. Furthermore, if there is a problem, an appropriate fiscal institution—state government—is already in place to correct it. U.S. mayors have recently advanced a third argument for suburb-to-city fiscal assistance. The mayors argue that suburban residents need an economically vibrant central city to support their own real incomes, claiming, “Economies don’t stop at the city’s edge.”4 The mayors cite the now well-documented positive correlation between the average income of city and suburban residents in U.S. metropolitan areas. Their argument moves beyond correlation to causation, however. They maintain that a weak city economy causes a weak suburban economy and one of the central causes of a weak city economy is weak city public finance. A fiscally weak city has high tax rates and low public services that induce mobile firms and households to leave the city, undermining the city’s private economy and thus, the mayors argue, the economy of the region as a whole. Suburb-to-city transfers that strengthen city finances will strengthen the city’s economy, which enhances, in turn, suburban residents’ private incomes. This paper seeks to evaluate the economic validity of this argument. In the next section, we outline how weak city finances might adversely affect both city and suburban economic strength. Suburban residents benefit from production advantages due to agglomeration economies within the city that lower the cost of city-produced goods and services. Inefficiencies in the central city’s public sector can counteract the benefits of city agglomeration economies by encouraging mobile firms and households to leave the city. Suburban households may prefer to transfer funds to their center cities to protect [End Page 47] city agglomeration economies and maintain low-cost city-produced goods and services that support both city and suburban economic well-being. The following section provides empirical evidence on these issues. First, we document the close interdependencies between central city and suburban economies for U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). We then test for the effects of weak city fiscal institutions—strong public employee unions, weak mayors, poverty obligations, and redistributive tax structures—on city and suburban economies. We find that such institutions reduce the growth of city incomes, populations, and home values. More telling, we find those same city fiscal institutions also slow the growth of suburban incomes, population, and home values. These effects are statistically...

Should Suburbs Help Their Central City?

Should suburbs help finance the core public services of their central city? Previous arguments for such assistance have stressed spillovers from city services to suburban residents or the fact that suburban residents (should?) care about their city’s poor. We explore the validity of a third possible argument for such assistance, one now stressed by many large city mayors. Suburban residents – even those who never use city services nor care about the city’s poor – may wish to support the city’s budget if that budget contributes to the productive efficiency of the city’s private economy and if suburban residents consume directly or indirectly the output of city firms. The analysis here presents first-difference regressions of city and suburban home values, city and suburban population, and city and suburban incomes for 217 MSA’s for the decade 1980-1990. We find that weak city fiscal institutions and increases in the rate of city poverty depress both the city’s and the suburb’s private economies. The econometric results are replicated in a general equilibrium model of an open MSA economy, calibrated to the Philadelphia MSA. Our results suggest each suburban family in an average MSA will find it in their economic self-interest to pay from $100 to $250 per year to their central cities to facilitate the reform of weak central city fiscal institutions.