Welfare Geography

Adam Whitworth, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article is a revision of the previous edition article by R. Lee, C. Philo, volume 12, pp 224–229, © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.

Glossary
Political geography Political geography is often taken to refer to the geographical study of electoral systems and results but can,
in a broader sense, relate to the varied processes through which spatial change is sought in, with, by, or to places.
Spatial inequality Geographically uneven distributions and concentrations of goods and resources considered to be beneficial
(e.g., greater income, health, good quality services, clean air, green space, adequate housing) and undesirable (e.g., poverty,
poor health, air pollution).
Spatial injustice Spatial (in)justice, sometimes referred to as (in)equity, focuses on the ethical assessment of whether those
distributions are themselves considered to be “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong,” “fair” or “unfair.” Spatial (in)justice is
distinguished from spatial (in)equality, which describes the objective distributions of goods and resources. Normative debates
about fairness are difficult to resolve objectively and often become the focus of political contestation.
Welfare geography Welfare geography is a field of human geography that places people, their well-being, and their quality of
life at its center. Welfare geography combines empirical, ethical, and political considerations. Welfare geography can
incorporate attention to the geographical patterns of key outcomes (e.g., income, well-being, life expectancy), to life chances
and opportunities (e.g., sustained geographical differences in educational outcomes or employment rates), and to the welfare
policy interventions that seek to affect those opportunities and outcomes.

Welfare geography as a field of study can perhaps best be understood by its ethosdhuman centered, ethical, and politicaldas much
as by its discrete substantive topics of interest. These topics range widely across key issues affecting people’s lives and well-being and
include the following: poverty, crime, housing, urban change, health, and education. Welfare geography can in part also be under-
stood by its origins, which help to define what it is not. It emerged as part of a counterreaction to the “quantitative turn” within the
(particularly Anglophone) discipline of human geography in the 1960s. This highly technical version of human geography saw the
discipline as (or, perhaps, wished the discipline to be seen as) similar to the natural sciences: technical, quantitative, predicated on
formal modeling that was rooted in the dehumanized equations of neoclassical economics, and in search of fundamental spatial
“laws.”
Academic resistance to this narrow technical view of the discipline had grown by the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this time
there was a desire to widen human geography (and wider social science) scholarship to new social, political, economic, and cultural
perspectives and problems. In short, there was an aspiration to take the “human” in human geography more seriously. What
emerged in response was a flourishing of rich and varied alternative lines of inquiry within the discipline that have both broadened
and enriched the discipline itself, as well as extended its ability to understand and contribute to the world around us. These lines of
inquiry include radical geographies, Marxist geographies, cultural geographies, queer geographies, black geographies, postmodern
geographies, and policy geographies, to name but some.
Welfare geography sits at the starting point of this broadening of the discipline during the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Lee and
Philo discuss in detail, the work of David Smith from the early 1970s was of particular importance to these changes in that period, as
well as to the origins of welfare geography as a distinct part of the discipline of human geography. Although all scholarship exists as
part of wider currents and bodies of work, Smith’s ideas and arguments respecting welfare geography as a distinct area of geograph-
ical inquiry must be considered a seminal driver of scholarly change within the discipline. They must also be thought of as an impor-
tant platform on which a wide range of later scholars and disciplinary subfields extended, critiqued, and in some way rested.

Welfare Geography: Key Themes

How best to crystallize the key elements of what is distinctive about welfare geography? If we reflect back across the work of Smith
and others we are able to identify several key strands that run through welfare geography scholarship. We are likewise able to
observe what the field continues to contribute both to the discipline of human geography and to our understanding of the wider
world. Three elements seem to us particularly important in defining welfare geography and these are taken in turn below: descriptive
sociospatial analysis; ethics and norms; and political engagement.

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition, Volume 14 https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10878-9 253

254 Welfare Geography

Empirical Investigation of Sociospatial Conditions

Flowing from its desire to return the human to human geography, a first distinctive element of welfare geography is its commitment
to the measurement and analysis of sociospatial conditions and distributions, with a particular interest in a whole range of
sociospatial inequalities. The focus of these descriptive analyses encompasses questions and issues relating both to outcomes
(who has what and where?) and to opportunities (what are people’s life chances depending on where they live?). Attention to
inequality is a strong theme throughout.
The use in this article of the term sociospatial as opposed to simply spatial is deliberate. A key objective of welfare geographers is
to achieve a better empirical understanding of different geographical realities of different people as they are embedded in and
interact with different places. Practitioners apply qualitative and quantitative approaches to their descriptive analyses of spatial
conditions. Social histories and oral narratives are the building blocks of the spatial biographies of place-based poverty; they
give individuals a voice to describe their own geographical realities in those communities. Quantitative methods and objective
measurement of geographical surfaces have been mainstays of welfare geography despite its being in part a critical reaction to
the earlier quantitative turn within the discipline. Quantitative geographic information system (GIS) methodologies have been
an important part of the methodological toolbox of welfare geographers and this field has seen a growing development of
innovative qualitative GIS approaches. Welfare geographers have also widely used quantitative social indicators. Indices of Multiple
Deprivation, for example, bring together a raft of different quantitative social indicators across diverse key domains (income,
housing, health, employment, living environment, crime, and so on) at small spatial units in order to provide a rich and spatially
detailed insight into the geography of welfare. Both quantitative and qualitative perspectives help welfare geographers to better
understand geographical realities, and that empirical understanding of space is inevitably key.
At the same time, however, this process of rich geographical empirical analysis within welfare geography should be understood
merely as a first stepda means rather than an enddto the better understanding of the lived realities of differently positioned indi-
viduals across those more or (too often) less equal geographical areas. A geographical focus that remains deeply human at its heart is
fundamental to welfare geography. Thus, “sociospatial” seems to capture the ethos more fully.

An Ethical Commitment to Sociospatial Justice

A second defining characteristic of welfare geography scholarship, linked to this empirical analysis of sociospatial conditions, is an
ethical commitment not only to understand the world but also to examine the normative status of that reality and the structures and
processes that continually reproduce it. There is, in other words, a desire within welfare geography to reflect critically on the
descriptive understanding of spatial (in)equality and to push that reflection through to a consideration of its ethical meaning in
terms of spatial (in)justice, (in)equity, or (un)fairness.
Accordingly, the dual descriptive focus of welfare geography on both outcomes and opportunities outlined above can be under-
stood to relate to an awareness of the ways in which an individual’s opportunities and outcomes, and the links between them, are
geographically shaped. People are far from being abstracted, atomized individuals; they are embedded in a whole range of complex
and varying social and spatial networks comprising multiple material, emotional, and cultural influences and resources. Welfare
geographers recognize the embedded relational reality in which individuals exist. The discipline thus brings into view complex
empirical debates about how “place” explains an individual’s life chances and outcomes. It also interrogates the relationship
between individual agency and responsibility in the context of those wider sociospatial structural conditions in which different indi-
viduals are variously positioned and which, to differing extents, shape, enable, and disable an individual’s opportunities and
outcomes.
The ethical commitment not only to describe but also to combat geographical distributions considered to be unjust, and the
willingness to dream of alternatives to those current spatial patterns remains a strong thread running through welfare geography
scholarship. In this way, welfare geography shares some common ground with the well-known field of welfare economics; however,
there are important differences. A clear initial difference is the explicitly spatial focus of welfare geography compared to the aspatial
focus of welfare economics. Welfare economics is centrally concerned with aggregate utility maximization across a whole society,
and within this it emphasizes the achievement of “Pareto optimal positions,” i.e., allocations of goods or resources whereby no one
individual’s welfare can be enhanced without harming somebody else’s welfare. One can also see significant differences between
welfare geography and welfare economics in the latter’s focus on the aggregate welfare of society (rather than each individual),
its typical (though, as noted below, not necessary) reliance on utilitarianism (which in principle leaves possible distributions
that are both highly unequal and extremely low for certain individuals), and its focus on optimality in the space of distributional
concerns (rather than passing comment on the justice/injustice of those distributions).
These foci in welfare economics open new questions and highlight new needs however. Welfare economics contains the ability
to select alternative social welfare functions beyond the simple utilitarianism mentioned above. In its wider capability it is possible
for welfare economics to move closer to the stronger commitment to equality and justice inherent in welfare geography. Yet the
reconciliation between the two fields remains only partial. At the heart of welfare geography is the human experience. The field
is committed to observing individuals within the sociospatial contexts and networks in which they live and dedicated to providing
a critically reflective and ethically fueled theoretical, empirical, and political response to the sociospatial conditions and inequalities
that it observes. The works of David Harvey offer major contributions to the field of welfare geography in this vein, with his 1973
publication Social Justice and the City still a landmark text. This book emerged from the creative space that had opened up within the
 Welfare Geography 255

discipline at that time and pushed it further forward. By contrast, what remains at the heart of welfare economics, regardless of how
far one adjusts social welfare functions within that field, is an abstracted, technical, and aggregated analysis of the complex human
face of debates around sociospatial justice.
Straightforward answers to, and universal agreement about, the ethical concerns of welfare geography are hard to find. Alterna-
tive normative, ideological, and political perspectives can lead to alternative views and interpretations of what is “just” and “unjust.”
An early critique of Smith’s work from Marxist scholars such as Harvey was its neglect of the broader structures and power relations
of the whole economic–social–political capitalist system. Irrespective of normative perspectives, differently positioned individuals
within that broader capitalist system have more or less to gain/lose by its current structure, operation, and distributional outcomes.
There is an incentive and tendency in this context for those with the greatest power to benefit from existing processes and inequal-
ities and to consider those outcomes “fair” and “deserved,” that is, to deem them a reward for effort, hard work, or ability. This
“agency–structure debate” is a key aspect of the ethical concerns that run through the field of welfare geography. There is a commit-
ment within its scholarship to keep in view the way in which powerful structures that determine various aspects of an individual’s
life are beyond that individual’s control. There is also a commitment to consider the implications of that structure–agency balance
on our understanding of outcomes, responsibility, and justice. Welfare geography scholarship, for example, highlights the difficulty
in defending, ethically, the view that the extent of (recently worsening) global poverty and inequality is “deserved.” The case against
merit is built on empirical evidence that the vast majority of income variation globally can be explained by two factors distributed to
us by brute luck and without any meritocratic content: country of birth and parental income.
Also abundant in the ethical concerns of welfare geography are questions of relativism. That is, the field demands an answer to
queries about whether positions on what is “good” or “bad,” “just” or “unjust” can ever be defined universally, or whether the
ethical nature of any phenomenon must instead be relative in nature taking varying contexts of space and time into considerations
of justness. Take the issue of global poverty, for example, which is an ongoing concern among welfare geography scholars. Thinking
on poverty in the 20th Century was dominated by the notion of absolute poverty that is associated with thinkers such as Booth and
Rowntree. In this concept, basic income thresholds are defined below which individuals are said to be poor. Growing affluence
across advanced economies throughout the 20th Century lifted most individuals in these advanced economies above those basic
absolute poverty levels, but a new strand of thinking on relative poverty emerged during the 1960s that remained concerned about
what it saw as the continued widespread existence of poverty. In this relative view, thinkers such as Townsend argued that while
advanced nations may have largely abolished absolute poverty, poverty must nevertheless be understood for what it truly means
to individuals: their ability to fit in, belong, and afford to live a life that their society deems socially acceptable so as to avoid exclu-
sion and stigma. This view is allied to Marshall’s seminal ideas about the meaning of citizenship rights and obligations that emerged
slightly earlier immediately following World War II.
Despite these advances in thought, issues remain when we consider poverty from a global perspective. Amartya Sen’s Nobel
prize-winning “capabilities approach” highlighted the problems from the perspective of a developing world context (Sen’s early
work considered the specific context of rural India). Before offering an explanation of his capabilities approach, Sen asked the ques-
tion: If we accept only relative poverty, then everybody can be poor in absolute terms (as many rural Indian villages were and are),
but, as nobody would be considered "poor" in these relative terms surely such a perspective cannot be sensible? Although people
may not consider poverty in relative terms, the priorities of relative poverty are nevertheless important to retain in all societies. These
are belonging, stigma, shame, and participation. Seeing neither the absolute nor the relative view as adequate in isolation, Sen
proposed the capabilities approach as a potential reconciliation and alternative way to thinking about poverty from a “global”
perspective. In his approach, “global” is used not only in its geographical sense but also, and perhaps more importantly for the
present discussion, in the sense that it is universally applicable. For in the capabilities approach the central tenets of “poverty”
become the freedom to do, have, and be. A set of core high-level capabilities can be argued to be universally shared, irrespective
of time and place: the ability to live a life with dignity, with safety, and without stigma, for example. All people in all places can
reasonably be said to value these; hence, they might ethically be considered universally applicable. The trouble, however, is that
even if these abilities are universally shared, what any individual must have, be, or do to achieve them varies across time and space.
The potential to achieve them depends on the circumstances, norms, and expectations of each society. The problem of relativism is
therefore reopened, but it arrives at the back door. If ethical debates about the “justness” or “unjustness” of global poverty can be
understood as central to welfare geography scholarship, then to what extent can solutions ever be determined and initiated when
the challenges of relativism make it so difficult to agree on a shared conceptualization and definition of “poverty”? How can poverty
as a relative concept be a starting point for any ethical and political conversation?

A Political Commitment to Progressive Change

A third and final defining element of welfare geography scholarship is its political engagement and commitment to seeking socio-
spatial change. Welfare geography’s political dimension was clearly evident in Smith’s work throughout the 1970s as well as in the
work of a number of other scholars in that period, in journals such as Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. This political commit-
ment to progressive change in the conditions and inequalities of society is a thread that has not only run through welfare geography
scholarship since that time but that is also more deeply part of its essence.
The political commitment within welfare geography scholarship is defined by a particular type of change: progressive. The use of
the term “progressive change” in the subheading is deliberate. It also carries a double meaning in the case of welfare geography
scholarship. First, the change welfare geographers seek is progressive in the sense that it is considered positive, that is, a step forward
256 Welfare Geography

toward a more just version of society. Second, it is progressive in the sense that there is within welfare geography scholarship the
dominance of political leftist views (to varying extents) such that welfare geographers aim significant attention at the inequalities in
and generated by wider structures of the economic–social–political system. Moreover, the “positive” changes they seek are
overwhelmingly done so by those welfare geographers who see greater sociospatial equality as a more just arrangement. This is
not to critique the tendency within welfare geography to come from and fight for the redistributive politics of the left, which emerges
from a combination of normative and political commitments to justice and well-evidenced empirical awareness of the nature and
power of existing structural inequalities. Rather, it is simply to illustrate that the political nature of welfare geography scholarship is
(inevitably) bound up with and shaped by its descriptive and ethical dimensions.
A further way in which welfare geography scholarship might be understood is by the attention of those in the field to the process
required to achieve the change to which they are politically committed. The term “welfare” is frequently used in policy studies
(particularly in a North American context) to refer to the variety of public policy interventions across a wide range of domains
related to an individual’s well-being: social security, health, education, housing, employment, and so on. An active area of
geographical welfare policy research is the study of “welfare regimes.” This term refers to the differing ways of organizing, across
nation-states, the state, private, voluntary, and family provision required to deliver the state’s objectives for those areas of public
policy and welfare. A second and less widely discussed aspect of the political dimension of welfare geography, therefore, might
be the relationship welfare geographers have with welfare policy regimes and interventions while they seek progressive change.
Welfare geography in this sense has as its key concern a desire to understand and analyze two things: the attempts, through policy
interventions, to affect the types and distributions of sociospatial opportunities and outcomes, and the impacts those attempts have
on those sociospatial realities. A range of questions and possibilities might then emerge: How are welfare systems configured across
different contexts? What is the best way to tackle geographical concentrations of disadvantage (and, potentially, hyperaffluence)? To
what extent do national, regional, and local actors play a role? Why have these differences emerged? And, what are the impacts of
these differences on sociospatial experiences and outcomes?
A vibrant literature on “policy geographies” exists that is related to these questions but is nevertheless distinct from them. They
focus primarily on debates about whether human geography as a discipline is or is not sufficiently engaged with and influential on
public policy processes and, indeed, whether it ought to be. Largely absent from these debates, however (though see Peck and
Massey for notable exceptions), is a consideration of the potential conceptual contributions that geographical thinking can
make to a fuller understanding of the multiple potential spatialities of welfare policies. Also absent is an examination of how those
in the field can seek to use that geographical understanding to enhance the ability of those welfare policies to deliver desired
progressive change.
These myriad linkages between human geography and welfare policy remain at present a relatively underexplored dimension of
welfare geography scholarship and one that has much potential to inform both scholarship and policy practice. Take, as an example,
the policy field of employment support policy, which helps individuals move from unemployment into paid work. Central debates
have been on whether locally or nationally controlled interventions are better able to support people effectively. More particularly,
these debates have considered whether locally integrated approaches that seek to join up services more seamlessly might be needed
in order to effectively provide for that priority group of individuals who have multiple support needs. That line of thinking has
encouraged understandable pressures for devolution of employment policy powers and budgets down from central to local policy
government. From the perspective of conceptual geographical thinking, however, it is arguably less useful to see the policy need in
terms of which scale is better suited to this task (central, regional, or local?)da view of space that conceptual geographical thinkers
define as absolute perspective. Instead, it is more powerful to start with a consideration of what it is, geographically speaking, that
such systems require in order to be more effectively integrated and, consequentially, better able to support individuals with multiple
support needs. Here, the priority is not its absolute scale (central, regional, local). Instead, the priority becomes one of developing
employment systems that enable easier, faster, more effective, and better aligned circulations and connections between different
parts of any local welfare system (currently fragmented) from which these types of unemployed individuals require a holistic
package of support. Support might relate to employment, health, housing, family, debt, and skills, to name a few. Such ideas
and potentials are for conceptual geographical thinkers the space of so-called relative and relational geography. Devolution of
employment powers to local areas may help to deliver these key relative and relational features. Indeed, localism may be necessary
to do so. Crucially, however, this richer understanding of the multiple specialities of employment support policy highlights that any
such localism of employment policy (i.e., the downscaling of employment policy in absolute space) is not in and of itself the key
issue, despite it being the focus of the political and scholarly debate. Rather, the key need is to develop locally integrated employ-
ment systems based on a sound understanding of the (in this case employment) policy system and service user needs in terms of
their relative and relational geographiesdconnections, flows, alignments, and circulations of the key cultural, operational, political,
financial, and other ingredients of what it is that makes multiple parts of any policy system functions effectively together. Multiple
other policy examples besides employment policy abound. Moreover, many further alternative ways to conceptualizing space might
be brought to bear in this kind of welfare geography scholarship.

Welfare Geography: Legacies and Current Contributions

Reflecting back on the emergence of welfare geography as a field of scholarship over the past 50 years, it is clear that it has both
contributed to and been part of significant changes in what human geography is fundamentally concerned with and, perhaps
 Welfare Geography 257

more deeply, in its philosophical orientation. In some ways human geography has become something of a “magpie discipline,”
composed of elements selected at will from other subjects where they add analytical value. The discipline has flourished from
this broadening of themes and approaches since the postwar dominance of the quantitative turn. Welfare geography emerged in
reaction to this ’quantitative’ turn.
Seeking to define the core essence of any field of study is always a difficult and dangerous task. Different scholars may emphasize
other defining characteristics of welfare geography than we do. For us, however, welfare geography scholarship is, in both its core
essence and its substantive body of work, concerned with the combination of, and dialectic relationship between, the following: an
empirical understanding of sociospatial conditions and inequalities; an ethical commitment to normative assessment of those
conditions and to achieving sociospatial justice; and a political commitment to achieving progressive change. Welfare geography
is a critical scholarly interrogation of the more or (often) less equal social and spatial nature of the world and status quo (its
outcomes, opportunities, processes, structures, power dynamics), combined with a passion and commitment to seeking a better
alternative future.
Moreover, welfare geography is a vibrant and flourishing field of study that itself inevitably changes as the economic–social–
political world around us similarly evolves. What, for example, does welfare geography scholarship have to say about a whole range
of pressing modern concerns? What critical comment does it make about increasingly large and powerful flows of offshore global
finance (outside of mainstream sight) in a global culture of nationally rooted regulatory and tax systems? What does it say about
migratory flows and pressures across unequal parts of the globe in the context of welfare systems, when citizenship and identity
remain based largely on national borders? Or, what comment does it make on the deepening sociospatial divisions between polit-
ical and economic realities that underpin the rise of increasingly divisive, extreme, and populist politics across many nations?
Human geography is nothing if not flexible, critical, and interdisciplinary. The combination of critical empirical, normative, and
political foundations that define welfare geography scholarship has contributed much to the discipline’s understanding of, and
engagement with, the sociospatial world. These foundations have provided the impetus for a wide range of broader critical subfields
within the discipline. As we move through an increasingly uneven and uncertain era of economic–social–political power relations,
the key (and linked) empirical, ethical, and political tenets of welfare geography leave it well placed to continue to examine, under-
stand, and seek to affect those ongoing changes around us.

See Also: Applied Geography.

Further Reading

Dorling, D., Shaw, M., 2002. Geographies of the agenda: public policy, the discipline and its (re)turns. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 26 (5), 629–646.
Esping-Andersen, G., 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Gelissen, W., 2002. Three worlds of welfare capitalism or more? A state-of-the-art report. J. Eur. Soc. Policy 12 (2), 137–158.
Harvey, D., 1973. Social Justice and the City. Edward Arnold, London.
Lee, R., Philo, C., 2009. Welfare geography. In: Kitchin, R., Thrift, N. (Eds.), International Encylopedia of Human Geography, first ed. Elsevier, London.
Marshall, T.H., 1950. Citizenship and Social Class: and Other Essays. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Martin, R., 2001. Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 25 (2), 189–210.
Massey, D., 2001. Geography on the agenda. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 25 (1), 5–17.
McKenzie, L., 2015. Getting by: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain. Policy Press, Bristol.
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 2015. English Indices of Deprivation 2015. MHCLG, London.
Mitchell, D., 2004. Radical scholarship: a polemic on making a difference outside the academy. In: Fuller, D., Kitchin, R. (Eds.), Radical Theory/critical Praxis: Making a Difference
beyond the Academy? Praxis (e)Press, Vernon and Victoria, BC, pp. 21–31.
Peck, J., 1999. Editorial: grey geography? Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. 24, 131–135.
Philo, C. (Ed.), 1995. Off the Map: The Social Geography of Poverty in the UK. Child Poverty Action Group, London.
Rowntree, S., 1908. Poverty: A Study of Town Life. Macmillan and Co, London.
Sen, A., 1983. Poor, Relatively Speaking. Oxford Economic Papers 35, pp. 153–169.
Smith, D., 1971. Radical Geography: The Next Revolution, pp. 153–157. Area13.
Smith, D., 1974. Who gets what “where,” and how: a welfare focus for human geography. Geography 59, 289–297.
Townsend, P., 1979. Poverty in the United Kingdom. Allen Lane and Penguin Books, London.
Van Ham, M., Manley, D., Bailey, N., Simpson, L., Maclennan, D. (Eds.), 2012. Neighbourhood Effects Research: New Perspectives. Springer Netherlands.
Ward, K., 2005. Geography and public policy: a recent history of “policy relevance”. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 29 (3), 310–319.

Relevant Websites

An extensive digital resource around Booth’s pioneering spatial analyses are available through the LSE at https://booth.lse.ac.uk/.
A history of Rowntree’s work then and now is available through the Rowntree Society at http://archive.rowntreesociety.org.uk/seebohm-rowntree-and-poverty/.