Poverty

Poverty is a social and economic condition in which access to goods and services lies below a given threshold. Often this threshold is defined according to an individual's or a household's monetary income. Unemployment, low wages, low educational attainment, high housing costs, high healthcare costs, and discrimination all can contribute to poverty. Poverty has an inverse relationship to quality of life, especially when people living in poverty live within close proximity to one another. Many governments establish an official poverty line to determine the income level at which individuals and households can be officially recognized as poor. This gives governments the ability to identify an official poverty rate, measure how much of a country's population is living in poverty at any given time, distribute welfare benefits, and locate the spatial dimensions of poverty.

Geographers use governmental statistics and other data to reveal the spatial characteristics of poverty at various scales. At the global scale, geographers and others note a general divide between the global North and the global South, with wealthier populations living in the former and poorer populations living in the latter. Spatial patterns of poverty also exist within countries. For example, in the United States, poverty is concentrated in the Appalachian Mountains, in the southeastern states, among Native American reservations, and in core sections of large cities. In China, a stark divide between urban and rural residents exposes the spatial distribution of poverty. Geographers have contributed to trends about poverty, including the feminization of poverty and the geographic unevenness of antipoverty legislation.

Poverty has been part of geographic study since the early 1900s. Social scientists research the spatial dynamics of poverty in three main ways. First, they direct attention to the location and experiences of poor people, often within an urban setting. Second, social scientists examine the social and economic conditions that contribute to poverty's spatial form. Third, they focus on the meaning of poverty from a variety of perspectives to critique any singular definition of poverty and its manifestation through space.

During the early part of the 20th century, sociologists at the University of Chicago began studying urban social relations through the lenses of race, ethnicity, and class. Led by Robert Park, the Chicago[Page 379] School of Sociology developed a set of theories about the city known as human ecology. Using Chicago as the primary case study, these models of the city's human ecology divide urban space into several distinct components that work in conjunction with one another to form the cohesive unit of a city's community and economy. Such studies partition urban space into districts, such as the central business district and ethnic enclaves, based on their perceived primary social and economic function. Each of these parts was held to operate as a relatively autonomous unit in the city's overall social and economic ecology. Such models reveal the social and economic segregation of urban space, whereby poorer residents live in close proximity to one another and wealthier residents live together in different places from where the poor can be found. Although these divisions also point to racial and ethnic segregation within urban space, the racial and ethnic divisions often correlate to the location of poverty because certain racial or ethnic minorities had not been incorporated into the city's economy.

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