Area Deprivation

AREA DEPRIVATION CONCERNS areas or communities populated by a large proportion of individuals having essential disadvantages in reaching the minimum living conditions, where the problem of social justice due to individual deprivation has additionally become a problem of spatial justice. The individual weakness develops into area economic depression, as in urban slums or shantytowns in cities, with populations in a state of poverty compared to contiguous affluence levels. The uneven spatial distribution of affluence is present at every geographical scale, within cities as inner cities, and remote rural areas, but also regions, states, and continents. The measure of the spatial variation of inequality and exclusion allows the detection of area deprivation.

The process of unbalanced economic development produced by capital accumulation creates leading and lagging areas. The structural and spatial reorganization of capital produces investment or disinvestments of industries in cities while price oscillations, subsidies regulation, and tariffs have an effect on the competitiveness of agricultural production and drive rural economies to a structural subsistence livelihood or to a viable market-oriented development.

Area deprivations are defined by common attributes of a material, economic, social, participative, and relational kind as less income; fewer employment opportunities; insufficient public infrastructures, services, and facilities; and a general poor ratio between resources and population exist. Area-specific features can be political conflicts and war; declining regions with factory closures; environmentally degraded areas by pollution, deforestation, erosion, or droughts; and hazard-prone areas.

Urban deprived areas have poor physical conditions as a result of an unhealthy environment with high levels of pollution, affected by industrial decline, poor housing conditions, large areas of derelict land, insufficient green areas and community facilities to satisfy leisure needs, and few public basic services.

Remote rural areas have increased disadvantages for their lack of accessibility. The deficiency and bad quality of road and communication infrastructures increase costs in transport and traveling and favor a low competitiveness. Reduced income is prevalent, and some areas show persistent poverty levels higher than in metropolitan areas. Environmental degradation by unsustainable exploitation of resources reduces the main active assets of these areas, including land, water, and biodiversity, and limits the opportunities for prospective development.

Social inequality in deprived areas results in higher unemployment rates, low educational levels and educational attainment, lack of qualification, greater frequency of health problems, and exclusion from social relations and civic activities. Social disorganization and weak social cohesion favors alcoholism, drug abuse, and crime. Strong migration processes in various directions are observed, while impoverished people in inaccessible areas leave for cities, causing rural age-selective depopulation. Deprived urban areas let middle-class people out, while poor foreign immigrants and rural expellees go in, reinforcing deprivation. Demographically urban areas have a younger population and a higher percentage of minority people, while rural areas and historical districts have aging populations.

Whereas areas of deprivation are common to areas and cities in developed and developing countries, they are structurally heterogeneous for they include nondeprived individuals, who nevertheless become socially excluded. Old people who live in declining and aging [Page 49]historic districts are a group vulnerable to potentially experience poverty and deprivation.

...