The Urban Geography of Inequality

Recent research has identified important shifts in the physical location of poor urban Americans. The concentration of poverty in the United States roughly doubled between 1970 and 1990, and then declined in the 1990s before reverting to an upward trend in recent years. What is striking and yet to be fully grasped is how the urban geography of poverty has changed over the past decade and how this impacts poor Americans. In 2000, the typical urban pattern was one of contiguous tracts with high poverty. By 2010, urban poverty had deepened but had unexpectedly become less geographically concentrated, that is, poverty tracts became less contiguous, partly due to gentrification. The Social Science Research Council, now led by distinguished political scientist Ira Katznelson, plans to organize a series of exploratory meetings to examine the character of these recent trends, their actual causes, and potential implications. These planning meetings will help launch the Council's program on cities, particularly its focus on connecting research on social geography – urban density, spatial organization, and demography – to questions of cumulative advantage and policies that improve such advantages. American and international scholars will convene to consider two challenging clusters of questions: 1) changes in the concentration of poverty in the U.S. over the past four decades; and 2) shifts, within cities and metropolitan areas, in where people live, and whether increasing income inequality influences these shifts. One of the aims is to determine how variations in spatial juxtaposition might alter the structures and experiences of poverty.