Introduction

This book sets out to explore the reasons why a city-spatial analysis is crucial to contemporary interpretations of, and policy responses to, urban poverty. In recent decades, there has been widespread recognition, within both academic and policy arenas, that the scale of the city is of utmost importance in understanding contemporary social, political, economic and cultural life. This perspective is typically justified by the oft-repeated incantation that more than half of the world’s population now live in urban areas (often overlooked in this justification is that urbanisation is not restricted to cities). At the same time, traditional interpretations of poverty as largely rural have lost traction, as aid agencies and scholars alike increasingly recognise the dominance of urban poverty, particularly in the rapidly urbanising Global South. However, whilst the dominance of these two agendas (the city and urban poverty) is now well established, what is striking is the absence of connections between research addressing the spatiality of the city (typically located in geographical approaches) and research exploring the dimensions of urban poverty (situated within poverty studies and development studies).