Social Injustice: The existence of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ due to social, economic, and political relationships that individuals have little control over. It involves a distinction between those with power and wealth and those without.
Responses to social injustice reflect a politics of awareness and responsiveness to inequalities, potentially leading to political and social disruption in the pursuit of a more ‘just’ society.
Spatial Inequality: Variations in access to social ‘goods’ (e.g., knowledge, employment, income, housing, education, healthcare) and ‘bads’ (e.g., pollution, deprivation, political repression) across different places.
People in different locations experience varying levels of ‘goods’ and ‘bads’.
Spatial inequality is interconnected with and caused by social injustice.
Territorial Social Indicators: Socioeconomic data (e.g., employment, income, health, access to services) spatially referenced to territorial units (places, areas, regions) at different scales.
Measurement of these indicators can reveal significant spatial inequality.
Welfare Geography: An approach that prioritizes the welfare of human beings and addresses spatial inequality in well-being and life chances due to where people live and work.
It describes, explains, and evaluates this spatial inequality.
Welfare Geography: Origins
The 1960s saw a rise in spatial science or locational analysis, a quantitative and formal version of geography based on neoclassical economics and positivist spatial laws.
By the late 1960s, resistance grew, with increasing demands to address ‘social’ and ‘political-economic’ issues ignored by spatial scientists.
This led to the adoption of a ‘radical geography’ perspective, influenced by Marxism, and the emergence of ‘welfare geography’.
Welfare geography focused on spatial inequalities in social welfare and well-being, with British geographer David M. Smith as a key figure.
Smith, a locational analysis expert, was influenced by the critical mood of the 1970s.
He advocated for studying social phenomena traditionally ignored, such as:
Racial segregation.
Poverty.
Hunger.
Infant mortality.
Morbidity.
Drug addiction.
Mental illness.
Suicide.
Illegitimacy.
Sexual deviance.
Welfare services.
Medical care.
Crime.
Justice.
Social deprivation.
Smith (1971) argued that these phenomena show more extreme areal variation than traditional physical and economic criteria.
Smith positioned this focus as a logical extension of a Hartshornian approach, emphasizing the differentiation of world regions.
He called for geographers to address the suffering of human ‘casualties’ due to societal and economic operations.
This highlighted the intersections between social injustice and spatial inequality.
Inequities in power, status, wealth, welfare, and well-being create ‘richer’ and ‘poorer’ places at various scales, configuring sociospatial relations globally.
Welfare geography takes the inequities in the spatial distribution of well-being and social problems as its starting point, creating a welfare surface with ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.
It connects with older geographical traditions, including regional geography, and uses spatial science for objective inequality measures.
Smith aimed to politicize human geography, introducing a ‘moral’ or ethically charged vision.
This was elaborated by Smith and others, leading to the identification of ‘welfare geography’.
Smith's key works include:
Human Geography: A Welfare Approach (1977).
Where the Grass is Greener: Living in an Unequal World (1979).
Other geographers in the late 1960s and early 1970s also focused on inequality.
B. E. Coates and E. M. Rawstron's 1971 survey, Regional Variations in Britain, mapped economic and social indicators across UK counties and drew upon spatial scientific orientations.
Coates and Rawstron aimed to refine ‘the regional idea’ using statistical evidence for planning and policy.
They acknowledged “spatial variations that are unjust, harmful and inefficient” leading to suffering in particular areas.
In 1977, Coates, Johnson, and Knox's Geography and Inequality used social indicators to trace spatial inequalities in housing, education, nutrition, and healthcare across various regions.
The authors stated that inequality is bad and drew on Smith’s advocacy of welfare economics in a spatial context assessing that some might see the inequality “as the winder of the springs of incentive that power the capitalist system”.
In North America, early issues of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography featured papers on geographies of inequality.
Richard Morrill (1969, 1970) outlined geography's role in societal transformation, advocating for addressing imbalances in job availability and income levels.
He called for combating spatial inequalities in employment, resources, wealth, poverty, discrimination, racism, pollution, and the (mis)treatment of landscapes.
Morrill advocated for social control over private property to mitigate the effects of economic power on disadvantaged groups while deliberately stopping short of social revolution.
The 1970 special issue of Antipode on ‘The geography of American poverty’, edited by Richard Peet, combined statistical methods with pleas to examine lower-class America.
These sentiments aligned with Smith’s welfare geography, driven by a commitment to progressive social change.
Welfare Geography: Concepts and Criticisms
Welfare is a recurring debate subject and is linked to altruism, moral concern, and the transformative dynamics of politics and society.
Economy is seen as significant in social life.
Welfare economics studies the criteria for judging economic circumstances and the desirability of changing them, internalizing welfare within the economy.
It frames welfare as a technical question of economic states, aiming for Pareto efficiency.
However, it is limited by its focus on consumer influence.
Welfare geography is more normative and narrowly defined.
David Smith defined it as examining ‘who gets what, where, and how’, adding the ‘where’ to economists' and political scientists' formulations.
Smith’s welfare geography emphasizes the ‘geography of welfare’, requiring detailed description of inequalities using objective measures.
Examples include variations in infant mortality between US states and differential accessibility to hospitals in Sydney, Australia.
Smith revealed a landscape of enquiry impacting people's lives and life chances.
The general level of welfare in a spatially disaggregated society is empirically a function of the sum of levels of living or social well-being across territorial units.
Social well-being is defined by societal ‘goods’ (benefits) and ‘bads’ (problems), measured through territorial social indicators.
The emphasis remained on consumption.
The welfare effects of production are subsumed into the consumption of goods and bads.
This focus on consumption was later challenged, including by Smith himself.
Smith critiqued welfare geography modeled on welfare economics and neoclassical economics, which struggled to explain inequalities in the welfare landscape.
The early focus on descriptive research shifted to the process of how inequality arises.
Neoclassical economics was found inadequate for explanatory analysis.
Alternatives such as Marxian economics provided guidance.
Researchers needed to consider the economic, social, and political system as an integrated whole to reveal its general tendencies.
The injustices of capitalism, and tendencies to inequality under socialism, should be central to a welfare geography with explanatory ambitions.
Explaining the uneven geography of welfare requires going beyond Marxian political economy to include sociocultural processes related to colonialism, Orientalism, and inclusion/exclusion dynamics.
Circuits of value shape life chances.
Smith also required critical normative analysis of the distributions of societal goods and bads through moral and ethical lenses.
This involved judging the gaps between the current state of society and a preferred alternative, assessing what might be a morally/ethically ‘better’ distribution.
Smith distinguishes between “ethics as moral theory, and morality as practical action”.
Achieving “[a] better state of affairs with respect to any or all of the criteria of what, how, for whom and where is a welfare improvement.”
Difficult ethical assessments raise complex philosophical issues, including relativism.
In a globalized world, the nature of space is disrupted through the intersection of relational and absolute/territorial formations of place.
The Enlightenment possibility of universals contrasts with the postmodern concern to decenter and account for difference.
Smith’s 1994 text Geography and Social Justice addressed ‘the possibility of universals’.
Criticisms include:
That ‘welfare’ is framed in terms of ‘economy’ rather than human existence.
Welfare can never be singular, geographically even, or merely material.
There is a distinction between absolute and relative concepts of well-being.
All terms in Smith’s formulation change in space and time.
If ‘who’ refers to an individual, it depends on their construction of identity in social relations.
If ‘who’ is a ‘collective’, its definition and limitations matter.
‘Gets’ can refer to private or social receipt and may imply ownership.
‘What’ shifts as economies change.
‘Where’ transforms dynamically through interactions between absolute and relational space.
‘How’ can be centralized/collective or privatized/individualized.
Welfare is complex in a world driven by minds rather than bodies, where education, health, social services, and housing are framed by economic competitiveness.
The nation-state becomes a market-enabling state, with an ideology of privatization.
Individuals find identities in private material success, and exclusion/failure are seen as individual issues.
Markets may be seen as part of the solution, while collective responses teach that individualism is damaging and impossible (e.g., climate change).
These issues remain at the forefront of political debate and address questions about human being.
Welfare geography’s vision is far-reaching but tends to abstract from sociopolitical processes and transformed geographies.
Welfare Geography’s Legacies
Smith reintroduced the ‘human’ into human geography through a concern for economic and social conditions of well-being.
This challenged asocial views of content and method in human geography.
It addressed significant aspects of social life, such as:
Poverty.
Racism.
Ill health.
Discrimination.
Exclusion.
These issues had been largely ignored despite their uneven incidence across space before welfare geography.
Research projects, monographs, and policy interventions like Sarah Curtis’s 1989 study, The Geography of Public Service Provision, and Chris Philo’s 1995 collection, Off the Map: The Social Geography of Poverty in the UK, stand in this tradition.
Smith’s contribution goes beyond describing uneven welfare landscapes to explaining and evaluating them based on stated principles.
This commits the welfare geographer to a critical stance, often at odds with the status quo under various societal regimes.
The term ‘welfare geography’ is not used often today, and some practitioners may be unaware of its roots.
Smith’s redirection of human geography significantly contributed to the rise of radical and critical geographies.
The radicalism of his work can be undervalued due to Smith’s modesty.
Smith noted that his initial version of welfare geography, anchored in welfare economics, needed to be supplanted by a more ‘Marxian’ version attuned to political economy.
David Harvey’s 1973 text, Social Justice and the City, moves from ‘Liberal formulations’ to ‘Social formulations’ with a Marxist theoretical armature, implying the former was inadequate.
Harvey critiqued the “'moral masturbation' of the sort which accompanies the masochistic assemblage of some huge dossier on the daily injustices to the population of the ghetto, over which we beat our breasts and commiserate with one another before retiring to our fireside comforts”.
This critique may be too harsh, impatient with the need for empirical reconstruction of welfare landscapes, and oversimplified about overcoming social injustice.
Harvey’s Marxist geography and recent critical approaches within human geography owe something to the substantive and normative provocations of welfare geography.
Further Reading
Chorley, R. and Haggett, P. (eds.) (1967). Models in Geography. London: Methuen.
Coates, B. E., Johnston, R. J. and Knox, P. L. (1977). Geography and Inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coates, B. E. and Rawstron, E. M. (1971). Regional Variations in Britain: Studies in Economic and Social Geography. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd.
Curtis, S. (1989). The Geography of Public Welfare Provision. London: Routledge.
Harries, K. D. (1978). Review of Coates et al’s Geography and Inequality. Geographical Review 68, 108 109.
Harvey, D. (1973). Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold.
Lee, R. (1979). The economic basis of social problems in the city. In Herbert, D. T. & Smith, D. M. (eds.) Social Problems and the City: Geographical Perspectives, pp 47 62. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lee, R. (1989). Urban transformation: From problems ‘in’ to problems ‘of’ the City. In Herbert, D. T. & Smith, D. M. (eds.) Social Problems and the City: New Perspectives, pp 60 77. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lee, R. (2006). The ordinary economy: Tangled up in values and geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31, 413 432.
Lee, R. and Smith, D. M. (eds.) (2004). Geographies and Moralities: International Perspectives on Development, Justice and Peace. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Morrill, R. (1969). Geography and the transformation of society. Antipode 1(1), 6 9.
Morrill, R. (1970). Geography and the transformation of society: Part II. Antipode 1(2), 4 10.
Peet, R. (ed.) (1970). Theme issue dedicated to ‘Geography of American poverty’. Antipode 2(2), i 106.
Peet, R. (1970). Preface. Antipode 2(2), iv.
Philo, C. (ed.) (1995). Off the Map: The Social Geography of Poverty in the UK. London: Child Poverty Action Group.
Smith, D. M. (1971). Industrial Location: An Economic Geographical Analysis. London: Wiley.
Smith, D. M. (1971). Radical geography: The next revolution. Area 13, 153 157.
Smith, D. M. (1973). The Geography of Social Well Being in the United States: An Introduction to Territorial Social Indicators. New York: McGraw Hill.
Smith, D. M. (1974). Who gets what ‘where’, and how: A welfare focus for human geography. Geography 59, 289 297.
Smith, D. M. (1977). Human Geography: A Welfare Approach. London: Edward Arnold.
Smith, D. M. (1979). Where the Grass Is Greener: Living in an Unequal World. London: Penguin.
Smith, D. M. (1994). Geography and Social Justice. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, D. M. (2000). Welfare geography. In Johnston, R. J., Gregory, D., Pratt, G. & Watts, M. (eds.) The Dictionary of Human Geography (4th edn.), pp 897 898. Oxford: Blackwell.