ABSTRACT
The spatial dimension has entered research on poverty and social exclusion in a completely novel way. As Jan Vranken indicated, the social and spatial dimensions enter the arena together in the debate on social cohesion. In practice, there is a need for taking the analysis a few steps further by decomposing poverty indices into various dimensions for several subgroups. Ever since the 1970s, the concept of poverty in western welfare states has been at the centre of a vivid debate in the social sciences. Jrgen Friedrichs and Jennifer Klockner find that the more disadvantaged a neighbourhood, the stronger the relationship between neighbourhood-level social capital and the observed disorder and deviance becomes, while individual-level characteristics seem to become less important. The increased dependency of urban regeneration projects on private capital might also have an impact on those population groups living at the 'margin' of the city in large housing estates.
