ABSTRACT
Poverty in the United States is increasingly concentrated in large cities, disproportionately burdening particular people and places. The complex realities that underlie these inequitable processes have attracted considerable academic attention, focusing most prominently on economic restructuring (Kasarda, 1989), underclass theory (Wilson, 1987), and neighbourhood impacts (Anderson, 1990). Encouraged by a new focus on place in the social sciences and cultural studies, geographers in particular have begun to interrogate the relationships between urban poverty landscapes, poor people, and larger economic, political and social forces (Wolch and Dear, 1993; Kodras, 1997a). Such an interrogation raises essentially geographical questions about how shifts in processes operating at global, national, institutional and individual scales influence the production of poverty landscapes in large American cities.
