"There are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them," acknowledges Michael Katz, in expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these cities has its origins in the American past. To understand contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude: because many nineteenth-century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behavior, they tried to use public policy and philanthropy to improve the character of poor people, rather than to attack the structural causes of their misery. Showing how this misdiagnosis has afflicted today's welfare and educational systems, Katz draws on his own experiences to introduce each of four topics--the welfare state, the "underclass" debate, urban school reform, and the strategies of survival used by the urban poor. Uniquely informed by his personal involvement, each chapter also illustrates the interpretive power of history by focusing on a strand of social policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: social welfare from the poorhouse era through the New Deal, ideas about urban poverty from the undeserving poor to the "underclass," and the emergence of public education through the radical school reform movement now at work in Chicago. Why have American governments proved unable to redesign a welfare system that will satisfy anyone? Why has public policy proved unable to eradicate poverty and prevent the deterioration of major cities? What strategies have helped poor people survive the poverty endemic to urban history? How did urban schools become unresponsive bureaucracies that fail to educate most of their students? Are there fresh, constructive ways to think about welfare, poverty, and public education? Throughout the book Katz shows how interpretations of the past, grounded in analytic history, can free us of comforting myths and help us to reframe discussions of these great public issues.

In a forward looking appraisal of the welfare state, Poverty, Welfare and the Disciplinary State examines such issues as: *the current dynamics of poverty in Britain, drawing on similar developments in Europe and the US *the major areas of social policy within which this abandonment and demonisation of the poor is taking place *the historical antecendents to this relationship between the state and the poor *the creation and expansion of a 'welfare' state that characterised the era of social democracy until the mid-1970s and from the point of view of the poor, was limited and conditional *the ideology and organisation of the New Right *the new terrain on which the struggle over the future of welfare and social policy must take place.

Based on more than thirty case studies in eight different countries, this book explores the governance dynamics of local social innovations in the field of poverty reduction. The diverse team of contributors reflect on the trajectory of social innovation in European governance. They illustrate how different governance dynamics and welfare mixes enable or hinder poverty reduction strategies and analyse how they involve a diversity of actors, instruments and resources at different spatial scales. The contributions are based on research motivated by the standstill in the fight against poverty in Europe and the anxiety that conventional macro-social policies are insufficient to deal with the current challenges.

RESCALING URBAN POVERTY “In this path-breaking book, Mahito Hayashi explores the rescaled geographies of homelessness that have been produced in contemporary Japanese cities. Through an original synthesis of regulationist political economy and immersive place-based research, Hayashi situates urban homelessness in Japan in comparative-international contexts. The book offers new theoretical perspectives from which to decipher emergent forms of urban marginality and their contestation.” —Neil Brenner, Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, University of Chicago “Mahito Hayashi traces the shifting spatial strategies of unhoused people as they create spaces of emancipation within Japanese cities. Attending to the complexities of contentious class politics and livelihoods barely sustained by the survival economies, Rescaling Urban Poverty is a unique and valuable contribution to the study of the geographies of urban social movements.” —Nik Theodore, Head of the Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois Chicago Rescaling Urban Poverty discloses the hidden dynamics of state rescaling that ensnares homeless people at the fringes of mainstream society and its housing regimes/classes. Explains the oppressive effects of rescaling and its limits in the interplay of the state, domiciled society, public space, urban class relations, social movements, and capitalism Uses ethnography as a re-ontologising medium of critical theorisation in Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, and other Marxian strands Develops rich context-based and field-based arguments about social movements, poverty and housing policy, and public space formation in Japan Uncovers the radical geographies of placemaking, commoning, and translation that can create prohomeless urban environments under rescaling Refines the method of abstraction to broaden the international scope of critical literatures and links different scholarly standpoints without obscuring disagreements By advancing a broad research program for homelessness and poverty, Rescaling Urban Poverty provides the essential understanding of how state rescaling ensnares homeless and impoverished people in the interplay of the state, domiciled society, public space, urban class relations, social movements, and capitalism. Its three angles – national states, public and private spaces, and urban social movements – uncover the hidden dynamics of rescaling that emerge, and are resisted, at the fringes of mainstream society and its housing regimes/classes. Evidence is drawn from Japanese cities where the author has conducted long-term fieldwork and develops robust urban narratives by mobilising spatial regulation theory, metabolism theory, state theory, and critical housing theory. The book cross-fertilises these Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, and other Marxian strands through meticulous efforts to reinterpret both old and new texts. By building bridges between classical and contemporary interests, and between the theories and Japanese cities, this book attracts various audiences in geography, sociology, urban studies, and political economy.

Throughout Europe income support for the poor has become highly controversial. It is often assumed to be not the answer to, but the cause of social exclusion, and is increasingly believed to give rise to welfare dependency. This book contributes to a more complex understanding of welfare state regimes and welfare recipients in contemporary Europe. Describing social assistance 'careers' in different national and urban contexts, it documents the strong interplay between personal biographies and policy patterns - a particularly useful perspective which complements the more structural, top-down approach of much international work in social policy. Social assistance dynamics in Europe is unique in comparing a range of northern and southern European countries (Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal); in its focus on the actual working of their policies: their set of actors; cultural background; implementation etc. and in its methodological approach, which combines longitudinal analysis with qualitative research. Academics and students of welfare and poverty, policy makers and social policy evaluators in the public, private and non profit sectors will find this book invaluable.

Wow! What a tour de force! This timely, masterly work does everything, from broad empirical comparison to theory, quantitative correlation to case studies of neighborhoods and quotations from individual life histories. Its findings from 25 neighborhoods in six cities demonstrate convincingly that urban destitution is not homogeneous, is concentrated in and generated by location, and has patterned institutional roots that produced varying processes of pauperization. This superb book must put to rest once and for all references to Chinese poverty as a matter of just the rural areas and their residents. Dorothy J. Solinger, University of California, Irvine, US Market reform has brought new forms of poverty to urban China, even while the standard of living of most urban residents has greatly improved. This research uses interviews with people in six cities to document their situation and to show how poverty is rooted in the failure of support systems in their neighborhoods and communities. It offers a stark evaluation of a system of inequalities that is only beginning to be addressed by state policy. John R. Logan, Brown University, US Urban poverty is an emerging problem. This book explores the household and neighbourhood factors that lead to both the generation and continuance of urban poverty in China. It is argued that the urban Chinese are not a homogenous social group, but combine laid-off workers and rural migrants, resulting in stark contrasts between migrant and workers neighbourhoods and villages. The expert authors examine the new urban poor in China and the dynamics of their poor neighbourhoods, highlighting both household experience and neighbourhood changes affecting the urban poor. Urban Poverty in China is based upon a comprehensive household survey in six Chinese cities and provides insights into microscopic and neighbourhood-level poverty dynamics. The comprehensive study explores the spatial implications such as concentration of poverty as well as the differentiation within poor neighbourhoods. This informative book tells an insightful story about evolving urban poverty in Chinese cities that will be invaluable to researchers and postgraduate students within urban studies, geography, social policy and development studies as well as Chinese and Asian studies. It will also prove to be an invaluable read for researchers in urban and social development and international development agencies.

The future European system of social security and welfare is in need of a new perspective. Invigorating and informative, this book contributes to developing this new form of 'social exclusion knowledge' thanks to its conceptual and theoretical framework and its comparative empirical studies in eight European cities between Bologna and Stockholm.

Alice O'Connor here chronicles the transformation in the study of poverty from a reform-minded inquiry into the political economy of industrial capitalism to the detached, highly technical 1990s analysis of the demographic and behavioural characteristics of the poor. "Poverty Knowledge" is a comprehensive historical account of the thinking behind these very different views of "the poverty problem". It is a century-spanning inquiry into the politics, institutions, ideologies, and social science that shaped poverty research and policy.

Introduces the reader to dynamic analysis, demonstrating its contribution to public policy formation in Europe and the USA. Key concepts underlying dynamic analysis are explored, providing an account of the way society works, the nature of poverty, and the impact of social assistance on welfare.