Alice O�Connor
Dept. of History, UCSB 

POSITION STATEMENT

As an historian of poverty, social science, and social welfare policy, I encounter the spatial dimensions of inequality in several aspects of my work. Space is also a key variable in a large-scale interdisciplinary project I have been involved with for several years, the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, which has just culminated in a 7-volume series published by the Russell Sage Foundation. The multi-city study is based on linked household and employer surveys fielded in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles in the early 1990s, which explore racial attitudes, residential segregation, and labor markets. Drawing on this experience as well as on my historical research, I would highlight the following:

1.)Historical shifts in the spatial configuration of poverty and, equally important, how those shifts affect the popular imagery of poverty and political support for anti-poverty programs.While heavily stigmatized as culturally backward and dependent, the rural poor have traditionally been pictured as white, working, in 2-parent families, and benign.The urban poor, in contrast, are pictured as �dangerous,� unemployed, morally deviant, racially �other,� and, especially in the wake of post-World War II migrations, black and brown.Place, that is, sets off a series of associations that alternately play on pity and fear about the poor.I raise this as a way of drawing our attention to the symbolic as well as the real significance of space�and to the political and economic consequences of space as a �signifier.� Witness the dramatic shift in the imagery of the �other America� as political backlash to the War on Poverty (and the subsequent war on welfare) set in.Evidence of the economic consequences can be found in the employer surveys conducted as part of the multi-city study (and in other, similar surveys as well): employers use space (neighborhoods, an inner city zip code) as a way of screening out potential workers, sometimes by not hiring particular applicants, but more often by simply not recruiting from or even considering locating in certain areas.

2.)The historical processes and institutional mechanisms through which space is stratified�by class, gender, and most prominently, in the 20th-century U.S., by race�and in turn becomes a factor in generating (and maintaining) social stratification.Racial residential segregation, as Massey and Denton and many others have pointed out, has been a key structural underpinning of racial inequality�regulating, as it does, access to education, employment, a whole range of services, political representation, and opportunities to accumulate capital and wealth.It is also a product of public policies, laws, legally-sanctioned real estate practices, and violence�and not simply, as some social scientific theories would have it, a reflection of migration patterns and residential choice.Historians have also begun to pay more attention to the segmentation of space by gender as a key issue in inequality, focusing especially on how traditional divisions of labor (and citizenship) are reinforced by sharp divisions (until recently) between domestic (female) and civic (male) space.Moreover, findings from the multi-city study suggest that �spatial mismatch� as a barrier to employment works differently across gender lines: women, who continue to carry the burden of household/child care responsibilities, feel more constrained to find paid employment close to home.

3.)The conceptualization of space in social scientific theories of poverty and inequality.Space has been a core component of social scientific writing and theorizing about inequality since at least the pioneering social surveys (featuring color-coded maps of poverty, wage-earning, and ethnicity) of the mid-late 19th century, and the emergence of a whole series of ecological theories ranging from the idea of �contagion� to the enormously influential models of ethnic succession, social isolation, and community disorganization associated with the Chicago school (and recently revived as part of the �underclass� debate).But space has also been the source of conflict and tension within the social sciences: over the Chicago school�s tendency to naturalize social geography, for example; and also about whether space �matters� in terms of its impact on social outcomes (as in the debate over �neighborhood effects.�)Having been eclipsed by the turn to economic methods and national-level datasets, spatial theorizing has been revived, (most prominently in ideas such as �spatial mismatch� and �neighborhood effects�) but remains underconceptualized, and often confined to what can be assessed in measurable outcomes.In qualitative evidence gathered from the multi-city surveys, however, it became clear that students of inequality need to do much more to explore the social and political meaning of space, as well as the cognitive �maps� of local geography that behavior and institutional practice.

4.)Similarly, there is a long history of �place-based� policies, principally aimed at �revitalizing� impoverished or �depressed� urban and rural communities, that have been the subject of controversy (to oversimplify: should anti-poverty policies target people or places?).What often goes unnoticed in these debates is that government policies (and politics) have themselves played a major role in creating spatial inequality�subsidizing suburbanization, industrial relocation, globalization, and other structural shifts that have undermined central city and rural areas.

As for spatial methods and models, I would point especially to the importance of qualitative, contextual, and, of course, historical analysis for getting at the spatial dimension.It is absolutely worth re-visiting the community studies tradition for insights (DuBois� Philadelphia Negro; Davis and Gardner�s Deep South ; Drake and Cayton�s Black Metropolis as well as more recent studies such as Cynthia Duncan�s Worlds Apart, all of which draw on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, and all of which are very much place-based).Some of the most valuable insights in the multi-city study come from the link between employer telephone and in-depth face-to-face interviews we conducted with a smaller subsample of the employers, in which we were able to find out more about how space figured into their labor market-shaping practices and attitudes.A workshop on combining methods would be very useful.