Space and inequality: How uncertainty in the spatial extent impacts observations of poverty and affluence throughout the urban realm

Abstract

Almost all major metropolitan spaces have experienced growth in poverty and low-income populations throughout the urban periphery in recent years, while affluence and high-income individuals have increasingly located in central spaces. Complicating how researchers observe this changing spatial inequality is how the urban and suburban realms are empirically defined. Scholars have developed a range of urban and suburban taxonomies to observe social trends, but there remains little work comparing how definitional choice shapes observations of demographics and inequality.

It is critical that researchers and policymakers understand how the geography of poverty and affluence is unfolding across the urban and suburban realm. How a social issue is addressed depends on how it is defined, and effective policymaking remains impossible without understanding the true spatial extent of poverty and affluence. This work contextualizes the geography of inequality to argue that inaccurate geographical perceptions of inequality leads to ineffective policymaking. Central to this research is the question, how do different observable taxonomies of the urban and the suburban change our understanding of the geographical extent of both poverty and affluence?

Achieved through a two-stage analysis, the research records the most common characteristics used to define urban/suburban space throughout academic literature before spatially mapping these political and ideological characteristics. The work compares how demographic and economic trends differ across each definition using variables of population and poverty from the Decennial Census and ACS. Operating longitudinally, the work examines change between 1990 and 2020 and it focuses on the case study of Richmond, VA.