Food price increases and the introduction of radical social welfare and enterprise reforms during the 1990s generated significant changes in the lives of urban households in China. During this period urban poverty increased considerably. This paper uses household level data from 1986 to 2000 to examine what determines whether households fall below the poverty line over this period and investiga...

Social exclusion” is a contested term. Not only is it used to refer to a wide range of phenomena and processes related to poverty, deprivation and hardship, but it is also used in relation to a wide range of categories of excluded people and places of exclusion. This presentation offers some evidence for the elusive and challenging nature of the concept both in the European Union and in New Zea...

The concept of social exclusion, applied widely in the European Union, has in recent years been gaining use in Bangladesh, mostly by international development agencies. Does this discourse of deprivation, developed in the welfare states of northern Europe, have salience in its application to deprivation in countries like Bangladesh where, for example, 31% of the rural population lives in chroni...

Space syntax is a set of theories and techniques about buildings and cities and how they function, rooted in a theory of society and space that originated at the UCL Bartlett School of Graduate Studies in the 1970s. The ability of space syntax methods to objectively measure the physical and spatial attributes of cities in relation to patterns of human activity has led to hundreds of projects, c...

Urbanisation in low and middle-income nations presents both opportunities and immense challenges. As urban centres grow rapidly, inadequate housing and the lack of basic infrastructure and services affect a large and growing proportion of their population. There is also a growing body of evidence on urban poverty and its links with environmental hazards. There is, however, limited knowledge of ...

We investigate the impact of neighborhood structural characteristics, social organization, and culture on self-rated health in a large, cross-sectional sample of urban adults. Findings indicate that neighborhood affluence is a more powerful predictor of health status than poverty, above and beyond individual demographic background, socioeconomic status, health behaviors, and insurance coverage....

The concepts of poverty, social exclusion and deprivation are widely employed but often problematic. This paper discusses some problems with prominent interpretations of these concepts and how Amartya Sen’s capability approach can provide a conceptual framework that can overcome these problems. It is argued that the capability approach can reflect the many ways that human lives are blighted and...