ABSTRACT
Academic, policy and media discussions of poverty are characterised by certain sociospatial assumptions. Across most countries of the global north these discussions have come to be associated with specific forms of poverty occurring in particular spaces in the city, with the presence of other types of poverty in small town and rural places often understated and sometimes denied altogether. Given that poverty represents a social (policy) issue, impacting on particular social groups regardless of their place of residence, the spatialised nature of these discussions raises key questions for welfare researchers. The most important of these is: why should the city have generated so much of the coverage of poverty and welfare? Perhaps the most obvious response to this question lies in the significance of sociospatial visibility within understandings of poverty.
