Welfare Approach in Human Geography

• Welfare geography is the approach to human geography that puts spatial inequality and territorial justice at its centre. It asks how the good and bad things of life are distributed across space, and why.
  • In David M. Smith’s phrase, it studies “who gets what, where, and how”.
• It emerged in the early 1970s as the liberal, reformist stream of the relevance movement within the critical revolution. It works within the existing system, through state policy and planning.

Emergence and Development

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Why It Emerged in the 1970s

• Social crisis in the West: the Vietnam War, urban riots, rising crime, Black ghettos and environmental degradation exposed deep injustice in the most prosperous societies.
• Growth was not welfare: the social indicators movement of the 1960s argued that GNP and national income do not measure the quality of life. Distribution became urgent once growth slowed.
• Reaction to spatial science: the quantitative revolution had built models of efficient location but said little about poverty, hunger or discrimination.
  • Smith held that models and theories matter only if they serve the welfare of society. Without that, human geography risks irrelevance.
• Usable tools: the multivariate methods of the 1960s (factorial ecologies) were now turned to mapping social well-being.
• A late arrival: before the 1970s, geographers’ philosophical debates were about method, not ethics. Humboldt’s study of New Spain and the anarchist geographies of Kropotkin and Reclus were early exceptions that the mainstream ignored.
• Moral philosophy: John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) gave a language of fairness that geographers applied to places.

Pioneers and Key Works

• Other studies applied the approach to crime and justice (Keith Harries, 1974), the provision of health care (Shannon and Dever, 1974) and the location of public services (Bryan Massam, 1975).
• David M. Smith (1936–2021) spent most of his career at Queen Mary College, London (1973–2001). He later wrote Geography and Social Justice (1994) and Moral Geographies (2000).
• Values it upholds: non-discrimination, social justice, gender equality, protection of children and the old, a secular society, ecological balance and a decent physical quality of life for all.

Phases of Development

• Descriptive phase (1970s): mapping territorial inequality with social indicators, using the formulations of neo-classical welfare economics. The geographer acted as a “delver and dovetailer” who supplied information for planners.
• Process phase (late 1970s–80s): attention turned to how inequality arises. As radical geography grew, Marxian political economy partly replaced neo-classical economics as the explanatory base.
  • Explanation worked at two levels:
    • the whole social, economic and political system, which makes uneven development endemic under capitalism;
    • specific policies, such as housing, which advantage some places and disadvantage others.
• Ethical phase (1990s onwards): the focus moved to social justice, ethics and “moral geographies”, to the restructuring of the welfare state (for example Jamie Peck’s Workfare States, 2001) and to feminist ethics of care, which looks beyond state-versus-market binaries to everyday relationships.
• The 1990s revival was spurred by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which forced whole societies to decide afresh how rewards and power would be distributed.
  • The AAG marked twenty years of Social Justice and the City with a special session, and attention widened to race, gender and marginalised “others”.
  • Methods shifted towards qualitative work, such as semi-structured interviews and participation, so that power passed partly to the people studied.
• Explanation as a moral choice: Smith showed that inner-city poverty can be explained in three ways, and each points to a different remedy.
  • The people: the poor’s way of life; the remedy is to change behaviour, which blames the victims.
  • The city’s spatial structure: homes are far from jobs; the remedy is better urban planning.
  • The economy: labour and housing markets consign some people to poverty; the remedy is to change the mode of production.
  • Choosing which explanation to stress means allocating responsibility.

Core Ideas

Definitions

• E. J. Mishan and S. K. Nath were welfare economists. Smith adapted their definitions of welfare economics to geography.
  • Adapted from Mishan: theoretical welfare geography seeks to rank alternative geographical situations open to society on a scale of better or worse.
  • Adapted from Nath: it studies the possible effects of geographical policies on the welfare of society.
• Smith: welfare geography is the study of who gets what, where, and how.
• A geographical state here means any spatial arrangement that bears on the quality of life. Examples are the spread of income or poverty, industrial location, the siting of hospitals and schools, and transport networks.

Who Gets What, Where and How

• Who: the population, divided by class, income, race, caste or gender.
• What: the goods (income, housing, health care, education, clean air) and the bads (pollution, crime, disease) that each group receives.
• Where: the area of residence. Life differs between, for example, a city’s planned colonies and its slums.
• How: the social and political processes that produce the observed distribution.
• Smith arranged the first three as a three-dimensional matrix. Each cell records how much of a good or bad one group receives in one area. The fourth question, how, explains the pattern.

Efficiency, Equity and Pareto

• Pareto optimality, after the economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), describes a state in which no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.
  • On a utility-possibility frontier for two groups or regions, every point on the line is Pareto-optimal.
  • However, the criterion says nothing about how fairly welfare is shared.
• Welfare geography therefore adds equity to efficiency, through a social welfare function that ranks points on the frontier.
  • Rawls’s maximin principle favours the arrangement that makes the worst-off group or area as well off as possible.
• Judgements must use both criteria: efficiency, with which geographers were already familiar, and equity, which is a moral choice.

Territorial Social Justice

• Territorial justice means that each area receives public resources in proportion to its needs, a test first proposed by Bleddyn Davies (1968).
• David Harvey (1973) proposed three criteria for distributing social income between territories:
  • Need: the needs of each area are met first.
  • Contribution to the common good: resources go where they create the largest inter-territorial multiplier effects.
  • Merit: extra help goes to areas with environmental or other disabilities, so they can catch up.
• Physical limits also matter: planning cannot make deserts fertile or create minerals where none exist. Welfare policy must work with the resource base of each region.
• Smith held that the birth of a child into a particular group and place already limits that child’s chances. Spatial justice is therefore part of social justice.

Measuring Well-Being: Social Indicators

• Social indicators measure the condition of people in an area. They are often combined into a composite index of well-being.
• Smith (1973) grouped indicators under income, wealth and employment; the living environment; health; education; social order; social belonging; and recreation and leisure.
• Paul Knox (1975) grouped human needs into three levels:
  • physical needs: nutrition, shelter, health;
  • cultural needs: education, leisure, security;
  • higher needs: those met from surplus income.
• Smith’s method runs through five stages:
  • Description: identify territorial levels of well-being.
  • Explanation: trace the cause-and-effect links behind them.
  • Evaluation: judge alternative states on efficiency and equity.
  • Prescription: decide who should get what, where.
  • Implementation: replace the undesirable state with a better one.
• Such work is the ancestor of today’s measures of social well-being and of the Human Development Index.

Scope, Comparison and Evaluation

Scope and Interdisciplinary Character

• Location is distributive: every hospital, school, road or sewage works benefits some people and places more than others, because of distance and accessibility. Location decisions are therefore welfare decisions.
• Subfields grew from it: the geography of crime, health care, housing, poverty, public-service provision and environmental justice.
• Interdisciplinary face: it draws on welfare economics for method, sociology and political science for process, moral philosophy for justice and planning for practice.
  • Smith saw welfare as a modern equivalent of the regional concept: a theme that ties geography together and links it to the wider social sciences.

Welfare and Radical Approaches Compared

• Both share the same origin and the same concern with inequality. Over time, welfare geography absorbed much of the radical analysis of process.

Indian Applications

• Area-based development programmes target lagging places, not only poor people. Examples include the Hill Area Development Programme, the Tribal Sub-Plan, the Drought Prone Areas Programme and the Aspirational Districts Programme (2018), which ranks 112 districts on social indicators.
• Fiscal territorial justice: the Finance Commission shares central taxes among states partly by income distance. Poorer states receive more. It carries the largest weight, 42.5%, in the Sixteenth Finance Commission’s formula for 2026–31.
• Welfare economics in India: Amartya Sen’s capability approach, which judges development by what people are able to do and be, shaped the human development measures now used across Indian states.
• Measurement: NITI Aayog’s National Multidimensional Poverty Index, the SDG India Index and district-level HDI studies map who gets what, and where.
  • NITI Aayog estimated in 2024 that about 24.82 crore people escaped multidimensional poverty between 2013–14 and 2022–23. The headcount ratio fell from 29.17% to 11.28%, with the largest falls in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.
• Persisting gaps: inter-state contrasts such as Kerala versus Bihar, rural–urban gaps, and the slum–colony divide within cities.

Criticisms

• Too descriptive: early work mapped inequality without explaining it, and its remedies treated symptoms rather than causes.
• Within the system: radicals charged that it legitimised the status quo, because it left untouched the structures that produce inequality.
• Measurement problems: “welfare” is defined differently by different societies. Indicators and their weights are value judgements, and composite indices hide internal variation.
• Welfare regions are hard to delimit. Data are often unavailable at the right scale.
• Diluted geography: some saw it as applied social science with weak links to the traditional concerns of geography.
• Top-down: it relies on the state and planners, and gives little voice to the people it studies. Humanistic geography addressed that gap.

Evaluation

• Welfare geography made equality and social justice core values of human geography. It joined the discipline to planning and public policy.
• Its ideas live on in social indicators, the human development approach, spatial justice, environmental justice and the geography of care.
• Inequality between and within regions persists, so the question “who gets what, where, and how” remains as relevant as it was in the 1970s.