Economic Geography

Relevance versus glamour: important policy problems
are not always the most attractive
How do we explain the scarcity of poverty references in the geography literature?
There is probably no more geographical problem than the origins of and persistence
214
Amy K. Glasmeier

---

of poverty. Dating back to the New Deal and accelerating in the 1960s, policy-
makers have defined the problem of persistent poverty from the perspective that
people are poor for many reasons. One deemed most important is where indi-
viduals find themselves, that is, where in space they reside. Starting with debates
in the 1950s, policymakers in Washington argued for and eventually formulated
policies that led to programs designed to address the existence of poverty 
in particular places. The southern coal fields of Illinois, the mountains of
Appalachia, the copper belt of Michigan, the old textile region of the Northeast,
the Mississippi Delta, and the Border region, all have been subject to policy
discussions since the late 1960s. Why has there been no geographical traction for
this subject?
The answer may be found, again, in history. The 1960s was a unique moment
in the history of the discipline. The creation of a number of federal research
programs led to the completion of a large number of studies on regional differ-
entiation. Economists did not dominate the scene then, so what happened? 
I cannot help but wonder whether our quest for legitimacy in the larger schol-
arly community, combined with our destructive internecine rivalries, simply
absorbed our attention. It also may be that the failure of theory and empirical
observation to fuse in a way that could be understood by policymakers and
concerned citizens left us with half a loaf; good description but no explanation.
The timing is right in the sense that the discipline was busy fighting within itself
to assert a single unifying theory, which as we know was not possible then and
remains impossible even today. But do we need one?
The era of active spatially specific policy formulation set into place instruments
of change that are now embedded and which we can study and understand.
From their beginning, these policy instruments used terms to describe underly-
ing problems that include resource exhaustion, institutional balkanization, struc-
tural economic change, political exclusion, social isolation, and discontinuity.
These terms are all found in geographical research and undergird many geograph-
ical explanations of contemporary reality. If we study these subjects, why is it so
hard to apply them as explanations for important geographic outcomes?
If truth be told, although economic geographers might not have considered
many of these issues, others in other areas of the discipline have: Charles Aiken
of Tennessee on spatial inequality and institutional racism as seen in the structure
of southern urban settlements post reconstruction; Joe Darden of Michigan State
and the spatial implications of institutionalized racism, housing policy and land use;
and others. Further, there are numerous examples of research on inequality in the
Global South by critical human geographers (Michael Watts as an example). I come
away from this wondering whether we have carved ourselves up to be so distinct
that commonality cannot be found and sympathetic conversations cannot occur.