Urban Deprivation and the Inner City

Colin Jones

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138036482
• eBook ISBN: 9781351713627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1979. Phenomena such as high levels of unemployment, decaying and vandalised council estates, poor educational achievements by schoolchildren and the population decline in inner cities are just some of the problems challenged by this important work. The contributors from such diverse fields as economics, geography, public administration, social policy and sociology investigate the specific areas where the problematic conditions of unemployment and housing tend to predominate. This title will be of particular interest to students of the social sciences.

1	DEFINING URBAN DEPRIVATION
	Geoff Norris

Towards the end of the 1960s the concept of deprivation entered the arena of academic and political discourse on the problems of economic and social inequality in Britain. Prior to the emergence of this concept, analysis of these issues had been carried out through the use of the concept of poverty (i.e. material poverty), the examination of poor housing (particularly the study of ‘slum’ areas), and to a lesser extent through research into the level of provision of services provided by central and local government. One of the reasons for the popularity of the concept of deprivation has been its attempt to bring together the issues raised by these problem areas under the umbrella of a more general approach. This very generality has raised a number of critical definitional issues, which it is the purpose of this chapter to explore.

The chapter, however, is not intended as a summary of the existing literature on deprivation. While there have been a number of interesting critical commentaries in the academic journals (for example Edwards, 1975; Hamnett, 1976) which provide accounts of the problems, much of the more important work, in terms of its practical consequences, has been carried out by researchers in central and local government who have been attempting to relate the concepts of deprivation, multiple deprivation and urban deprivation to the problems and policies of their political masters. There are a number of widely published accounts of this type of analysis (Great Britain, 1975a; Flynn et al., 1972) but it is probable that much that has been written has remained unpublished.

While it is not therefore possible to undertake a complete examination of this body of work as a whole there are grounds for suggesting that there is a tendency to adopt similar procedures and definitions in the analysis of the problem. Central and local government researchers face similar political and methodological difficulties for reasons which are explored later and consequently similar definitional approaches are likely to follow. It is a discussion of these definitional problems, and the consequences and pitfalls of the solutions adopted, which form the focus of this chapter.

An interest in definitional problems does not mean, however, that the aim here is to develop a set of concepts which can be used to derive an unambiguous definition of urban deprivation against which practice can be measured. Rather our aim is initially to outline the definitions which appear to have been implicit in much of this work; implicit for, in fact, in many cases there was no attempt to rigorously define the relevant concepts. The chapter will then argue that even within the terms of these definitions actual empirical studies have committed a number of methodological errors with practical consequences. Many of these criticisms have been discussed elsewhere in some detail particularly by Edwards (1975) but also Hamnett (1976), and consequently the discussion here attempts to be brief but comprehensive.

A second aim of the chapter will be to understand the reasons which lie behind these failures. The concluding discussion therefore extends outside the narrow confines of the definitional framework in order to examine those ways in which this framework itself predisposes analysts towards a certain view of the problems and at the same time forecloses discussion on other significant issues raised by the concept of deprivation.

Definitional Problems

Any attempt to come to grips with the notion of deprivation has to tackle the issues raised by three separate concepts: deprivation, multiple deprivation and urban deprivation. These three terms have provided the major themes around which many students of the problem of inequality in our society have played a number of variations. The fact that ‘the problem of inequality’ is the overarching issue which has been underlying much of this analysis should serve as a reminder of the fact that much of the earlier work in this field was carried on under the banner of the analysis of poverty itself.

It would appear to be the case that the interest in poverty in advanced capitalist societies which burgeoned during the early and middle 1960s has now been superseded by the concern with deprivation. A useful way into the problem of defining deprivation lies therefore through an examination of the way in which the concept constitutes a development on this earlier work in poverty. Since shortly after the Second World War with an early paper by Townsend (1954) poverty has been seen as a problem of inequality in the distribution of resources; that is the inadequacy of material resources relative to the living standards of society as a whole.

The concept of deprivation would appear to introduce two features to the analysis of inequality. First, deprivation is clearly an attempt to bring into the arena of discussion features which lie outside a rather narrow concern with purely material resources. The use of the word displays an apparent sensitivity to problems of emotional and cultural deprivation for example which the poverty analysts of the 1960s tended to ignore in their struggle to obtain official recognition for the continued existence of stark material inequality in an age of so-called affluence. While the poor were often seen as those lying at the bottom of an overall distribution the deprived can be interpreted as being those who fall below a certain well-defined line. It turns the examination away from a study of the overall structure to those who do not reach a certain level.

The introduction therefore of the problem of accessibility to non-material resources by the use of the notion of deprivation means that the issue is seen as multidimensional. Multiple deprivation as an issue emerges from this feature of deprivation as a concept. If deprivation means a relative lack of access to all kinds of resources, both material and non-material, then an immediate problem is the identification of the relationship between an individual's position and the whole range of dimensions to which the general notion is supposed to apply. The identification of the multiply deprived, those who appear at the bottom end of each of several dimensions of unequally distributed resources, and attempts to explain why such reinforcement occurs, have provided major research themes in recent years. One of the processes involved here, the fact that the unequal distribution of some resources in space ‘explains’ the incidence of multiple deprivation, has given rise in its turn to a further elaboration of the deprivation concept, urban deprivation.

It would be quite reasonable to maintain that the notion of urban deprivation merely refers to deprivation which occurs in urban areas and that therefore the concept has no special significance. This would, however, constitute an underestimation of its impact and the kind of analysis which it implies. As a result of obvious connections with urban economics the concept of urban deprivation has come to stand for the analysis of the relationship between deprivation and space in general.

In fact the relationship under consideration consists of two separate issues. The first is the purely descriptive question of the extent to which deprivation, and indeed multiple deprivation, is geographically concentrated, not only in certain regions or cities, but more crucially within a particular city. The mapping of the incidence of deprivation at the small-area level has of course raised questions about why this geographical concentration of the problem should occur. The second separate problem which urban deprivation concerns, however, is the more difficult, and politically more significant question, of whether the fact of spatial concentration itself constitutes at least some kind of partial explanation of the overall incidence of deprivation. The concern here then is with the explanatory relevance of space.

Empirical Research

Within the terms of the definitional approach described above attempts to analyse deprivation display three important methodological deficiencies. Faced with a plethora of relevant but not wholly adequate indicators the tendency has been to present deprivation as whatever can be easily measured. There is no critical assessment of the status of different indicators nor any attempt to relate various measures to some underlying explicitly formulated concept. In this sense all indicators are accorded the same validity as measures of deprivation. A second deficiency which follows from this extreme operationalism is that not only are certain dimensions of deprivation more adequately accounted for than others but also it is possible to suggest that identifiable ‘errors’ are being made. Certain facets of the problem are being ignored.

Third, while it is true that all indicators will in some sense bias the kinds of explanations and policies which are developed, one particular set of indicators appears to owe its importance more to prior assumptions about relevant policies and explanations for deprivation than to its direct relevance to the phenomenon itself. Specifically the emergence of explanations of deprivation in terms of the pathology of individuals (and a consequential recourse to policies based on improving methods of social control and management) is related clearly to the use of certain measures to assess the incidence of deprivation. It is to these latter measures that the chapter now turns for they illustrate not only this third deficiency of research on deprivation but also offer good examples of the first two methodological difficulties noted above.

A number of authors (for example Flynn et al., 1972; Strathclyde Regional Council, 1976) have made use of statistics generated by official agencies whose functions consist in controlling and coping with the immediate problems of certain sections of the poor. Statistics such as crime rates, truancy levels, incidence of social work referrals, all come within this category and have been used to chart the incidence of deprivation in various areas. The deficiencies of these kind of measures even as accurate indicators of the reality they purport to measure have been well known for some time. They measure the incidence of a particular behaviour pattern or attribute as far as this is known to and recorded by the official agency in question.

They are just as much measures of the activities of a particular service or agency as an indicator of the behaviour the latter are attempting to modify or control. In this context comparisons between areas must be particularly suspect. It is well established for example that local authorities will vary in the extent of their provision of a wide range of services for the poor. Differences between areas on these indicators will contain an unknown element which will be accounted for by the different levels of provision between areas.

Secondly, although it is usually correct to argue that the adoption of particular behaviour patterns which cause people to come into contact with these various agencies is related to the experience of poverty and deprivation, what is rarely explicitly stated is that this relationship is rarely simple or the same for all the poor. Crime statistics offer a particularly good example here for it is known that recorded criminal activity is a young man's occupation. Poverty, however, is not infrequently an old woman's fate. Where statistics on crime are used therefore they will necessarily point only to poorer younger people and to the areas in which they live. The poverty of the old is not taken into account by such measures.

It is not sufficient to point to both the measurable and unmeasurable deficiencies of these statistics as indicators of deprivation. It is necessary to underline what they do measure: the recorded incidence of problems which certain, largely working-class poor, sections of the population pose for other, usually more affluent, members of our society. What are recorded are problems of management in the broadest sense. The question which needs to be raised here is whether the importance given to some of these indicators is solely a result of their assumed relationship to deprivation or because they actually measure real problems of social control. The point here is not that social control is necessarily to be rejected as a policy alternative but that it covers quite different issues and policies from those raised by deprivation.

Analytically social control as a problem immediately raises questions concerned with who is controlling whom in whose interests. The problems of power and interests immediately emerge. Secondly, improving social control mechanisms is not and never can be a solution to the problems of deprivation and poverty unless the view is being taken that the reason deprivation is a problem is because it leads to antisocial behaviour. However, the two issues, deprivation and antisocial behaviour, should not be confused. If social control is the real issue then this should be made clear, but a policy or a study which concentrates on such issues should not be allowed to masquerade as a policy for deprivation.

Research work which eschews measures based on the activities of various agencies of local and central government has to make considerable use of direct measures of characteristics of individuals obtained through censuses and surveys. The census of population, frequently used in this context, and other surveys were not specifically constructed to measure deprivation or poverty and consequently researchers using them are forced to rely on indicators of deprivation which they happen to include. Again such indicators are merely related, usually in an unknown fashion, to the incidence of deprivation rather than being direct attempts to measure the phenomenon. Locality-based data on money incomes and assets for example are particularly difficult to obtain although most researchers would probably see these as being central to any assessment of the distribution of material deprivation.

In the context of the identification of material poverty, measures such as the proportions of unemployed men, single-parent families, large families and old age pensioners in the population are often used without any attempt to assess the relative contribution each measure makes to the overall incidence of material poverty. What is particularly disturbing about this failure is that a certain amount is known about not only what proportions of these separate groups do have particularly low incomes but furthermore what proportion of all the poor consists of people in these categories.

This uncritical use of a variety of indicators lends itself to situations where certain dimensions of the problem receive more attention than others merely by virtue of the greater availability of quantifiable data concerning the former. Thus housing receives a considerable amount of attention as a result of the large amount of information available on certain aspects of inadequate housing, plumbing amenities and space in particular. A good example in this respect is provided by the Department of the Environment's analysis of census indicators of urban deprivation in Great Britain; of the 39 main indicators 18 relate to housing amenities or housing tenure (Great Britain, 1975a).

An understandable reliance on publicly available quantifiable data moreover leads to significant gaps in the empirical work on deprivation in precisely those areas where the concept is supposed to be an improvement on its predecessor, poverty. The recognition, implicit in the concept of deprivation, that the problem of inequality is more than merely the lack of access to material resources, remains largely unexplored by the empirical deprivation literature. Quantified measures of emotional and cultural deprivation (even assuming that the considerable definitional problems could be overcome) are virtually nonexistent and are likely to remain so. Secondly, while policies developed for tackling the problems of deprivation at the small area level have placed some emphasis on the social structure of deprived areas, such as the values and attitudes of residents and the way in which they relate to each other as individuals and groups, there is no doubt that empirical analysis of deprivation has been very little concerned with these less quantifiable but important aspects of the problem.

While British sociologists wrote extensively in the 1960s on the nature of interaction at the neighbourhood level amongst the working class as a whole very little is known about whether deprived areas display distinctive patterns of internal social relationships (i.e. whether they have distinctive locality-based social structures) or whether their residents adhere to a significantly different set of values, beliefs and attitudes. The single notable exception is Damer (1974). This tendency to ignore structure at the expense of a concentration on the attributes and characteristics of individuals is an important one because it is not just based on the problems of data availability, but derives from the way in which deprivation comes to be defined in terms of the position and situations of individuals. This individualistic bias is a significant feature of the definitional framework outlined earlier and has vital wider consequences which are examined later.

Problems with the empirical analysis of deprivation are incorporated into the examination of multiple deprivation. Attempts to assess the incidence of multiple deprivation will founder necessarily on the deficiencies of the measures of deprivation noted above. If the aim is to identify those individuals or groups who are deprived simultaneously on a number of dimensions then certain issues require prior clarification. A concern with correlations between different indicators implies the ability to weight these different indicators relative to each other. Such weighting is rarely attempted in practice even at the crudest level. The assumption is usually made that achieving a high score on four dimensions is ‘worse’ than a high score on three different dimensions. This is not necessarily the case. The very fact that we are dealing here with correlations rules out those aspects of deprivation which are either unmeasured or nonquantifiable.

The search for high intercorrelations of different measures oversimplifies a complex social reality to an extent that results from such an exercise are often meaningless. The identification of multiply deprived areas for example through correlation analysis ignores both the difficulties of ecological correlation and the possibility that it is more useful to thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Defining Urban Deprivation
• 2. The Corporate Dimension of Employment Change in the Inner City
• 3. The Inner City Labour Market
• 4. Area Externalities and Urban Unemployment
• 5. Access and Deprivation in Local Authority Housing
• 6. Politics and Planning of Urban Renewal in the Private Housing Sector
• 7. Low Income Owner-Occupation in the Inner City
• 8. Population Decline in Cities
• Notes on Contributors
• Index