Welfare geography

Welfare geography is an area of geographical study and related policy activity that is concerned with the welfare of individuals and the places in which they live. The emergence of academic interest in welfare geography was part of the wider broadening of human geography as a discipline during the 1970s which followed the "quantitative turn" during the 1960s. Welfare geography scholarship can be characterized by three interlinked features: its attention to rigorous empirical inquiry of sociospatial conditions; its attention to the normative assessment of those sociospatial conditions and the social–political–economic process and power imbalances that (re)produce them; and the willingness of its practitioners to engage in political activity to seek progressive change.