West campus news Releases Archive
ASU professor to present paper on urban poverty at 2005 Oxford Roundtable in England
Mar. 8, 2005
Andrew Kirby, professor of social sciences in ASU’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, will present a scholarly paper at the 2005 Oxford Roundtable to be held at
Every year, approximately 40 individuals from academics, government and politics are invited to attend the workshop in order to focus on a designated topic and produce a book that summarizes the discussions. This year the emphasis will be on poverty. Kirby, editor of the academic journal Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning, will present a paper on the relation between urbanization and poverty.
Kirby focuses on poverty and inequality in a world where, he says, for the first time more people live in cities than in rural areas. His talk will focus on what we know about this population and what can be done to ameliorate urban poverty.
“In the last century, urban inequality was an issue of ‘people poverty,’ such as the concentration of the disadvantaged in the inner cities in the advanced economies,” Kirby said. “In the 21st century, the spectacular growth of megacities in the evolving economies brings attention to a very different population who lead an interstitial existence between rural and urban economies. To a significant degree, this is ‘place poverty,’ by which residents live in situations of hardship exacerbated by a shortage of housing and infrastructure, although, significantly, many accomplish the transition to a new economic, social and political existence in the city proper.”
Kirby’s paper will explore what is known about inequality and poverty, reminding us that rural poverty remains a pressing quantitative imperative, and that there are still poor people in rich cities. Yet the relative novelty of massive urban inequality in the evolving economies rightly captures our attention, amidst calls for limits to globalization and the curbing of urbanization on the grounds of sustainability. Relatively little has been accomplished to ameliorate poverty via policy interventions in the cities of the advanced nations; so what will be done in this century as we turn our attention to the new cities of the evolving nations?
Kirby, whose teaching deals with a broad range of contemporary social issues, was recently invited to become one of the 48 Founding Fellows in the Arizona Arts, Sciences and
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