Introduction

Social policy and human geography are intimately intertwined yet frequently disconnected fields. Whilst social policies are always conceived, implemented and experienced in and through geography, the role of place in social policy scholarship and practice is frequently overlooked. Bringing together experts from both fields, this collection illuminates the myriad of ways that human geography offers rich insights conceptually, empirically and methodologically into the neglected spatialities of policy scholarship, practice and experience. By building the necessary bridges towards a spatial social policy, this book enables the enhanced design, performance and understanding of social policies once properly rooted in their multiple spatialities.

Doing space and star power: Foucault, exclusion–inclusion and the spatial history of social policy

This chapter discusses Michel Foucault, the celebrated French intellectual, as a spatial historian of social policy: as someone who, in critical and scholarly veins, consistently probed ideas and practices constitutive of an envisaged ‘right ordering of the social’, particularly but not exclusively in settings from the past of Western Europe. Taking his early-1970s lecture course on The Punitive Society as a pivot-point, the chapter explores a key transition in Foucault’s thinking about the role of space in such an ordering of the social: a shift from seeing space (distance, barrier, boundary) primarily as a tool for excluding troublesome populations (abandonment, banishment, segregation) to seeing space (arrangements, distributions, relations) as additionally a tool for including such populations (reforming, rehabilitation, reintegration). Identifying this transition helps to sharpen understanding of the different ways in which a spatialising of social policy research can proceed.

Situating social policy analysis: possibilities from quantitative and qualitative GIS

This chapter discusses the potential use of GIS in social policy analysis. It describes the advantages of GIS as an approach to social policy enquiry and provides a number of extant examples from a variety of policy fields. Although it is typically thought of as a quantitative method, the chapter also emphasises more recent qualitative uses of GIS. The chapter addresses some of the barriers to the use of GIS in social policy and how these can be overcome. The chapter concludes with an overview of how recent innovations in GIS and the availability of social data can have a positive impact on the use of GIS in the field of social policy.

Spaces of welfare localism: geographies of locality making

Situated in the latest incarnation of the ‘localism’ turn, this chapter offers new theoretical insights into the rhetoric of decentralist discourses and the geographical complexities and contradictions of state-remaking realities on-the-ground. The chapter suggests that there is considerable mileage in the notion of ‘locality’ to advance critical social policy analysis and that its earlier jettisoning may have been premature. The chapter urges for a ‘return to locality’ to enlighten studies of social policy and advances its argument through three new readings of locality – locality as bounded territorial space, as an approach to comparative analysis, and to read spaces of flows for diverse policy fields. Taken together the chapter argues that these constitute the basis for the benefits in thinking about geography through the lens of new localities.

Developing a spatial social policy: taking stock and looking to the future

This closing chapter reflects on some of the different ways in which the book has brought geography into conversation with social policy. In particular, it draws attention to the different sorts of geographical understandings that are mobilised in this project, from Philo’s view of Foucault as a critical spatial analyst to Pykett’s engagement with ‘neurogeographies’. Each of the chapters contributes something important to the challenge of making space and place visible as dynamic elements in the world of social policy. Too often, social policy studies view place as a passive context for policy rather than a formative or constitutive force. The chapter aims to deepen the critique of social policy’s limited attention to space and place. It ends by considering ways in which policy might be seen as an active ‘place making’ process, and how topological approaches to geography and the concept of assemblage might contribute to such possibilities.

Not just nuisance: spatialising social statistics

Outside of the specialist community of quantitative spatial researchers’ statistical analyses in the social sciences see geography merely as simple units of analysis or else as nuisance risks to the satisfaction of underlying statistical assumptions, if indeed it sees geography at all. In step-by-step discussion and visualisations this chapter upends that dominant treatment by illustrating the range of rich and frequently untapped spatial insights that a clearer understanding and grasp of specialist but (relatively) straightforward spatial methodologies can bring substantively to social policy analysis and practice.

A critical neuro-geography of behaviourally and neuroscientifically informed public policy

Amidst the growing enthusiasm for the application of behavioural insights from behavioural economics, psychology and the neurosciences in social policy, there has been a shift in emphasis from structural, through individuated and towards neuromolecular scales of explanation for social problems. This chapter explores the role of these trends in carving out new spatialities of social policy. The chapter considers the scale at which government intervention is deemed necessary, effective and efficient; and who should be responsible for health, productivity and wellbeing in liberal societies. It traces continuities between behavioural and neuroscientifically-informed public policy through analysis of international and supra-national policy documentation within societies in which neoliberalism is increasingly recognised as a source of social harm and economic instability. The chapter develops an approach to ‘critical neuro- geography’ which sheds new light on the strategic importance of scalar claims and other spatialities to forms of governance targeted at the mind, body and soul.

Re-placing employment support: multi-spatial activation diorama

Geography and public policy are intimately related but explored typically only I relation to what critical geographical thinkers might regard as a simplistic, and certainly highly partial, absolute conceptualisation of space. Using the policy domain of employment support policy as its case study example this chapter explore how richer alternative conceptualisations of geography can serve to illuminate and empower policy analysis and practice.

Grenfell and the place of housing in modern life

Focusing on the Grenfell tragedy this chapter examines critically the place of housing in society, the economy and policy in the UK today. The chapter traces key reforms that have served to undercut housing and communities as social goods and to instead reconceptualise and rebuild them as investment assets, highlighting the pervasive housing insecurity that has as a consequence been created and normalised in the UK housing market and its significant deleterious human impacts for less affluent people and places.

Financialisation, Social Impact Bonds and the making of new market spaces in social policy

Social Impact Investing (SII) is a mechanism by which governments seek to access and mobilise the resources of private for-profit and philanthropic capital to finance a range of social policies. SII is used increasingly but remains relatively under-examined conceptually, empirically and particularly geographically. This chapter explores the ways in which SII represents a distinctive process of extensive financialisation that creates new financialised market space within social welfare programmes. In doing so, the chapter examines how SII forges new financial chains of value that transform geographically rooted ‘problem’ populations and welfare delivery into investable products linked to distant mobile national and global financial market actors. Through this spatially transformative financial shift, it is argued that the SII starting point of finance capital for welfare provision instead results in appropriating additional public resources for finance capital