Geoffrey Deverteuil
Biographic Data
| ID | 911206 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Geoffrey Deverteuil |
| GIVEN NAMES | Geoffrey |
| FAMILY NAME | Deverteuil |
| SIGNATURE | DEVERTEUIL G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3036-9303 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 872 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Growth and flexibility at the margins? The voluntary sector and civil society in post-welfare Portland
In this article, we shed light on the growth and flexibility of the voluntary sector as it responds to the housing crisis in American cities. To do so, we adopt a perspective from the margins of the post-welfare city (using governmentality studies), focusing on obscure grassroots actors at the interface of the state, the voluntary sector and civil society. Based on fieldwork carried out in Portland, Oregon (USA), this article analyzes city code c…
Reversal of fortune
In this extended meditation, I want to build on a key insight from my provocations around the lopsided city: that for all of its forward momentum, the lopsided city remains prone to falling over, of over-reach. This connects to an older interest in faded grandeur, entropy, cracks in the city, and ruins, while being careful to avoid wallowing in purely dystopian representations
Response to Portugali
This commentary provides several critiques to Portugali's admirably ambitious paper on the utility of applying Bohm's scientific approach to unify the current disarray in urban studies. The critiques focus on incommensurability between science and social science, conceptual over-reach, and the value of diversity versus unity
Juxtaposition and visualising the middle ground in the unequal city
This photo essays fleshes out the notion of juxtaposition, both as an empirical reality in unequal cities but also as a visual and aesthetic technique to capture the overlaps between powerful and everyday city fabrics. Across a series of nine images, I illustrate the visual practice of juxtaposition by finding the edge of the two fabrics within the same place, of contrasting textures and tones, the product of chance material collisions. But I als…
Damned if we do, damned if we don't”
Urban marginality has long-been a concern of urban studies. The governance of urban marginality is important empirical terrain, particularly in the context of COVID-19, an event that challenged established governance systems globally. This article contributes to our understanding of the governance of urban marginality during the COVID-19 pandemic by examining urban poverty management responses in one Canadian city, Edmonton, Alberta. The article …
Critical visual approaches to understand the complexities and contradictions of the city
Visual imagery has long been part of urban scholarship. Geographers, planners and urban studies researchers take a lot of pictures, and feature many in their lectures and publications. However, photographs are typically used as a descriptive illustrator of a place, process or phenomenon. Through this approach, visual imagery accompanies or supports an argument, analysis or conclusion derived from other methodologies. For example, if statistical a…
Urban inequality revisited
In this forum paper, I revisit the rich and coherent literature on inequality from the 1990s, immersed in radical urban studies and Marxist political economy, and apply it to recent transitions in city fabrics, that is the built environment and the social worlds around it. Some city fabrics reflect powerful interests, while others are more everyday and mundane. Recently, there has been the sense that powerful fabrics have increasingly encroached …
Revisiting the emerging lopsided city
In the context of an ongoing conversation about cities and inequality, I offer a critical but not contrarian set of responses to the very generous commentaries provided by the five peer reviewers. I hope to use this space to both clarify and nuance some of my original provocations around the emerging lopsided city and the value of revisiting insights on inequality generated in the 1990s
Age-Unfriendly by Design
Problem, research strategy, and findings The world’s population is aging at a rapid rate, yet many local built and social environments are not well suited to support older adults. Australia exemplifies the demographic–environmental disconnect because it is one of the world’s most suburban nations and has one of the proportionally largest baby boom generations. In this research we examined the relationship between built and social environments wit…
Managing service hubs in Miami and Osaka
As key sites of governance and poverty management, service hubs are conspicuous inner-city clusters of voluntary sector organizations that serve vulnerable urban populations, including people grappling with homelessness, substance abusers and mental illness. In this paper, we frame service hubs as potentially embodying capacious commons on the one hand, and meagre street-level bureaucracies on the other, reconstituting Lipsky’s individual focus t…
Slow scholarship, the slow city, and counter-visual practices
Slow scholarship offers an alternative way to do research, yet its implications for visual practice and production remain implicit. In this article, I translate and apply key notions of slow scholarship to visual practice and production, in particular that slower can be a better and more care-full way of doing research. This gap is filled by re-purposing existing methods (time-series, inconvenience sampling, replicable) to capture what I deem the…
Deaths of despair and the social geographies of health denial
The aim of this article is to articulate and translate the key points emerging from Case and Deaton's (2020) provocation on "deaths of despair" in the United States, to an audience concerned with the social geography of health and health denial. According to the authors, the recent waning life expectancy in the United States is mostly due to an unprecedented increase in deaths among middle-aged Whites in rural areas, due to suicide, alcohol and e…
Commons, counterpublics and dissident urban space
We put into conversation two conceptual approaches for understanding the dissident nature of urban space: the commons and the counterpublics. This novel conceptual conversation asks the following questions - what is the interplay between them? Do they complement, build on, contradict, or ignore each other? What is urban about their particular interplays? These hypothetical matters are framed by a consideration of the fate of populations deemed su…
More than Bare-Bones Survival? From the Urban Margins to the Urban Commons
We revisit the urban margins by recasting service hubs—conspicuous clusters of helping agencies in inner-city locales, designed to serve vulnerable populations—as both spaces of survival but potentially transformative, emerging as so-called cracks in the city. We undertake this recasting using the concept of the commons. Using case studies in London, Miami, and Osaka, we focus on the everyday practices of commoning and the role that service hubs …
The role of the 'ambiguous home' in service users' management of their mental health
Research on mental health geographies and housing has focused on pattern and distribution, rather than social and cultural constructions of home. Here we attempt to understand meanings and roles of home for individuals with mental illness in the UK within the context of a deep-seated housing crisis. The discussion is sharpened by the notion of the ambiguous home, ranging from a place for retreat, separation or even isolation from the world, with …
Disaster and the lived politics of the resilient city
Emerging anti-poverty infrastructural gaps in suburbia
Suburbs are subject to numerous stereotypes, including that they lack density, diversity and inclusivity. While these stereotypes have largely been dispelled, the deficit around anti-poverty infrastructure remains understudied. The focus of this paper is to systematically investigate the ostensible mismatch between (a) the emerging suburbanization of poverty, and (b) the potential lack of anti-poverty infrastructure to serve it, with a focus on s…
Austerity Britain, poverty management and the missing geographies of mental health
The service hub as bypassed social infrastructure
We shed light on understudied social infrastructure by focusing on the service hub, those conspicuous clusters of voluntary sector organizations designed to help the most vulnerable urban populations. Using Kamagasaki, Osaka as an exploratory case study, we find that the service hub acts as a distinctly inner-city social infrastructure marked by very close proximity of clients and services, as well as high accessibility, mutuality, and provisiona…
Reversing the dominant directionality
Reversing the usual directionality of gentrification theory and process emanating from Anglo‐American models, we work from an East Asian model of gentrification via Seoul to see whether it has been emulated in the Global North, in this case Koreatown, Los Angeles. Focusing on the style, density, scale, scope and pace of the East Asian model and using interviews with 25 Korean gentrifiers and 10 key informants alongside secondary data, the results…
Power, powerlessness and the politics of mobility
Handbook of Global Urban Health
The relational geographies of the voluntary sector
We propose that voluntary sector geographies are best understood using a systematic relational approach, drawing upon neo-Marxist and symbiotic perspectives. We focus on relations between the voluntary sector and the (shadow) state, internal spaces of client interaction, and external urban spaces. Our relational approach advances alternative understandings of the voluntary sector: ones that are partly but not fully in the orbit of the shadow stat…
Post-revanchist cities
This intervention focuses on how national-level rhetoric aimed at impugning “others” has thrived of late, but how concomitantly 1990s-style urban revanchism has faded in cities that were once punitive crucibles against the homeless. Using Los Angeles as case study, I argue that the recent trend has been to grudgingly support the homeless, increasingly via taxpayer initiatives, leading to a potential but stymied post-revanchist city. If the spirit…
Between the cosmopolitan and the parochial
This paper questions the currently lopsided relationship between the cosmopolitan and the parochial, in which the former is favored both conceptually and empirically. In response, we propose a relational framework for bringing them into conversation, simultaneously recasting and re-animating longstanding debates via three framing devices – the process of relationality/territoriality, disposition, and spaces of encounter – embedded in and through …
Complexity not collapse
Over the past decade there has been a proliferation of work on homelessness by geographers. Much of this has been framed by the desire to connect discussions of homelessness to wider debates around gentrification, urban restructuring and the politics of public space. Though such work has been helpful in shifting discussions of homelessness into the mainstream geographical literature, too much of it remains narrowly framed within a US metric of kn…
Does the Punitive Need the Supportive? A Sympathetic Critique of Current Grammars of Urban Injustice
This paper is a sympathetic critique of mainstream grammars of urban injustice, arguing that they are frequently too one-sided and selective to adequately grasp the full complexity of urban realities. Most prominently, I contend that urban injustice and punitiveness co-exist with, if not sometimes depend upon, more supportive responses within urban space. I therefore counterbalance the spectacular logics of punitive urbanism and the everyday logi…
Spaces of sobriety/sites of power
The local state and homeless shelters
The relational geographies of the voluntary sector
We propose that voluntary sector geographies are best understood using a systematic relational approach, drawing upon neo-Marxist and symbiotic perspectives. We focus on relations between the voluntary sector and the (shadow) state, internal spaces of client interaction, and external urban spaces. Our relational approach advances alternative understandings of the voluntary sector: ones that are partly but not fully in the orbit of the shadow stat…
Can resilience be redeemed
Resilience has been critiqued as being regressively status quo and thus propping up neo-liberalism, that it lacks transformative potential, and that it can be used as a pretence to cast off needy people and places. We move from this critique of resilience to a critical resilience, based in the following arguments: (i) resilience can sustain alternative and previous practices that contradict neo-liberalism; (ii) resilience is more active and dynam…
Conceptualizing violence for health and medical geography
Homeless Mobility, Institutional Settings, and the New Poverty Management
Poverty management involves organized responses by elites and/or the state to contain potentially disruptive populations. As a result of global, national, and institutional compressions, the new poverty management tends to circulate these populations, especially the mentally disabled, across an array of unrelated and frequently institutional settings. This restructuring of interactions between mobility and institutional settings, in the form of i…
Spaces of abeyance, care and survival
New spaces for the local welfare state? The case of General Relief in Los Angeles County
The current 'hollowing out' and devolution of the national welfare state produces new spaces for the local welfare state, theoretically allowing more leeway to dismantle, privatize, further devolve, or even experiment with new local bureaucratic structures. At the same time, national devolution places greater burdens on local resources. Over the past twenty years, a series of theoretical frameworks have been proposed to understand local welfare s…
Where has Nimby gone in urban social geography
Overseas investment into London
This paper focuses on the spatial imprint and social impacts of the emerging geographies of concentrated overseas investment into London's high-end real estate market, particularly the boroughs of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea. Framed by literatures on the 1% and the super-rich, and based on a mixed methodological approach of qualitative interviews with intermediaries and a quantitative mapping of overseas investors using 2011 census dat…
Survive but not thrive? Geographical strategies for avoiding absolute homelessness among immigrant communities
This article seeks to unpack why certain immigrant communities manage to avoid absolute homelessness, emphasizing how survival strategies embedded in immigrant community space may be deployed in both advantageous and disadvantageous fashions. Bangladeshis in Greater London and Central Americans in Los Angeles County were compared, based on the fact that they are similarly vulnerable immigrant communities in terms of poverty and segregation, yet h…
Reconciling indigenous need with the urban welfare state? Evidence of culturally-appropriate services and spaces for Aboriginals in Winnipeg, Canada
No more of this macho bullshit’
Health geography has largely failed to engage with the topic of masculinity. This absence is surprising for several reasons, not least because health geography has close ties to social geography, where a burgeoning scholarship on masculinity has developed in recent years. In this paper, we contribute to what Thien and Del Casino ( ) envision as a more robust health geography for men. We do so through a detailed analysis of men's experiences withi…
Any Space Left? Homeless Resistance by Place-Type in Los Angeles County
This study develops a more nuanced concept of homeless resistance, incorporating a range of resistance behaviors (exit, adaptation, persistence, and voice) that bridge the gap between current frameworks that either romanticize or ignore it. We also consider the possibility that different kinds of space may theoretically allow for different kinds of resistance. To this end, we employ an ecological approach to homeless space by classifying Los Ange…
Weak-Center' Gentrification and the Contradictions of Containment
This case study of recent efforts to deconcentrate poverty within the Skid Row area of Los Angeles examines processes of 'weak-center' gentrification as it applies to a 'service dependent ghetto,' thus filling two key gaps in prior scholarship. We document the collaboration between the government, business and development interests, and certain non-profit agencies in this process and identify two key mechanisms of poverty deconcentration: housing…
Mental health and the city
Post-revanchist cities
This intervention focuses on how national-level rhetoric aimed at impugning “others” has thrived of late, but how concomitantly 1990s-style urban revanchism has faded in cities that were once punitive crucibles against the homeless. Using Los Angeles as case study, I argue that the recent trend has been to grudgingly support the homeless, increasingly via taxpayer initiatives, leading to a potential but stymied post-revanchist city. If the spirit…
Disaster and the lived politics of the resilient city
Between the cosmopolitan and the parochial
This paper questions the currently lopsided relationship between the cosmopolitan and the parochial, in which the former is favored both conceptually and empirically. In response, we propose a relational framework for bringing them into conversation, simultaneously recasting and re-animating longstanding debates via three framing devices – the process of relationality/territoriality, disposition, and spaces of encounter – embedded in and through …
Post-welfare city at the margins
The putative post-welfare city is marked by a debate between continuity with previous welfare structures, versus a radical break whereby new, more punitive measures prevail. Seeking to clarify the role of the third sector at the margins of the debated post-welfare city, margins which can be characterized by a stigmatized and abandoned clientele, I focus on organizations serving precarious migrants in London. There were 15 interviews of third sect…
Evidence of Gentrification-induced Displacement among Social Services in London and Los Angeles
This paper addresses two key gaps within the gentrification/displacement literature: whether gentrification is displacing social services and whether displacement patterns differ comparatively. To this end, evidence is examined of gentrification-induced displacement of 81 purposively sampled social service facilities across gentrifying boroughs in London (Islington, Lambeth, Southwark and Westminster) and areas in Los Angeles (Downtown, Hollywood…
Towards a contextual approach to the place–homeless survival nexus
Reconsidering the legacy of urban public facility location theory in human geography
In 1968, Michael Teitz initiated a new locational theory, focusing on how best to locate urban public facilities given the need to balance efficiency and equity. This locational problematic would evolve into a coherent set of geographical concepts steeped in normative, neoclassical and quantitative assumptions. Building on Teitz's original formulations, quantitative geographers and regional scientists focused on operationalizing efficiency and eq…
The Fate of Place . Edward S. Casey, and City Lives and City Forms . Jon Caulfield and Linda Peake, editor; Streets
(1999). The Fate of Place. Edward S. Casey, and City Lives and City Forms. Jon Caulfield and Linda Peake, editor; Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space. elik Zeynep, Diane Favro, and Richard Ingersoll, editors; Culture, Globalization, and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Anthony D. King, editor; Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes. Talmadge Wright. Urban G…
Reconsidering the legacy of urban public facility location theory in human geography
In 1968, Michael Teitz initiated a new locational theory, focusing on how best to locate urban public facilities given the need to balance efficiency and equity. This locational problematic would evolve into a coherent set of geographical concepts steeped in normative, neoclassical and quantitative assumptions. Building on Teitz's original formulations, quantitative geographers and regional scientists focused on operationalizing efficiency and eq…
Cast adrift in the post-911 city
New spaces for the local welfare state? The case of General Relief in Los Angeles County
The current 'hollowing out' and devolution of the national welfare state produces new spaces for the local welfare state, theoretically allowing more leeway to dismantle, privatize, further devolve, or even experiment with new local bureaucratic structures. At the same time, national devolution places greater burdens on local resources. Over the past twenty years, a series of theoretical frameworks have been proposed to understand local welfare s…
Welfare Reform, Institutional Practices, and Service-Delivery Settings 1
The 1996 U.S. welfare reform legislation promises to fundamentally restructure the ways in which local institutional practices and clients interact within welfare neighborhoods. Focusing on the neglected scale of the service delivery setting, I conceptualize the implications of federal welfare reform for institutional practices and examine actual institutional outcomes within the University Park neighborhood in Los Angeles. Employing a multimetho…
Homeless Mobility, Institutional Settings, and the New Poverty Management
Poverty management involves organized responses by elites and/or the state to contain potentially disruptive populations. As a result of global, national, and institutional compressions, the new poverty management tends to circulate these populations, especially the mentally disabled, across an array of unrelated and frequently institutional settings. This restructuring of interactions between mobility and institutional settings, in the form of i…
The changing landscapes of Southwest Montréal
The Canadian inner city is currently marked by diversity and dynamism. One way to approach this diversity is through photography. A visual approach was used to capture the simultaneous upgrading, decline/revitalization, decline and stability within the changing landscapes of Southwest Montréal, Canada's original industrial heartland
The Relationship between Government Assistance and Housing Outcomes among Extremely Low-income Individuals
This paper illustrates the relationship between government assistance (housing subsidies and/or welfare payments) and housing outcomes, using qualitative methods and a sample of 25 extremely low-income, homeless women at an emergency shelter in Central Los Angeles. The paper seeks to illustrate three specific patterns (identified within the larger literature) to this complex and multifaceted relationship: (1) that the presence of housing subsidie…
Mental health and the city
The local state and homeless shelters
Spaces of sobriety/sites of power
Fragments of Inequality
Key Words: inequalitypunctuated equilibriumsocial fragmentationspatial fragmentation Additional informationNotes on contributorsGeoffrey DeVerteuilReviewed by
Complexity not collapse
Over the past decade there has been a proliferation of work on homelessness by geographers. Much of this has been framed by the desire to connect discussions of homelessness to wider debates around gentrification, urban restructuring and the politics of public space. Though such work has been helpful in shifting discussions of homelessness into the mainstream geographical literature, too much of it remains narrowly framed within a US metric of kn…
Any Space Left? Homeless Resistance by Place-Type in Los Angeles County
This study develops a more nuanced concept of homeless resistance, incorporating a range of resistance behaviors (exit, adaptation, persistence, and voice) that bridge the gap between current frameworks that either romanticize or ignore it. We also consider the possibility that different kinds of space may theoretically allow for different kinds of resistance. To this end, we employ an ecological approach to homeless space by classifying Los Ange…
Towards a contextual approach to the place–homeless survival nexus
Spaces of abeyance, care and survival
The Geographies of Intoxicants
As social geographers of health, we wish to review the field of geography and intoxicants. By intoxicants, we mean substances that have psychoactive, consciousness-altering effects. This article defines the geography of intoxicants, and provides a selective review of geographically inclined research that has focused on (i) the consumption of intoxicants, especially its regulation within public spaces, (ii) intoxicants and public health, especiall…
Reconciling indigenous need with the urban welfare state? Evidence of culturally-appropriate services and spaces for Aboriginals in Winnipeg, Canada
Weak-Center' Gentrification and the Contradictions of Containment
This case study of recent efforts to deconcentrate poverty within the Skid Row area of Los Angeles examines processes of 'weak-center' gentrification as it applies to a 'service dependent ghetto,' thus filling two key gaps in prior scholarship. We document the collaboration between the government, business and development interests, and certain non-profit agencies in this process and identify two key mechanisms of poverty deconcentration: housing…
From E1 to 90057
This study contributes to the current literature on the welfare state, the voluntary sector, and immigrant communities in two ways. It compares two immigrant groups who immigrated to London and Los Angeles in the 1980s (Bangladeshis and Central Americans, respectively), in terms of how their immigrant-serving, nonprofit sector mediates the larger welfare state, itself pluralistic and neoliberalizing. Results suggest that although each community e…
Evidence of Gentrification-induced Displacement among Social Services in London and Los Angeles
This paper addresses two key gaps within the gentrification/displacement literature: whether gentrification is displacing social services and whether displacement patterns differ comparatively. To this end, evidence is examined of gentrification-induced displacement of 81 purposively sampled social service facilities across gentrifying boroughs in London (Islington, Lambeth, Southwark and Westminster) and areas in Los Angeles (Downtown, Hollywood…
Survive but not thrive? Geographical strategies for avoiding absolute homelessness among immigrant communities
This article seeks to unpack why certain immigrant communities manage to avoid absolute homelessness, emphasizing how survival strategies embedded in immigrant community space may be deployed in both advantageous and disadvantageous fashions. Bangladeshis in Greater London and Central Americans in Los Angeles County were compared, based on the fact that they are similarly vulnerable immigrant communities in terms of poverty and segregation, yet h…
You have to make a new way of life’
The concept of the ‘therapeutic landscape’ has been widely applied by health geographers over the past decade and a half. Despite its broad application, the concept has been criticized. Some scholars, for example, have argued that it adopts an overly positive view of the health effects of therapeutics settings. Others have noted a lack of attention to gender. In this article we respond to these limitations by engaging with feminist research on wo…
The relationship between place ties and moves to small regional retirement communities on the Canadian prairies
Resisting gentrification‐induced displacement
This paper focuses on resistance to gentrification‐induced displacement among non‐profit social services in London and Los Angeles. I identify three key strategies for ‘staying put’: private, voluntary sector embeddedness, and public sector support. Results suggested both advantages and disadvantages to resisting displacement, which also varied by city
Sociology (50 works) · Political science (37 works) · Homelessness and Social Issues (33 works) · Economics (25 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (23 works) · Geography (20 works) · Economic growth (19 works) · Politics (19 works)