10 - Developing a Spatial Social Policy: Taking Stock and Looking to the Future

Summary

This book brings about a long overdue, and much needed, encounter between social policy and geography. Now that it has finally arrived, we can see some of the possibilities and problems that might be at stake in developing the encounter into a more long-running dialogue. Here my aim is to reflect back on some of the issues and arguments that emerged in the preceding chapters and their implications for the study of social policy. Later, I try to pick out two or three themes that might add to the potential conversation between geography and social policy by thinking a little further about ways in which space, place and policy are entangled. The chapter is written from the perspective of an occasionally disaffected social policy scholar who had the good fortune to mix with geographers who taught him the benefits of ‘taking geography seriously’ (Massey and Allen, 1984).

One of the conditions underlying my social policy disaffection is shared with many of the authors in this collection, and with the position that underpins it. The book is inspired by a deafening silence about place and space in social policy, characterised by the assumption that place is a self-evident and unquestioned terrain where policy and its practices happen. It is treated as a backdrop, location or passive context rather than an active force in the organisation of social life. Whether analysis is directed to the nation state or the neighbourhood, social policy is shot through with geographical reference points that are rarely questioned. For me, the assumptions about the nation (and its accompanying state) have always been a stumbling block, with national borders taken for granted as the framework within which analysis could be conducted – or between which comparisons could be safely made. The presumption of what we might call spatial tidiness, the belief that there is a stable entity bounded by fixed borders, in which the people, the policy and culture form a coherent and harmonious whole, has dominated much of social policy – with unfortunate consequences.