Journal of the Korean Geographical Society ISSN:1225-6633(Print) 대한지리학회지

The central aim of this paper is to identify the distributional pattern of poverty and to investigate the spatial relationship between poverty and welfare service providers in Busan, Korea. It is intended to explain how the relationship of service-dependency between impoverished people and social welfare services leads to uneven social geography. Welfare services controlled by public or private agencies may support the impoverished people in different ways, generating social outcomes. By exploiting the spatial variations in the incidence of poverty and the provisions of social welfare services, this paper is to understand the dynamics of the geography of poverty from a local scale so that it can help us understand how various governmental and nongovernmental area-based service providers are spatially uneven when they are compared to the distribution of service dependency group such as impoverished people. From this research, it is finally argued that the implications of locational interdependence between such needed groups and social welfare services for their support demand a paradigm for urban social geography that centers on the changing welfare provision structure and the linkages between population and service-provision.