290162 SE Seminar: Geography of Poverty (2006W)

The processes of globalisation and the changes in our socio-economic systems through the post-fordistic dynamics of development have greatly intensified social and spatial disparities. The gap between the rich and the poor, between highly developed countries and those of the Third World, is widening more and more. The seminar will start with scrutinising the issue how such disparities, existing on diverse levels of scale, may be empirically described and circumstantiated. In a second step, attempts shall be made to reconstruct the causes, general conditions and backgrounds of these dynamics of development. In this context, special consideration will be given to the theory of fragmenting development, the regulation theory and, above all, to the doctrine of the "actually existing neoliberalism" and its connection with processes and phenomena dealt with by the "New Political Economy".