Contextual poverty refers to high proportions of people with a low income in a certain (residential) space, and it can affect individual socioeconomic outcomes as well as decisions to move into or out of the neighbourhood. Contextual poverty is a multiscale phenomenon: Poverty levels at the regional scale reflect regional economic development, while meso-scale concentrations of poverty within cities are related to city-specific social, economic and housing characteristics. Within cities, poverty can also concentrate at micro spatial scales, which are often neglected, largely due to a lack of data. Exposure to poverty at lower spatial scales, such as housing blocks and streets, is important because it can influence individuals through social mechanisms such as role models or social networks. This paper is based on the premise that sociospatial context is necessarily multiscalar, and therefore contextual poverty is a multiscale problem which can be better understood through the inequality within and between places at different spatial scales. The question is how to compare different spatial contexts if we know that they include various spatial scales. Our measure of contextual poverty embraces 101 spatial scales and compares different locations within and between municipalities in the Netherlands. We found that the national inequality primarily came from the concentrations of poverty in areas of a few kilometres, located in cities, which have different spatial patterns of contextual poverty, such as multicentre, core-periphery and east–west. In addition to the inequality between municipalities, there are considerable within-municipality inequalities, particularly among micro-areas of a few hundred metres.

环境贫困是指在某个（住宅）空间中低收入人群的比例很高，它会影响个人的社会经济成果以及搬入或搬出社区的决定。背景贫困是一种多尺度现象：区域尺度的贫困水平反映了区域经济发展，而城市内的中尺度贫困集中度与城市特定的社会、经济和住房特征有关。在城市内部，贫困也可以集中在微观空间尺度上，这在很大程度上是由于缺乏数据而经常被忽视。在较低的空间尺度上（例如住宅区和街道）暴露于贫困很重要，因为它可以通过诸如榜样或社会网络等社会机制影响个人。本文基于社会空间语境必然是多尺度的前提，因此语境贫困是一个多尺度问题，可以通过不同空间尺度的地方内部和地方之间的不平等来更好地理解。问题是如果我们知道它们包含不同的空间尺度，如何比较不同的空间上下文。我们对环境贫困的衡量包括 101 个空间尺度，并比较了荷兰城市内部和城市之间的不同位置。我们发现，全国的不平等主要来自几公里范围内的贫困集中，这些地区位于城市，具有不同的背景贫困空间模式，如多中心、核心-外围和东西向。除了城市之间的不平等，