Investigating Spatial Inequalities

Offering in-depth perspectives on factors such as local labour markets, housing and mobility, this book investigates centralization tendencies in Scandinavia and South East Europe that help shape regional development and act as a catalyst to creating regional inequalities.

Offering in-depth perspectives on factors such as local labour markets, housing and mobility, this book investigates centralization tendencies in Scandinavia and South East Europe that help shape regional development and act as a catalyst to creating regional inequalities.

In this Element, we investigate how economic geography, the distribution of subnational economic endowments within a nation, shapes long-run patterns of inequality through its impact on the development of fiscal capacity. We present an argument that links economic geography to capacity through different types of industrialization processes. We show how early industrializers shape spatial distributions domestically by investing in productivity across their nations, and externally by reinforcing spatial polarization among late industrializers. We also show how differences in economic geography impact the process of capacity building, setting the stage for the modern politics of redistribution discussed in Volume II. We support this argument with descriptive data, case studies, and cross-national analyses.

This work aims to provide unique insights into the multidisciplinary research on spatial disparities from an unconventional point of view. It breaks with the conventional narrative that tends to interpret this theoretical tradition as a series of factual contributions to a better understanding of the issue. Instead, related theories are investigated in their political, economic, and social contexts, and spatial disparity research is presented as a political discourse. It also reveals how the propagandistic problematization or de-problematization of geographical inequalities serves the substantiation of political goals, while taking advantage of the legitimate authority of science and the image of scientific objectivity. The book explains how the discourse has functioned from 19th century social physics over the Cold War period up to Marxist geographies of the current neoliberal age, and in what way and to what extent political considerations prevent related concepts producing ‘objective’ knowledge about the complex phenomenon of spatial inequalities.

The neighborhoods and the biophysical, political, and cultural environments all play a key role in affecting health outcomes of individuals. Unequal spatial distribution of resources such as clinics, hospitals, public transportation, fresh food markets, and schools could make some communities as a whole more vulnerable and less resilient to adverse health effects. This somber reality suggests that it is rather the question of "who you are depends upon where you are" and the fact that health inequality is both a people and a place concern. That is why health inequality needs to be investigated in a spatial setting to deepen our understanding of why and how some geographical areas experience poorer health than others. This book introduces how spatial context shapes health inequalities. Spatial Health Inequalities: Adapting GIS Tools and Data Analysis demonstrates the spatial health inequalities in six most important topics in environmental and public health, including food insecurity, birth health outcomes, infectious diseases, children’s lead poisoning, chronic diseases, and health care access. These are the topics that the author has done extensive research on and provides a detailed description of the topic from a global perspective. Each chapter identifies relevant data and data sources, discusses key literature on appropriate techniques, and then illustrates with real data with mapping and GIS techniques. This is a unique book for students, geographers, clinicians, health and research professionals and community members interested in applying GIS and spatial analysis to the study of health inequalities.

What exactly is spatial inequality? Why does it matter? And what should be the policy response to it? These questions have become important in recent years as the spatial dimensions of inequality have begun to attract considerable policy interest. In China, Russia, India, Mexico, and South Africa, as well as most other developing and transition economies, spatial and regional inequality - of economic activity, incomes, and social indicators - is on the increase. Spatial inequality is a dimension of overall inequality, but it has added significance when spatial and regional divisions align with political and ethnic tensions to undermine social and political stability. Also important in the policy debate is a perceived sense that increasing internal spatial inequality is related to greater openness of economies, and to globalization in general. Despite these important concerns, there is remarkably little systematic documentation of what has happened to spatial and regional inequality over the last twenty years. Correspondingly, there is insufficient understanding of the determinants of internal spatial inequality. This volume attempts to answer the questions posed above, drawing on data from twenty-five countries from all regions of the world. They bring together perspectives and expertise in development economics and in economic geography and form a well-researched introduction to an area of growing analytical and policy importance.

Across the global South, the rapid urbanisation and uneven development that have occurred over the past few decades have brought to the surface a tight connection between social conflicts and urban space. Indeed, the physical conformation of urban space is one of the primary factors that trigger social tensions, with repercussions at the metropolitan, regional and national scales. Such tensions are related to the conditions of social and spatial inequality which characterise many urban areas across the South; they can also be connected to contingent political and institutional orders which find in the materiality of space both the means and the cause of conflicts among different groups, amidst diverging territorial demands and the overlapping of competing struggles for power. At the same time, new possibilities arise in the concreteness of space, including innovative forms of local activism, adapting strategies of self-organisation, and unconventional relations between the ‘formal’ and the ‘informal’ city. On acknowledging the multifaceted nature of the urban space, there arises a question which constitutes the core problem addressed by the book: are cities to be tamed? This volume gathers a series of cross-disciplinary contributions on these topics, spanning from architecture and urban design, to planning, social theory and geography. These contributions revolve around two core themes. The first concerns the agency of design in contexts of ‘informality’ and centres on the missing/unexpected/pursued exchange between projects and realities. The second concerns the complex relationship between spatial planning, politics, and conflicts in contexts characterised by marked ethnic, political, and social tensions. Contributors: Alessandro Balducci, Scott A. Bollens, Jeffrey Chan Kok Hui, Francesco Chiodelli, Laure Criqui, Viviana d’Auria, Beatrice De Carli, Bruno De Meulder, Annalies De Nijs, Maddalena Falletti, Nabeel Hamdi, Joud M.I. Khasawneh, Hamed Khosravi, Olivier Legrand, Colin Marx, Carmen Mendoza-Arroyo, Lina Scavuzzo, Erez Tzfadia, Ignacio Castillo Ulloa, Faith Wong and Oren Yiftachel.

2007 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Sociologists have too often discounted the role of space in inequality. This book showcases a recent generation of inquiry that attends to poverty, prosperity, and power across a range of territories and their populations within the United States, addressing spatial inequality as a thematically distinct body of work that spans sociological research traditions. The contributors' various perspectives offer an agenda for future action to bridge sociology's diverse and often narrowly focused spatial and inequality traditions.