Understanding Geographies of Polarization and Peripheralization

Perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond

Thilo Lang, Sebastian Henn, Kornelia Ehrlich, Wladimir Sgibnev, Thilo Lang, Sebastian Henn, Kornelia Ehrlich, Wladimir Sgibnev

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349579754
  9781137415073
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137415080
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Geografia

This book presents a multifaceted perspective on regional development and corresponding processes of adaptation and response, focusing on the concepts of polarization and peripheralization. It discusses theoretical and empirical foundations and presents several compelling case studies from Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.

1

Understanding New Geographies of Central and Eastern Europe

PoSCoPP: Research Group Production of Space in the Context of Polarization and Peripheralization (collective authors)¹

1. Introduction

This book arises from empirical observations of recent spatial changes in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and from our engagements with current shifts in geographical thinking that prompt us to reconsider how we research and explain them. Both the complexity of changes in CEE geographies and the paradigmatic shifts in geographical research raise questions about the ways we register, survey and conceptualize spatial phenomena, such as the emergence, persistence and transformation of spatial disparity and socio-spatial inequality in and beyond CEE.

The volume engages with the concepts of polarization and peripheralization to grasp these phenomena, which have become highly pronounced in CEE over the last two decades. In doing so, we want to direct attention towards the different methodological and conceptual perspectives through which we understand processes of spatial differentiation and their connections to wider inequalities. We suggest understanding peripheralization and polarization as analytical concepts that facilitate process-based relational understandings of spatial differentiation and supplement structural research approaches. Although our focus lies on the regional scale, we suggest a multi-level conceptualization of the phenomena under observation. As the relation of core and periphery is immanent to the concept, peripheralization implies processes of centralization and thus forms of socio-spatial polarization at various scales. Such forms of polarization are intrinsically connected to discourse which places higher value on particular regions and developments and thereby devalues others. Some authors define regional peripheralization as the growing dependence of disadvantaged regions on the centre (e.g. Komlosy 1988, Bernt and Liebmann 2013); hence, it is not only the simultaneity of a number of features constituting the formation of peripheries, such as distance, economic weakness and lack of political power (cf. Blowers and Leroy 1994), but is often also the dynamic formation of core and peripheral regions overlapping at different spatial scales (regional, national, European and global). This multi-faceted, multi-level understanding of peripheralization and polarization has the potential to define novel starting points for research on current regional development issues in CEE. Applying these conceptual notions allows a process-based, relational understanding of up-to-date forms of spatial differentiation in CEE and offers opportunities for spatial research circumventing dichotomous ideas of urban and rural, of central and peripheral, of ‘leading’ and ‘lagging’ or growing and declining, which tend to determine our methodological, theoretical and normative approaches to regional studies.

Up until recently, spatial development in CEE has mainly been researched through the lenses of post-socialist transformation and modernization. Within this introductory chapter, we aim to suggest additional conceptual approaches useful for grasping spatial processes and their contextual groundings. We further argue that adopting these approaches enables new comparative perspectives to similar phenomena in other parts of Europe and the world. This is particularly true since the 2007/2008 economic, financial and national debt crisis has shown similar economic, social and spatial impacts as well as political forms of response across Europe as a whole.

In the following section, we have collected various empirical snapshots which we understand as showing increasing socio-spatial polarization in CEE. This is based on statistical analyses of core indicators as well as a literature review of spatially relevant social, political and economic processes in the past 20 years indicating the emergence of new forms of spatial differentiation. In Section 3, we review a number of conceptual and theoretical approaches to regional polarization and peripheralization and propose a relational perspective for grasping their contemporary complexity. The final section of this Introduction gives an overview of the issues and themes discussed by individual contributors to the book.

2. Polarization and peripheralization in Central and Eastern Europe

In CEE, focusing on processes of polarization and peripheralization provides an important starting point for critical analyses of the assumptions on which the Washington Consensus of the early 1990s was built, such as the claim that radical privatization and the swift introduction of unimpeded market economies would right the wrongs of state socialism most effectively and would (eventually) deliver prosperity to, if not all, then at least a majority of people. What we have witnessed since is a much more diverse and problematic picture. While in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) growth, many parts of the macro-region – in particular the capital regions – have indeed embarked on an upward trajectory after the initial crisis of the early 1990s (Lang 2011), the success of market reforms in improving living standards and ensuring a more even spread of wealth among wider populations has been limited (Heyns 2005, Alber et al. 2007, Smith et al. 2008, Smith and Timár 2010, Stenning et al. 2010). Analysts of the causes, effects and dynamics of spatial development in CEE have pointed to a pronounced increase in socio-economic disparities between regions, places and populations, in CEE in particular (EC 2010). While differences in national rates of GDP growth have been decreasing for some years, regional economic and social disparities within CEE countries have grown considerably (Schürmann and Talaat 2008).

Looking at forms of peripheralization at a global scale, it is notable that CEE regions play a negligible role when world city hierarchies are analysed, such as by the ‘Globalization and World Cities Research Network’ (GaWC) focusing on financial services and globalization indicators. Following Friedmann’s (1986) and Sassen’s work on the world or global city (1991), a number of authors have argued that worldwide economic activities have become concentrated in a small number of city-regions. In the globalized economy, only a few global cities and metropolitan regions are said to be the ‘control points of the global economic system’ (Beaverstock et al. 2000). One could argue that CEE cities and their functional regions are being peripheralized by the dominance of world cities in the global economy. European and national policies add a further dimension to this, as they frequently copy the model of the global city in regional policies by focusing on the promotion of growth in metropolitan areas (Brenner 2009). This has been witnessed particularly in the aftermath of the most recent economic crisis, as decision-makers have been led to concentrate scarce resources on supporting development in larger cities, hoping that disadvantaged areas will profit from core–periphery spillover effects. Such policies, however, carry a major risk of further increasing socio-spatial polarizations and the peripheralization of disadvantaged areas (for example due to disinvestment in transport infrastructures or centralization of service provision). It is in this context that metropolitan regions attract economic and political interest to the disadvantage of the rest of the country. In addition, in CEE, prevailing negative experiences from the period of centrally planned economies have led to a sceptical perception of public sector interventions and to a general turn towards neoliberal policies during the transition period (Bohle 2006, Dragos Aligicia and Evans 2009).²

Paralleling the concentration of economic activity in metropolitan areas and further exacerbating problems of deepening polarization and peripheralization are current demographic developments (Filipov and Dorbritz 2003, Steinführer and Haase 2007). CEE population is increasingly concentrated in a diminishing number of prosperous areas, particularly the capital regions, in contrast to a growing number of regions suffering population decline. Thereby, intraregional and interregional migration patterns overlap with international migration on the basis of age selectivity, stratified labour mobility and an overall decline of birth rates, which is particularly sharp in CEE. The decrease in population has been particularly pronounced in structurally disadvantaged rural and deindustrialized regions as well as many inner-city and high-rise, edge-of-city areas (Tsenkova 2006, Steinführer and Haase 2007).

These demographic developments combine with other processes of social differentiation to produce highly uneven social geographies at regional, sub-regional, intra-urban and micro-geographic scales that intersect but do not necessarily overlap. While, on a local level, the rapid growth of gated communities and of smaller enclaves of redeveloped, expensive housing in post-socialist cities shows an ongoing attempt at carving out, demarcating and safeguarding privileged spaces of wealth in otherwise disadvantaged regions and places (Hirt 2012, Smigiel 2013, Kovács and Hegedűs 2014), other regions, places and groups of people have, however, become radically disadvantaged and displaced (Hörschelmann and van Hoven 2003, Smith and Rochovská 2007). This affects particularly rural and deindustrialized regions such as rural parts of eastern Slovakia and its small towns (Michálek 2004), high-rise estates that were built along the perimeters of many socialist cities in the 1970s and 1980s, and inner-city pockets of low-quality housing that have not become redeveloped (Nedović-Budić et al. 2006, Tsenkova 2006, Steinführer and Haase 2007). Processes such as migration for work, homelessness and discrimination against cultural minorities are further leading to forms of peripheralization that no longer map onto specific regions, cities or urban quarters but that are, nonetheless, often a result of, and a contributing factor to, socio-economic and spatial disparities in Europe (cf. Smith 2007, O’Neill 2010).

The empirical observations summarized above show that various processes lead to and interlink with socio-spatial polarization and peripheralization at different intersecting scales. Also apparent, however, is the need to look critically at our approaches to researching these phenomena and processes and to consider how and why different insights are produced from different perspectives. Thus, while helpful for the identification and assessment of the scope and reach of polarization and peripheralization as phenomena, conventional indicators such as rates of inward investment, GDP growth, availability of key infrastructures and services, distance from metropolitan centres, or poor accessibility rarely capture the wide range of causes and dimensions of polarization and peripheralization as processes that intersect with other aspects of inequality, uneven development and power, and that breach conventional territorial boundaries. There is a need, therefore, to ask more carefully what our descriptions and analyses are based on and which aspects, practices and spaces we perceive and explain differently from different perspectives.

These considerations lead us to review, in the next section, a number of conceptual perspectives that have been developed over several decades to grasp the complexity of polarization and peripheralization processes. Instead of seeking to develop a one-size-fits-all model for how to research the topic, we conclude this review by proposing a relational approach which requires the application of diverse methodological and conceptual perspectives as well as reflexivity on the performativities of these perspectives themselves, that is, their effects on what we are able to observe, how we understand it and how our research intervenes in the processes under investigation (Paasi 2010, 2013).

3. Conceptual perspectives

The analysis of spatial disparities has been at the centre of regional science for more than 50 years. It is thus not surprising that aspects of polarization and peripheralization have been considered in many areas of economic and social geography as well as in related disciplines such as economics and spatial planning. While, in this section, we aim to give a short overview of concepts and explanatory frameworks that have played an important role in the debate, the choice of approaches presented is necessarily selective and does not cover the literature as a whole. Nevertheless, our review demonstrates that issues of regional polarization and peripheralization have been approached from a range of perspectives, considering different scales and their intersections as well as diverse factors and effects. It also confirms that, as Paasi (1995 and 2010) has explained, research on the production of regions requires attention to numerous factors, relations, discursive constructions, agencies and materialities that constitute a spatial entity as an assemblage that, while never completely stable, has nonetheless acquired a certain durability.

a. Modelling and explaining processes of spatial polarization and peripheralization

Early regional development theories did not pay attention to processes of spatial polarization and peripheralization. Rather, neoclassical approaches (for example Solow 1956, Borts and Stein 1964) argued that regions with different factor endowments due to unrestricted movements of factors and commodities as well as flexible prices would gradually converge over time. While neoclassical theory thus expects an external shock to bring about forces that will bring an unbalanced spatial system to a (new) equilibrium, polarization theorists since the 1950s have argued that spatial disequilibria lead to circular cumulative effects that finally result in a state of spatial polarization. In the model developed by Myrdal (1957), such cumulative processes may be initially triggered by changes in interdependent economic factors, such as demand or income, and may occur within a single country and/or between different ones. According to Myrdal, the extent of interregional and international imbalances depends on the type and the intensity of the centripetal backwash effects and the centrifugal spread effects. While backwash effects refer to negative changes that occur as a corollary of the expansion of a centre (for example selective outmigration from agrarian areas to growing centres), spread effects denote positive effects triggered by growing centres but affecting other regions (for example the spread of technical know-how). Under certain conditions, the latter effects may stimulate development in lagging regions without challenging the growth of the centres. Myrdal (1957), however, expects backwash effects to typically prevail over spread effects, and therefore suggests government intervention to reduce disparities in income. Though being ‘criticized for its qualitative nature and lack of econometric substance’ (Haggett 1972: 398), Myrdal’s model endowed the debate with new impetus: it directs attention to problems of deepening differentiation and it focuses on micro-causalities in situations of increasing interregional contrast (in terms of income, investment, migration and so on). Moreover, Myrdal already addressed the importance of socio-cultural categorization and stigmatization in processes of socio-spatial differentiation and marginalization (Myrdal 1944). Since then, it has become almost a commonplace to understand centre and periphery in their reciprocal conditionality deriving from the nature of relation between two established/establishing poles that are rooted in discursive (communicative) conditions and social structures.

Hirschman (1958), in a different, albeit somewhat similar, approach, distinguishes positive trickling-down and negative polarization effects. In his model, polarization effects initially exceed the trickling-down effects. However, he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Understanding New Geographies of Central and Eastern Europe
• Part I: Theoretical Backgrounds, Methodological Considerations
• Part II: Role of Diverse Socio-Political Agents in the Production of Peripheries
• Part III: Fragmented and Relational Construction of Peripheralities
• Part IV: Different Modalities and Relations between Cores and Peripheries
• Index