Political Functioning of the Spatial Disparity Discourse: A Summary

Abstract

In Chaps. 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 we have provided a broad multidisciplinary overview of the theoretical concepts about spatial disparities. This journey through the history of the research tradition has shown that the challenge to explain geographical inequalities has inspired thinkers very differently in terms of personal background, the methods they used, and the way they conceptualized the topic (Figs. 9.1 and 9.2). The first actors came from the domain of natural sciences, and interpreted spatial disparities based on then accessible “moral statistics”. Later on, the tradition became dominated by new approaches. From the late nineteenth century onwards, philanthropists, charity movements, political philosophers, and even active politicians came to the fore. Thus, the discourse moved into the hands of actors actively involved in public issues, but only until the Cold War period, when spatial disparity research became the arena of academics—first economists, later sociologists and human geographers as well. Meanwhile, the original interest in questions such as education and crime, regarded then as decisive in the reduction of poverty, gradually shifted to the economic aspects, which have been dominating the discourse ever since. The attention paid to various geographical scales has also moved broadly.