Title:	Understanding Geographies of Polarization and Peripheralization
Authors:	Thilo Lang Sebastian Henn Wladimir Sgibnev Kornelia Ehrlich
Keywords:	Polarization (Social sciences) Europe, Central
Issue Date:	2015
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	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 sociospatial 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 multilevel 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.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53790
ISBN:	978-1-137-41508-0
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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