Cities Beyond Reach?
Inequality and Representation in Fragmented Societies
— Book manuscript in progress —
The book examines the political foundations of growing spatial inequalities between rich and poor regions. It asks: why do some governments fail to address rising inequalities between people and places, while others do not? And what are the consequences of spatial inequalities for social solidarity and democratic politics? I argue that the widening chasm between thriving metropolitan cores and declining peripheries is not an inevitable byproduct of technological change or agglomeration, but a failure of political integration that is engineered by policy choices, sustained by political institutions, and deepened by the very democratic structures meant to resolve it.
Two transformations converge to produce a new territorial order. The state relinquished its integrative capacity, trading policies of territorial equality and cohesion for policies that promote regional competitiveness and urban-centric growth. The economy shifted from Fordist manufacturing, whose gains diffused across classes and regions, to a knowledge economy that concentrates opportunity in dense urban cores. Whether the state mitigates this inequality depends on two institutions: local autonomy, which determines whether prosperous places can retain economic gains and "hoard resources," and electoral rules, which shape political responsiveness and the distribution of public resources. Their interaction yields distinct pathways. Fiscally decentralized countries enable opportunity hoarding, as local insiders exclude outsiders who lack political recourse — as in the United States. Centralized countries with majoritarian elections under-represent urban areas, rendering urban-centric policy electorally unviable even when economically necessary, while favoring a single dominant region that captures the central state — as in the United Kingdom. Countries with proportional representation and moderate decentralization can attenuate self-reinforcing cycles of socio-economic disadvantage through fiscal equalization and coalition governments that represent diverse regions — as in Germany. Put differently: spatial inequalities result from political institutions, and the specific mix of decentralization and electoral rules explains why some countries reinforce them while others soften them.
The inequalities the knowledge economy produces are best understood as a set of mutually reinforcing boundaries. Spatial boundaries concentrate prosperity and opportunity in fewer places while restricting access to thriving urban labor markets through rising housing costs and inadequate public transit. Social boundaries emerge as knowledge-economy workers accumulate not only wealth but also social recognition, while people without degrees in peripheral regions feel economically obsolete and culturally devalued. Political boundaries form when administrative units that structure political autonomy and electoral competition no longer align with economic geography, violating the democratic principle of affected interests and weakening political representation.
The book examines these questions by drawing on a broad empirical infrastructure. It builds a regional knowledge-economy index that captures the spatial concentration of service-sector employment, innovation, and university ecosystems over time. It maps interregional firm ties, revealing that thriving metropolitan regions have deepened their links to global cities abroad even as their domestic ties to peripheral areas stagnate. It constructs territorial measures of structural and distributive government spending to test whether states amplify or moderate this divergence. It assembles cross-national electoral data to trace place-based realignment. And it draws on original surveys from seven rich democracies to show how residential exclusion, public transit connectivity, and place of residence shape political efficacy and demands for access as well as perceptions of social value and economic fairness.
The book shows that if democracies cannot rebuild integrative institutions or redesign governance to match economic geography, spatial inequality will continue to erode belonging, representation, and legitimacy, and fuel resentment between booming hubs and left-behind regions. It contributes to major debates in comparative politics and political economy, integrating economic geography, political institutions, and electoral politics into a new framework for understanding why the compounding inequalities of the 21st century persist. By adopting a comparative perspective and shifting the focus from inequality between people to inequality between places — and from economic to political explanations — the book offers an important corrective to broad claims about rising urban-rural divides in economic and political life, as well as about the fate of “left-behind” regions.