Cities Beyond Reach? Inequality and Representation in Fragmented Societies
(book manuscript in progress)
Economic inequality in rich democracies is not only about who earns what; it is increasingly about where people live. The shift from Fordist manufacturing to knowledge-based service economies has reshaped the relationship among people, places, and political power, and created what I call boundary-producing capitalism: an economic order that sorts individuals by place and status while eroding democracy's capacity to govern the resulting inequalities.
These inequalities are not simply byproducts of technological change, globalization, or agglomeration effects. They reflect political choices and institutional design. States have relinquished much of their integrative capacity, shifting from policies that promoted territorial equality and social cohesion toward those that prioritize regional competitiveness and urban-centered growth. This shift has weakened key pillars that once tied people and places together: industrial relations systems that compressed wages across regions, national welfare states that guaranteed minimum living standards regardless of location, and strong central governments that redistributed resources to lagging areas. In their place, a new territorial hierarchy has emerged in which cities operate as competitive economic actors, ties between metropolitan centers and their peripheries have frayed, and high-skilled workers increasingly cluster in urban regions.
The knowledge economy erects three mutually reinforcing, inequality-inducing 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 social recognition, while those in peripheral regions and non-knowledge occupations come to feel economically obsolete and culturally devalued. Political boundaries form when the administrative units that structure political autonomy and electoral competition no longer align with economic geography, violating the democratic principle of affected interest and weakening political voice and representation. Together, these boundaries create generative inequalities: structural, self-reinforcing, and cross-dimensional forms of disadvantage that cascade across economic, social, and political life.
The severity of these inequalities depends on two institutional variables: the degree of local autonomy, which determines whether places can hoard resources, and the structure of electoral rules, which shapes politicians' responsiveness to different constituencies. Their interaction produces distinct national pathways of spatial inequality. Decentralized systems enable opportunity hoarding, as local insiders erect barriers that exclude outsiders who lack political recourse — a pattern exemplified by the United States. Centralized systems with majoritarian elections tend to politically under-represent urban areas, making urban-centric policies electorally unviable even when economically necessary — as seen in the United Kingdom's top-down metropolitan favoritism. Proportional representation systems with moderate decentralization can attenuate self-reinforcing cycles of socio-economic disadvantage through fiscal equalization and coalition governments that represent diverse regional interests — visible in Germany.
The spatial reorganization of the economy also transforms how parties balance the competing interests of voters and organized businesses. Left-wing parties find their electoral and economic coalitions naturally aligned around urban knowledge-economy interests. Right-wing parties, however, face an asymmetric dilemma: their electoral base lies in the periphery, yet redistributing resources away from metropolitan cores would undermine the growth model on which national prosperity depends. Unable to resolve this tension through economic policy, they turn to cultural and identity-based appeals—a pivot that diverts political attention from the structural roots of spatial inequality while leaving the knowledge economy intact.
Empirically, the book combines cross-national comparative analysis with detailed case studies of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It develops a novel regional knowledge-economy index at fine geographic scales to document how regions' exposure to the knowledge economy varies across countries, and draws on firm-network data to show that metropolitan hubs have become deeply embedded in global corporate networks while their domestic ties to peripheral regions have stagnated. A new measure of regional government spending reveals that classical expectations from redistribution models are inverted: per capita government spending is systematically higher in denser, wealthier, and more knowledge-economy-intensive regions, regardless of the governing party's ideology.
Drawing on an original nationally representative survey of over 28,000 respondents across France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the book demonstrates that these boundaries have profound consequences for democratic life. People lacking transit access to urban cores report considerably lower political efficacy, trust in government, and perceived social value. Knowledge economy insiders report far higher levels of social recognition, perceived fairness, belief in intergenerational mobility, and political representation than outsiders, and these gaps are structured more by place than by individual income or education. Insiders also favor local government power, consistent with opportunity hoarding, while outsiders disproportionately support place-based redistribution.
Spatial, social, and political boundaries thus compound and reinforce one another, producing self-perpetuating cycles that democratic institutions have so far failed to break. If democracies cannot rebuild integrative institutions or redesign governance to match economic geography, spatial inequality will continue to erode social belonging, political representation, and democratic legitimacy, fueling durable resentment between booming hubs and left-behind regions.