More Than Numbers: Reconceptualizing Left-Behindness and Remoteness within Italian Inner Areas.

In this presentation, we advance the reconceptualization of two tenets of the debate about left-behind regions, i.e., remoteness (Bocco, 2016) and left-behindness (Pike et al., 2023). We do it by discussing the theoretical implications of the fieldwork we conducted in 2023 to explore the public and social infrastructures (Klinenberg, 2018; Tomaney et al., 2023) of the areas that are included in the Italian institutional geography of remote(d) areas, that is the one of “inner areas” (aree interne). Here, we argue that we need new concepts and methods to grapple with the situated process and multidimensionality of being (and feeling) left behind, as well as to understand the infrastructures that inform how people interact, organize, make, unmake, and remake societal and spatial configurations in their everyday lives. Based on our findings, we argue that remoteness is not just the measure of how distant places are from the primary urban hubs of welfare services and facilities, nor is left-behindness the mere tabulation of the tangible infrastructure that is present or absent in a specific place. We define remoteness as the relational perception of how remote the place is where people live based on the relation and comparison to other peer locations (e.g., similar rural, mountain or valley ones), usually in a context of proximity. Relatedly, we understand left-behindness as the processual evaluation of the intra-place ability to secure the public-social infrastructures that are deemed pivotal for retaining a sense of place (e.g., a school, a cafeteria, a post office, or a grocery shop) beyond the definition of essential services, and the capacity of external actors (especially multilevel institutional ones) to supply the missing tangible and intangible resources needed to salvage (or restore) them.