Peripheralized, Left-behind, Marginalized, Uneven, or Shrinking? Empirical and Conceptual Perspectives on Local and Regional Deprivation.

Over time, a profusion of terms has been coined to capture the varieties of local and regional deprivation. "Shrinking" cities or regions is perhaps the most descriptive term, pointing more or less directly to patterns of population decline. Critics have called it conceptually superficial (Bernt 2016), yet it inspired countless studies, not least in Asian contexts, and opened a platform for rethinking urban planning (Pallagst et al. 2024). Uneven development and peripheralization, by contrast, conceptualize socio-spatial and power inequalities beyond the city itself with an eye on power relations: the former as a structural feature of neoliberal capitalism (Peck et al. 2023), the latter through a multi-factor account of how peripheries are produced (Kühn 2015; Lang 2018). The left-behind-places debate (Pike et al. 2023) brings governance and responsibility to the fore.

These conceptual arguments are context-dependant, shaped by the geographies and epistemic traditions of where they emerged. Research of urban peripheries draws heavily on postsocialist (Lang et al., 2015), Latin American and Indian contexts, often examining the fringes of large agglomerations and mega-cities (Reis and Lukas 2022; Schmid et al. 2023), thereby challenging the conceptual dominance of urban centres (Ren 2021; Richmond et al. 2025).

Despite circling the same underlying issues, the debates rarely speak to each other. This session sets out to bringing them into direct conversation, contrasting their assumptions, and probing both their synergies and their blind spots. We invite conceptual and empirical contributions that address socio-spatial inequality beyond the city – with particular attention to centre-periphery relations.