Table Of ContentPeripheralization
Andrea Fischer-Tahir
Matthias Naumann (Eds.)
Peripheralization
The Making of Spatial Dependencies
and Social Injustice
RESEARCH
Editors
Andrea Fischer-Tahir Matthias Naumann
Berlin, Germany Erkner, Germany
This book was completed with the support of the Leibniz Institute for Regional
D evelopment and Structural Planning (IRS) and the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO).
ISBN 978-3-531-18332-9 ISBN 978-3-531-19018-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-531-19018-1
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... 7
Andrea Fischer-Tahir & Matthias Naumann
Introduction:
Peripheralization as the Social Production
of Spatial Dependencies and Injustice ........................................................ 9
I: Peripheralization and Development ..................................................... 27
Eren DUzgiin
The Poverty of "Peripheralization":
Re-conceptuaIizing the Peripheral Space ................................................. 29
Benjamin Zachariah
Developmentalism and its Exclusions:
Peripheries and Unbelonging in Independent India ................................. 55
Antia Mato Bouzas
Securitization and Development as Modes of
Peripheralization in North-Eastern Pakistan ............................................ 77
11: Peripheralization and Regional Decline ................................................ 99
llmLeibert
The Peripheralization of Rural Areas in
Post-socialist Central Europe: A Case of Fragmenting Development?
Lessons from Rural Hungary .................................................................. 101
Arian Mahzouni
The Missing Link Between Urban and Rural Development:
Lessons from Iraqi Kurdistan Region .................................................... 121
6 Table of Contents
Matthias Naumann & Anja Reichert-Schick
Infrastructure and Peripheralization:
Empirical Evidence from North-Eastern Germany ................................ 145
Thomas Bilrk
Voices From the Margin: The Stigmatization Process
as an Effect of Socio-Spatial Peripheralization in
Small-Town Germany ............................................................................ 168
Kristine Milller
Yet Another Layer of Periphera\ization:
Dealing with the Consequences of the Schengen Treaty
at the Edges of the EU Territory ............................................................. 187
Frank Meyer & Judith Miggelbrink
The Subject and the Periphery:
About Discourses, Loopings and Ascriptions ........................................ 207
ThiloLang
Conceptualizing Urban Shrinkage in East Germany:
Understanding Regional Peripheralization in the Light
of Discursive Forms of Region Building ............................................... 224
Ill: Periphera\ization and Urban Fragmentation .................................... 239
Jan Simon Hutta
Beyond the Right to the Governmentalized City:
Queer Citizenship in a Brazilian Context ofPeripheralization .............. 241
Doralice Satym Maia
Urban Dispersion and Fragmentation:
Public Housing Estates in Brazil ............................................................ 265
Alexandru Biinicii, Marinela Istrate & Daniel'IiuJora
(N)ever Becoming Urban?
The Crisis of Romania's Small Towns ................................................... 283
Manfred Kiihn & Matthias Bemt
Peripheraiization and Power - Theoretical Debates .............................. 302
About the authors ................................................................................... 318
Acknowledgments
This book owes its publication to the support and commitment of several peo
ple and institutions. Therefore, we want to thank all the researchers who con
tributed to this volume, as well as Judith Hofikes, Sabine Beisswenger, Henrika
Prochnow, Martina Leppler and Petra Geral, Ross Beveridge and Sunniva Greve.
We are grateful to Silvia Naumann and Klaus Wedel, Anja B. Nelle and Carsten
Borck, and Sopbie Wagenbofer. We are also thankful for the financial support by
both of our home institutions, the Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and
Structural Planning (lRS) and the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO).
Introduction:
Peripheralization as the Social Production
of Spatial Dependencies and Injustice
Andrea Fischer-Tahir & Matthias Naumann
The last two decades have witnessed the economic and demographic decline of
cities and regions, for the most part in Central and Eastern Europe. The radical
abandonment of the prevailing modes of production and structnres of exchange
put an end tn labour and income opportunities in countless areas of the former
"socialist block", and led tn miscellaneous forms of out-migration. At the same
time, developmentalist strategies favouring the growth of cities and the exten
sion of urban agglomerations caused the downtom of rural infrastructnre in the
form of transportation, health, educatiooal, cultnral and leisure services, in tom a
compelling incentive tn migrate tn metropolitan regions. Those who remain or are
forced tn remain in these areas of decline frequently face economic and political
dependency on decision-makers in the metropolitan centres. The territorializa
tion of social injustice in terms of access tn material and symbolic resources on
a local, regional, national or transnatiooal scale is at times accompanied, if not
fostered, by discursive acts of stigmatization affecting whole regions and their
inhabitants.
In order tn grasp the structnral problems of rural regions and their growing
disconnection from urban agglomemtions, urban and regiooal research describes
such areas as ''peripheral'' in relation tn metropolitan regions, and the process
of becoming disconnected from and dependent on the centres as ''peripheraliza
tion". In this perspective, a ''periphery'' is neither a given nor a static entity to be
localized on the "natnral" margins of certain regiooal, national or transnatiooal
units. Instead, we interpret ''peripheries'' as the outcome of complex processes of
change in the economy, demography, political decision-making and socio-cultnr
al norms and values. Looking at rural areas and small and medium-sized towns
in Eastern Germany and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe, however,
raises the question of whether ''peripheralization'' could also serve as an analyti
cal tool to explore spatial differentiation in other regions, on different scales and
at different time periods, and if so, what common ground there is for theoreti-
A. Fischer-Tahir, M. Naumann (eds.), Peripheralization,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-531-19018-1_1, © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2013
10 Andrea Fischer-Tahir & Matthias Naumann
cal and methodological debate. These deliberations led to the organization of a
workshop entitled "Peripheralization: The Making of Spatial Dependencies and
Social Injustice", which took place at the 6th International Conference of Criti
cal Geography in Frankfurt am Main in August 2011. The workshop provided a
framework for discussion with researchers working in different global regions
and from different discip1inary perspectives, e.g., human geography, urban and
regional planning, sociology, history, political science and social anthropology.
This volume is the rewarding outcome and contains case studies and reflections
on spatial differentiation in local and regional settings in Central and Eastern Eu
rope, Eastern Germany, Romania and Hungary, as well as in Brazil, Turkey, Iraqi
Kurdistan, Pakistan, and India.
The term ''peripheralization'' is used in both the academic and the political
field with reference to the decline of rural areas and of small and medium-sized
towns in Eastern Germany, notably when it comes to governing and planning. On
the other hand, the theoretical satoration of the term constitutes a deficit, leav
ing unsettled the question of whether the periphera1ization approach can produce
a more substantial theoretical concept. The overall debate on peripheralization
resonates with dependency and world-system theory. But is this explicit in cur
rent studies on uneven regional development? What forms of space production
can we distinguish from peripheralization? In other words, is peripheralization
just another word for - spatially structured political and social-marginalization
and dependency? Several of the contributions in this volume draw on the work
of Henri Lefebvre and share the paradigm that space is socially produced. We,
however, still see the need to describe the practices of conceiving, perceiving and
living space that has been labelled ''peripheral'' by academics, politicians, tech
nocrats and the media alike.
Most of the contributions in this volume identify peripheralization as intrin
sically linked to imaginations of either development or of decline. For this reason
we decided to use our introduction for some reflections on the concept of "devel
opment" and its siguificance in various academic disciplines. In the second sec
tion we turn to issues of uneven geographical development and urban or regional
decline. We outline approaches discussed predominantly in Anglophone critical
human geography that allow us to understand peripheralization as a constitutive
element of capitalism rather than the result of a temporary mismatch. The third
section describes the structure of the volume. It strings together and systematizes
the thoughts and ideas on conceptua1izing peripheralization as they emerged from
individnal contributions and the group discussions at the workshop in Frankfurt.
Introduction 11
1 Peripheries, PeripheraIization and Development
Concepts generally serve to perceive, interpret and shape the world, and at the
same time they tell us a great deal about the social conditions of knowledge pro
duction to which they owe their existence. In the course of the last few decades,
cultural studies, social anthropology and areas of history such as the Anglo
American history of ideas or the German Begriffsgeschichte have emphasized
the need to question them with regard to their cultural context and origin, the
modalities of their translocal travelling, and the conditions of appropriation and
semantic transformation involved. Concepts such as "civilization", "modernity"
or ''progress'' have lost their ability to veil their ideological essence and conse
quently become highly contested. The same applies to "development" - a concept
typifYing the "certainty that shared progress is the normal and long-term direction
of all social change" (Dufiield, 1994: 3). The normative ballast attached to the
word Hdevelopment" as such and to its particular conceptualization as "social"
and "economic" was discussed when "development studies" was merely in its in
fancy (Blumer, 1966; Stauley, 1967). Since then this criticism has frequently been
repeated and in the given case extended to the more recent conceptualization of
"development" as "sustainable", ''participatory'', "green" or "eeo-development"
(Sachs, 1994; McAfee, 1999).
Raymond Williams writes in Keywords (1976) that "development" went
"through its first main extension in the new biology, in close relation to ideas of
EVOLUTION" in the late eighteenth century. It was later linked to "the nature
of economic change" and referred eventually to "the idea of a society passing
through definite evolutionary stages"" The industrial and trading economies of
parts of Europe and the North American continent represented the notion of be
ing "developed". In contrast, the word "underdeveloped" alluded to ideas about
countries whose natural resources had hitherto been insufficiently exploited, and
economies and societies that were expected to pass through predictable stages of
becoming "modem" (Williams, 1976: 103).
The concept of "development" in the sense of economic progress emerged
in the early post-World War IT period. The chief proponents were US American
and British politicians, organizations such as the International Bank for Recon
struction and Development (World Bank) and prognurunes such as the Marshall
Plan. Economic and political "development aid" to countries in Western Europe,
Latin America and parts ofA sia were elements of a strategy "to prevent the spread
of communism" (Frankovitz, 2005: 79). "Discovered" in Asia, Africa and Latin
1 In this and the following quotations, emphasis according to the original text.
12 Andrea Fischer-Tahir & Matthias Naumann
America around the same period, ''mass poverty" was likewise rendered a field
of action. As a ''relatively inconspicuous and seemingly logical" term, ''poverty''
provided ''the anchor for the important restructuring of global cultore and politi
cal economy" (Escobar, 1995: 23). ''Development'' as an antidote to ''poverty''
in the newly invented ''third world" served to maintain control over the (former)
colonies. As for the "socialist block", its political elites invented the notion of
"construction assistance" or applied the term "solidarity" to legitimize political,
econontic, cultural and ntilitary acts of "developing" so-called ''young democra
cies" in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and to support the erstwhile colonized
subjects on their "socialist path to development" (Daring, 1999: 37). Actors in
both blocks tended to shape their practice according to imaginations of mod
ernization that echoed dichotomies of "colonizer" vs. "colonized", "patron" vs.
"client", ''top'' vs. '1Jottom", "civilized" vs. ''backward'', "adult" vs. "growing
up", and "knowledge" vs. "nescience" (Williams, 1976: 3-4; Herzfeld, 2001: 153;
Ferguson, 1990; Gupta, 1995).
Due to the growing strength of the anti-colonial movements in Asia andAf
rica, however, and "a new sense of collective assertiveness in Latin America",
the term "development" alternatively "came to be used as a code word for the
belief that the countries of the South could 'develop' themselves, as opposed to
'being developed' by the North" (Wallerstein, 2004). This political self-assertive
ness found its academic expression in the dependency theory that emerged in the
1950s. Theoreticians from various academic and political perspectives highlight
ed the inequality and unevenness of capitalist "development" and discussed the
causes of the econontic and political dependency of (especially) Latin American
societies and econonties, and the consequences for the centres of capital accumu
Raw
lation in the north. Particularly influential was the work of Prebisch, who
attributed the "centre-periphery" structoration of the capitalist world economy to
the progressive deterioration of the terms of trade since the last third of the nine
teenth century (prebisch, 1950). Describing the statos and social conditions of
Latin American societies in the world of capitalism, Andre Gunder Frank (1967)
coined the term "development of underdevelopment", arguing that the colonial
structore of the system had penetrated the countries of the south, producing back
wardness, poverty and political compliance, all of which would persist until such
time as the south liberated itself from the north. Central to the work of many
dependistas was the belief that the capitalist mode of production "developed" di
fferently in dependent countries than in Europe/North America and would retain
its differences. There were several reasons for this belief, among them the weak
ness of the domestic bourgeoisie, which was perceived - in established models -
as the protagonist of capitalist modemity. A further reason for this "development"
