Unevenness and deservingness: regional differentiation in contemporary Italy

Abstract

This article challenges “regionalist” approaches to spatial transformation and capitalist development. Drawing on the comparative analysis of two mid-size towns in the North and South of Italy, the article brings into light the “critical junctions” articulating local and global processes, showing how people and places are connected to larger fields of power, differently situated in the geography of capital accumulation, and how connectedness and situatedness are intimately coherent with the unevenness and disjuncture of global capitalism. By bringing into comparison a “successful” story of flexible accumulation and a case of “peripheralization” alongside the decline of state-driven industrialization, our goal is to highlight how unevenness and deservingness are mutually produced, as well as how their entanglement is enmeshed in the formation of spatialized cosmologies of difference. Our analysis deconstructs the essentializing notions of the North as “hospitable” and South as “hostile” to capital, by showing, first, the different scales at which unevenness is produced and, second, the interplay of erudite economic models and popular common sense in capital’s unfolding moral geographies. Finally, the comparison points to unevenness and deservingness as the products of geographically larger and historically deeper relations and connections and shows how the state is the fundamental agent translating them into both spatial and cultural differentiation.