A foundational turn?

Abstract

‘Geography, the foundational economy, and the fallen-below’ proposes a useful extension to the narrow focus in contemporary place-based regional economic policymaking in the EU, from its current focus on building an export economy to one highlighting the accessibility and affordability of ‘foundational’ goods and services essential to household wellbeing: housing, food, utilities, and transportation. This list should be extended to foundational goods associated with sustainability (the more-than-human world) and digitization (cyberspace infrastructure). Foundational economics shares with mainstream regional economics a faith in the capacity of capitalism, with appropriate tweaks, to overcome uneven geographical development, thereby enabling the left behind/fallen below to no longer be so. Yet, this overlooks how impoverishment (under capitalism, and many other political economic systems) is relational: How the economic logic of capitalism implies that select people and places become prosperous in good part by exploiting/impoverishing other people and places. This relational aspect of uneven geographical development is vital. In its absence, spatial differentiation becomes reduced to temporal sequencing, with those who are disadvantaged enjoined to simply catch up. In an emergent global conjuncture characterized by authoritarian ethnonationalism, the renewed interest in seemingly long-buried Euro-American cultural beliefs requires that any political economic theorization of foundational politics undergo a cultural turn.