Imagine two children born on the same day, just forty kilometres apart. One grows up in a city with well-equipped schools, reliable public transport and a doctor close to home. The other lives in a town where heavy rain can cut off the road, and where pupils travel long distances to overcrowded classrooms. The two children need not differ in ability or ambition. What separates them is their place on the map, a place neither had any say in choosing. Thirty years later, one of them may hold a position in which decisions are made about where roads, hospitals and investments should go. The question I want to explore is simple: what understanding of geography will that person bring to those decisions?
We tend to measure development through numbers: growth rates, average incomes, kilometres of paved roads and hospital beds per thousand inhabitants. These measures matter, but they tell us little about one of development's more enduring effects: the way it shapes people. Someone raised with good schools and dependable public services develops higher expectations of institutions, becomes less tolerant of poor performance and takes for granted things that an earlier generation regarded as privileges. Over time, these expectations become social norms and eventually institutional standards, carried by successive generations into schools, public administrations and planning offices.
There is good reason to welcome this process. But what passes from one generation to the next is not simply a standard of living. It is also a sense of where that standard begins and ends. We can distinguish three things that people inherit from the places where they grow up: the opportunities actually available to them, their expectations of what constitutes an acceptable quality of life, and what I would call their radius of responsibility, the geographical reach of their concern for others. This third dimension deserves more attention when we consider the long-term influence of development on societies and institutions. A child growing up in a prosperous city may gradually come to regard the point where the paved road ends, at the entrance to a neighbouring town, as the natural boundary of public concern. No one needs to teach this explicitly. And if that child eventually enters public office, they may bring high standards of service with them, along with an unspoken assumption about how far those standards ought to reach.
There is a useful parallel here with loss aversion, a well-established concept in behavioural economics. People generally attach greater weight to losses than to equivalent gains. This helps explain why they may be particularly determined to protect what they already have, although it cannot, on its own, account for collective or institutional behaviour. Existing advantages can be defended in different ways: by extending them to others or by protecting them behind boundaries. Where prosperity remains geographically concentrated, the second response may become more attractive, especially when local interests develop around existing advantages. Gated communities may emerge, public budgets may follow the areas with the strongest voices, and administrative boundaries can gradually become boundaries of concern. This is why the amount spent in a place tells only half the story. The other half is the attitudes that spending helps form, among those who grow up inside its advantages and those who grow up just outside them.
The Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal drew attention to a related problem in the 1950s. He argued that growth in an economic centre produces two competing forces: spread effects, through which demand, investment and knowledge benefit surrounding areas, and backwash effects, through which labour and capital are drawn away from them. When the latter outweigh the former, disadvantaged regions can lose some of their most skilled and ambitious young people to larger centres. The centres face growing pressure on housing, transport and public services, while the places left behind find it harder to develop the capacity to grow. The consequences reach beyond the economy. A persistent sense of geographical neglect can weaken trust in institutions, deepen perceptions of unequal opportunity and shape how communities view their own future.
Treating disadvantaged regions as potential threats to be contained would miss the point. Such a view risks encouraging the construction of barriers where connections are needed. A more useful way to understand these regions is as reservoirs of unrealised potential: talented people without access to adequate education, promising businesses unable to secure finance, and productive resources disconnected from markets. The greatest loss is not what these regions might do, but what they could have contributed and were never given the chance to.
Urban economics helps explain how these disparities emerge and persist. Large cities benefit from what economists call agglomeration economies: the advantages created when people, firms and activities are concentrated in one place. Labour markets become deeper, suppliers are easier to reach and knowledge circulates more quickly. From the standpoint of short-term economic efficiency, concentrating investment in major cities can therefore appear entirely sensible.
The difficulty arises when these cities are poorly connected to smaller towns and surrounding regions. Workers are drawn towards the centre, while new investment and productive opportunities remain concentrated there. Small towns end up exporting people instead of products. Spatial inequality can consequently widen even during periods of economic growth. But when a major city is connected to its surroundings through transport networks, education and integrated supply chains, it can become a market for the wider region, supporting local production and creating opportunities closer to where people live.
One might conclude that the answer is simply to transfer more public resources from prosperous centres to disadvantaged areas. Italy's experience suggests that the problem is more complicated.
When the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, a public agency established to develop southern Italy, was created in 1950, GDP per capita in the South was roughly half that of Central and Northern Italy. Public investment did make a difference. Incomes and living standards improved, and the gap between the two parts of the country narrowed from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, supported in part by policies encouraging industrial investment in the South. That convergence subsequently stalled. By 2018, GDP per capita in Southern Italy was still only about 55 per cent of the level recorded in the Centre-North.
Studies of the Italian experience highlight the importance of distinguishing between expenditure that builds local productive capacity and financial transfers that primarily compensate for its absence. Public spending can reduce deprivation and improve living conditions, but lasting economic convergence also requires productive businesses, capable institutions and the means to put local resources to work.
Spatial justice can be given a straightforward practical definition: the place where a person is born should not be the decisive factor in their access to education, healthcare and employment. This does not require every region to have the same economy, the same income or the same level of infrastructure. Places differ naturally in resources, population density and economic advantages. Nor is it realistic to promise that every region will advance at the same speed. Such promises can raise expectations beyond what institutions are able to deliver.
What matters is that progress becomes visible and credible. Development that raises expectations without creating the means to fulfil them may deepen frustration. For people living in regions that have fallen behind, the first evidence of change need not be a major economic breakthrough. It might be a road that remains open after heavy rain, or a teacher who stays at the local school for more than a single academic year. Small improvements like these matter because people can see them.
Let us return to the two children. Giving the second child access to a good school, a safe road and nearby healthcare is not an act of charity. It is an investment in both of them. The child from the disadvantaged town will have a better chance of building a future without being forced to leave in search of basic opportunities. The child from the prosperous city, meanwhile, may grow up in a society where decent living conditions are understood to extend beyond the city limits. Over time, that broader understanding of responsibility can find its way into the institutions that both generations may one day help lead.
Our children may or may not inherit wealth. But they will inevitably inherit a map. The choice we make today is simple to express, though its consequences will be felt for generations: whether we leave them walls, or roads.
References
- Boltho, A. (2002). Italy's regional experience: Will the Mezzogiorno finally converge? In Cohesive growth in the enlarging euroland (pp. 91–93). Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. https://library.fes.de/fulltext/id/01135c02.htm
- Buscemi, T. (2026). No revenge of the places that don't matter? Evidence from Italy's Cassa per il Mezzogiorno. Cliometrica, 20(1), 185–220. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-025-00310-0
- Canale, R. R. (2014). National disparities and cyclical dynamics in Italy (1892–2007): Was Mezzogiorno a sheltered economy? International Review of Applied Economics. https://doi.org/10.1080/02692171.2014.983054
- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185
- Myrdal, G. (1957). Economic theory and under-developed regions. Duckworth.