What is a border? People often think of borders as those things that demarcate different countries – where one country stops and another begins. Borders are patrolled, we are greeted by barriers as we get off the plane or ferry in another country where we have to show our identity and declare our intentions for crossing the border. The geographic border continues to be a topic that causes major angst, tension and instability in the world – the source of conflict and contestation. Politicians continually talk of controlling borders, controlling who and what can cross them, stopping people who cross them and deporting people who have crossed them without permission. The US border in one way or another was a major element of Donald Trump's 2024 election victory, whether that be in terms of his promise to impose large tariffs on goods that cross the border from China, or deporting migrants who have crossed the border illegally, or continuing to construct the huge border wall with Mexico. In Britain, the vote to leave the European Union was won on the basis of ‘taking back control [of the border]’. In other European countries, like Germany and France, a rise in support of far- right political parties has largely come from feelings of disenfranchisement and angst that the borders are ‘under threat’ from mass uncontrolled migration. The border has become one of the most heated political topics of our time, with no sign of any end in sight.

The hysteria, fear and tension that exists around the national border is very much connected to other forms of border and division that exist within countries. These are the internal borders that exist within countries – the gaping differences between different geographic places, in terms of wealth, prosperity, health and education outcomes.

We have so far seen how a visceral way of knowing place, often held by the least privileged groups in Western industrialised societies like the UK and the United States, describes the need for an intuitive and deeply ingrained level of knowledge about your surroundings – it is knowing people and place but in a deep- seated sense. It is more than just knowing of somebody or of a place (that might be useful in ‘getting ahead’, for example), rather, it is knowing the very essence of a person or place, in a way that you can intuitively know what will happen next – there is none of the ‘unexpected’ in a visceral knowing. This was juxtaposed in with an instrumental connectedness that is only concerned with what you can get out of people or places; what they symbolise in status terms, and in contributing to a person's identity – a way of relating to place more often held by the most privileged. When you are instrumentally connected, you are only concerned with the objective goods and resources people and place afford access to. A deep- seated knowing of Chapter 4 people and place, in a truly authentic sense, does not matter here.

These two opposing ways of relating to geographic places go hand in hand with how people understand the purpose of social connections in their lives – and ultimately the kinds of networks they develop, the role these play and how these are utilised. When people hold a visceral way of knowing place, the places they can imagine living are entirely dependent on the geographic location of their social networks – their social networks are in effect their maps of the world in terms of places that ‘exist’ to them.

Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel Laureate in literature, embodied a strong attachment to the Irish landscape which was richly described in his poetry. His poem Digging is an example of this identification with people and land, describing the earthy smells, sounds and rhythms of his father digging potatoes and his grandfather cutting peat. It is rich in place- based identification and attachment, a sense of roots and rootedness. But his poetry describes a kind of connection to place that goes beyond superficial attachment in the sense of a ‘fondness’ for a place or a sentimentality for place based on memories of being there. It speaks to a way of knowing place that is deep- seated and almost visceral in character.

At the core of geographic divisions is a split between two unique identifications with place – on the one hand, people can hold a visceral connectedness, while on the other hand, people's connectedness to place is highly instrumentalised. The book shows that some of the visceral identifications people hold with place, captured so beautifully in Heaney's poetry, put them at a major disadvantage in modern capitalist economies. On the other side of the coin, the instrumentalist identification with place (described in ) is what helps people thrive in capitalist market economies, and perpetuates the disenfranchising of visceral connectedness. This fundamental split must be properly understood and fully acknowledged, with aligned policy solutions, if we are to begin dismantling the stark Chapter 5geographic divides of countries like the UK.

This book started by setting out the extent and nature of geographic divisions within countries – the borders within that have plagued many countries around the world for decades. Some countries have geographic divides that are astronomical and at the same time have government interventions which are doing little to change them – at best they are not making them worse – but are certainly not going any way to make them any better. The case of the UK was drawn on in this book because it is one such country.

Indeed, the UK is said to be one of the most geographically divided advanced economies in the world, and certainly one of the most spatially divided countries in Europe. The numbers speak for themselves here. In 2016, inner London (west) had an economic output that was 611 per cent higher than the average region of a European nation []. London substantially overshadows every region of the UK, having a gross value added per head of population (£50,000) that is over double every other region apart from south- east England (for example, the north- east and Wales have a gross value 1added of just over £20,000).

What lies beneath these stark numbers are historical structures of power that maintain these borders within – a key message from this book is that geographic places are positioned, and have little, if any, control over this positioning. When governments talk about wanting to boost economically lagging areas by activity that restores their ‘pride’ in where they live, this misses a fundamental point. People living in economically deprived localities have little control over how their locality is judged – their ‘pride’ in where they live is not entirely within their orbit of control – this is at least in part determined by how it is judged in relation to other places, as part of the broader web of power relations that maintain the relatively high and low status positions of places.

In 1973, Britain was the second most equal large country in Western Europe, and now it is the second most unequal of any country across the entirety of Europe. It has all of the hallmarks you expect to see in very unequal countries, including a life expectancy that, today, remains lower than it was in 2014 (other than briefly in 2019). There has been an explosion in food bank use since the Conservative- led austerity programme began, university tuition fees were tripled in 2012 and have risen twice since. Britain is now also one of the places in the world with the least affordable housing. What this has done is to raise impenetrably high walls segregating people and places – sometimes quite literally walls in the gated communities that shield the wealthy, who have mostly grown so much more wealthier, from the poorer, who are getting poorer. A polarisation has always existed – but the degree of polarisation has not been so wide as it is now for almost a century.

One of the compelling points made in this book is that the conventional wisdom and taken- for- granted assumptions that politicians draw on to try to fix the problem are often part of how the problems came about in the first place. It is clearly of little use to keep rehashing the same old solutions that are based on flawed logics and will do nothing to fix these entrenched divides. A new way of looking at the problem, and a more radical set of solutions that gets to the heart of what reproduces division, is needed – which all necessitates picking apart some of the fundamental bases of how we live and function as a society and economy.

Those from affluent backgrounds are often said to not be burdened by ‘place’ in the same way poorer groups are often thought of as. People often think of them as less tied down to places, more open to travelling or moving around to ‘get ahead’. They will go where opportunities take them and have no sentiments or sense of obligation towards specific places in the world.

Sometimes people embrace the idea that they are not rooted down to a place forever more, but are ‘global citizens’, open to difference and culturally aware; able to move from country to country with ease, ‘swimming like fish in water’ (as Bourdieu referred to middle classes in education). People often proudly declare themselves ‘citizens of the world’. Later in this book, this idea will be exposed as false, vacuous and little more than virtue- signalling.

It is these so- called ‘citizens of the world’, embodiments of globalising economic forces, who many blame for the disenchantment felt in places within countries that have not benefited from globalisation. In the UK, during the aftermath of the referendum on whether to leave the European Union, the newly elected Prime Minister Theresa May, took aim at ‘citizens of the world’, criticising them for what she saw as the lack of a sense of obligation towards the plight of local people and places in their pursuit of wealth creation.

Education is a tool and policy lever used by governments around the world to try to heal their borders within – applying these ‘educational fixes’ to plug the gaping gaps between regions and places within countries is common. These educational fixes might involve trying to spread out education more evenly across geographic space or giving out particular kinds of educational qualifications to ‘needy’ areas. Or they could involve more root and branch reforms, overhauling the entire education system of a country in an attempt to make it work for all regions and places.

Reflecting the broader doctrine that is so embedded in global policy thinking, these educational responses to addressing regional inequalities stem from thinking about people as a resource for economies – a resource that differs in its adequacy to meeting the needs of businesses. This orthodox way of thinking, referred to as human capital theory, is ingrained in public policy and directly equates ‘learning to earning’; the more educated an individual becomes, the higher their earnings, and the higher the skills base of a region the stronger its economy.

Public policy in many countries, not just the UK, is locked in a way of thinking that sees the value of education purely in terms of individual earnings; just like investments can be made into machinery or technology to improve productivity, investments can also be made into people to improve their productivity. In this sense, the problem of regional economic inequality is interpreted at least in part as a problem of deficient human capital in low growth areas and regions: therefore, investments to boost this human capital, just like investing in infrastructure like road and rail, is seen as the route to growing these ailing regional economies.

This book has sought to dig beneath the surface of the borders within to unearth the complex social mechanisms that sustain them. Addressing geographic divides within countries that have deeply entrenched spatial inequalities like the UK and the United States requires accounting and acknowledging these social mechanisms in the logics of regional development policy. This chapter argues that all too often regional development policy fails to do this, and is frequently reliant upon a set of flawed logics.

A major hurdle to addressing regional inequality is overcoming normalised notions of development; the conventional wisdom and taken- for- granted assumptions that are drawn on when developing solutions. These are assumptions, principles and ‘ways of doing things’ that helped to create the problems of regional inequality in the first place. For example, the assumptions that are embedded within educational and labour market policy in terms of how we think education is linked to the world of work. These assumptions and orthodoxies are so ingrained within our minds that it takes a major cognitive shift to think beyond them.

In his book Injustice, Danny Dorling argues that there are ‘five social evils’ that have driven inequality and injustice – elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair. What these evils produce is a ‘sham hierarchy’ where people are pitted against one another with the creation of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Underpinning each of these evils are a set of myths that many people in society implicitly believe to some extent, which only emboldens them further.

It is crucially important that strategies to dismantle the borders within have economic divides at their core, addressing the stark geographic gaps in wealth and prosperity – in essence, this comes down to bringing greater investment and financial capital to economically less prosperous places. Economic inequality lies at the heart of spatial divisions within countries. It is only through spreading economic activity and wealth more equally between geographic places that other forms of spatial inequality will begin to shift. Economic capital has major knock- on effects across all aspects of people's lives, differences in economic resources determine the likelihood of how educated you are, how much you earn and how long you will live for. The social, educational and health gaps we see between places within countries ultimately stem from a country's spatially unbalanced economy, which has deep- seated roots that stem from the origins of the modern economy.

There are many examples of how countries have tried to grow the economies of less prosperous regions and places in the past. For example, in the case of the UK, in the 1980s, they encouraged businesses to invest in economically less prosperous areas by offering huge tax breaks. It was a tax policy that intended to boost the creation of new businesses within the regions by encouraging enterprise and innovation through the incentive of lower taxes. The logic was that people and businesses within the specific areas would be encouraged by the lower taxes to be entrepreneurial, innovate and invest.

The way people conceive of geographic places (either viscerally or instrumentally) and the way they connect to people (either in individualistic or collective terms) is important because it ultimately shapes how they go about making locational choices in their lives. These next two chapters expose two sets of values that people draw on to consider locational choices – values that orientate people to imagining place as positional or place as personal.

The instrumental- connectedness to place, and an individualised way of connecting to people, means that people value place in a positional sense – in other words, places are imagined as a rank ordering from ‘best’ to ‘worst’. When people judge places, they are also judging people and positioning themselves in terms of status and social standing. In deeply classed societies like the UK, these judgements on place will be more prolific and fine- grained, as people jostle for social status. This stands in stark contrast to when people are viscerally connected to place, and form collectivising relationships with people characterised by strong bonds – this group of people tend to value places in person-centred ways, which centres around ‘fitting in’, relationships and diasporic allegiances. These two values upon which locational choices are made have significant implications for how regional divisions are (re)produced – and more importantly, the solutions needed for them to be healed. In this chapter, the focus is on this orientation to valuing of place in a positional sense.

This book has so far shown that the borders within are generated through differences in how places are judged. On the one hand, the most privileged groups in society think in very instrumentalised ways and judge places positionally (as detailed in the ). This establishes and maintains a hierarchy of places, with superficial identifications with place. While on the other hand, the least privileged in society tend to have a visceral connectedness that produces judgements on place that are person-centred. These person-centred judgements are non- hierarchical and founded upon previous chapterpersonal relatedness or ‘fit’ with place in a deeper sense.

It is worth for a moment going back to what lies beneath the two distinct judgements that people make on place – that is, the kind of connectedness people experience in everyday life. On the one hand, positional judgements on place stem from an instrumental connectedness (more often than not held by the most privileged groups in society), characterised by judgements on the hierarchical status of people and place. It is about seeing place only in terms of what they symbolise in status terms – and the value that can be accrued from them. This value might be in relation to advancement economically or might be about aligning oneself to an image or identity that holds status. Whereas those who make person-centred judgements on place tend to experience the world in a viscerally connected way (largely the least privileged in society); drawing comfort from holding an almost intuitive level of knowledge about where they live, and the people they know

Many would argue that the map- maker's drawing of geographic boundaries is artificial and does not always correspond with reality, or gives a distorted picture of geographic difference. For example, we commonly regard the UK to be a highly prosperous country, and might think of Eastern European countries like Romania as economically polar opposites. This view is based on privileging the national borders that exist between countries. But when we draw a different set of boundaries, the story changes – comparing across the continent of Europe at a smaller geographic scale, we see that many parts of the UK (especially north- east England, Wales and Cornwall) have economic output levels similar to the average levels within what we would regard as the least prosperous countries of the European Union (EU). This underlines the arbitrary and dubious way we carve up the geography of the world, and the stories this foregrounds and those it obscures. It raises questions about how we draw geographic boundaries and makes the study of the borders within even more crucial.

But when it comes to the borders within nation- states, this question of drawing the boundaries does not go away and, if anything, becomes even more complicated. First, there are questions about what and where these borders actually are. Unlike national borders that demarcate countries, the borders within are debatable, ambiguous and hidden – that's because they are often dependent upon individual and subjective perceptions that are not recorded on mapping systems.