This paper focuses on the response of Italian inner areas to the Great Recession. Inner areas represent the majority of the Italian territory and are very heterogeneous in terms of (unstable) growth trajectories and industrial composition. One key issue that has partially hindered a thorough empirical analysis of the development paths of these areas so far, is defining these inner areas. To this aim, we adopt the recent classification proposed by the National Strategy for Inner Areas (2014), which identified six categories based on the travel distance from service provision centers. Our purpose is to analyze the potential structural change of inner vs non-inner areas in the face of the 2007–2008 economic crisis, assessing their adaptive capacity to the recessionary disturbance and the factors underlying their industrial composition change. We found that urban poles and inner areas had different abilities to re-adapt their local industrial compositions in response to the economic crisis with obvious effects on their future resilience.

The challenge of governing metropolitan regions calls urban-rural relationships into question. Rural actors’ silence within it and the blurring of boundaries between urban and rural are still much debated issues. This paper explores the rural perspective on metropolisation processes, considering local actors’ perceptions towards incorporation into a larger urban entity, urban-rural cooperation and the barriers hindering it. Our case investigates a peripheral area within the Italian “National Strategy for Inner Areas” that simultaneously falls into a metropolitan region (Genoa). Adopting a mixed-methods approach, and a rural perspective, we scrutinize i) the material and imagined coherence of the strategic planning (inner) area, and ii) their role in the metropolitan locality-making. Despite a presumed collapse of the urban-rural dichotomy or the two categories, yet the rural exhibits a distinctive identity. However, its agency, even when it is given more voice within metropolitan governance, might be disempowered by colliding policies and internal fragmentations.

The results of the elections have increasingly brought to the forefront the long‐standing issue of lagging regions – also labelled as “places that don’t matter” – since they had a great influence on the electoral outcomes. In this paper, we focus on the municipal results of the Italian senate elections, held in March 2018. Italy is a peculiar country where two non‐traditional parties, namely “Lega” and “Movimento 5 Stelle” (M5S), ended up forming the government coalition running until August 2019 and competing for different shades of populism. Our aim is to investigate the regional characteristics which underlie the local preferences for the two non‐mainstream parties. Firstly, we find that the spatial distribution of their votes is associated with territorial socio‐economic and institutional differences, and hence that Lega and M5S are characterized by a different electoral base (e.g. Lega capitalized its traditional support in the North, while M5S won especially in the South). Secondly, beyond these expected regional patterns, our evidence also highlights a sharp rural‐urban contrast.

The concept of periphery, going beyond the mere interpretation in geographical terms, incorporates a ‘relational’ character that is implicitly characterized by connotations of power and inequality. Peripheries can be actively created as an outcome of shifts in economic and political decision-making at various scales. The recent populist wave has brought to the fore the issue of peripheries as ‘left behind’ places, striking back in the ballot boxes. In this paper, we investigate the role of different dimensions of peripherality and their changing geographies on populist voting patterns by analysing the growth of non-traditional parties between the general elections held in Italy in 2013 and 2018. First, we consider a spatial dimension of peripherality, that is, the geography of access to services of general interest. Second, we explore some factors that might be associated with a condition of peripherality, meant as marginality. We find that the growth of discontent in Italy has different explanatory factors in core and peripheral areas. Irrespective of geographical peripherality, where, however, populist votes are more concentrated, our findings reveal that a condition of marginality may feed a sense of revenge connected to the feeling of ‘not mattering’ also in urban areas.