(Former) old industrial regions are a specific kind of lagging regions that suffer from long-term restructuring problems and deindustrialization. They are back in the focus of many researchers as well as media observers, because of the rise of populist parties in many of these regions in North...

Scholarly work in economic geography and regional science has recently seen a renewed interest in spatial inequalities, driven significantly by the debate on left-behind places and the resulting geographies of discontent. The plight of left-behind places calls for new place-based policy...