Peripheral, Marginal, or Non-Core Areas? Setting the Context to Deal with Territorial Inequalities through a Systematic Literature Review

Territorial inequalities are an issue of increasing relevance in the international scientific debate across different disciplinary fields, and their mitigation is a key challenge on the political agenda in many countries at the European and international level. An ongoing research project developed by the authors is investigating the phenomenon and possible strategies for rebalancing territorial development. In this framework, the present study provides an extensive review of the literature on the topic with the purpose of grasping the multiplicity of terms referring to areas affected by conditions of territorial inequalities. This paper describes the methodology adopted for developing a stand-alone Systematic Literature Review (SLR) protocol able to navigate both quantitative and qualitative insights on this complex topic. The SLR includes 347 records assessed for quantitative eligibility, 50 of which were included in the qualitative phase and studied through four categories of analysis (terms and phenomena, causes, models, and drivers) corresponding to the research questions. By tracing the evolution of the debate and the increasing scientific interest in the topic over time, the findings highlight the cross-disciplinary nature of the territorial inequalities that can be examined as complex and dynamic results of many spatial and aspatial issues at different territorial scales of investigation. Development models are benefiting from the evolution of the proximity concept from spatial to aspatial features—organizational, cognitive, and technological ones—changing the dependency between geography and innovation, especially with reference to entrepreneurship.