Reinforcing unevenness: post-crisis geography and the spatial selectivity of the state

This paper considers the unevenness of the 2007–08 crisis by examining the literature of England's North–South divide. From the 1980s this longstanding divide was exacerbated as a result of promoting London as a global financial hub, so when the crisis hit many expected some regional economic convergence as redundancies spread throughout the financial sector. This has, however, not taken place and previous patterns of uneven development have rather been reinforced. Attempts have been made to explain this deepening of established geographical patterns as the result of different regions’ degrees of economic resilience, but this approach is, however, problematic because it naturalizes crises, downscales responsibility and neglects politics. Inspired by Martin Jones’s concept of the ‘spatial selectivity of the state’, the paper will rather argue that to understand the uneven geography of the economic crisis, one has to look beyond localized resilience to how the state’s austerity policies have displaced the crisis’s impacts away from its origins in a London-centred financial sector.