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The “levelling up” agenda set out by the UK government was designed to tackle entrenched regional patterns of social inequality, which have been associated with “left behind places”. These places are united through discontent resulting from being ‘left behind’ in regional development, experiencing stagnation whilst other, often metropolitan, areas experience rapid growth. Alternative datasets, including social media data, have been identified as possible ways to evaluate this discontent. This study will use a specific case study, perspectives of London from outside London, to evaluate how this dataset can be used to understand the dynamics of levelling up.

This research explores the spatial focusing of the migration network within England and Wales at local authority level. The Gini Index is used to quantify the inequality of migration flows between local authorities at a national level, with the decomposed index then used to analyse the spatial focusing of origins and destinations within the network. It then analyses individual local authorities calculate the inequality of incoming and outgoing migration flows, to evaluates the geographical patterns of spatial focusing. The conclusion is that England and Wales have a spatially focused migration network.

This paper explores the relationships between labour organising, globalisation and national identity through an engagement with the 2009 Lindsey Oil Refinery strikes. Some strikers adopted the controversial slogan ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ in response to employers' attempts to undercut existing wages and conditions with a new migrant workforce. This led to accusations of xenophobia. We make three inter-related arguments. First, we contend that it is necessary to interrogate the spatialised power relations generated through particular forms of labour agency enacted in relation to globalising processes. Second, since these responses can be politically ambiguous, success in territorially based disputes does not always equate with broader (transnational) class agency. Third, relevant to the project of labour geography, we propose that labour scholars and activists be more attuned to the mundane ambiguities in labour agency, and the subsequent need to frame local action within a broader relational politics of global labour solidarity.

Since the 1970s, many different governments around the world have sought to transfer power to sub-state governments, meaning that devolution has become a key ‘global trend’ of recent decades (Rodriguez-Pose and Gill, 2003). The term devolution can be defined as a form of political decentralisation, involving a “transfer of power downwards to political authorities at immediate or local levels” (Agranoff, 2004, p.26). Devolution has introduced in response to pressures exerted on established states from both ‘below’ and ‘above’, referring to demands from regions within the state for more say over their own affairs and the effects of processes of globalisation and supra-national integration respectively (Keating, 1997; Tomaney, 2000). Arguments for devolution have variously stressed questions of identity in relation to the recognition of minority groups, governance in terms of creating more effective political institutions, and the economy by allowing regions to adapt to changes in the economic environment and to fulfil their economic potential (Rodriguez-Pose and Sandall, 2008).

Economic geography has, over the last decade or so, drawn upon ideas from\ud evolutionary economics in trying to understand processes of regional growth and\ud change, with the concept of path dependence assuming particular prominence.\ud Recently, some prominent researchers have sought to delimit and develop an\ud evolutionary economic geography (EEG) as a distinct approach, aiming to create a\ud more coherent and systematic theoretical framework for research. This paper\ud contributes to debates on the nature and development of EEG. It has two main aims.\ud First, we seek to restore a broader conception of social institutions and agency to\ud EEG, informed by the recent writings of institutional economists like Geoffrey\ud Hodgson. Second, we link evolutionary concepts to political economy approaches,\ud arguing that the evolution of the economic landscape must be related to the broader\ud dynamics of capital accumulation, centred upon the creation, realisation and\ud geographical transfer of value. As such, we favour the utilisation of evolutionary and\ud institutional concepts within a geographical political economy approach rather than\ud the construction of a separate and theoretically ‘pure’ EEG; evolution in economic\ud geography, not an evolutionary economic geography.

The position of old industrial regions (OIRs) has been neglected in recent regional\ud development research, partly as a result of dominant discourses concerned with concepts\ud such as the knowledge economy, learning regions and the new regionalism. One outcome\ud of this conceptual overload is that empirical research has typically been confined to all\ud too familiar case studies of regional success that tell a rather partial story. Yet the\ud extension of the European integration project eastwards alongside growing competition\ud from the urban and regional ‘hotspots’ of the global south prompts a series of largely\ud unconsidered questions about the ability of OIRs to achieve sustainable economic\ud development and social cohesion in the years ahead. Lacking the capital, technological\ud and labour assets of more dynamic cities and regions, and with the historic legacy of\ud deindustrialisation and the decline of traditional sectors, OIRs face some important\ud dilemmas of adjustment and adaptation.\ud In this paper our purpose is to engage with these issues through some preliminary\ud empirical research into the recent fortunes of OIRs in Western Europe’s largest\ud economies: France, Germany, Spain and the UK. Drawing upon material from the\ud Eurostat database, our results hint at interesting patterns of divergence in the performance\ud of OIRs in terms of processes of economic restructuring, employment change and social\ud cohesion. In particular some important variations emerge in the trajectory of regions\ud within different national contexts. Drawing upon recent thinking relating to commodity\ud chains and global production networks, our results lead us to pose a series of questions\ud that relate to the way regions are being repositioned within broader political and\ud economic networks as part of unfolding processes of uneven development and changing\ud spatial divisions of labour.