ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 looks at several contemporary challenges in spatial development. In the early twenty-first century, a number of problems of global reach are affecting European countries (and others) which create particular challenges for spatial development. The authors identify three – climate change, migration and austerity – for which European countries, and other countries in the Global North, have some responsibility. Each of these problems has gendered implications through which women experience them in particular, often more acute, ways. The authors argue that the causes behind each of these problems result from hyper-masculinist structures, which now characterise the whole of the global economy. However, the severest impacts of each problem are spatially concentrated amongst the poorest and most disadvantaged communities. The authors propose that spatial development can change the ways in which it operates to address both the causes and the impacts of these problems. Indeed, by drawing on different European examples, they illustrate how such changes are being made, and from which organisations responsible for spatial development lessons can be learned.
