ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the contested concept of development, its historical roots, the manifold ways it has been theoretically conceptualized and practically utilized, its inequities and the sometimes rather exclusive instead of inclusive outcomes of developmental policies. It discusses early twenty-first-century trends, as well as some opportunities for dealing with these issues from new and different perspectives. The notion of development, in the sense in which it made a worldwide career in the twentieth century, was rooted in certain fundamental concepts of the European Enlightenment. A massively technology and economy-oriented interpretation of development was also compatible with, and thus further justified by, official views in the Soviet Union. Spatial inequality of development received previously unprecedented political attention in the Cold War period. Given that an eminent form of social disparity is inequality between people in different geographical locations, spatial inequality is a very sensitive, highly political and politicized issue.
