ABSTRACT
Geographers have long sought to partition the world, and the people and multitude of other things that go up to make that world, into various zone or areas. A variety of strategies of partition have been utilised, ranging from abstract geometries of, say, central place theories; through the cognitive maps educed from people by behavioural geographers such as Gould and White; into conscious and unconscious constructions of places within humanistic geographers. It is in the latter geographies that notions of margin and marginality have often been spotlighted, although the precise hues of illumination have again varied considerably. As is well evidenced in many of the other chapters of this book, political economist perspectives of both a Marxist and more liberal hue have made much of spatial patterns of inequalities in social and economic resource provision and often partitioned the worlds into 'core' areas of wealth and affluence and 'peripheral' or 'marginal' areas of poverty and destitution.
