Foundational liveability, the 15-min city and the limits to place-based policy

I am sympathetic with Bassens et al.’s project of rethinking in explicitly social class, people-based terms the question of socio-spatial inequalities that has occupied the minds of urban and regional scholars after the populist eruption of the mid-2010s and onward. In doing so, the article has the merit of moving beyond a merely place-based understanding of today’s regional inequality phenomenon, constructed around the undifferentiated notion of ‘left-behind places’. However, despite embracing a people-based perspective, the article offers a response to the liveability crisis centred on a conventional place-based approach to public policy. I argue that a place-based approach to public policy on liveability can have the effect of increasing the attractiveness of some places and, in doing so, of fomenting phenomena of inter-place competitiveness. Following this criticism, in conclusion, I call for a renewed role of the national state, in collaboration with local authorities and communities, in the pursuit of equity in public service delivery.