The Production of Uneven Geographies: Environmental Hazard Exposure and Socioeconomic Inequality

This thesis examines how environmental, economic and digital change are reshaping the geographies of inequality. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates economic geography, environmental economics and critical urban studies, it argues how space is an active dimension that structures the allocation of resources and the distribution of costs and benefits. The analysis is organised around two interconnected themes. The first concerns the exposure, vulnerability, and resilience of places and productive systems to environmental hazards, with particular attention to the role of urban form and the spatial organisation of economic activity in determining differences in exposure and adaptive capacity. The second explores the transformation of urban space under the expansion of the digital economy, examining how platforms are reconfiguring the organisation, use, and value of cities. Although analytically distinct, both themes seek to explain how ongoing socio-economic change generates new forms of spatial inequality. Taken together, the three chapters show that understanding spatial inequality requires analytical frameworks capable of integrating environmental, economic, and digital processes. They advance a perspective in which exposure, vulnerability, and resilience are understood not as fixed attributes of places, but as outcomes of identifiable economic processes.