Abstract
Most recent studies on regional cohesion in the European Union and its individual member states are concerned with socio-economic disparities between large regions. This paper, however, concentrates on the micro-level aspects of social cohesion.
It deals with a phenomenon described as inner peripheries. In order to delimitate inner peripheries, statistical data describing the so-called "general units" for 1984 and "Sub-regional units" for 2004 were used.
General units and sub-regional units consist of clusters of municipalities. For this micro-level analysis, we used 916 general units in 1984 and 1423 sub-regional units in 2004.
In data analysis for 2004, 17 demographic, socio-economic, and housing quality indicators were used. Analyses based on these indicators have shown that about one million people resided in the inner peripheries of the Czech Republic.
Until 1995, the population of Czech inner peripheries declined for many decades. After 1995, we observed a turn in that the population started to grow.
The combined geographic area of the peripheries grew for many decades until 1995 and started to decrease after 1995. At present, we are still unable to tell if this is a change in the long-term trend or only a short-term deviation.
The Czech Republic's inner peripheries are most often located along the borders of administrative regions and, to a lesser extent, along the country's borders. There are three rather large and contiguous geographic zones of inner peripheries: (1) a zone starting in Western Bohemia, continuing along the border between the regions of Central Bohemia and South Bohemia, and continuing further to the east; (2) a cluster of units in North-Western Bohemia, and (3) a cluster of sub-regional units in North Moravia.
In addition to these largest clusters, there are numerous smaller ones. The study concludes with some comparisons of our results with similar studies carried out in other European countries.
Ours and international research alike demonstrate that pupils and students, old people, middle-aged and old women, and disabled people represent the most socio-spatially excluded groups due to lower accessibility of service centres. In the last section, the study tries to explain the main causes that led to the formation of inner peripheries.