Geography, the foundational economy, and the fallen-below

Amid the ongoing cost-of-living crisis in Europe, this article calls for more academic engagement with the concept of foundational liveability. Current conceptualisations of left-behind places and regions focus on uneven development and the legacies of deindustrialisation. With a cost-of-living crisis, however, we need to understand differences between households and new patterns of foundational precarity and discomfort in leading and lagging regions. Within various social settlements, we now have the growth both of social groups absolutely struggling to afford foundational essentials and of groups of the relatively deprived with disappointed expectations. Foundational economy analysis has highlighted residual income to understand liveability issues but has remained largely silent about how time and space are conceptualised and mobilised in the analysis. The current article hence sets up a dialogue between geography and foundational economy thinking. It does so by mobilising a time geography perspective that feeds a three-way interdisciplinary agenda calling for research on foundational practices, cultures, and politics.