Economic Geography

Political economy meets economic geography
Economic geography as it evolved in the Anglo-American academy up through 
the 1950s bore few marks of Marxist influence. In the immediate postwar period,
the birth of regional science as an inter-disciplinary enterprise of economists and
geographers moved economic geography in the opposite direction, towards 
an empiricist spatial mechanics that stripped analysis of its social and political
behaviour dimensions. But beginning in the 1960s, younger geographers, econ-
omists, political scientists, sociologists and urban planners, self-taught in Marxism
while trained in rigorous deductive and quantitative methods, began to write
oppositional analyses from many quarters. In the 1970s and 1980s, these were
often fresh and surprising works, creating quite a stir among younger scholars.
Disciplinary barriers fell as confident, politically concerned scholars across these
disciplines learned of each others’ work and began to converse, debate and use
each others’ insights.
It is impossible to do more than highlight a few of the more unique and
important of these contributions here. The first round was more urban than
regional. Geographer David Harvey’s powerful Social Justice and the City (1973)
presented a scathing critique of postwar urban/suburban structure and paved
the way for dissident work, including his own brilliant geographical application
of Marxist crisis theory in ‘the spatial fix’. Sociologist Manuel Castels’ The Urban
Question (1977) improved on production-centric spatial theory by emphasizing
social consumption as a key determinant of urban form, mediated by social 
organizing and conflict. Economist Ann Markusen’s ‘Class and urban social
expenditures’ (1976), an analysis of American suburbanization, emphasized class
enclave-building as a driver.
A second wave addressed community and regional job loss in Europe and the
United States. Geographers Doreen Massey and Richard Meegan’s (1978, 1982)
precocious work on corporate restructuring and its impact on workers and
communities, closely paralleled economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett
Harrison’s Deindustrialization of America (1982) focus on the same phenome-
non. Both teams offered analyses of the causes of plant closings and downward
pressure on wages and tested them on individual industries; both formulated
pro-labour action strategies and worked closely with unions and communities to
implement them. Geographer Gordon Clark’s Unions and Communities under
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Siege (1989) offered a powerful account of how corporate spatial strategies created
tough dilemmas for democratic unions, demonstrated with case studies.
On a regional scale, Pierre Vilar (1978) wrote a pathbreaking holistic Marxist-
influenced analysis of Catalonian regional economic geography. Markusen
(1987) offered an historical political economy of American regional development,
expanded the Marxist conceptual framework for studying regional economies, and
developed an institutional interpretation of American politics and political struc-
ture as it bore on regionalism. Geographers Michael Storper and Richard Walker
developed a labour and technology-focused interpretation of regional uneven
development in The Capitalist Imperative (1989).
These formulators of the political economy of place, informed by 
their rigorous social and regional science training but driven by pressing intellec-
tual agendas linked to place-based political movements, brought economic geog-
raphy a number of new tools. These scholars operated on a meso-economic level
(Granovetter 1985; Holland 1976), rejecting macro-economic aggregates as too
crude and micro-economic analysis as too individualized, abstract and stripped
of institutional and political context. Spatial economies were to be studied on 
the basis of their industries and occupations, not just as amalgams of individual
consumers, workers and firms. Formal and informal associations and networks
among people were central to the analysis. They reintroduced the concept of
social class, struck from the universe of important actors by economists, who
substituted the abstraction ‘labour’ in its place. Not only did they embrace the
broader dimensions of the concept of class (ideologies, associations, culture) but
they added complexity by insisting that cross-cutting concepts of gender, race
and ethnicity be considered co-equal in geographical analysis (Markusen 1979).
Many of these accounts incorporated the Marxist emphasis on historical mate-
rialism and strove to trace the origins of contemporary economic geographical
issues in decades, even centuries of evolving political economy. This work placed
contestation and class (and race, gender, etc.) struggle centre-stage, analysing
evolving urban and regional economies as the product not just of capitalist or
market dynamics but of success and failure of political movements. In order to do
so, political and cultural institutions were brought into focus.
A hallmark of this body of work is its acknowledged commitment to
constituencies and to scholarly-informed advocacy. The work of Massey and
Meagan, Bluestone and Harrison, for instance, assumed an equity norm, focused
on working class concerns, and wrote policy and action conclusions to their 
work that counselled organizing for change and concrete policy solutions, many
of which were surprisingly incremental and some of which were embraced and
won. Research topics are selected precisely because they address the large, often
new issues and problems of the times, and researchers often worked with unions,
community groups and others in formulating a research design and conducting
it. Results are presented in academic forums but also in more popular forms for
constituencies and the general public.
These diverse contributions played a major role in shaping economic geogra-
phy in the ensuing decades. In addition to their conceptual and theoretical
Economic geography and political economy
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contributions, including their introduction of work from the various social
sciences, they made important methodological contributions that are part of the
economic geographer’s toolkit today. Planner and geographer Erica Schoenberger,
for instance, was the first to employ corporate interviews and write about the tech-
nique (1991). Planner and political scientist Annalee Saxenian (1994) pioneered
ethnographic techniques to study the political and economic geography of two
high tech regions. Both these contributions are fruits of the grounded, meso-
economic approach. This school also kept alive a healthy scepticism and habit of
respectful debate with each other and other tracks within economic geography
(e.g. Lovering 1991; Markusen 1999; Martin 1999).
The political economic revitalization of economic geography had its blind
spots, many of which it inherited or shared with other strains in the field. 
It was not particularly attuned to culture – the Marxist focus on material condi-
tions made it difficult to acknowledge the role of culture and offered no very
good tools for studying it. It was also not very good on ideology. It rather broadly
rejected intellectual history in favour of dialectical material, and was rather unself-
conscious about its own operation as an ideology. And, it was not particularly 
evaluative. Scholars who advocated everything from worker ownership to minute
changes in policy were often naïve about the prospects for success and rarely
reflected later on the success or failure of their prescriptions.