Economic Geography

The education of an economic geographer
105

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Instead, the decade of the 1990s saw me return to urban geography, using the
San Francisco Bay Area as point of entry. I had been teaching Urban Field
Geography since 1980, after taking over the course from Jay Vance. Despite
tense relations with the prickly Vance, I learned a great deal about urban history
from his writings. Allan Pred’s historical work was another huge influence, and he
became a good friend, as well. I’ve never lost my belief that without historical
depth, economic and urban geography are inevitably shallow enterprises. This
has often sent me into the arms of the historical geographers (who are another
world apart), and made me skeptical of many of the glib claims coming from
economic geographers about Post-This and the New-That.
This phase of work started with a long essay on the Bay Area (1990). It was
inspired in part by Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1992) and Ed Soja’s sweeping
studies of Los Angeles (1989). I also had long admired Harvey’s essays on nine-
teenth century Paris done in the 1970s (now out in a stunning book, Paris:
Capital of Modernity, 2003). Mike asked me to turn the Bay Area essay into a
short book for Verso Press, but, instead, the project exploded into a full-fledged
attempt to capture the urbanization process in all its dimensions over a century.
The idea was to combine the following:
•
How industry molds cities over time (1996a, 2004a)
•
How class and race divisions create a residential city of realms (1995b,
1996)
•
How politics and social struggles over space have shaped the city (1998,
2007)
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How property development creates the built environment (1981, 1998,
2006)
These angles on urbanization combined several influences. The first was the
reintegration of industrial location and city form. These had been sundered
between economic and urban geography until Allen Scott put them back together
in the 1980s. The second was how property development shaped the city, which
Harvey (1973) had brought back into urban geography (and Harvey Molotch
[1976] into urban sociology). The third was how class and class struggle shaped
cities, which had been revived by Harvey, Chester Hartman (1984) writing on
San Francisco’s urban renewal, and Davis’ political portrait of Los Angeles.
Another element – the look of the urban landscape – has been a significant part
of my writing and teaching on the Bay Area (1995b). I firmly believe that in the
distinctive elements of house types, gardens, and street layouts, among other
parts of the built environment, one can find keys to the secrets of a city and a place.
I never much liked the conservative views of J. B. Jackson, Pierce Lewis and 
other purveyors of the Landscape School in a previous generation; but my
contemporaries in Cultural Landscape studies, such as Paul Groth (1994), Deryck
Holdsworth and Gray Brechin (1999), have taken the field in very different direc-
tions. These are not names that regularly come up in economic geography, yet
they have much to say about labor markets, merchant networks, office functions,
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Richard Walker

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The education of an economic geographer
107
resource flows, and more. The tensions between the old and new, left and right,
in landscape studies are apparent in Groth and Bressi’s collection, in which I have
an essay (1997b).
Urban and historical geographers know that economic geography is 
never enough. It is only the skin and bones of cities and regions and countries,
never the flesh. And the latter, the social order, is what gives places their face 
and their personality, and gives capitalism its necessary human and geographic
form. Anyone coming out of urban studies doesn’t need to rediscover local 
institutions, local governance, local cultures, and so forth in the way economic
geographers have had to do; urban studies are inherently more attuned to poli-
tics, power, race, class and community, and less likely to fall into the traps of
economism.
That necessarily means that my interest in the Bay Area has also been an
extended inquiry into the social and political peculiarities of the place. On the
economic side, this led to an inquiry into the character of California social rela-
tions and economic development going back to the Gold Rush (2001). My long
look at California’s social order took seriously Annalee Saxenian’s challenge to
economism in her study of Silicon Valley (1994), but pushed it much farther
back in time than she was able to do – and made for a more ambiguous tale of
the intertwining of regional social relations and regional economic development.
That project also grew out of a long dialogue with the ‘roads to capitalism’
approach to regional growth pioneered by Barrington Moore and Charles Post.
It revisited some of the themes I developed with Brian Page (1991, 1994). We
ruffled some feathers by challenging William Cronon’s magisterial view of the
region in Nature’s Metropolis (1992), which, we argued, is just a variant of the
Adam Smith trade theory of development, previously exposited by Vance
(1970), that skips too lightly over the agrarian and industrial development of the
Midwest (Cronon was not pleased, but we have since become very friendly, and
he is publishing my latest book).
On the more political side, I tried to track California’s contemporary condi-
tion (1995c). Without question, my view was darkened by the political malaise
of the state and its anti-immigrant movement in the mid-1990s. Things turned
around after that, but after another major economic crisis we’ve returned to 
reaction and degradation under Arnold Schwarzenegger. I became involved in
resistance to Proposition 187 and wrote on immigration to California, including
a pamphlet co-authored by Jeff Lustig (it was disowned by Mario Savio, leader
of our little political coalition, because of objections by a couple of African-
American members, before he and his son wrote a remarkably similar essay on
their own). That experience, along with the creation of the American Cultures
requirement at UC Berkeley, led me to plunge further into race theory and race
history for my Geography of California course, and to incorporate racial order
more thoroughly into my conception of class and political economy (1996b). 
A glimpse of these moves can be found in an essay in Roger Lee and Jane Wills’