Economic Geography

Geographies of Economy (1997a). They are the kind of necessary enrichment of
social economic thinking we need more of in economic geography.

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After what seems like forever – thanks to long interludes as a department chair
and father – the Bay Area work will finally come together into two books on the
urbanization of San Francisco and Silicon Valley (almost 20 years will have
passed, making me feel rather old). In some respects, these are only particular
case studies of American city formation. In other respects, the Bay Area is distinc-
tive, as in what I’ve called its ‘ecotopian middle landscape’ of upper middle class
residence or in its long history of maintaining the urban core as a cosmopolitan,
politicized space. In still other respects, I’ve found the area a maddening combi-
nation of the unique and the mundane, like the juxtaposition of Silicon Valley’s
technical innovation and its banality of urban form.
A piece of the Bay Area project on the rural landscapes of the metropolis broke
off to become a book of its own, a history of California agribusiness, The
Conquest of Bread (2004b). This is a work of economic geography as much as
anything else. As one might expect, key themes are the logic of agrarian capital-
ism, the expanding division of labor, production networks, class oppression, and
the peculiarity of California’s social order. These bump into secondary theses on
remaking the natural landscape, the evolution of consumption, and so forth.
Here, again, I was deeply influenced by two former students, Julie Guthman
(2004) and George Henderson (1998), who have written brilliantly about
California agribusiness, and Michael Watts, with whom I have shared many
students in agrarian development. I also admire Don Mitchell’s (1996) excoria-
tion of rural landscape studies, though I depart from his narrowly farm-worker
centered view of California agriculture.
The long tap root of my interest in agriculture goes back to the 1970s and 
my political education growing out of the movements supporting the farm workers
and occupational health regulation. I didn’t have to read agrarian theory to under-
stand the importance of nature in agriculture, because I’d already been inculcated
with the idea of real impacts of pesticides and water, among other things. And I
carried that idea over to industrial geography in my treatments of technology,
industrial variation and the labor process leading up to The Capitalist Imperative.
Another spin-off from the Bay Area project is a new book, The Country in the
City (2007), on the way the countryside has become part of the urban fabric,
especially as open space and parks. I argue for the distinctiveness of Bay Area
environmentalism as a mass political movement and for the radical element of
opposition to capital (especially property development). This historical geography
takes me back to my political origins and highlights my own contradictory posi-
tion as an upper class environmentalist and class-renegade friend of workers, immi-
grants and the poor. I am very likely too soft on white environmentalists, but the
point is to show how important this kind of sustained critique of capitalism and
American urbanization is – because it is so rare, so hard to maintain, and so
much a part of a larger, reinforcing culture of left-leaning politics nurtured in
what is known hereabouts as ‘the Left Coast of America’. This project thus
echoes the ideas about regional social order I have put forward with regard to
economic development and the exploitation of nature, or ecotopian urban 
landscapes, but with a quite different twist.
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Richard Walker

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Despite all the work on California, I do not believe in the priority of local over
the global. I have to keep abreast of developments in global political economy
for my course, the Economic Geography of the Industrial World. In the late
1990s, I wrote on the state of American labor in the face of global competition
and global failure of capital accumulation (1999). Echoing Bob Brenner (2002)
on the excesses of the 1990s, I argue that the fate of labor is not just about loca-
tion and worker competition, but also the performance of national and world
capital. On the other hand, I have debated Brenner about his relatively feeble
approach to technology and geography. I have tried to link the global and the
local in my latest paper on the influence of the US bubble economy of the late
1990s on the Bay Area and its urban landscape (2006).
So, in the end, my approach to geography is hard to put in a box. I regularly teach
the global economy, but love to write about the local. I emphasize the grinding of
the capitalist gears, but think that economic geography cannot make sense of
things without social relations and politics. I see class all around but never doubt
the significance of race, gender and nation. I watch with disgust the American
empire trampling the globe in a thoroughly predictable way, while believing 
in the heroic achievements of a few dedicated Greens, counterculturalists or anar-
chists in the belly of the monster. I have tried to maintain my status as an icono-
clast even as I’ve matured from Young Turk to Old Fart in the discipline. I have
kept to my course, while being deeply influenced by brilliant people around me.
I have even come to terms with being a Geographer, with a capital ‘G’. For a
long time, I felt I’d backed into the discipline and could care less about the disci-
plinary obsessions of my colleagues. But time has worn down my contrariness.
I’ve accommodated to being a Geographer. I see the discipline as in many ways
better than the alternatives, like economics and sociology, which wouldn’t know
an ecosystem if it hit them in the eye. On the other hand, I do not believe that
Geography is uniquely situated to know the world. What Geography does is to
put me in contact with a lot of open minds and imaginative people who look at
things in original ways. With time, I have come to see my career as a very long
education of an economic geographer – though an education of a quite differ-
ent sort than that of Carl Sauer (1963), whose essay title I’ve commandeered and
whose long shadow of antipathy to things economic, political or modern hung
over Berkeley geography for decades. So while arrived at by serendipity and
circuitousness, the label Geographer will do as well as anything else. Economic
Geographer sounds good, too – and is particularly useful when dealing with calls
from the press, since no one in the United States seems to know what geogra-
phy is. But just plain Geographer fits well enough to wear.