Economic Geography

How did we get here?
For a long time the received discourse of geographers was that we were 
a discipline divided into physical geography and human geography. After a while,
this discourse was clarified in terms of the identification of two axes of interest,
one being human–environment relations, and the other being space and place
(Turner 2002). In the case of economic geography, it is fair to say that concern
with space and place has been the dominant strand of enquiry (Scott 2000). The
concepts that economic geographers have brought to the fore, and the claims that
we have made regarding the contribution of economic geography to the study of
economic change, have been almost entirely to do with the spatiality of economic
activity, whether this be the location analysis of the 1960s, or the analysis of
agglomeration economies, industrial districts and globalization of the 1980s and
beyond. This tendency to focus on space and place was reinforced by the primary
focus of economic geography on industrial activity, and within industrial activity
upon the manufacturing and service sectors that were dominant employers in
OECD economies. Studies of domains and places of economic activity with more
visible connections to the environment, such as subsistence agriculture in the
developing world or oil and gas extraction in the Middle East, Russia and 
the North Sea, took place outside of an economic geography focused squarely
on manufacturing and service industries. Even in resource-intensive manufac-
turing industries such as metal production, the primary interest of economic 
geographers has been the location of these production facilities rather than 
economy-environment relations.
This placement of economic geography squarely on the society-space axis of
the discipline mirrored of course the externalization of issues of environment and
resources within the activities of industrial firms themselves. While obviously
varying tremendously across industrial sectors, resource use and environmental
impacts were for many firms and industries of secondary concern to more
‘central’ business challenges, such as how to reduce labor costs and enhance labor
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David P. Angel

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productivity, how to accelerate the development of new products and to break into
new markets, and how to manage increasingly complex global business organiza-
tions. Studies of industrial sectors such as food production, fishing, and primary
resource industries, where issues of resources and environment were of central
concern to business practice, sat uneasily on the fringes of industrial geography
and rarely impacted theory development in the field.
Even when issues of environment and resources were thrust squarely in the
forefront of economies, such as on the occasion of the oil price shocks of the
1970s, and the Bhopal chemical disaster of the 1980s, scholarship on these econ-
omy-environment concerns within geography tended to take place in specialized
niches, such as study groups on energy and the environment, and on risk-
hazards, rather than being a central and integrated part of the scholarship, and
especially the theory development, of economic geography. Calls by Fitzsimmons
(1989) and others for economic geography to address issues of environment and
nature-society relations had little impact. In part this was a result of the institu-
tional fragmentation that had been created within geography. As Castree (2004:
80) has noted ‘. . . because the environment is strung out between many different
parts of human geography, it is difficult to generate a critical mass of researchers
working on the same environmental issues, asking similar questions or deploying
similar theoretical apparatuses.’
For all of this, during the 1990s and with increasing momentum over the past
five years, issues of resources and the environment began to work themselves
onto the stage of economic geography (see, for example, Angel 2000; Bridge
2002; Gibbs 2002). In part this was a direct result of a broadening of the concept
of the economic and the engagement with different theoretical perspectives
beyond that of the dominant political-economy of the 1980s. With increased
interest in issues of development has come an engagement with an important
literature on political ecology (Peet and Watts 1996). Understudied sectors, such
as the processed food industries (Murdoch et al. 2000), have been a platform for
important work on constructions of nature and on concepts of quality. Studies
of other economic activities, from the tending of garden lawns (Robbins and
Sharp 2003) to biotechnology (Marsden et al. 2003), have raised important ques-
tions about the environment and technology in everyday life. Economic geogra-
phers have also engaged with inter-disciplinary research on issues such as human
dimensions of global environmental change (O’Brien and Leichenko 2003) and
ecological modernization (Gibbs 2003). The concept of nature itself has under-
gone close scrutiny in ways that connect to the cultural turn in economic geog-
raphy (Castree and Braun 2001). There has also been direct engagement with
some important resource issues, such as water supply (Bakker 2004). Indeed, the
literature of economic geography is now replete with calls to integrate the analy-
sis of resources and the environment into the core of human geography (Castree
2004), economic geography, and urban geography (Braun 2005).
It is with firms and industries themselves, however, that the real driver of 
the current interest among economic geographers in economy-environment
relations lies. To be sure, issues of environment and resources are now firmly and