Economic Geography

2
Thinking back, thinking ahead
Some questions for economic
geographers
Susan Hanson
This book is about change: How has economic geography been changing over
the past 30 years and how might it continue to change? What are the ideas and
problems that have energized us as students, teachers, scholars, and practitioners
of economic geography? How have the ideas and problems themselves changed
(or not), and, for those questions that have persisted, how has our thinking
about them changed? How can this look to the past inform the future? 
Moreover, why should tomorrow’s economic geographers care about what
they may view as ancient history – the shaping of the discipline 30 or 40 years
ago? I’m frequently asked to review for potential publication manuscripts in
which the authors cite no literature whatsoever written before the dawn of the
twenty-first century; others may reach as far back as 1990! As a result, such
authors erroneously claim to be the first to examine x or y, they follow some of
the same blind alleys visited by previous generations, and they are unable to
relate their own findings to those of earlier studies and thereby build a body of
scholarship on a set of questions.
As we draw upon the past to envision the future, I pose four questions in this
chapter: (1) What will be the domain of economic geography, or put another
way, what will count as economic geography? (2) What approaches and methods
will we use? (3) What audiences will we seek to address? (4) What and how will
we teach? My aim is not to provide tidy answers to these closely linked questions
but rather, by thinking about each question in light of changes in economic geo-
graphy over the previous several decades, to spur reflection about future directions
for the field. I would also like to provoke thought about how we geographers
might think constructively about the changes to come. 
The only part of the future we can be certain of is the part that concerns
change (we know we can count on change), but how will we shape and respond
to these inevitable changes? I have seen how, over the past 40 years, geographers
have managed change primarily by caricaturing, deriding, denigrating, and rejecting
what has gone before and setting it in complete opposition to the preferred ‘new’.
(The ease with which authors fail to link their own work to earlier work seems to
exemplify this point.) This approach simply does not make sense to me because
it means that much of value is needlessly discredited, submerged, and lost. For
me, a look at the history of this field provokes a call for greater ecumenism, for

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more willingness to see the connections across the decades, and for the enduring
tolerance that making those connections should foster. 
As I take up these four questions, a connecting thread will be a problem that
has fascinated me since my graduate school days in the late 1960s and early
1970s, namely that of people’s access to opportunity in the context of the geog-
raphy of everyday life. The opportunities in question include, inter alia, jobs,
child and elder care, health care, political participation, recreation, socializing,
and shopping. This problem is one of several that have been central to economic
geography for at least 40 years while having been conceptualized and analyzed
differently over the years. A key dimension along which this question of access
(along with many other questions) has been treated differently is that of the
continuum defined by universality-particularity. Examining the various ways that
people’s access to opportunity has been conceptualized and investigated can serve
as an example of how the past can help to inform the future. One caveat at the
outset: the version of the past offered here is my understanding, my interpretation,
based on my 35
+
years as an academic geographer.