Economic Geography

The new economic geography of the 1960s: from
location theories to the behavioural geography critique
of spatial science
The new economic geography of the 1960s focused attention on constructing
general explanatory statements about the spatial structure of the economy as it
sought to reconstruct economic geography as spatial science (for example, see
Haggett 1965). Geographers sought to explain the locations of a variety of
economic activities – agriculture, industry, commercial land use in cities and so
on. However, the ways in which explanation was sought soon became seen to 
be problematic. At one level, this was because they conflated explanation with
prediction; predictive accuracy became the measure of explanatory power. At
another level, there were profound problems associated with an approach that
sought to deduce equilibrium spatial patterns on the basis of restrictive assump-
tions about the natural environment, human knowledge and the character of
social processes.
The fundamental difficulty was that such assumptions were indispensable to
this particular deductive approach to theory building and explanation but were
also both a pre-condition for and symptomatic of an impoverished and partial
view of the social processes of the economy. Assumptions of the environment as
an isotropic plane ignore the grounding of the economy in nature and the chron-
ically uneven character of economic development. They also reduce the signifi-
cance of spatial differentiation to variations in transport (and sometimes other
production) costs within a pre-given space. Assumptions of perfect knowledge
deny the fact that economic decisions are always made in a condition of partial
knowledge and ignorance. Assumptions of static equilibrium deny the fact that
economic processes are chronically in a state of dynamic disequilibrium, set on
open-ended and unknown trajectories of change rather than inevitably and
mechanistically circling around a known point of static equilibrium. In summary,
while the approaches of the new economic geography of the 1960s placed ques-
tions of explanation firmly back upon the agenda of economic geographers, as a
result of these limitations they did so in a way that was based upon unhelpful
abstractions. Consequently, they resulted in inadequate theory, providing only
weak and thin explanations that failed to grasp the essential character of the key
processes that produced geographies of economies and determined the locations
of economic activities.
These new approaches were soon criticised by behavioural geographers, who
argued that their behavioural assumptions were untenable in an economy that
exists in real space and time (for example, Pred 1967). They therefore argued the
need to investigate what people actually did know, how they came to acquire this
knowledge, and where they knew about, rather than assuming that they knew
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Ray Hudson

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The ‘new’ economic geography?
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everything and everywhere of relevance to a particular type of behaviour. For
example, behavioural economic geographers focused on the knowledge that
consumers had of retail environments in order to explain who shopped where for
what and that key corporate decision makers possessed about alternative locations
in an attempt to explain why economic activities were located in some places
rather than in others. Such approaches, built upon a partial and imperfect grasp
of the relations between knowledge and the spatial organization of the economy,
generally resulted in little more than descriptive accounts of behaviour, with
minimal explanatory power. As such, having set out to refine an explanatory
approach, behavioural geographers unfortunately fell into the descriptive trap
that neo-classical location theories had set out to escape. Consequently, they
quickly slipped back into obscurity but their abandonment resulted in economic
geographers pushing important questions of agency from the research agenda for
a decade or so.