Economic Geography

Toward a re-synthesis
As I have tried to show in this chapter, Krugman-style geographical economics
offers at best an extremely narrow vision of the dynamics of the economic 
landscape, and is in any case, less preoccupied with geography as such than it is
with geography as just another domain within which markets unfold.
Geographers and economists certainly occupy much common ground at the
present time, but encounters between them on this shared terrain are endemi-
cally susceptible to deeply-seated disputes about theoretical priorities. My guess
is that the influence of the Krugman model will in any case soon wither away as
geographical economics comes up against the model’s inner and outer limits, just
as neoclassical regional science began to show signs of enervation after the 
mid-1970s in part as a consequence of its commitment to the strait-jacket of
convexity and constant returns to scale (cf. Neary 2001; Thisse 1997). As it
happens, any such retreat may just possibly help to open up opportunities for
more fruitful future encounters between geographers and economists over issues
of space (see also Sjöberg and Sjöholm 2002). For the present, the undisputed
major contribution of geographical economics to our understanding of spatial
problems has been its resuscitation of the notion of pecuniary externalities in a
world of Chamberlinian competition.
The cultural turn, for its part, has sought to take economic geography 
in an altogether different direction. In some degree, of course, the clashing
claims of economic geographers and cultural geographers over the last decade or
so can be interpreted as expressions of an internal power struggle for status and
A perspective of economic geography
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influence in the profession of geography as a whole. This struggle owes much to
the unquestioned intellectual re-invigoration and consequent self-assertion of
cultural geography that occurred over the 1990s as cultural studies expanded in
the academy at large. Despite the clashes, there remains, as I have indicated,
much useful work to be accomplished by cooperation between economic and
cultural geographers in any effort to comprehend the spatiality and locational
dynamics of modern capitalism (Bathelt and Glückler 2003; Gertler 2003a;
Gregson et al. 2001; Yeung 2003). At the same time, there will undoubtedly
continue to be strong points of divergence between the two subdisciplines; 
lines of investigation opened up by economic geographers where cultural geog-
raphers hesitate to tread, and vice versa. A degree of mutual tolerance (though
certainly not automatic and uncritical mutual endorsement) is no doubt called
for in this situation.
Notwithstanding all the theoretical turbulence of the last few decades, there is
probably still wide agreement among economic geographers, as such, that one of
the main tasks we face is in the end some sort of transformative understanding
of the historical geography of capitalist society (Harvey 1982; Harvey and Scott
1989). I suspect, as well, that most economic geographers would agree with the
proposition that we need some sort of new synthesis in order to pursue this task
more effectively (cf. Castree 1999), i.e. a revised cognitive map that can help us
make sense of all the complex contemporary tendencies that have turned what
critical theorists used hopefully to call ‘late capitalism’ into the triumphant and
rejuvenated juggernaut that it is today. I make this claim about the need for a new
synthesis in full cognizance of the reductionist dangers that it opens up (cf. Amin
and Robbins 1990; Sayer 2000). Equally, I want to avoid the self-defeating
conclusion that because of these dangers we must always downsize our theoret-
ical ambitions. One of the truly disconcerting aspects of much geographical work
today is that it preaches a doctrine that privileges the small, the piecemeal, 
and the local, even as capital plays out its own grandiose saga of expansion and
recuperation at an increasingly globalized scale.
A prospective economic geography capable of dealing with the contemporary
world must hew closely, it seems to me, to the following programmatic goals if
it is to achieve a powerful purchase on both scientific insight and progressive
political strategy.
•
To begin at the beginning: economic geography needs to work out a theo-
retical re-description of capitalism as a structure of production and consump-
tion and as an engine of accumulation, taking into account the dramatic
changes that have occurred in recent decades in such phenomena as techno-
logy, forms of industrial and corporate organization, financial systems, labor
markets, and so on. This theoretical re-description must be sensitive to the
generic or quasi-generic forms of capitalist development that occur in differ-
ent times in different places, which, in turn, entails attention to the kinds of
issues that regulation theorists have identified under the general rubric of
regimes of accumulation (Aglietta 1976; Lipietz 1986).
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