Economic Geography

The question of access
For me, the really interesting questions still have to do with the relationship
between people and place: How do people’s actions and decisions, individually
and collectively, create the structures that then enable and constrain them? The
question of access – the access of people and the access of places – to opportu-
nity has been central to economic geography for at least the past 40 years (think
of Weber’s industrial location model), and the changing conceptualizations of
access have both reflected and driven the enlarging of economic geography
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Susan Hanson

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described in the previous section. In general, the shift has entailed a move away
from simplicity and abstraction, toward a growing appreciation for complexity
and specificity in understandings of access. 
From the earliest days of the so-called quantitative revolution, spatial access
has been at the core of what economic geographers studied, and from the begin-
ning, one focus has been on the relationship between human spatial behavior
(individuals’ movements in space) and spatial structures (the spatial organization
of activity sites such as shops, workplaces, or towns). Although the dialectics and
synergies of this relationship were appreciated from the start, the initial empha-
sis was on spatial structures as the outcome of spatial behaviors. An example is 
the body of work by Brian J. L. Berry and others aimed at empirically testing 
the tenets of Central Place Theory in various US contexts (Berry 1967). These
studies articulated a concern for people’s access to opportunities, where access
was seen in terms of spatial separation (measured in distance or travel time) and
opportunities were central places (agglomerations of retail facilities) of varying
sizes. 
With an overriding concern to tease out the important generalizations about
the dependencies between human spatial behavior and the geography of retailing
(with an emphasis on explaining spatial patterns), these rich empirical studies
grew out of the drive to make geography a respected scientific enterprise by
discovering universal laws. In fact, the empirical focus of these studies compli-
cated Christaller’s model by negating the isotropic plain and testing the extent
to which actual behavior fit with the Central Place Theory assumptions of
completely rational, utility-maximizing, distance-minimizing behavior.
An enduring tension in geography has been that between the general and the
specific, and this tension has characterized studies of access. In particular, concep-
tualizations of access have come to incorporate more complex understandings 
of human agency as well as of geographic context. Perhaps most important,
economic geographers now recognize that people sharing a common location 
do not necessarily share equal access to opportunities; variations among people,
especially along the lines of gender, class, and race, significantly affect access
(Deka 2004). Actors are no longer thought of as autonomous, independent
decision makers, but rather as individuals who are embedded in various socio-
geographical networks, which enable and constrain access. The geographic scales
at which the contexts of access are conceptualized have moved beyond primarily
the local and regional to encompass the international, as in Gerry Pratt’s study
of the labor markets for Filipina nannies (Pratt 1999), and the Internet and 
other communication technologies have further complicated the question of
spatial access (Kwan and Weber 2003). For these and other reasons, the relation-
ship between proximity and access has become more complicated.