Economic Geography

4
The ‘new’ economic geography?
Ray Hudson
Introduction
For many years, economic geography was mainly concerned with descriptive
geographies of commerce, trade and Empires. However, during the 1950s 
some economic geographers, along with regional scientists such as Walter Isard,
re-discovered the deductive location theories of von Thunen, Weber and Lösch
and began again to get more seriously interested in issues of explanation and
theorising why economic activities are located where they are. From the perspec-
tive of contemporary economic geography, characterised (inter alia) by a plethora
of theoretical perspectives and vigorous debates as to the most appropriate forms
of theory and explanation, this may seem to have been a pretty modest move
forward. However, at the time it was seen as a radical and sharply contested move.
More importantly, longer-term it had massive implications for the development
of economic geography. 
Re-focusing concerns from description of the unique to explanation of more
general classes of events and spatial patterns marked a decisive and radical break.
It once and for all placed the issues of explanation and theory irrevocably on the
agenda of economic geography and economic geographers. This initial engage-
ment with theory hinged on exploring the potential of mainstream neo-classically
informed approaches to theorising the space-economy. Much of the next four or
five decades in economic geography can be seen in terms of a series of problema-
tisations of different theoretical positions and debates amongst their various
adherents. This has involved exploring the terrain beyond mainstream economic
theory, probing the links between the mainstream and various strands of hetero-
dox economics, political economy and social theory, and acknowledging the
significance of the non-economic relations that make the economy possible. 
One consequence of this has been an engagement between economic 
geographers and a variety of other social scientists interested in the spatiality of
economies – with the result that not all economic geography is carried out by
economic geographers in geography departments. Far from being a problem or
a weakness, this rich inter-disciplinary debate has contributed greatly to the
development and intellectual vibrancy of economic geography. Reciprocally, it
has been equally important in sensitising other social scientists to the significance

---

of space in the constitution of economies and societies. In this chapter, I will briefly
review the sequential emergence of a number of ‘new’ economic geographies, the
reasons for this, and the relationships between them.