Economic Geography

Political economy
Political economy perspectives, in the sense of Marx rather than the Milton
Friedman School favored in mainstream economics, emerged in the 1970s. Early
proponents had abandoned location theory, convinced that capitalist market
mechanisms could never deliver the social equity that they had sought (in the
furore of post-1945 social engineering). Under the echoes of 1968, these
critiques galvanized a new generation of economic geographers. Just as Lösch
turned to the capitalist market to redress the evils of Nazism, so Harvey (1982)
turned to socialism to redress the evils of capitalism. Drawing heavily on 
Marx (whose arguments can be as deductive-analytical as those of mainstream
economics, Roemer 1981), Harvey shows that economic inequality is inevitable
because production under capitalism entails the exploitation of one class by
another. Furthermore, the geography of capitalist production is bound up 
with uneven development and spatial divisions of labor that create geographical
inequalities (e.g. dividing workers and capitalists in core regions from workers in
the periphery). Capitalism is conceptualized as riven with social and geographical
conflicts and contradictions that make any equilibrium at best serendipitous and
temporary. Capitalism lurches from one crisis to another, with its trajectories
shaped by class and spatial struggle and by the unintended consequences of
The economic geography project
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economic choices and political strategies. Here, the ‘economic’ is centered on
capitalist commodity production (the realization and accumulation of profits, and
their investment in new production) rather than simply on market exchange.
Geography matters for two reasons. First, as for Lösch, space trumps economic
theory. The barriers that space poses to the rapid realization of profits on capital
invested in commodity production (in the form of both the built environment
and the geography of communication) require modifications to Marx’ theories 
of value, class and crisis (Harvey 1982; Massey 1984; Scott 1980; Sheppard and
Barnes 1990; Webber and Rigby 1996). Second, nature constrains the impera-
tive to accumulate and grow that is at the center of capitalist commodity produc-
tion (Smith 1984). Both nature and the spatial organization of production are
dialectically related to capitalism: they are shaped by, but also shape, its evolution.
In this view, social movements have limited influence and unequal livelihood
chances are best redressed by replacing capitalism, although little normative or
empirical analysis of livelihood possibilities under more collective modes of
production has been undertaken.
During the 1990s political economy came to be dominated by regulation
theory. Seeking to understand capitalism’s resilience, geographers sought to
understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism and neoliberalism. Of