Economic Geography

Conclusion
A pervasive and striking theme in the chapters in this book is that change occurs
not just at the level of the discipline but also at the level of the individual
teacher/scholar. People’s ideas do change. As obvious as this notion appears, we
often seem to forget it, as when we pigeon-hole someone into one category or
another. Another theme is that for most of the questions and problems that ener-
gize economic geographers today, each has a long and interesting history, a
history that can and should meaningfully inform current and future work. 
As I have noted elsewhere (Hanson 1992), Anglo-American geography seems
to be vulnerable to violent swings of the pendulum, particularly along the axis 
of generality-specificity – as, for example, the swing from the high theory of 
environmental determinism in the 1910s and 1920s to the particularity of the
regional geography of the 1930s–50s to the concern for universals in the spatial
Thinking back, thinking ahead
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science of the 1960s and 1970s to the particularity of the post-structuralism of
the 1980s and 1990s. Whereas the distinctiveness of these swings serves to
sharply delineate differing paradigms, ontologies, and epistemologies, the strong
rejection of previous thinking that has characterized this history is counterproduc-
tive. Instead of rejecting what has gone before (which may have more entertain-
ment value than intellectual merit), it pays to look for common threads that can be
picked up and possibly reworked to reveal new patterns and insights.
I have stressed the long intellectual history, within economic geography, of
interest in people’s access to opportunity. Over that history, the growing impor-
tance accorded to geographic context has increasingly called attention to the
ways that access is shaped by the social relations within which individuals and
groups are embedded. In addition, the complex role of information technologies
in shaping access is just beginning to be investigated. The ways that differences
among different types of individuals affect access are now better understood. The
focus of inquiry has enlarged from examining human behavior at the individual
level as the shaper of spatial structures to include examining spatial patterns and
spatial structures as shapers of social processes, including those that shape access.
An example of how spatial structures shape social processes is the entrepreneur
who locates her firm near to a spatial cluster of a certain type of female labor (say,
white, middle class, well educated; or immigrant Puerto Rican single parents)
and then designs the labor process around that specific labor force. This kind of
complex socio-spatial process shapes people’s access to employment, and it does
so in part through some of the basic principles (e.g. about people’s willingness
to travel) that were first articulated in the context of Central Place Theory in the
1960s. 
Economic geography is interested in understanding people’s livelihoods in all
their complexity. In terms of what will count as economic geography, 
I hope that economic geographers will continue to explore livelihoods as they
intersect with the wide range of social, cultural, political, and environmental
processes that shape them. I hope that investigators will use a variety of approaches
that allow them to combine theory and empirical work, and I hope that we will
think broadly about potential audiences for our work. Most important of all, I
hope that we will think as incisively and critically about teaching and learning as we
routinely do about research. Our future depends on it.
Notes
1. In contrast, to signal the editors’ interest in global connections, since 1992 the jour-
nal’s cover has had a silhouette of Earth’s landmasses.
2. Shalom was, before his death, a Professor of Geography at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem.