Economic Geography

KNOWLEDGE OF ECONOMIC geography was first essentially descriptive, with a focus on the REGION and its economy, demography, and social characteristics. It represented the typical approach in research agenda in North America and Western Europe. The birth of economic geography dates from the age of European exploration, with an expansion in commercial geography from the 15th century to the 19th century. George Chisholm, author of the first book in economic geography, Handbook of Commercial Geography (1889), collected information on economic activity. In the late 19th century, economic geographers started to take into consideration the physical environment as influencing the economic activity.

The environmental determinist movement started with Ellen Churchill Semple’s book (The Influences of the Geographic Environment, 1911), in which she explained how the environment is considered as a major factor in the location of human settlements and economic activity. The turn to the study of geographic regions gave birth to the areal differentiation movement in the mid-1930s, with Richard Hartshorne (The Nature of Geography, 1939). The movement supported a geography that provided accurate, orderly, and rational descriptions and interpretations of regions. Economics has occupied a central position within human geography for more than a century, and started its modern development in the 1950s. The post-1950s geography is characterized by the quantitative revolution.

The utilization of earlier location theoretic models by German spatial economists (Johann Heinrich Von Thünen, 1826; Alfred Weber, 1929; Walter CHRISTALLER, 1933; August Lösch, 1939) has contributed to the development of geography as a spatial science. The French economists, on their side, were working on the theory of GROWTH POLEs and regional development problems.

Economic geography represents two areas very close to each other but with some nuances. It is referred first to as geographers working on spatial questions, with a synthetic approach from sociology, economics, political science, and history, reflecting the multidisciplinary character of the field of geography. Second, it is related to regional science with economists working on spatial mathematical models. The work in the 1960s in quantitative geography was represented by William Alonso and Brian Berry. Alonso (Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of Land Rent, 1964), in the area of neoclassical economics associated with location theories was influential in urban land-use modeling. A William Alonso Memorial Prize was established in the United States by the council of the Regional Science International Association in 1999. Berry has worked, with his book Geography of Market Centers and Retail Distribution (1967), on market functions and spatial scale, focusing on settlement patterns and the hierarchy of places in national economies. Until the mid-1970s, with the main intellectual orientations of the neoclassical economics principles and of the German theorists, location has provided the new framework for the study of the spatial organization of the contemporary economy. 

Economic geography was, during the period, essentially an industrial geography dealing with the problems of industry and regional economic development. The end of the postwar economic growth in major developed countries, the end of the golden age of capitalism, and the worldwide stagnation of regional and urban problems were all new questions for economic geographers. With the Marxist critique of capitalism, economics geographers switched their interests from neoclassical economics toward political economy, such as the Marxian political economy. David Harvey refocused his work toward a Marxist-based geographical political economy with his book The Limits to Capital (1982), which is still one of the best interpretations of Marx’s work. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, geographers dealt with the questions of regional and urban problems, which included the logics and the dynamics of urban space, regional development and its crisis, the geographies of services, labor, and money, the restructuring of regional industries, and uneven development.

Doreen Massey, with her book Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structure and the Geography of the Production (1984) on industrial restructuring, reacted to Harvey’s abstract ideas by bringing a more concrete perspective of the place to the study of spatial relations. From the 1980s on, economic geography has evolved in several field categories. Economic geography has taken a step toward critiques of the Marxist social and economic theory. This has led to a new turn in the development of capitalism, with the emergence of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories. Feminist geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, in their work The End of Capitalism (as We Knew it): a Feminist Critique of Political Economy (1996) on Marxist political economy, bring the concept of class as a central topic in economic analysis. They focus on the relationship between gender, social class, and economics and according to them, the discourse on Fordism and post-Fordism is too economistic and male-centered.