Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
1
The aims and scope of evolutionary economic
geography
Ron Boschma and Ron Martin
1. Introduction
Over the past two and half decades, key theoretical developments have been taking
place in the i eld of economic geography (Martin, 2008; Martin and Sunley, 2007b). For
their part, economic geographers have moved i rmly away from traditional economic
analysis, and sought insights from various forms of heterodox economics and from other
social sciences outside the economics i eld (see Amin and Thrift, 2000; Bagchi-Sen and
Lawton Smith, 2006; Bathelt and Glückler, 2003; McCann, 2007; Martin and Sunley,
2001; Martin and Sunley, 2007a; Sheppard and Barnes, 2000; Simmie, 2005). Their inter-
est has been in the institutional, cultural and social foundations of regional and urban
development: a so-called 'institutional' or 'cultural turn' has taken place. At the same
time, since the early to mid-1990s, several economists, led by Paul Krugman, the Nobel
Laureate, on the one hand, and by Michael Porter, the business economist, on the other,
have discovered geography, and argued for the importance of a geographical perspective
for understanding the dynamics and competitiveness of the economy: both have empha-
sised the process of spatial agglomeration of economic activity as a source of increasing
returns. Krugman and his followers even labelled their formal mathematical approach as
the 'New Economic Geography'.
However, what has been lacking from these theoretical developments is any real
appreciation of the importance of history in the economic landscape: neither perspective
really tells us much about how that landscape evolves over time . Yet an evolutionary per-
spective is essential to a fuller understanding of such issues as the geographies of techno-
logical progress, dynamic competitive advantage, economic restructuring, and economic
growth. In this context, there is thus considerable scope and potential for applying
and extending the ideas and concepts from evolutionary economics to our analysis of
regional and urban development.
Until the past few years, evolutionary economics, which itself has only developed in
earnest since the early 1980s, has not attracted much attention from either economic
geographers or the new breed of geographical economists. But very recently, a new
evolutionary geographic perspective on the economic landscape has begun to emerge
among geography and economics scholars, especially across Europe. This new body of
work, though hitherto somewhat scattered, has gained sui cient momentum to warrant
bringing the key conceptual, theoretical and empirical advances together in a clear
statement on the aims, objectives and methods of this new paradigm. This is the central
aim of this topic. It is based on a special European Science Foundation Workshop on
Evolutionary Economic Geography, held at St Catharine's College in the University of
Cambridge, UK in 2006, which drew together a number of the most distinguished schol-
ars in the i elds of evolutionary economics and economic geography. 1 A basic conclusion
3
 
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