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is transformed from within over time
. As Boschma and Martin (2007) put it, evolutionary
economic geography is concerned with the spatialities of economic novelty (innovations,
new i rms, new industries, new networks), with how the spatial structures of the economy
emerge from the micro-behaviours of economic agents (individuals, i rms, organisations);
with how, in the absence of central coordination or direction, the economic landscape
exhibits self-organisation; and with how the processes of path creation and path depend-
ence interact to shape geographies of economic development and transformation, and why
and how such processes may themselves be place dependent. Our concern is both with the
ways in which the forces leading to economic change, adaptation and novelty shape and
reshape the geographies of wealth creation, work and welfare,
and
with how the spatial
structures and features so produced themselves feed back to inl uence the forces driving
economic evolution. For the economic landscape is not just the passive outcome or by-
product of the process of economic evolution, but a conditioning inl uence on that process.
Economic transformation proceeds dif erently in dif erent places, and the mechanisms
involved neither originate nor operate evenly across space. The emphasis is on understand-
ing the processes and mechanisms that make for or hinder the adaptation of the economic
landscape, and how spatial and historical contingency interact with systemic necessity.
Given these aims, what are the theoretical and conceptual foundations on which
such an understanding might be based? This question is the focus of Part 1 of the topic,
where several authors explore and assess some of the possible conceptual foundations
for an evolutionary economic geography. Within economics - and indeed in other social
sciences - it is possible to identify three main approaches to the study of evolution: gen-
eralised Darwinism, the theory of complex adaptive systems, and path dependence ideas
(see Figure 1.1).
3
Much of evolutionary economics is based on ideas and concepts taken
Generalised Darwinism
Concepts from modern
evolutionary biology:
variety, novelty, selection,
itness, retention, mutation,
adaptation. 'Population
dynamics thinking'.
Complexity Theory
Aspects of complex
'far-from-equilibrium' adaptive
systems: emergence,
self-organisation,
adaptation, itness landscapes,
hysteresis
Path Dependence Theory
Role of contingency and
self-reinforcing (autocatalytic)
dynamics, 'lock-in' by increasing
returns (network externality)
efects, branching, path creation
Figure 1
.
1
Three major theoretical frameworks for evolutionary economic geography
