Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
fringes of new neoclassical economics and a resolutely systems analytic approach to
urban and regional studies, whose origins also lie in the 1960s, based in general systems
theory, as in much natural science, engineering and technology, evolving from there as
a complex analytical and guidance model expressed in the discourse of 'systems theories
of planning' (Chadwick, 1971; McLoughlin, 1969). This was the integrated 'substance
and process' approach to spatial analysis that modernised a professional urban design
approach that had hardly changed since the Pre-Raphaelites, by virtue of modelling
urban and regional systems mathematically, utilising gravity models, and the like, to
predict behaviour. It was over-ambitious, complicit with what are now perceived as
destructive biases in favour of, for example, suburbanisation, separation of land-uses,
primacy of vehicular mobility in cities, and the destruction of traditional heritage and
ambient city environments. However its underlying conceptual analysis, unlike its prog-
nostications, was ef ective at facilitating representations of complex process realities in
non- trivial ways.
The same can be said of the more mainstream innovation systems approach, which
populates its perspective on the object of interest with core systems concepts such
as 'networks, nodes and interactions' including feedback and 'institutional learning'
(Lundvall and Johnson, 1994). Accordingly, as noted, it is open to small elements
(increasing returns, asymmetric information, principal-agent relations, and possibly
transaction costs) of new neoclassical economics or spatial econometrics. This is also
because of
its
neo-Schumpeterian interest in variety, search, selection, routines, trust,
and embeddedness. But it goes further in sharing interest with both regional innovation
systems and, for example, Italian industrial district theory, in collaboration, innova-
tion, learning, path dependence, institutional change, disequilibrium and knowledge
intermediation practices of institutions and organisations, including i rms (Boschma
and Frenken, 2006). These 'bring life back into economic(s) geography' to paraphrase
Hodgson (1993). In what follows, the chapter reprises and updates the case for an evolu-
tionary approach over any alternative approach to the understanding of spatial process.
Finally, having made the connection to the evolutionary study of regional innovation,
one strand of the broadening i eld of evolutionary economic geography, the chapter
i nishes by devoting empirical attention to search and selection procedures conducted
by high-tech businesses in UK ICT agglomerations of which the M4 motorway corridor
is one, and East Anglia, centred on Cambridge, is the other. The interest here lies in the
discovery of practices of possibly adverse search and selection. That is, what is normally
presumed to be an asset of agglomerative behaviour - indeed it is said to be a main
driver of the 'cluster craze' (Asheim et al., 2006) - namely access to prized 'knowledge
spillovers' and 'swift trust' (Sabel, 1995), turns out to be associated with quite high trans-
action costs and extortionate rents, the apotheosis, in other words, of diseconomies of
agglomeration.
2. Theorising evolutionary economic geography
Neoclassical theory hypothesises that economic actors are homogeneous, rational, non-
opportunistic and capable of calculating best value optimal decisions in a world without
uncertainty. The i rm is the centrepiece of this ratiocination. Here, economic actors
transform inputs into outputs represented mathematically as a production function
given appropriate technology and, through the market, an external price mechanism
