Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
(Castells, 1996; Hohenberg and Lees, 1995). A central network position can be achieved
by attracting corporate headquarters, developing specialised business services, and
functioning as major transportation hubs. On the one hand, one might expect cities and
regions in one historical era (e.g. based on railways) to be less successful in the next era
(e.g. based on airlines), because of institutional rigidities and sunk costs associated with
previous infrastructures. On the other hand, some major cities (like London and New
York) seem to be capable of maintaining their leading positions in world-wide operating
networks (Wall, 2009).
6
The i fth and i nal part of this volume focuses on the relationship between structural
change and the evolution of the spatial system at the macro level. Jan Lambooy, being
one of the founding fathers of evolutionary economic geography, takes up this issue in
Chapter 22. He explores how an evolutionary approach in economic geography may deal
with the inter-relationship between structural change and the evolution of the economic
landscape. While the relation between technology and economic development has drawn
a lot of attention, Lambooy argues that the impact of this relation on spatial structures,
in particular urbanisation, has remained relatively unexplored. He claims that spatial
structures tend to rel ect technological and economic development in various ways, but
often with a time lag, because of physical and institutional constraints that are engraved
in space. More particularly, Lambooy discusses how general purpose technologies like
ICT have impacted on spatial patterns, such as the process of urbanisation and the
spatial evolution of industries and networks.
Evolutionary economic geography deals with the uneven distribution of economic
activity across space, and how that evolves over time. In Chapter 23, James Simmie takes
up how new technological regimes impact on the evolution of the economic landscape.
He examines the example of the rise of the service-based economy, and he addresses the
need for an evolutionary perspective to investigate its spatial implications. Drawing on
recent experiences in the evolution of the English urban system, Simmie investigates two
recent phenomena in the rise of the information society, namely the rise of knowledge-
intensive business services and the importance of network ties between service sectors in
the Greater South East region.
An evolutionary approach centres on historical processes that produce the uneven
economic landscape. In this respect, spatial patterns emerge from economic growth
processes that occurred in the past (Simmie and Carpenter, 2007). At the same time,
spatial distributions af ect subsequent patterns of growth because of the uneven spatial
distribution of resources built up in the past giving rise to (positive and negative)
externalities. Stochastic models of urban growth using time series on city size investi-
gate sustained
urban growth and decline, thus going beyond the logic of Gibrat's Law
stating that urban growth rates are stochastic and independent of city size (Pumain
and Moriconi-Ebrard, 1997). This approach falls under evolutionary economic geogra-
phy, since these models account for path dependence in which each event changes the
probability of a next event to occur (Arthur, 1989; David, 1985). Such an evolutionary
perspective dif ers from the core model in new economic geography (NEG) (Krugman,
1991) where changes in spatial distributions are explained from parametric changes, as in
transport cost. The concept of path dependence in that model is dif erent in that it refers
to multiple equilibria that are sensitive to initial conditions only (Boschma and Frenken,
2006; Martin, 1999, 2010a, 2010b). What unites evolutionary models is that the growth
