Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
industry. Within the advanced countries, this has been a poor strategy, as growth
has come to those regions and countries concentrating on new technologies and
products.
The spatial structure
Apart from the results, it is possible to criticize the whole spatial apparatus of
regional aid to development in Britain. For the planning to be effective, a
regional structure of economic planning regions might have been used, as was
begun in 1964, dividing the whole country into units within which specific plans
might be set up. Such regions could be devised so as to maximize both their
homogeneity (e.g. coalfield regions, textile regions) and their functional identity,
focusing on one of the large regional cities. As an alternative for regional
planning, the counties have never had a strong economic function. Instead of a
strategic planning system, there came into being a set of regions, varying in
geography over time, defined on the basis of a single set of statistics:
unemployment.
Perhaps an even more fundamental critique is that the definition of regions for
aid was not a function of positive aims, but a fire-fighting approach, seeking to
help every region that encountered difficulty. This is attacking the symptoms
rather than the causes. Only in a few noteworthy exceptions were there moves to
new industrial areas. The best-known of these is the “new towns”, which were
created as industrial sites as well as residential areas for overflow from the large
cities.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that much of the money spent must have
been incorrectly allocated to industries and areas with little hope, and that the
forces for change and development were simply hindered by the programme. The
lesson that can be gained from a study of economic history of British regions is
that a series of massive changes has occurred, and that while some regions can
convert so as to have important roles in more than one long wave of
development, many are important only during a single period when they enjoy a
favourable combination of physical and human resources.
Spain
This country belongs to Europe and, on some historical indexes, to the older
industrialized, developed group of countries like the UK. On the other hand, it
has also been regarded as part of the semi-periphery in studies of world systems
(Knox & Agnew 1989). Under this analysis, rather than part of the core, it is on a
Mediterranean fringe, with the alternative possibilities of moving up into the
core, or down into the periphery. It offers some parallels with Britain, but also
some significant differences which are treated in the following summary
of development. One of the differences has been in the strength of regional
feeling. Spain was united in the fifteenth century with the unification of Castille
