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In the context of recent articulations of a distinctive 'evolutionary economic geography' (EEG) (Boschma and Frenken 2009; Journal of Economic Geography 2007), our article sought to reassert broader conceptions of [...]

Economic geography has, over the past 15 or so years, drawn upon ideas from evolutionary economics in trying to understand processes of economic growth and change, with the concept of [...]

Learning from Clusters: A Critical Assessment from an Economic-Geographical Perspective. Edited by Ron A. Boschma and Robert C. Kloosterman. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2005. Clusters have become a major focus [...]

Trade unions are facing a series of challenges around place-based forms of work in industries such as construction, transport and public services. New spatial strategies by employers involving corporate reorganization, increased outsourcing and the use of migrant labour, allied to a deepening of neoliberal governance processes are accelerating a race to the bottom in wages and conditions. Drawing upon the experience of two recent labour disputes in the UK--at Heathrow Airport and Lindsey Oil Refinery--we explore the potential for workers to intervene in such globalizing processes. We highlight both the ability of grassroots workers to mobilize their own spatial networks but also their limitations in an increasingly hostile neoliberal landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the need for meaningful political responses to socionatural change, in this article we develop an interim politics of resourcefulness as a strategy for addressing the limitations of postpolitical environmental governance. Drawing on political and epistemological insights of third-world feminism as well as an ongoing collaborative with environmental justice organizations in West Atlanta, we argue that visions for just socionatural futures must necessarily be generated in conversation with historically marginalized communities. We offer an interim politics of resourcefulness as one way of forging those kinds of engagements between academic researchers and communities, and describe the forms that such engagements have taken in our own research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relationship between regions and external capital has been a topic of recurring interest in economic geography and regional development studies since the 1970s. This relationship has recently been re-conceptualised in terms of strategic coupling, a concept that is closely associated with the adoption of a Global Production Networks (GPNs) approach among economic geographers. Like many other concepts in economic geography, strategic coupling has been informed by the experiences of manufacturing and service-orientated regions in developed countries. As such, the question of the applicability of strategic coupling to resource economies in semi-peripheral regions of the world economy remains unexamined, despite the emergence of critical work seeking to unpack and evaluate the concept. This paper aims to extend this embryonic strand of research by providing a critical appraisal of the meaning and relevance of strategic coupling in the Pilbara mining region of Western Australia. My argument is that the relationship between mining capital and regional actors in the Pilbara is more akin to an unbalanced form of structural coupling than the balanced process of strategic coupling depicted in the GPN literature. This underlines the enduring relevance of some long-standing themes of geographical political economy such as external domination, uneven development, conflicts over value and the distinction between development ‘of’ a region and development ‘in’ a region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the dominant political-economic approach to scale has been subject to critique from poststructuralist perspectives. In this paper, I argue that the charge of ‘reification’ has been accepted too readily, masking areas of conceptual overlap between political-economic and poststructural approaches, particularly in terms of their shared concern with the construction of scale. On this basis, I propose to replace the established concept of ‘the politics of scale’ with ‘scalar politics’, arguing that it is often not scale per se that is the prime object of contention, but rather specific processes and institutionalized practices that are themselves differentially scaled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain's major cities have fallen behind the best practice in transport of European and north American cities, and need to address this to compete in global markets. A number of potential mechanisms are available to UK cities, but only if central government is willing to transfer (limited) financial powers to the city regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Points out that the purpose of this issue of "Urban Studies" is to evaluate critically the concept of clusters, and to broaden the empirical base of cluster analysis through a number of detailed studies. Explanations of the rise of clusters research and policy; Conceptualizing clusters; Clusters, knowledge and innovation; From dynamic to mature clusters.