Economic Geography

From empirics to empiricism
The loss of empirical substance (as opposed to a celebration of empiricism) is the
distinctive feature of the PCTEG. It was once ‘normal science’ in regional or urban
economic research, or development studies (under the heading of an examina-
tion of the export base or the investment multiplier) to conduct empirical
research to find whether this or that economic factor, actor, sector, or whatever
had some special significance as a driver of economic change in a chosen place
(and therefore perhaps of special policy interest) (Dicken and Lloyd 1978). The
PCTEG has no capacity to perform on this stage, so it is often left to neo-liberal
simplistes (see Artisans below) who in effect know all the answers a priori (‘more
competitiveness’!). An economic understanding of space and place at more than
a sloganistic level requires the type of empirical (not empiricist) investigation for
which the PCTEG provides neither skills nor respect. I take it this was one of Ann
Markusen’s (1999) points in the ‘fuzzy concept’ paper, much misrepresented as
an old-fashioned call for quantitative approaches (Peck 2003).
Lancaster’s famous (amongst economists) theory of the second best, showed that
an intervention that would produce certain results in one context could lead 
to dramatically different ones if the starting conditions were only very slightly
different. This would suggest that policies for globalisation, ‘competitiveness’,
the ‘knowledge economy’ or some other claimed imperative need to be exam-
ined a lot more closely in specific context before anyone can have any confidence
that they will deliver what they promise even in their own terms. This is demon-
strated independent of anyone’s preferred values. This kind of contribution is not
possible within the PCTEG.
... and the geography
The second casualty of the great purge has been a similarly radical redirection 
of economic geography’s geographical imagination, severing it from what most
people think the subject is about – an empirically informed awareness of the
planet we live on. The PCTEG monastery is a delightful place for unspecified
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timeless ponderings about liquidities, propinquities, and relationalities untram-
melled by any pressure to weigh these on some kind of scales balanced by
disprovable facts, or to work out rigorous theories. The results are segued, accord-
ing to preference, to equally theological policy utterances, conjuring up agonistic
engagements, fleeting coalitions, passions, empowerment, and other wonderful
things that are unlikely to require any political body to actually change anything,
except perhaps in the rhetoric of its procedures. To judge by the practice, the job
of high-level economic geographical theorists today is to contemplate and pontif-
icate, primarily amongst themselves. The notion that geography might seek to
discover (rather than invent) and pass on some information that could be consid-
ered as sufficiently factual to change some minds, is history.
If persuasion is not to be achieved by presenting logic or evidence, cultural
capital must do the job. Ash Amin (2004), for example recently asserted that
globalisation and the general rise of a society of transnational flows and networks
‘no longer allow’ a conception of place politics in terms of spatially bound processes
and institutions. This certainly illustrates the labour saving benefits of this kind
of geography: just to mention relationality is enough to solve even the trickiest
of problems, like the significance of scale, in a trice. There’s no need to actually
investigate anything anywhere. The new emphasis on relationality is motivated,
according to Doreen Massey (2004), by the political need to combat localist or
nationalist claims to place-based essentialisms. She does not explain whose need
this is, nor why no equivalent campaign was needed to combat globalist essen-
tialisms. Equally puzzling, this kind talk is not new. As Henry Yeung (2005)
notes, geography has been ‘relational’ all along: that’s what made it geography in
the first place. The novelty today seems to lie in the implication that invoking it is
the end, rather than the beginning, of geographical inquiry.
The PCTEG repeatedly demonstrates this irrational leap from the (elemen-
tary) observation that all empirical studies are theoretically conditioned to a cava-
lier abandonment of any careful empirical input at all. Amin and Thrift (2005:
238) for example recently delivered the judgement that geography is ‘moving
on’, but unfortunately they gave no criteria whereby anyone other than them-
selves could distinguish between ‘on’, ‘back’, ‘down’, ‘off’ or ‘nowhere’. They
then issue a call to arms insisting on ‘not only imagining the world in multiple
ways but also a willingness to engage with heterodox thinking from all manner
of disciplines’. But since they gave no clues as to what ‘engagement’ might mean,
how to engage, on what basis such encounters should take place, only they will be
able to judge whether these noble tasks have been accomplished. The model of
geographical research presented here is to collect lots of pictures of the other in
a gigantic photo album, the beauty of which only an expert can judge.
So it is no wonder that the cognitive light is so hazy in many geographical
corridors that many find themselves embracing neo-liberalism without recognis-
ing it, or get to see only its most seductive profile. So the geographical friends of
Empire now include a deconstructionist chapter. Doel and Hubbard (2002:
365) for example, dismissing the idea that a city might be a place, conclude that
‘cities can only enhance their competitiveness by recognising that world 
The new imperial geography
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cityness ... needs to be performed and worked at in a multiplicity of sites’. After
scrambling through the textualist bushes they find themselves on the usual neo-
liberal highway, trotting along with everyone else seeking ‘competitiveness’.