Economic Geography

What will count as economic geography?
The domain of economic geography – what counts as economic geography – has
enlarged in recent years. I’ll first present an overview of how I see the domain of
economic geography as having expanded and then use the example of access to
opportunity to illustrate some of the specific ways that the field has changed. 
An expanded conception of economic geography 
Economic geographers have traditionally focused on production, and, within
production, the emphasis until recently was on agriculture and manufacturing.
Telling indicators of this emphasis were the icons on the cover of Economic
Geography from 1950 to 1964: in one corner, a factory belching smoke; in the
other corner, palm trees, a farmer and ox.
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Another indicator is that the Economic
Geography Specialty Group within the Association of American Geographers did
not come into being until 1996; before then, the specialty group serving economic
geographers was the Industrial Geography SG, which ceased to exist in 1996. 
What counts as economic geography has expanded both within and beyond a
focus on production. Within the arena of production, as the service sector has
become more dominant, geographers have increasingly given more attention to
services. The production lens brought to the study of services by geographers
such as Bill Beyers and his students has resulted in studies exploring the location
decisions of service sector firms and documenting the importance of services to
regional export economies (Beyers 2005). Despite their growing willingness to
encompass industries other than manufacturing, economic geographers are still
wont to look at the world one industry at a time, whether the industry in ques-
tion is films, computers, software, financial services, machine tools, automobiles,
or retailing. 
Thinking back, thinking ahead
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The scope of economic geography has gradually expanded beyond the realm of
production, and I attribute this expansion to economic geographers’ increasing
interaction with urban geographers and to the blurring of the boundary between
these two sub-disciplines. The traditional division of labor between economic and
urban geography assigned the study of production to the economic and the study
of reproduction to the urban; until the 1980s the two seemed to be separated by
a firewall. In the 1960s and 1970s studies on the reproduction side (although 
it was not called that) focused on housing and neighborhoods, with a nod to
employment only insofar as workplace location (implicitly understood to be that
of the male household head) was assumed to influence residential location. Urban
geographers did not pay much attention to the impact of multiple earners in
households and rarely looked within the household to reveal the power relation-
ships at work there. Economic geographers did not see economic decisions as
being embedded in larger fields of social relations. 
Feminist geographers, most of whom have backgrounds in urban geography,
have influenced economic geography by showing the importance of the links
between production and reproduction, demonstrating these ties via in-depth
studies of the material circumstances of people’s everyday lives in places, and
thereby emphasizing the importance of place. An emphasis on place highlights the
intricate and profound connections between the economic and the non-economic –
indeed the difficulty of separating the two. Urban geographers, in part because 
of the nature of the urban, have been more comfortable than have economic
geographers with the study of places, in all their confusion, complexities, and
conundrums. By contrast, economic geographers have been interested in place
only secondarily as it relates, for example, to industrial clusters. 
In sum, what counts as economic geography has broadened both within and
beyond the study of production, such that economic geographers are increas-
ingly probing the connections between the economic and the non-economic 
or eroding the boundaries around what has been considered as the economic, 
to include the social, cultural, and political. If we want to understand how
economic geographies come to be, how they function and how they change, 
I think we need to be alert to the interdependencies between production and
reproduction and to the interdependencies created by space and place – and not
just one industry at a time. I hope that what will count as economic geography
will be sensitive to these interdependencies.