In recent years a spate of books and articles have argued that the world today is so mobile, so interconnected and so integrated that it is, in one prominent assessment, flat. But as Harm de Blij contends in The Power of Place, geography continues to hold billions of people in an unrelenting grip. We are all born into natural and cultural environments that shape what we become, individually and collectively. From our "mother tongue" to our father's faith, from medical risks to natural hazards, where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming the obstacles in our way. Incorporating a series of revealing maps, de Blij focuses on the rough terrain of the world's human and environmental geography. The world's continuing partition into core and periphery, and apartheid-like obstructions to migration from the former to the latter, help explain why, in this age of globalization, less than 3 percent of "mobals" live in countries other than where they were born. Maps of language distribution suggest why English, the Latin of the latter day, may become as hybridized as its forerunner. The fateful map of religion casts a shadow of what he calls "endarkenment" over the future of the planet in a time of increasingly destructive weaponry. De Blij also looks at the ways we are redefining place so as to make its power even more potent than it has been, with troubling implications for the future. Optimistic demographic projections based on declining national populations in the global core are tempered by the prospect that the vast majority of the 3 billion additions to the world's population will burden the periphery. Megacities such as Lagos and Jakarta with their corridors and nodes of globalization foreshadow a future of potentially explosive social contrasts. Subnational entities from southern Sudan to northern Sri Lanka seek independence at a time when the planet's limited living space is already fragmented into 200 states. Looking down from the business-class compartment of a transcontinental airliner, the world looks a lot flatter than it does from the doorway of a dwelling in a local village. Harm de Blij brings us back to earth to reveal the all-too-rugged contours of place.

Planetary Mine suggests that the burgeoning race for resources that began at the turn of the century has come to signal two distinct, yet overlapping, epoch-making shifts: the end of the Western phase of capitalism, on the one hand, and an unfolding technological revolution on the other. Through an exploration of the integrated logistical infrastructures that connect mines in the Atacama Desert of Chile with an expanding constellation of megacities, ports, banks, and factories across East Asia, the book rethinks uneven geographical development in the current, post-globalisation context.

This critical addition to the growing literature on innovation contains extensive analyses of the institutional and spatial aspects of innovation. Written by leading scholars in the fields of economic geography, innovation studies, planning, and technology policy, the fourteen chapters cover conceptual and measurement issues in innovation and relevant technology policies. The contributors examine how different institutional factors facilitate or hamper the flows of information and knowledge within and across firms, regions, and nations. In particular, they provide insights into the roles of important institutions such as gender and culture which are often neglected in the innovation literature, and demonstrate the key role which geography plays in the innovation process. Institutions and policy measures which support entrepreneurship and cluster development are also discussed. The result is a comparative picture of the institutional factors underlying innovation systems across the globe.

Governments and regional authorities often express the belief that the key to prosperity and economic expansion is related to the ability of countries to sustain regional clusters of competitiveness and innovation. The book reviews the most important conceptual approaches to the analysis of the emergence, growth and evolution of clusters of innovation. Drawing from the different experiences of industrial districts and high-tech regions such as Silicon Valley, Boston's biotech region, and Hsinchu-Taipei, the contributions in this book offer a broad interpretative framework and policy implications for the creation and strengthening of competitive clusters. Themes include: * the wide variety of existing clusters and the diversity in their emergence and growth; * the international mobility of factors and demand linkages; * the role of different network types and the social setting; * the accumulation of capabilities in key large actors and the importance of spinoffs and new firm formation; * the role of different learning regimes and sectoral specificities; * the importance of social networks, labour mobility, and face-to-face contacts as vehicles of knowledge spillovers. Broad implications are drawn for the design of policies to encourage successful economic clusters in developed and developing clusters.

This critical addition to the growing literature on innovation contains extensive analyses of the institutional and spatial aspects of innovation. Written by leading scholars in the fields of economic geography, innovation studies, planning, and technology policy, the fourteen chapters cover conceptual and measurement issues in innovation and relevant technology policies. The contributors examine how different institutional factors facilitate or hamper the flows of information and knowledge within and across firms, regions, and nations. In particular, they provide insights into the roles of important institutions such as gender and culture which are often neglected in the innovation literature, and demonstrate the key role which geography plays in the innovation process. Institutions and policy measures which support entrepreneurship and cluster development are also discussed. The result is a comparative picture of the institutional factors underlying innovation systems across the globe.

This book applies a spatial economics perspective to the understanding of the recent dynamism of the global economy, with particular focus on East Asia, and examines the prospects of regional integration in East Asia.

This book examines the responses of the Indian states to economic reforms, and addresses a wide range of issues, such as growth dynamics, income inequality, the fiscal behaviour of the states, the role of the banking sector, and the emerging institutional structure aimed at catering for social banking and strategies for agricultural growth.

By examining the issues of environmental policy formation and implementation linked to economic development, and reviewing the Japanese experiences and the examples of other Asian countries, this book reveals factors of dynamism between environmental policy and social change in a domestic, regional and global context.

Techno-regions have generated most of the new jobs in the past decade and this technology is driving economic development; however, problems persist. This book highlights the potential pitfalls and suggests methods by which a sustainable, distinctive and prosperous technology-based regional economy can exist.

Drawing from the detailed case studies of India and five ASEAN countries, this volume establishes the complementary role of innovation system and trade regime in promoting production and use of ICT and draws lessons for other developing countries that adopted a liberal trade regime to catch up with the ICT revolution.

This is a book about how cities occupy space. We are not interested in architectural masterpieces, but the tools for reinventing city life. We try to provide a framework for the architecture and design of public space without aesthetic considerations. We identify several defining factors. First of all, history as the city today very much depends on how it was yesterday. The geographical location and the technology available at a point of time both play a constraining role in what can be done as well. Culture, in the form of social norms, laws and regulations, also restricts what is possible to do. On the other hand, culture is also important in guiding the ideas and aspirations that together inform what society wants the city to be. The city needs government intervention, or regulation, to ameliorate the problem posed by a tangle of externalities and public goods. We focus on two comparative case studies: the evolution of urban form in the US and how it stands in a sharp contrast with the evolution of urban form in Japan. We emphasise the difference in regulations between both jurisdictions. We study how differences in technological choices driven by culture (i.e. racial segregation), geography (i.e. the availability of land) and history (i.e. the mobility restrictions of the Tokugawa period) result in vast differences in mobility regarding the share of public transport, walking and cycling versus motorised private transport. American cities are constrained by rules that are much further from the neoliberal economic idea of free and competitive markets than the Japanese ones. Japanese planning promotes competition and through a granular, walkable city dotted with small shops, fosters variety in the availability of goods and services. We hypothesise how changing regulations could change the urban form to generate a greater variety of goods and to foster the access to those goods through a more equitable distribution of wealth. Critically, we point out that a desirably denser city must rely on public transport, and we also study how a less-dense city can be made to work with public transport. We conclude by claiming that changes in regulations are very unlikely to happen in the US, as it would require deep cultural changes to move from local to a more universal and less excluding public good provision, but they are both possible and desirable in other jurisdictions.

Japanese manufacturing firms established in Britain have often been portrayed as carriers of Japanese corporate best practice for work and employment. In this book, the authors challenge these views through case study research, undertaken at several Japanese manufacturing plants in Britain during the 1990s.
The authors argue that in actual fact production and employment regimes are adapted and 're-made' in a number of ways, responding to specific corporate and local contexts. In particular, they focus upon the ways in which Japanese and British managers have sought to construct distinctive work regimes in the light of their particular branch plant mandates and competencies, the evolving character of management-worker relations within factories and the varied product and labor market conditions they face. The book highlights the constraints as well as the opportunities facing managers of these greenfield workplaces, and the uncertainties that continued to characterize the development of management strategies. Ultimately the authors show how arguments about the role of overseas branch plants in the dissemination of management practices must take more careful account of the varied ways in which such factories are implicated in wider corporate strategies. The operations of international firms are embedded within intractable features of capitalist employment relations, especially as they are 're-made' in specific local and national settings.
This book is an important intervention in contemporary debate about international firms and globalization, and will be of interest to teachers, researchers, and advanced students of this subject from disciplines including Business Studies, Organization Studies, Industrial Relations, Sociology, Political Economy, and Economic and Social Geography.

In recent years, Supply Chain Management has gained greater attention from academics and managers concerned to improve process efficiencies; and take best advantage of information technology and inter-organizational networks and relationships. This book brings together leading experts to provide a reference point for developments and issues in the area.

Why do some cities grow economically while others decline? Why do some show sustained economic performance while others cycle up and down? In Keys to the City, Michael Storper, one of the world's leading economic geographers, looks at why we should consider economic development issues within a regional context--at the level of the city-region--and why city economies develop unequally. Storper identifies four contexts that shape urban economic development: economic, institutional, innovational and interactional, and political. The book explores how these contexts operate and how they interact, leading to developmental success in some regions and failure in others. Demonstrating that the global economy is increasingly driven by its major cities, the keys to the city are the keys to global development. In his conclusion, Storper specifies eight rules of economic development targeted at policymakers. Keys to the City explains why economists, sociologists, and political scientists should take geography seriously.

This is the most comprehensive and significant statement about the value and potential of economic geography in thirty years. More than forty leading economists and geographers from around the world investigate the rival theories and perspectives that have sustained the recent development of economic geography, and offer stimulating insights into the emerging global economy of the twenty-first century.

In den westlichen Staaten gibt es einen Diskussionsbedarf uber den weiteren Weg von Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft angesichts der durch die Globalisierung zunehmenden oekonomischen Konkurrenz und des Wandels von einer Industrie- zu einer Informationsgesellschaft. In den Debatten uber die zukunftige soziooekonomische Entwicklung wird das alte Schlagwort des Dritten Weges (zwischen Kapitalismus und Sozialismus) aufgebracht. Es lasst sich ein Traditionsstrang von der Diskussion um Anthony Giddens Third Way uber Ota Siks Marktsozialismus uber die SPD-Programme der 50er Jahre geradewegs zuruck in die zwanziger Jahre verfolgen, wo sich unterschiedliche Personen und Gruppen um eine solche Zwischenordnung bemuhten. Die Aufgabe der Arbeit ist es, die Suche vieler Zeitgenossen der Weimarer Republik unterschiedlichster Couleur nach einem Dritten Weg vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Zeitdiagnose zu analysieren.

This textbook is an introduction to some of the most important economic, social and political challenges that the EU currently faces. It covers the issues of competitiveness, cohesion, ageing, migration, employment and social polarization, enlargement, and the emergence of regionalism and nationalism. These structural challenges will in the medium-run determine the place of the EU in the world. Written by a single author, it has greater cohesion than many of the multi-contributor volumes available.

The book describes the context within which the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union has been established, the basic mechanisms of the policy for the main sectors of agricultural production and their adaptation over time in line with changes in the broader world economy; the changes in Eastern Europe, the problems of developing countries and the GATT-WTO Agreement in particular. An introduction by Franz Fischler, European Commissioner with responsibility for Agriculture, sets the scene for Community policy beyond 2000.

The worst chemical disaster ever could be happening right now. In India and Bangladesh between forty and eighty million people are at risk of consuming too much arsenic from well water that might have already caused one hundred thousand cancer cases and thousands of deaths. Many millions elsewhere in South-East Asia and South America may soon suffer a similar fate. Venomous Earth is the story of this tragedy: the geology, the biology, the politics and the history. It starts in Ancient Greece, touches down in today's North America and takes in William Morris, alchemy, farming, medicine, mining and a cosmetic that killed two popes.

The book presents the views of leading experts on both sides of the Atlantic on the changes to the social structure of cities as a result of recent migration. The contributors consider the link between globalization cities and existing zones of social exclusion, employment prospects for all residents and the likelihood of social mobility for recent arrivals. A particular feature of the book is the comparative focus of the chapters that, for the first time, seek to assess the importance of national institutional structures.

The world is not as mobile or as interconnected as we like to think. As Harm de Blij argues in The Power of Place, in crucial ways-from the uneven distribution of natural resources to the unequal availability of opportunity-geography continues to hold billions of people in its grip. We are all born into natural and cultural environments that shape what we become, individually and collectively. From our "mother tongue" to our father's faith, from medical risks to natural hazards, where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny. Hundreds of millions of farmers in the river basins of Asia and Africa, and tens of millions of shepherds in isolated mountain valleys from the Andes to Kashmir, all live their lives much as their distant ancestors did, remote from the forces of globalization. Incorporating a series of persuasive maps, De Blij describes the tremendously varied environments across the planet and shows how migrations between them are comparatively rare. De Blij also looks at the ways we are redefining place so as to make its power even more potent than it has been, with troubling implications.

This book examines tropical resource management in West Africa. Drawing widely on field examples, it argues that more account should be taken of ecological conditions and indigenous land-use methods in decision making about tropical management projects.

Clothes are inherently geographical objects, yet few of us consider the social and economic significance of their journey from design to production to consumption. The Geographies of Fashion is the first in-depth study of fashion economies from a geographer's perspective, exploring the complex relationship between our attachment to the clothes we own, love and desire, and their geographic and economic ties. How far does a garment physically travel from factory to wardrobe? How do clothes come to have social or economic value and who or what creates it? What are the geographies of fashion and how do they interact with one another? This ground-breaking book powerfully reframes fashion spaces, from the body to the city, digital or virtual space to material production, positioning fashion at the centre of contemporary culture and collective identities. Combining contemporary theoretical approaches with a cutting-edge analysis of international fashion brands and institutions including Maison Martin Margiela, Zara, Louis Vuitton, ASOS and Savile Row, The Geographies of Fashion is essential reading for students of fashion, geography and related disciplines including sociology, architecture and design.

This timely book presents a wide range of quantitative methods, including complex network analysis and econometric modelling, to illustrate how the Internet both follows, and at the same time challenges, more traditional geographies.Emmanouil Tranos explores the spatiality of the Internet, its physical infrastructure, and the geographic and socio-economic factors that shape its spatial distribution. He shows that although the Internet is a technical system with strong topological attributes, an almost 'hidden' spatial dimension also exists. The scattering of Internet Backbone Networks across European city-regions is compared with the aviation network in order to better understand the topology of the digital infrastructure. Finally, a causality analysis demonstrates the significant positive effect of the Internet infrastructure in the economic development of regions characterized by high absorptive capacity. This book will prove a highly fascinating read for those with an interest in Internet geographies, ICTs, regional development and infrastructure, digital economy, network analysis, and regional science. Practitioners working on local and regional development, as well as those focusing on ICTs, digital economy and smart cities, will also find this book to be an invaluable reference tool. Contents: Preface 1. Introduction 2. The Fundamentals of the Internet Infrastructure: A Cross-discipline Review 3. Methodology and Research Framework 4. The Network Nature of the Internet Infrastructure 5. Internet Backbone and Aviation Networks: A Comparative Study 6. An Explanatory Analysis of the (Unequal) Distribution of the Internet Backbone Networks 7. Internet Infrastructure and Regional Economic Development: A Causality Analysis 8. Conclusions References Index

Macroeconomic adjustment and sectoral reforms have strongly modified the framework for rural development in Central America. This book offers a structural analysis of agrarian policies in Central America and their impact on production conditions and farmers' welfare.