Technology and New Regional Growth Complexes: The Economics of Discontinuous Spatial Development

Abstract

This paper outlines an economic logic for explaining the rise of new regional growth complexes, or regions where industries associated with major new product groups undergo their first major phase of growth. In it, both demand for and supply of spatial factors of production are seen as endogenous outcomes of the process of competition and technical change under the condition of perpetual economic disequilibrium. As a result of the development of these complexes, the margins of industrial space economies as a whole are pushed outward. This process of ‘extensification’ is a critical phase in the long run dynamics of spatial production relations. The logic of these dynamics is thus a key element in the future development of an historically tractable theory of spatial political economy. This paper assembles a series of specific concepts with respect to technology, production prices, and spatial behaviour into a coherent view of new growth centres. It borrows openly from a variety of literatures on these subjects; it is us synthetic rather than specialised. The purpose of the synthesis is to construct a solid interpretation of reality, rather than to construct an aesthetically perfect theoretical edifice. Nonetheless, virtually all of the constituent concepts in the hypothesis proposed here are available in mathematical form in the referenced literature.

I wish to thank Meric Gertler, Andrew Sayer and Manuel Castells for comments on a prior version of this paper. All errors remain my responsibility.