Geographies of production I

Abstract

This report considers recent developments and ongoing debates around relational economic geography, and a growing body of work that has focused on economic practices as a means better to understand production processes and economic development. In particular, it examines the critical reaction to relational thinking within the subdiscipline, and the nature of the debate about the degree to which relational work is – and needs to be – regarded as distinct from more traditional approaches to economic geography. It then considers how relational economic geography has become inflected towards an epistemological and methodological focus on practice. It argues that this engagement with economic practices provides the basis to respond to some of the limitations identified with earlier work, and opens up fruitful new potential for theorizing the nature of agency in the space economy.