Volume 66, Issue 1

How people assess their prospects and act accordingly is anchored in time and space. But context is only half the story. Human beings share predispositions in favour of the here and now, discounting the future, and risk aversion. This paper provides a framework for integrating cognition with context in economic geography focusing upon agency, resources, and risk and uncertainty in European labour markets. In doing so, it seeks to avoid essentialising the individual while ensuring that the resulting framework does not leave individuals as cyphers of time and place. The framework is illustrated by reference to individual’s assessments of the consequences of technological change for their employment prospects in a multicountry European setting. Implications are drawn for a behavioural economic geography that is policy relevant.

Urban-regional economies are developing in highly variegated, uneven ways globally. In economic geography, studies of urban-regional development emphasize the prospects for innovative, globally-competitive industrial sectors to emerge and enhance a city-region’s exchange value in global markets. This focus reflects a productivist bias that may fail to address issues related to the use-value of, or living conditions associated with urban transitions. Such concerns are particularly significant in the Global South where urbanization has often not led to socioeconomic transformations that benefit the majority of urban residents. To examine the relationships between a city’s exchange and use value, this paper argues for a sociotechnical systems approach that conceptualizes cities as constituted by interdependent or coupled regimes related to production, consumption, and infrastructure that stabilize urban-regional economies and determine development pathways. The framework is deployed empirically to examine the case of Nairobi, Kenya – a rapidly growing urban-regional economy characterized by high rates of inward foreign direct investment, principally in speculative real estate ventures in the consumption regime. Domestic manufacturing industries (the production regime) are stagnating, struggling to compete against imports, and failing to generate widespread formal employment and raise tax revenues for the infrastructure regime. The net result is a city characterized by fragmented or splintered regimes that create highly uneven, exclusionary development outcomes. These dynamics and findings are analyzed in relation to a similar study of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in order to demonstrate the comparative potential of this conceptual approach. The paper concludes with a call for economic geographers to better account for the use-value of urban-regional economies such that development concerns beyond production become more central to our analyses.

The present article aims at analyzing the dynamics of innovation that emerges and develops in some iconic collaborative spaces that are epicenters of a technological or artistic revolution. The study focuses on three cases (the Homebrew Computer Club, the TransMedTech institute, and the elBulli restaurant). The results highlight some important common traits between these collaborative spaces, namely: The dynamics of innovation in these spaces is orchestrated by bottom-up initiatives carried out by informal groups of passionate individuals (called the “commoners” in the contribution) who articulate a series of “innovation commons” to develop their collaborative innovative project. Based on our observations, the dynamics of innovation in the collaborative spaces results from the following sequence of  commons : 1)  social relationship commons , 2)  symbolic commons , and 3)  innovation commons . Each of these commons corresponds to a collective action governance mechanism over a specific common pool resource which is a key determinant of the innovative project.

In this paper we explore patenting activity in two peripheral economies (Portugal and Greece), to analyze the dispersion of inventor networks. Inventor networks are key conduits through which knowledge flows. Therefore, they can be critical in the catch-up process of peripheral economies – economies that belong to the group of rich countries but have weaker innovation systems. As global value chains fragment into geographically dispersed activities, opportunities arise for peripheral economies to participate in global innovation processes. However, different types of innovation activities have distinct network properties. More codifiable innovative activities can be carried out through collaboration by internationally dispersed teams. On the other hand, activities that are more dependent on tacit knowledge are likely to require the co-location of knowledge workers. This implies that innovation that relies mostly on tacit knowledge will provide limited connectivity benefits for peripheral economies’ innovation systems. We hypothesize that, while this is generally true, “leading” innovative multinational enterprises may possess more sophisticated capabilities for transnational collaboration than less innovative firms. Therefore, innovation in activities involving tacit knowledge may show different network characteristics depending on who performs them: leading firms or “laggards”. Our results, based on data from Portugal and Greece are consistent with our hypotheses.