Geography in a Fast Changing Economy

Course goals

Content

The world is thoroughly interconnected, as the current crisis in Ukraine, the corona pandemic but also previous worldwide crises (2008, the 1970s, 1939-1945, etc.) have shown. At the same time, it is not ‘flat’, as some claim; it is round and spiky – from the local to the global perspective, economic activity is unevenly distributed, and both global crises and global economic booms have different outcomes in different places. This observation means economic processes are fundamentally territorial processes, and this is revealed in the different fortunes of local communities, cities and regions. Place and space exert significant influence on the territorial occurrence and characteristics of economic processes, as well as on their dynamics, the way they develop over time.

Economic geography is concerned with describing, understanding, explaining and influencing economic territorial patterns and processes. For this purpose, from an identification of key actors, economic geography has developed a range of approaches and key concepts. This course offers an overview of these approaches and key concepts. Moving up and down between the local level to the global, main concepts and ideas on the spatial development of industries and of regions at various scales are discussed. This is done through the lens of main actors: firms/entrepreneurs, labour and institutions. In addition, the spatial economy involves a wider societal ‘context’ surrounding economic processes: socio-cultural, institutional, cultural and relational (network) patterns and characteristics. On top of that, the course is also an introduction to geography as a wider discipline, and pays attention to the (economic) landscape of the Netherlands.

Throughout the discussion of approaches and key concepts you will be engaged in discovering the value added of a bi-disciplinary (economics and geography) rather than a mono-disciplinary approach of economic processes. This will be done through the study of ‘real world’ cases in class, revealing the relevance of not just economic but also geographic questions with respect to recent global developments.