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Competition and Culture in the New Geography

Since at least the late 1980s, economic restructuring has given new prominence to sectors frequently categorized as the “new economy,” such as flexible manufacturing, financial services, information technology, cultural commodities, and tourism. Whereas many urban scholars view this process as the most recent instance of capitalism’s structural tendencies toward creative destruction and uneven development, some social scientists and planners take the “new” very seriously and describe a corresponding “new geography.” Otherwise theoretically disparate (and not exclusive to the discipline of geography per se), they argue that new economy industries engender their own spatial forms and systems, which cohere through particular social and economic mechanisms that cannot be attributed solely to ubiquitous processes and agents of urban and economic development. Often written from a technocratic planning and policy perspective, this literature frequently fails to address the concerns of urban political economy for capitalism’s structural contradictions and of urban poststructuralism for the discursive constitution of places and landscapes. Nevertheless, scholars from the latter camps should attend to the new geography research for insights on what emerging spatial divisions of labor portend for space and society. These three books offer provocative claims and empirical data that, although not wholly satisfactory, make useful starting points for critical thinking about the new