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Beyond the Regional Cradle and Policy Trap: Proximity and Embedding as Development Potentialities

Prompted by the alleged rise of the “knowledge economy”, the nexus between knowledge and space presents one of the key fascinations in the field of economic geography and regional studies. Over the years, a lively, even frenzied debate, has emerged, yielding some consensus, but also many doubts and open questions. The debate starts with approaching the role of knowledge primarily from an “endogenous” development perspective. This means that a city’s or region’s wealth is attributed, first and foremost, to its capacity to accumulate and valorise knowledge. Understanding this “local” capacity in technical, organisational, institutional and even socio-economic terms poses a key challenge for our thinking and inquiries. Especially in policy debates, these capacities are principally seen as generally attainable. The implication is that once basic resource conditions (such as physical infrastructure, education and business services) are met, each region is seen as capable of nurturing its own innovative capacities. As a result, a substantial part of policy-making has been geared towards the shaping and circulation of regional “selfhelp” practices, based on concepts such as clusters, Regional Innovation Systems, Triple Helix and the creative class. A problem with the “endogenous” perspective is its emphasis on factors and processes within the region (Van Reine & Dankbaar, 2011). More specifically, it assumes that there are ubiquitous regional advantages “out there” waiting to be grasped and promoted. These advantages are twofold. In part, they are based on spatial proximity, and the way that spatial proximity intersects with other forms of proximity such as social, cognitive, organizational and institutional (Boschma, 2005; Capello & Faggian, 2005; Mattes, 2011), as a