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Nicholas A. Phelps: Interplaces: An Economic Geography of the Inter-urban and International Economies

The prestigious Oxford University Press recently published Nick Phelp’s book, in a row of key economic geography monographs by, among others, Neil Coe and Henry Yeung, Jamie Peck, Eric Sheppard and Harald Bathelt and Johannes Glückler. Whereas the latter books are on familiar theories and paradigms of economic geography, such as global production networks, geographical political economy and relational economic geography, Nick Phelps’ book is on a much less obvious and known phenomenon, namely interplaces. In the preface he honestly states that the book “is a pragmatic and inelegant attempt to bring together [...] three main [...] strands of research on urban agglomeration, the politics and planning of (post) suburbanization, and the economic geography of the multinational enterprise and foreign direct investment” (p. vii). They apparently meet at interplaces, a term coined by Casey (1993) for the first time, but not much used in economic geography. Interplaces is a shorthand for the economy in between, that is to say spaces between cities and between nations, where many economic activities take place, but which so far has received little attention in economic geography. The organizing principles or metaphors that run through the book are the agglomeration, the network, the enclave and the arena. The main point Phelps wants to make in this book is “that the geographic organization of the contemporary economy is neither purely one of agglomerations (place) or networks (space) [...]” (p. 9), but that a considerable part consists of interplaces, namely enclaves, such as export processing zones, and arenas, such as trade fairs as temporary clusters. It is therefore particularly the enclave and the arena that Phelps regard as significantly contributing “to our vocabulary when seeking to understand contemporary economic geography” (p. 10). The focus on interplaces is also a “call for an economic geography that sees empirical validation of meso-level abstractions as key to understanding the possibilities for broader generalizations [...] and the celebration of exceptions-of the uniqueness of place when these are not reducible to the dictates of the metatheory” (p. 32). The book is structured in five parts and 11 chapters. After introducing the term interplaces in Part I, the theoretical framework is laid out in Part II, both within human geography (Chapter 2) and economic geography (Chapter 3). In the latter chapter, the above-mentioned organizing principles and metaphors are conceptualized. In Part III, interplaces in the inter-urban economy are dealt with, such as suburbia (Chapter 4), the mid-urban realm (Chapter 5), but also plains, trains and automobiles (Chapter 6) in which economic activities take place on the move, and policy mobility (Chapter 7). Part IV discusses interplaces in the international economy, concerning the multinational enterprise (Chapter 8), global production networks (Chapter 9), the cognitive-cultural economy (Chapter 10) and the non-territorial realm of the international economy (Chapter 11), whereas conclusions are drawn in Part V. The book is rich both concerning its international empirical examples from countries such as the UK, USA, Germany, Russia, China, Indonesia and Chile, and its historical accounts. Although it is not an easy read, and although there are some small issues, such as the imprecise use of geographical names (Indonesia is, for instance, presented as an example for East Asia), it provides eye-opening insights in forgotten topics in economic geography. It also works out very well the dualities and tensions between fixity and mobility, place and space, agglomeration and networks, and elaborates on non-places, placelessness, as well as the non-territorial and trans-territorial realm of economic activities. The book clearly contributes to recent pleas to take place seriously again in economic geography, also to make clearer what the latter distinguishes from geographical economics and other neighboring disciplines (Rodríguez-Pose 2011; Hassink/Gong 2017). I therefore definitely recommend this book highly, certainly to economic geographers, but also to urban geographers and planners.