Berkeley in-between : radicalizing economic geography

Economic geography was rather slow off the mark in getting its radical makeover. Until the late 1970s, the discipline was variously in the sway of the classical location theories of Von Thünen, Weber, Christaller, and Lösch, several strands of neoclassical regional science, and a descriptive, often rather dull, industrial geography. In each case, the economic world depicted tended to be ordered, predictable, set in static equilibrium. All that changed from the late 1970s when a cluster of Marxian and marxisant approaches gripped and transformed the discipline. Out went the old lexicon of bid‐rent curves, isodapanes, and hierarchically ordered hexagonal markets, and in came a new one with its talk of profit cycles, corporate restructuring, creative destruction, and deindustrialization. Radically different economic worlds came into view. They were jagged and lumpy, often chaotic, sometimes on the brink of careening out of control, punctuated by abrupt dislocations, and skewered by pervasive social conflicts. The promise of equilibrium seemed ever more irrelevant; the new language was of crisis, disruption, instability, and unevenness.