Encounters and Engagements between Economic and Cultural Geography

The introduction traces the history of growing intersections between economic and cultural geography, including milestones such as: non-structural Marxism; Granovetter’s thesis of cultural embeddedness; flexible production, clusters, and the role of trust, reputation, and tacit knowledge; geographies of the body; Richard Florida’s creative class; consumption; and the cultural turn. It points to some of the analytical and epistemological implications of the convergence between the cultural and the economic. Finally, it briefly summarizes each of the chapters in the volume.

My aim in this chapter is to provide a cultural geographical history of the very discipline of economic geography. I write that history by focusing on four cultural elements: bodies, books, machines, and places. My theoretical starting point is similar work carried out in science studies. From the beginning of that field there was recognition that scientists were and are never simply “brains in vats,” disembodied, displaced and disembedded from culture. Knowledge never arrives from pure brainpower. Rather, it is the outcome of embodied and located cultural practices that include the use of various cultural artifacts. Scientists are not faceless organs of scientific rationality, but real people with particular kinds of socially defined bodies, histories, skills, and interests. Those characteristics make a difference to the kind of knowledge produced, even to the most rarefied forms of scientific inquiry and representation. I make a similar argument about economic geographers from the first stirrings of the discipline in late nineteenth century Western Europe through to the present. I draw upon various studies, many of them archive based, which I have carried out on the history of economic geography over the last 15 years.

Consumption is an activity where the notion of freedom prevails. The consumer has to feel that she or he can do what they want in the market place – buy this or that, apparently at will. For the culture of consumptive freedom to prevail, the commodity has to appear out of no-where, as total appearance stripped of background. So culture has a function: masking the material reality of the production of commodities. Masking the material particularly means eliminating the labor component from consumptive consciousness. This is especially because labor is most contradictory to consumptive happiness. Critical social theory wants to disturb this dream state, and the analysis of commodity chains is its political-theoretical agent. So commodity chain analysis, linking the act of consumption with the process of production, constitutes a materialist deconstruction of consumption culture. And further, as industrial capitalism is over-taken by financial capitalism, a new link needs to be added to the commodity chain, as finance, speculation and debt further distance both producers and consumers from economic reality – this is particularly the case for the speculative trading of commodities in the futures markets. This chapter explores such issues in terms of new actors and new cultural, political, economic power flows in the global financial capitalist economy. Exploring commodities in this way blurs the sub-disciplinary lines between economic and cultural geography.

The last 20 years have seen an explosion of work on geographies of consumption. Much of the research has been informed by approaches arising from the New Cultural Geographies. While cultural geographers have examined issues of representation, identity, landscape, and sociality, economic geographers continued to focus on geographies of retail and of commodities informed by political economic and commodity chain perspectives. Although the need to integrate production and consumption has long been discussed and the merits of particular approaches debated, economic and cultural perspectives have until recently remained relatively largely separate. As geographies of consumption expanded rapidly in the latter decades of the twentieth century they have not so much undergone a singular economic or cultural turn but have been characterised by the growing intersection of cultural and economic perspectives through particular research agendas. The chapter discusses these and then concludes with a discussion of research themes in which perspectives derived from cultural and economic geographies are providing new insights into the nature of social and spatial change.

In recent years, geographers have argued for a commodity chain approach to consumption. This approach involves tracing the multiple activities associated with the production of one good or service, such as manufacturing, consumption, design, retailing, marketing and advertising. Each commodity chain displays a distinct spatiality, but also distinct ethical and political concerns. The growing attractiveness of this approach relates to a broader “cultural turn” in human geography, which aims to bring together economy and culture, production and consumption, and the material and the symbolic. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the emergence and importance of a commodity chain approach to consumption, contrast it with other approaches, and to foreground the need to interrogate questions of gender along the chain. Through a case study of gender relations across space in the clothing commodity chain, the chapter will highlight the connections between women and the political possibilities opened up by a commodity chain approach.

Consumption research in geography illustrates the ongoing dialogue between the economic and the cultural. This paper examines consumer choice behavior of Chinese immigrants to Toronto to provide a hybrid view that emphasizes the role of ethnicity. Using a mixed methods approach that includes focus groups, field work, and surveys, it explores the relations between ethnic identity and economic rationality in immigrants’ choices of shopping outlets. In showing how shopping is saturated with cultural meanings, it reveals how their behavior contributes to the formation of unique ethnic retail environments.

Trust is a constituent of a broad range of social relations, such as interpersonal ties, communities, groups, classes, and societies. It is the basis for different processes within the spheres of economy and culture at varying spatial scales. The last three decades have seen neoliberal principles for organizing the economy becoming hegemonic, pervading social and cultural relations by trying to install an economic way of behaving in everyday life. Trust characterized by the logic of economic rationality has been on the rise. However, the cultural turn tells a different story: economics is something more than mere economic rationality and the role of trust within and between different spheres of society underlies economic relations. This chapter discusses how contributions to the study of trust improve our understanding of the intersections between economic and cultural geography, but also how geography’s focus on place, space, and scale contributes to the understanding of trust. This analysis points to the need to make the political dimension of trust explicit.

This chapter examine Detroit techno music production by utilizing the lenses of Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community and community-based proposals for rebuilding Detroit, which recognize that large-scale industrial production will not be coming back to the city. In light of the limited opportunities in the formal economy for city youth, the threat of illegal drugs and alcohol, and the defunding of arts programs in the public schools, Detroit’s techno community has been active in fostering the next generation of musicians while producing a critical alternative to mainstream urban music that glorifies violence and programs failure. To ensure the future for such young musicians by protecting the Detroit techno brand, Detroit’s techno community has also worked to emphasize Detroit both as the place where techno was born but also as a current creative force in the music. Detroit’s globally recognized techno musical production highlights a creative and mutually supportive community that has long been part of the city that has inspired its artists, even as Detroit and Michigan have largely overlooked them in favor of initiatives aimed at attracting footloose creative workers.

This chapter examine Detroit techno music production by utilizing the lenses of Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community and community-based proposals for rebuilding Detroit, which recognize that large-scale industrial production will not be coming back to the city. In light of the limited opportunities in the formal economy for city youth, the threat of illegal drugs and alcohol, and the defunding of arts programs in the public schools, Detroit’s techno community has been active in fostering the next generation of musicians while producing a critical alternative to mainstream urban music that glorifies violence and programs failure. To ensure the future for such young musicians by protecting the Detroit techno brand, Detroit’s techno community has also worked to emphasize Detroit both as the place where techno was born but also as a current creative force in the music. Detroit’s globally recognized techno musical production highlights a creative and mutually supportive community that has long been part of the city that has inspired its artists, even as Detroit and Michigan have largely overlooked them in favor of initiatives aimed at attracting footloose creative workers.

This chapter is a critical reflection on the role of networks and networking in the context of the creative economy. There is a large literature emerging on the role of networks in general in various economic contexts. Some older theoretical frameworks, such as clusters and industrial district analysis, place considerable importance on networks and the interactions within them. However, the dynamics and interactions that emerge in the context of the creative economy provide an interesting setting to test and explore how individuals use networks in their creative and cultural practices. This often involves managing not only a business but the enhancement of their knowledge base and artistic skills. Research for this chapter was conducted in 2005–2007 in the region of the North-East of England (UK), specifically in Newcastle-Gateshead, an old industrial city-region trying to establish itself as center of the knowledge and creative economy. The chapter maps the dynamics of individuals working in the creative economy in this context and captures their interactions and engagement as key elements in the local creative development of the city.

The city of Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, Spain, has long served as a magnet for religious pilgrims. Contemporary tourism has been greatly enabled and reshaped by the introduction of digital information and communication technologies. This chapter explores how cyberspace both reflects and in turn affects the landscapes of Santiago, as tourists acquire information, and often stereotypes, over the web. Because digital images are vital to local place promotion, the city’s representations on the Web have significant material impacts. Tourist expectations and behavior lead to the creation of Santiago as a “city of spectacle” designed to be consumed by non-locals. The chapter also addresses the impacts of technology-inspired tourism on the region’s Galician culture. Its aim is to demonstrate the unity of the cultural and the economic, the real and the virtual, the global and the local, in a concrete urban context.