Industrial Geography

Abstract

Industrial geography has traditionally been defined as the study of the spaces, places, and geographical circulation of industry. It is a sub‐branch of economic geography and deals with the spatial arrangement of industrial activities. This entry is organized along a rough time line. After an introduction, the second section seeks to review briefly the main phases of the discipline's historical development from the early twentieth century when industrial geography was institutionalized in both Western Europe and the United States to its most recent situation. Four main phases and relevant approaches are presented: location theory and spatial science; the behavioral approach; Marxism, the radical approach, and regulation theory; and industrial district and cultural turn. The third section outlines the contemporary research in industrial geography by listing some of the primary groups of theoretical and empirical studies: globalization; firms, networks, institutions, and poststructuralism; industrial district, embeddedness, cluster, and agglomeration; global production networks, global commodity chains, and global value chains; labor and labor market; and the evolutionary approach. The last section concludes this entry.