Territorial Production Complexes

Abstract

The territorial production complex is a concept introduced in Soviet planning of spatial organization of the economy – industrial production, in particular. It is a planned economic entity consisting of three economically linked components: production (including specialization industries and auxiliary activities), infrastructure, and local resources (including manpower), which have to be harmonized in a particular geographical area. The main rationale for planning the territorial production complex is making savings in labor inputs, investment outlays on infrastructure, and transportation costs. The concept was primarily applied in the planning of the industrial development of the vast sparsely populated lands of Siberia. A famous, widely discussed example is the Urals–Kuznetsk Combine created in the 1930s. The most essential feature of the territorial production complex, making it fundamentally different from all the concepts conceived in Western geography and economics, is that it was developed for the practical purposes of determining and creating the territorial organization of production, rather than simply analyzing or explaining it. This rests on a belief in the necessity and possibility of designing and controlling economic life at the macro-spatial level, which was one of the fundamental assumptions of the centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union and other state-socialist countries.