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In the previous lecture I described the history of thought in development economics as being like the
history of European mapping of Africa: the rich if unreliable insights of the early explorers, the
development theorists of the 1940s and 1950s, were eventually ruled inadmissible as evidence because
those insights could not be clearly modeled. Still, nobody forgot that the continent had an interior;
development economics as a subject remained an acknowledged area of importance, even if much of its
distinctive content got lost.
The history of economic geography of the study of the location of economic activity is more like the
story of geological thought about the shapes and location of continents and mountain ranges. The
location of production is an obvious feature of the economic world. Indeed, I began to get interested in
economics as a schoolchild by looking at those old-fashioned maps of countries that used picturesque
symbols to represent economic activity: sheaves of wheat to represent agriculture, little miners' carts to
represent resource extraction, little factories to represent industry, and so on. And yet there is almost no
spatial analysis in mainstream economics. It is almost forty years since Walter Isard attacked economic
analysis for taking place in a "wonderland of no spatial dimensions," yet his plea for spatial economics
has gone virtually unanswered.
Consider, for example, the latest entrant in the field of economic principles textbooks: Joseph Stiglitz's
Economics. It's a widely acclaimed book, faulted if at all for its excessive comprehensiveness, which
accounts for its 1,100-plus page length. Yet the index contains no reference to the words "location" or
"spatial economics," and has precisely one reference to "cities'' which occurs in the course of a
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