ABSTRACT
At a very broad level Economic Geography seeks to understand spatial uneven development, how geographies of growth and decline are produced, how they change over time and what role the spatial distribution of economic activity plays in the processes that drive these dynamics. Since the 1980s, Economic Geography has been restless. For practitioners within this field, the research domain, theoretical cores and principal methodologies have been up for grabs, along with the preferred connections to other fields within geography and those further afar (Martin & Sunley, 1996; Amin & Thrift, 2000; Plummer & Sheppard, 2001; Bathelt & Glückler, 2003). There is little question that the pluralism introduced by various ‘turns’ has broadened Economic Geography. Whether such breadth deepens our leverage over substantive concerns remains to be seen. Against this changing backcloth, a shift to embrace evolutionary ideas, a variant of heterodox economics, stands as one of the most recent examples of the dynamism of the field. While the popularity of Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) has grown rapidly, precisely what it offers economic geographers, and whether and how it should be integrated with existing theoretical frameworks are important questions that are beginning to generate healthy debate (Boschma & Frenken, 2006; Grabher, 2009; Mackinnon et al., 2009; Boschma & Martin, 2010; Pike et al., 2016).
