Proximity, territory and innovation
A critical approach from absent categories: scalarity, social structuring and periphery
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-34022021000300187Keywords:
local productive systems, relational space, social space, production of space, historical-structuralAbstract
From the mid-1980s to the present day, there has been a long debate focused on the relationships between proximity, territory and innovation. This debate was structured around two underlying questions: what links society with geographic space?; and what are the reasons that affect its economic performance? This work offers an interpretation of the debate, showing the main hypotheses at stake, the limitations they faced, and the lines of research that open up from there. It is argued that the competing ideas oscillated between the marginalist and the relational approach and the growing importance and autonomy assigned to the institutions that favor the predominance of the second over the first. It is also observed that the relational foundations, by specifying and gaining centrality, revealed their main limitations. They are expressed in a structural disconnection between society and geographic space, which then extends to the inability to define the bases of relative economic performance, the scale of production systems, their internal social divisions and the center-periphery structuring of world system. The article concludes with a balance of the research agenda based on the assessment made.
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