Urban governance, interspatial competition and the political geographies of the new economy

The concept of the new economy has been deployed widely during the last decade to refer to a variety of putative technological and institutional transformations in contemporary capitalism. The notion is hardly coherent, however, for it is used in significantly divergent ways in different contexts, whether journalistic, political or academic. Nonetheless, discourses on the new economy generally refer to one or more among five key purported developments (Martin 2002).