ABSTRACT
The task facing economic geography is to make sense of the geographical pat-tern of economic activities around the world. In this book, the task has beenpursued using the geographical metaphor of core and periphery to provide a basic model or way of seeing, against which actual patterns of economic activities at a range of scales can be compared. Even at scales finer than the global or world region like Europe, the core-periphery conceptualization can be useful in thinking about how the core and periphery intersect locationally. The social, economic and locational polarization of migrant workers in world cities like Los Angeles, for example, reflects a kind of periphery or semi-periphery existing within the core. Significant pockets of wealth in some NICs and oil-rich semi-peripheral countries, in contrast, could be viewed as part of the core within the semi-periphery.
