ABSTRACT

Thinking about economic alterity demands intellectual effort but acting upon it demands much more: plans, resources, demonstrable effectiveness and, above all perhaps, imagination and the possibilities of transcendence that imagination brings. And this is as true, of course, of the mainstream economic geography. What is especially interesting and demanding about economic alterity is that, whilst the possibilities of otherness are great – economic geographies are and can be diverse – these possibilities are constrained by the need to design and perform economic geographies that work in the sense that they enable people to make a living of a kind and in conditions that they might choose. To paraphrase Marx (1968, 96), imagining and practising economic geographies otherwise enables people literally to make their own histories and geographies in conditions of their own choosing. This essay addresses these relationships between imagination, materiality and practice and the possibilities and potential of economic diversity.