ABSTRACT
The steel industry has long been regarded as a key sector in both capitalist and socialist industrial development policies. This chapter places the steel industry within the context of models of regional development, introducing an economic geography perspective. We aim to show how the steel industry influences economic geography theories and regional development models, from A. Weber's location theory to ‘territorial production complexes’ and the concept of the ‘industrial Kombinat’ in the USSR in the early 1930s. They both inspired the formulation of F. Perroux's ideas on growth poles in the 1950s, which later became a regional development doctrine with steel as one of its leading industries. Although today this intellectual legacy is not as strong, it still has crude applications. Mapping the travel of concepts such as industrial Kombinat and growth poles highlights the importance of a multiscalar spatial approach to industrial development.
