ABSTRACT
The past few decades witnessed two paradigmatic shifts in the approach to urban and regional development. Traditionally, geographers tended to focus on local factors in explaining economic conditions - the physical, social, and cultural characteristics of place. Since the 1960s, more critical generations of scholars have challenged the role of such horizontal factors in explaining development, or its absence. In the wake of the dependencia school, they stressed the importance of vertical forces in explaining underdevelopment, such as the subservient position imposed on communities in the South within a hierarchic world system. The neo-liberal counter-revolution of the 1980s produced yet another shift in thinking. Not so much perhaps in theo retical insights - essentially these comprised refinements of existing approaches - as in the globalization that ensued. Globalization was first con sidered as a phenomenon, i.e., the acceleration of economic and social integration processes spanning substantial parts of the globe, driven by tech nological innovation on the one hand, and by the liberalization of the policy framework on the other. In the 1990s, globalization also emerged as a new discourse in world affairs, not least in development studies. I will not pur port to define the globalization paradigm here, but as an approach it challenges the separation of the various spheres of life (as between the eco nomic and the cultural), is preoccupied with interaction patterns between actors (perceiving networks and clusters everywhere), and it raises the issue of scale levels. This last factor means that, instead of implicitly adopting a horizontal (as the traditional regionalists did) or a vertical approach (as the structuralists did), the globalization approach focused on the questions what different scale levels mean in the development process, and how vertical and horizontal forces interact with one another.
