ABSTRACT
For much of its history, economic geography focused, sometimes exclusively, on transportation costs as a key factor in the spatial organization of the economy (Christaller 1966; Isard 1956). As air transportation, interstate highways, and containerization matured within developed economies during the 1960s and 1970s, the expense of moving goods became an increasingly smaller portion of the cost of production and, consequently, of less interest to researchers. Although the access to low-cost production locations afforded by cheap transportation was central to the deindustrialization process within advanced economies (Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Piore and Sabel 1984), relatively little attention was paid to it. Instead, work within economic geography dealt with issues of technology, learning, knowledge, social networks, and the ever-expanding “space of flows” (Castells 1989, 1996) supported by new computer and communications technologies. In recent decades, much of economic geography has focused more on the immaterial aspects of the global economy and has paid less attention to the complexity of physically moving material goods (Coe et al. 2008).
