ABSTRACT
A systematic effort to disperse industry as a major means for providing employment in peripheral regions did not emerge until 1957. Previous calls for dispersion of industry in the 1940s and early 1950s were influenced by the 1940 report of the Barlow Commission published in Britain (Hall 1982), and stressed the disadvantages of large conurbations in terms of economic vulnerability and defence, as demonstrated in the depression of the 1930s and in the Second World War (Sharon 1951). These calls were also influenced by classical location theory, which classified manufacturing activity into raw materialsoriented, market-oriented and footloose categories, and emphasised the dispersal potential of footloose industries, which were considered to be insensitive to transport costs (Reichman 1979). However, these calls had little impact until the mid-1950s.
