ABSTRACT
Why are geographies of production constituted in particular ways in different companies, industries, times and places? How do geographies of consumption relate to those of production? Why do patterns of urban and regional uneven development take the forms that they do? What are the relationships between state policies, geographies of production and territorially uneven development? Why are relationships between the production system and the natural environment configured in particular ways? These are typical of the questions of interest to economic geographers. Accordingly, the objective of this first chapter is to provide an introduction to some of the ways in which economic geographers have sought to answer such questions. A corollary of so doing is to establish a context in which the rest of the book can be situated by selectively introducing some of the ways in which approaches to geographies of economies and uneven development have changed over the last three or so decades.
