ABSTRACT
The profound changes in the world economy in the last few decades have deeply changed the way geographers think about the world, bringing “new” economic geographies to the forefront in the Third World, as a consequence of the displacement of considerable segments of production, as well as in the peripheries of North America and Western Europe. Alongside these significant shifts, the developed world has seen the emergence of numerous new industrial spaces, the expression of both the consolidation of high-tech areas (such as Silicon Valley or Route 128) and the revitalization of areas with a manufacturing tradition (Third Italy, Denmark, Baden-Württemberg). The rise of the “world cities,” around which intense interdisciplinary debate has developed, is part of this process. These phenomena, accompanied by the weakening of the old industrial cores which had expressed and sustained the mass production system, cannot be isolated from a dual and dialectical process, which Markusen (1996) defines as the paradox of “sticky places within slippery spaces”: on the one hand, the hypermobility of financial capital and technology; on the other hand, the strength of the clustering (agglomeration) of industries and companies. The duality between deterritorializing and territorializing forces is a question that the economic sciences and geography have examined at length: significant contributions have been made recently by geographers, and also by political economists, sociologists, and international business scholars (Granovetter and Swedberg 1992, Storper 1995, Veltz 1996, Enright 1998, Becattini 2000, Dunning 2000, Gilly and Torre 2000, Hudson 2001, to cite just a few).
