ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I attempt to evaluate a number of prominent claims put forward in recent years by both geographers and economists about the methods and scope of economic geography. Much of the chapter revolves around two main lines of critical appraisal. First, I seek to highlight the strong and weak points of geographical economics as it has been formulated by Paul Krugman and his co-workers (though I also acknowledge that geographical economics is now moving well beyond this initial point of departure). Second, I provide a critique of the version of economic geography that is currently being worked out by a number of geographers under the rubric of the cultural turn, and here I place special emphasis on what I take to be its peculiar obsession with evacuating the economic content from economic geography. On the basis of these arguments, I then make a brief effort to identify a viable agenda for economic geography based on an assessment of the central problems and predicaments of contemporary capitalism. This assessment leads me to the conclusion that the best bet for economic geographers today is to work out a new political economy of spatial development based on a full recognition of two main sets of circumstances: first, that the hard core of the capitalist economy remains focused on the dynamics of accumulation; second, that this hard core is irrevocably intertwined with complex socio-cultural forces, but also that it cannot be reduced to these same forces. In order to ground the line of argument that now ensues, we need at the outset to establish a few elementary principles about the production and evaluation of basic knowledge claims.
