The Dictionary of Human Geography

a highly flexible labour market, internal to
the district; a unique local cultural identity;
specialized sources of finance, technical exper-
tise and business services available within the
district outside of firms; limited co-operation
or linkage with firms external to the district;
investment decisions made locally; labour in-
migration, with lower levels of out-migration;
and worker commitment to districts rather
than to firms.
A contemporary example of an industrial
district is ‘motor sport valley’ in the UK, a
cluster of firms in mid-Oxfordshire in and
through which has developed the world’s
major agglomeration of Formula 1 and Indy
car engineering (see Henry and Pinch, 1997).
This region is a community of knowledge sus-
tained by and expanding through the rapid
production, application and dissemination of
knowledge (through observation, gossip, ru-
mour and direct and indirect contact) among
and between a network of highly secretive
small and medium-size enterprises. High
rates of new firm formation and knowledge
transmission through a mobile workforce
with a small area (a 160 km long narrow cres-
cent, 60 km north and west of London) rests
on a knowledge pool and has created a ‘con-
stant learning trajectory’ (Henry and Pinch,
1997, p. 7). Integral to the district is a socially
and industrially created matrix of firms.
Motor sport valley is an illustration ofnew
industrial spaces (Scott, 1988), such as the
Third Italy and Orange Country, California,
through which the transmission of impulses
around integrated and interdependent firms
is both effective and flexible (hence the
Marshallian argument that locality exercises a
powerful influence upon productive dyna-
mism: see Storper and Scott, 1989). In these
sorts of districts, other characteristics not an-
ticipated by Marshall are specially important,
including a high incidence of exchanges of
personnel between customers and suppliers;
intense co-operation among competitor firms
to share risk, and to stabilize market share and
market instability; a collaborative system of
localinnovation; a disproportionate share of
workers engaged in design and innovation;
robust trade associations providing manage-
ment training, marketing, technical or finan-
cial help; and, last but not least, a strong local
government role in regulating and promoting
core industries. This argument is compelling
in its spatiality. Geography is central, in
other words, to the ‘untraded interdependen-
cies’ and conventions that provide the ether in
which industrial districts flourish (Storper and

Salais, 1997). Amin and Thrift (1992) argue

relatedly that while place constitutes social

and economic practice in the City of London

and Santa Croce in Tuscany, the way in which

this constitution takes place is itself shaped by

geographical requirements of social practice.

The localization of economic geographies is

not an autonomous or independent influence

on productive spaces, but is also shaped by the

geographical demands of increasingly global

economic geographies. One of the conditions

of existence of such geographies is the pres-

ence of a place or centre to act as a site of

representation (a centre of authority), inter-

action (a centre of sociability) and as a means

of making sense of data and information

(a centre ofdiscourse). In short, industrial

districts are doubly geographical: both re-

quired for and constitutive of social practice.

The industrial district is not restricted to

manufacturing and financial services, but has

also been productively deployed as a way of

describing theglobalizationof agriculture

and the changing geography associated with

what has been called ‘high-value agriculture’.

commodity chainanalysis has provided a

powerful optic through which one can explore

the emergence of key agro-industrial nodes, in

which many of the properties described in the

Third Italy or the Silicon Valley can be seen in

the agro-export region of the Sao Francisco

valley of Brazil or the wine-producingterroires

of France (see Goodman and Watts, 1997).

Here, the intersection of local specialized

knowledge (often with a deep, if modernized,

history), commercial and customary conven-

tions pertaining to inter-firm interdependence

(between growers, buyers, shipper and proces-

sors), and various forms of linkages to banking

and the local state provide for similar forms of

industrial dynamism, often draped in the cul-

tural language of attachment to the land. The

rise of the organic industry provides simply one

way in which these agricultural districts are

madeandremadebyshiftsin,andasresponses

to, industrial agriculture (Guthman, 2004).

(See alsoagricultural geography.) rl/mw

industrial geography A sub-branch ofeco-

nomic geographyconcerned with describing

and explaining the spaces,placesand geo-

graphical circulation of industry. Interest in

the discipline emerged in the early twentieth

century, driven partly by theoretical argu-

ments developed in economics. The history

of industrial geography has been punctuated

by moments of illuminating theory and novel

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INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY