Regional development is one of the most important and complex issues in economic geography. It is about how to grow and make regions better places to live, work and invest. The field is broad and diverse, ranging from economic policy and planning to the spatial dynamics of businesses, companies and industries – as well as the cultural, political and environmental concerns that they entail.
A prominent strand of the literature on regional development focuses on noneconomic factors (e.g. human capital, cultural, social and business practices) as a way to explain and shape the evolution of regions’ economic landscapes. While this approach is clearly influenced by and is an important part of the wider socioeconomic research tradition, it has not always been treated in a proper and critical manner.
As a result, it tends to treat noneconomic factors as some kind of autonomous forces that act independently from the dynamic processes and interactions within and among different parts of a region’s economy and society. This is problematic, because it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the notion of power and its relation to the various forms of power relations in a complex socioeconomic system like a region.
A second and related problem is the fact that a great deal of the current literature on regional development is caught in an in-built tension between efficiency and equity, where efficiency refers to the economic issue of how to maximize the value of a region’s output and/or investment, while equity relates to the question of how to cope with undesirable interregional welfare discrepancies. Both of these problems can be addressed by applying a more critical and interdisciplinary approach to the study of regional development.