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Economic geography has long wrestled with a central question: should the spatial organization of economic life be explained by universal laws of location and exchange, or does it emerge from historically specific social relations, cultural practices, and political struggles? This tension between formal modeling and contextual understanding has driven the subfield through a series of theoretical transformations over the past 140 years.
The earliest framework, Commercial Geography (1880–1920), was primarily descriptive. It catalogued the distribution of natural resources, agricultural products, and trade routes, treating economic space as a mosaic of resource endowments. By the early twentieth century, this inventory approach gave way to Regional Economic Geography (1900–1950), which sought to understand how economic activities cohered into distinctive regional complexes. Regional economic geographers emphasized the unique combination of physical environment, historical development, and local culture that made each region function as an integrated whole. This idiographic tradition valued thick description over general theory, but it struggled to explain why similar economic patterns appeared in very different regions.
The mid-twentieth century brought a sharp break. Spatial Science / Location Theory (1950–1970) rejected the descriptive particularism of regional geography in favor of deductive models borrowed from neoclassical economics. Drawing on the work of Walter Christaller, August Lösch, and later William Alonso, spatial scientists argued that the location of firms, households, and services could be predicted by principles of distance minimization, agglomeration economies, and market area competition. This framework transformed economic geography into a nomothetic science, complete with mathematical models and quantitative methods. Yet its assumptions—perfect information, rational actors, equilibrium—struck many critics as deeply unrealistic. The models could predict abstract patterns, but they had little to say about power, inequality, or the messy historical processes that actually shaped industrial landscapes.
Marxist / Radical Economic Geography (1970–1990) emerged as a direct response to these limitations. Drawing on David Harvey's synthesis of Marxian theory and spatial analysis, Marxist economic geographers argued that the spatial patterns described by location theory were not neutral outcomes of market efficiency but products of capitalist accumulation, class struggle, and uneven development. Where spatial science saw equilibrium, Marxists saw crisis; where it saw optimal location, they saw the spatial fix for overaccumulation. This framework shifted the subfield's moral and political center of gravity, insisting that economic geography could not be value-neutral. It coexisted with spatial science in a state of deep disagreement, each side accusing the other of missing the fundamental drivers of economic space.
By the 1980s, a second wave of critique began to unsettle Marxist orthodoxy. Post-Structural Economic Geography (1980–2000) drew on Foucault, Derrida, and feminist epistemology to question the grand narratives of both neoclassical and Marxist theory. Post-structuralists argued that economic identities, practices, and spaces were not fixed by structural forces but were discursively constructed, contested, and performed. They focused on how categories like "the market," "labor," or "the firm" were produced through language, institutions, and everyday practices. This framework narrowed the analytical lens from broad structural dynamics to the micro-politics of economic representation.
Running alongside post-structuralism, Cultural Economic Geography (1990–2010) insisted that economic action is always embedded in webs of meaning, trust, and social convention. Drawing on the work of scholars like Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, cultural economic geographers showed that even the most abstract financial markets depend on shared cultural understandings, embodied routines, and face-to-face interaction. This framework absorbed insights from post-structuralism while adding a thicker account of how culture shapes economic practice—from the symbolism of corporate architecture to the tacit knowledge that makes industrial districts innovative.
At roughly the same moment, a very different project emerged from within economics itself. New Economic Geography (1990–2010), pioneered by Paul Krugman, revived the formal modeling tradition by using increasing returns, transport costs, and labor mobility to explain the emergence of core-periphery patterns. For many economic geographers, however, this framework felt like a return to the very spatial science they had spent decades criticizing. The models were elegant but abstract, treating space as a friction surface rather than a socially produced arena. New Economic Geography coexisted uneasily with cultural and post-structural approaches, each side viewing the other as missing the essence of economic spatiality.
Feminist Economic Geography (1990–Present) grew out of the recognition that all previous frameworks—whether neoclassical, Marxist, or cultural—had largely ignored gender as a constitutive dimension of economic space. Feminist economic geographers showed that the division between paid and unpaid labor, the gendering of occupations, and the spatial organization of work and home were not peripheral to economic geography but central to how capitalism operates. They challenged the assumption that the economy is a separate sphere from domestic life, and they insisted that economic agency includes reproductive labor, informal work, and care. This framework remains active today, increasingly intersecting with post-colonial and intersectional analyses to ask how race, class, and sexuality co-produce economic space alongside gender.
Building on feminist critiques of what counts as "the economy," Diverse Economies / Post-Capitalist Economic Geography (2000–Present) argues that capitalism is only one of many economic forms that coexist in any landscape. Drawing on the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham, this framework maps the vast terrain of non-capitalist practices—cooperatives, community economies, gift exchange, subsistence agriculture, ethical markets—that mainstream economic geography had rendered invisible. Rather than treating capitalism as a monolithic system, diverse economies scholars see it as a set of practices that can be contested, refused, or transformed. This framework is explicitly political: it aims not just to describe economic diversity but to enlarge the space for post-capitalist experimentation.
Evolutionary Economic Geography (2000–Present) takes inspiration from evolutionary economics and complexity theory to explain how regional economies change over time. It focuses on path dependence, lock-in, spin-off dynamics, and the role of routines and institutions in shaping industrial trajectories. Unlike the equilibrium models of spatial science, evolutionary approaches treat economic landscapes as historically contingent and constantly in flux. They share with Marxist geography an interest in uneven development, but they replace class struggle with concepts like technological relatedness and adaptive fitness.
Relational Economic Geography (2000–Present) shifts attention from territorial units—regions, nations, clusters—to the networks, flows, and connections that bind economic actors across space. Drawing on actor-network theory and economic sociology, relational geographers argue that economic agency is distributed among humans, technologies, organizations, and infrastructures. A firm's "location" matters less than its position in global production networks; a region's success depends on its connectivity rather than its internal assets. This framework coexists with evolutionary economic geography, but the two disagree on whether the most important economic processes are territorial (path-dependent regional evolution) or topological (network position and relational reach).
Today, economic geography is a pluralistic field. The leading active frameworks—Feminist Economic Geography, Diverse Economies, Evolutionary Economic Geography, and Relational Economic Geography—agree on several key points: that the economy is socially and historically constructed, that power relations are central to economic spatiality, and that formal models alone cannot capture the complexity of real economic landscapes. They disagree, however, on what drives change. Evolutionary geographers emphasize technological and institutional path dependence; relational geographers stress network dynamics and actor-network assemblages; feminist and diverse economies scholars foreground political contestation and the possibility of alternative economic futures. These disagreements are productive, pushing each framework to refine its claims and engage with empirical cases that challenge its assumptions. The old divide between nomothetic science and idiographic interpretation has not disappeared, but it has been transformed into a richer conversation about how to study an economy that is simultaneously material, discursive, relational, and always in the making.