Spaces of Global Production: The Territorial Dimensions of Global Production Networks and World City Networks
Final Report Abstract
The scientific network “Spaces of Global Production” has forged meaningful connections between a group of relatively junior economic and urban geographers during a critical phase of their careers. The project enabled us to conduct seven workshops with international guests from Singapore, Chile, Australia, the United Kingdom, Luxemburg, and Germany. The workshops were organized around the themes of global production networks and their dark-sides, infrastructures as physical dimensions of global production networks, the future of world cities research, financial networks and urban enclaves and the extraction in global capitalism. During all workshops we further developed our understanding of different spatial figures in economic geography. Our debates have highlighted how uneven development and a transformation of urban and rural landscapes results from the integration into global production networks. The key outcome of this network has been the development of a shared terminology and concepts to classify the different territorial dimensions of global production networks, which we understood more broadly as Spaces of Global Production. We moved away from the territorial dimension narrowly understood and instead moved through our discussions to the idea of spatial figures and representations. These spatial figures variously address the different positive and negative regional and place-based outcomes of global production. Research ranges from the prospects and trajectories of upgrading, catch-up development and peripheral innovation to those pertaining to labour struggles, organization and exploitation, uneven development, capitalist expansion into new spaces, and the transformation of nature into economic resources. Here, our key conceptual contribution has been to develop and systematize “Spaces of Global Production” as a diverse set of spatial figures that result from and support a global division of labour. In our key publication, we map the conceptual landscape produced by the proliferation of spatial figures in scholarly work on global production in economic geography and beyond. We introduce the network, the agglomeration, the frontier, the plantation, the gateway, the corridor, the zone, the enclave and the archipelago as key concepts mobilized by social sciences and humanities scholars in order to map, problematize, analyse and help transform the varied spaces of global production.
Publications
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(2020). Global Commodity Chains, Global Value Chains and Global Production Networks. In: The Routledge Handbook to Global Political Economy: conversations and inquiries (Ed. E. Vivares). Routledge, 174-193
Scholvin, S.
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(2020). Globalizing urban research, grounding global production networks. Transnational clothing production and the built environment. Articulo - Journal of Urban Research, 21, Article 21
Hagemann, A., & Beyer, E.
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(2020). Waren, Wissen und „Raum“: Die Dunklen Seiten globaler Lieferketten im Lebensmittelhandel. In: Nina Baur, Linda Hering, Elmar Kulke et al. (Hg.). Waren - Wissen - Raum. Interdependenz von Produktion, Markt und Konsum in Lebensmittelwarenketten. Wiesbaden, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH; Springer VS, 486–516
Ouma, S.
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(2021). Emptying the Future, Claiming Space: The Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania as a Spatial Imaginary for Strategic Coupling Processes. Geoforum, 123: 23-35
Tups, G., & Dannenberg, P.
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(2021). Industrial Infrastructure: Translocal Planning for Global Production in Ethiopia and Argentina. Urban Planning, 6(3), 444–463
Beyer, E., Elsner, L.-A., Hagemann, A., & Misselwitz, P.
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(2022). The Global Division of Labour as Enduring Archipelago: Thinking through the Spatiality of ‘Globalisation in Reverse’. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 15 (2): 389–406
Van Meeteren, M., & Kleibert, J.
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(2022). When agricultural commercialization fails: ‘Re-visiting’ value-chain agriculture and its ruins in northern Ghana. Globalizations, 1–21
Iddrisu, A., Ouma, S., & Yaro, J.
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(2022). World city making by branding: insights from Cape Town and Johannesburg. African Geographical Review
Scholvin, S.
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(2022). Zones and Zoning: Linking the Geographies of Freeports with ArtTech and Financial Market Making. Geoforum 134: 165-172
Dörry S., & Hesse, M.
