Space and time

Improved means of communication and the liberalization of trade, resulting in globalization, has profoundly altered how regions link to each other. Such an empirical insight is of course trivial, but it is not as easy to understand how globalization has affected the ways that economic change in particular plays out in regional economies. So far, evolutionary economic geography has, with a few exceptions, refrained from integrating its ideas about novelty, retention and selection in regional economies with globalization.

In order to be relevant today and explain how regions change and grow in our time, the ideas of evolutionary economic geography need to be combined with a framework that allows us to explore and explain exactly how lower- cost and faster communications have transformed regional novelty, retention and selection processes in an era of globalization. In this chapter, we investigate whether “time geography” can provide such a framework (Hägerstrand 1991; Pred 1977). Although time geography has not frequently been used to answer research questions in economic geography, it has recently enjoyed something of a revived interest in transport geography (Neutens, Schwanen & Witlox 2011; Ellegård & Svedin 2012) and at the intersection between human geography and gender studies (Scholten, Friberg & Sandén 2012).

The Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand published the first papers about time geography in the early 1970s. Time geography focuses on individuals, how they move in space and over time, how people meet to accomplish projects and how people's movements are constrained by different identifiable factors. Hägerstrand never developed his time geography into a theory about economic production by explaining how “fitting people together” in space and time is (was) a necessary condition for the production of goods and services (Hägerstrand 1970). However, Hägerstrand came close to accomplishing this before he left economic geography to venture into other fields of research.