"Zones, Geopolitics and Entrepreneurial Governance"

About

This colloquium will be delivered by Dr Kevin Ward from Georgia State University and Dr Alan Wiig from the University of Florida, two of the leading urban economic geographers in the field. They will discuss the following topic: The last four and a half decades have seen zones of various sorts emerging as a means of generating economic development and growth. On the one hand, a considerable amount of recent academic attention has turned to the various experiments with Enterprise Zones, Export Processing Zones, Freeport Zones, and Special Economic Zones in rapidly urbanizing areas of Africa and Asia. On the other hand, we see still zones used in the United Kingdom and the United States, where they have existed since the early 1980s. It is to an understanding of the latter that we contribute. Our paper takes the example of Airport City Manchester to make three broad contributions to the wider extant academic literature. The first is to underscore the need to be attentive to the relationally interconnected nature of “local” policy experimentation. What we see in the case of the global chronology of zones is their complex, incremental, start-stop-start emergence. The second is that regardless of their spatial demarcation beyond existing governance norms and regulations, each zone is a creature of its geographical-cum-institutional state context. The third point is a reminder of the geo-political nature of many economic redevelopment strategies, as cities enroll themselves, or others enroll them, in wider global issues, particularly as what some label as the Second Cold War rumbles along.