Industrial Districts

This article reviews the scholarly literature that has developed in the wake of the discovery of industrial districts and the Third Italy in the 1970s, and explores the traveling of this concept through a variety of geographical contexts and theoretical perspectives. Being originally associated with the Marshallian theory of externalities and being subsequently related to emerging strands of neo-institutionalist theorizing, the industrial district concept has inspired a lively and influential literature dealing with local economic regeneration in both the Western and the non-Western countries. While industrial district theory has been not exempt from criticism and more recent disillusionment, the understanding of these socioeconomic entities as locally bounded systems of production has contributed to the reassertion of the importance of space and place in contemporary studies dealing with industrial restructuring and the local–global interplay, in the context of increasingly networked, transcalar, and knowledge-based capitalist economies.