Environment and Planning A 1994, volume 26, pages 1123-1145 Locational avoidance by nonmetropolitan industry G Norcliffe, T Zweerman Bartschat Department of Geography, York University, North York, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada Received 8 September 1992; in revised form 26 October 1993 Abstract. The concept of locational avoidance is applied to the process of nonmetropolitan indus- trialisation by means of a periodisation involving two phases of locational avoidance. During the phase of Fordist mass production, certain labour-intensive industries decentralised to low-wage non- metropolitan areas to avoid locating close to other firms where there was a danger of wages subse- quently being bid up. In the present phase, characterised by a tendency towards flexible accumulation, a new wave of more capital-intensive industries has sought out nonmetropolitan areas, again displaying a pattern of locational avoidance, but mainly in order to retain the human capital invested in their skilled labour force. This second dispersed arrangement of industry stands in stark contrast to the flexible production agglomerations that have been formed elsewhere in new industrial spaces during the same period, even though both were produced under regimes of flexible accumulation. A series of conjectures exploring these ideas is examined in light of the locational behaviour of firms locating in the Georgian Bay nonmetropolitan area north of Toronto. 1 Introduction In this paper we are concerned with the concept of locational avoidance as pro- posed by Laulajainen and Gadde (1986) (1) to explain the locational behaviour of three Swedish retail chains whose choice of supermarket location revealed a pattern of mutual avoidance. Here, we extend the concept to a new domain by applying it to the location of manufacturing industry. In so doing, we explore a set of locational processes that differ from those treated in the recent literature on new industrial spaces where neo-Marshallian forms of agglomeration are in evidence. The key process under scrutiny is the tendency, in certain situations, for manufac- turing industry to decentralise. Although this tendency has been widely observed in industrialised countries, theoretical explanations of it are still not very satisfactory. In this paper we argue that new approaches to industrial location, involving spatial divisions of labour, flexible modes of production, and labour-market segmentation, help explain this phenomenon. Specifically, we suggest there is a periodisation arising from two related pro- cesses of nonmetropolitan industrialisation, both requiring locational avoidance, operating under two different but overlapping regimes of accumulation. In the earlier phase of inflexible accumulation (widely labelled Fordism) (2) , multiplant firms decentralised certain routine production units to low-wage nonmetropolitan regions in order to reduce labour costs. Wage levels within this spatial division of labour were expected to remain low in such regions, provided competition for labour was minimised by strategies of locational avoidance. During a later phase under a more flexible regime of accumulation, some firms engaged in technologically sophis- ticated activities that required greater training of employees. These firms have found that returns on their considerable investments in human capital are more W An explanation of this principle can be found in Smithies's (1941) extension of Hotelling's classic paper of 1929. (2) One of us has argued elsewhere (Norcliffe, 1993) that rigid regimes of accumulation displayed a variety of local forms, of which Fordism is but one.