The New Industrial Spaces: Locational Logic of a New Production Era?* zy NICK HENRY Introduction The suggestion is now widespread that fundamental changes within the advanced western economies are part of the transition to a new era of capitalist development. Moreover, whether this transition has been conceptualized as the coming of the ‘fifth Kondratieff‘ (Freeman, 1986; Hall, 1981; Perez, 1985), the ‘second industrial divide’ (Piore and Sabel, 1984) or the transition to a ‘postfordist’ era (Leborgne and Lipietz, 1988), possibly of ‘flexible accumulation’ (Harvey, 1987; Cooke, 1988; Scott and Storper, 1986; Scott, 1988a; 1988b), its geographical repercussions have become the subject of much conjecture. The question has become one of explaining how the present period of economic restructuring is being translated into a period of spatial restructuring (Lovering, 1990). zy A key element of such theories of change has been the ‘high technologies’, defined both as a process of technological change and as the basis of new industries encapsulating new forms of production organization. Indeed, for the proponents of the New Industrial Spaces (NIS) thesis, the rise of ,‘high-technology zyxw ’ industry is the harbinger of structural change, and its spatial development is indicative of the future form of regional development we may expect throughout North America and western Europe (Scott and Storper, 1986; Scott, 1988a; 1988b). This paper will outline a theoretical and empirical investigation of the NIS thesis, an investigation structured by the principal claim of the thesis to explain the emergent form of uneven development in advanced capitalist societies. In the first section, the essential elements of the thesis and, most especially, its (refreshingly explicit) ‘spatial logic’ will be described. That is, its incorporation of ‘transaction costs analysis’ into location theory to explain how processes of change in the organization of production have brought about a geographical reorganization of production. The subsequent section will then put forward particular aspects of a theoretical and methodological critique of this logic. Following an analysis of the operation of the transaction costs location mechanism in producing the particular outcome of agglomeration, a critique of the empirical methods used in identifying the New Industrial Spaces will be developed. Section three will present some of the results of an alternative and more appropriate form of empirical investigation of Britain’s own prominent candidate for the title New Industrial Space, namely ‘high-technology Hertfordshire’. Finally, both theoretical and empirical investigation will be fused to discuss whether or not the New Industrial Spaces thesis does indeed describe the ‘locational logic of postfordist flexible production’. *In preparing this paper I am indebted to the following: Doreen Massey, Dave Wield, Allan Cochrane. Allen Scott and Andrew Sayer.