New industrial space
Jinn-Yuh Hsu
Ling-I Chu
National Taiwan University
The concept of “new industrial space” was
developed by Allen Scott in 1988 to describe the
agglomeration of highly specialized frms that
took place in various parts of the world in the
late 1970s and the 1980s. Scott argues that these
small frms cluster in one place because proximity
to one another allows them to reduce transaction
costs. The concept was often considered as a part
of the “fexible specialization” thesis proposed by
French regulation school scholars, who argued
that capitalism has undergone a profound trans-
formation since the 1970s, from “Fordism” to
“post-Fordism.” Here, “Fordism” refers to the
system of mass production in search of economy
of scale. It is characterized by vertically inte-
grated global frms, Keynesian welfare states, and
unionized labor. In contrast, “post-Fordism” is
a more fexible form of production that seeks to
achieve economies of scope. It is characterized
by vertically disintegrated frms engaging in
batch and specialized production, neoliberal
regimes of governance, and the emergence
of informal, contract-based, or self-employed
workers. While in the 1980s regulation school
scholars had interrogated issues such as vertical
disintegration (Piore and Sabel 1984) and the
emergence of fexible labor (Brusco 1982), Scott
points out that transformation to post-Fordism
has a spatial dimension: that the big factories that
used to dominate the industrial landscaping are
now giving way to industrial districts.
The International Encyclopedia of Geography.
Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0575
One of the cases of new industrial spaces
that Scott examined was the “Third Italy.”
The term refers to the central and northeast
regions of Italy (including Tuscany, Umbria,
Marche, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Friuli, and
Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol), which in the
1970s and 1980s witnessed the clustering of
small artisan frms and workshops. Each region
specialized in a range of loosely related products
and each workshop usually had 5–50 work-
ers (often less than 10). The wide range of
products in each cluster suggested a shift from
economies of scale to economies of scope. Addi-
tionally, these small frms and workshops were
known for producing high quality products and
employing highly skilled and well-paid workers.
The workshops were also very design-oriented
and multidisciplinary, involving collaboration
between entrepreneurs, designers, engineers,
and workers. This unique industrial structure
was in sharp contrast to the large-scale mass pro-
duction systems seen in Turin, Milan, and Genoa
(the First Italy) and the underdeveloped South
(the Second Italy). Scott also pointed out that,
because these vertically disintegrated frms often
do not need to have direct contact with estab-
lished industries, and because they prefer places
without the presence of big unions, new indus-
trial spaces often appear either in depressed urban
enclaves (e.g., the clustering of high-tech frms
in Paris’s southern suburb) or in underdeveloped
regions (e.g., the Third Italy and Silicon Valley).
Industrial agglomeration is certainly not
a new issue in economic geography. In the
late nineteenth century, Alfred Marshall, in
Principles of Economics (1890), had examined
the agglomeration of textile manufacturers in
England. He argued that textile manufacturers