Abstract
This article analyses the evolution of the field of studies of space and economy (economic geography) between 1980 and 2017. Using a sample of 55 journals from the Web of Science, we study the existing subfields of research, the interaction between communities of geographers and economists and the changing role played by those journals that act as bridges for dialogue between these communities. For this purpose, we analyse the Bibliographic Coupling network of journals in four periods to identify groups of strongly interlinked journals that could represent research communities within the field of economic geography; and we also study the betweenness measure of centrality to identify those journals that have played the role of bridges between disciplines and estimate the level of interdisciplinarity of these journals. Results confirm the increasing complexity and fragmentation of the field of economy and space. We also find that there are spaces for dialogue and pluralism, but they are still peripheral to the core journals of academic communities related to space and economy both in geography and economics, and not yet strong enough to create a distinct academic community.
Introduction
For decades, Environment and Planning A has been one of a small number of journals that acted as a bridge between geography and economics. As it embarks on its future as a pillar of pluralist and interdisciplinary studies on ‘economy and space’ (Barnes et al., 2018), it is worth surveying the evolution of this field of enquiry and the position of the journal within it. Such an exercise is valuable for at least four reasons. First, the field of economy and space (a term we use interchangeably with and to denote the subdiscipline of economic geography) ‘has for a variety of reasons begun to pay more attention to its own intellectual development, its position in the academic division of labour, its social and political role, its internal composition or “shape” and its potential futures’ (Foster et al., 2007: 295). This includes concern over the fate of UK economic geography in particular (Barnes, 2018a; Cumbers, 2018; James et al., 2018; Martin, 2018). Thus, there is a substantial interest in charting the evolving relationship between the subdisciplines of economics and geography that most closely map onto the economy and space field of Environment & Planning A. Second, the interdisciplinary relations involved in the study of economy and space are also shaped by patterns and processes of research specialization: ‘The past quarter century has … been a turbulent one for economic geography … as a range of different theoretical frameworks, methodologies and substantive concerns have come and gone … . Economic geographies seem not only to be proliferating, they may also be accelerating’ (Foster et al., 2007: 295). Third, there is perhaps a greater need to chart the comings and goings across this field after the controversy between so-called economic geography (proper) and geographical economics (Martin, 1999; Martin and Sunley, 1996). This controversy gave rise to many calls for more dialogue, pluralism and interdisciplinary studies looking for a ‘common ground’ (Clark et al., 2000; Duranton and Storper, 2006; Marchionni, 2012; Sjöberg and Söjholm, 2002). It is not clear, however, whether after almost a decade of declarations of good intentions, the dialogue has increased or ‘mutual neglect’ persists (Brakman et al., 2011; Duranton and Rodríguez-Pose, 2005). Fourth, the relationship between those subdisciplines of economics and geography most concerned with economy and space is mediated by particular journals whose role has changed over time. Here, it is important to analyse to what extent those journals, such as Environment & Planning A, are acting as bridges that promote dialogue between economic and geographic approaches to the study of economy and space.
The present paper has three aims: first, to delineate subfields of research within the field of space and economy, understood in a broad sense and including some of the ‘trading zones’ 1 that define the changing boundaries that economic geography shares with other social sciences (Barnes and Christophers, 2018; Barnes and Sheppard, 2010), and to analyse their evolution between 1980 and 2017; second, to study the distance between the groups identified as a proxy of the dialogue between them across time; and third to analyse the role and evolution of those journals that act as bridges between subdisciplines, promoting dialogue in research about space and economy.
Bibliographic studies of the field of economic geography are relatively scarce and have been predominantly based either on the study of a group of highly cited authors (Bodman, 1991, 2010; Gorraiz et al., 2016; Sternberg, 2015) or on the citation patterns of a single journal (Brakman et al., 2011; Dunford et al., 2002; Pike et al., 2007; Wrigley and Overman, 2010). An exception is Foster et al. (2007), based on 26 journals of the field and on articles with 10 or more citations between 1982 and 2006. This article follows the latter line of research with a broader sample of 55 journals covering a longer period, 1980–2017, using the Web of Science Journal of Citation Reports, 2016 edition (WOS). Thus, although our delineation of the field of economy and space is partial – necessarily so with bibliometric analyses – it could be said to enlarge the historical scope of our understanding of the field. Instead of establishing an arbitrary number of citations of articles, we focus on the Bibliographic Coupling (BC) network (Van Raan, 2014). Two journals are bibliographically coupled if they have references in common. The more references they have in common the stronger their relation is. BC allows us to identify groups of journals that are strongly interlinked and that could represent subfields of research or research communities within the broader field of economy and space. We also analyse the betweenness measure of centrality that allows us to identify those journals that act as bridges between disciplines and estimate the interdisciplinarity of these journals (Leydesdorff, 2007; Leydesdorff and Schank 2008). The story we have to tell is one of: (a) increasing distance between geography and economics; (b) the partial splintering of the field with the emergence of new subfields; and (c) the persistence of a small set of journals bridging between the two disciplines. Environment and Planning A has been one of these, though it is debatable whether it remains so in quite the same way as in the past.
The paper is divided into four sections. The first briefly reviews the evolution and complexity of the field of economy and space – economic geography by another name. The second section describes our dataset, the criteria used to select our units of analysis and the methodology employed. The third section then presents results focusing on the identification of research communities and their evolution; the analysis of the distance between economists and geographers; and the study of the role of those journals that act as bridges in the field of economic geography. Finally, we summarize our findings and offer some reflections about the future of the field of economy and space.
Journals, geographers and economists: bridges and dialogue or mutual ignorance and disciplinary fragmentation?
Geography’s insecure evolution versus economics’ self-confident involution
Geographers and economists are the natural inhabitants of the field of research concerned with space and economy. Nevertheless, the history of the dialogue between them, since the origins of regional science in the mid-1950s as the first systematic attempt to incorporate space to neoclassical economics (Barnes, 2004), has been mostly characterized by indifference with some moments of tension and conflict. Both communities acknowledge similar roots in German location theory, but the ‘salient feature of this relationship is mutual ignorance rather than two disciplines at war with each other’ (Duranton and Rodríguez-Pose, 2005). As a consequence, there has been a very low level of cross-fertilization, fundamentally due to different conceptions of space (Rodríguez-Pose, 2011), different methods and techniques (Duranton and Rodríguez-Pose, 2005; Overman, 2004) and, more deeply, distinct epistemological approaches to science (Mäki and Marchionni, 2011; Marchionni, 2004, 2012; Plummer and Sheppard, 2006). A result of these discrepancies is the existence of scientific associations and journals specifically oriented towards either economists or geographers whose practices differ not only in their disciplinary definition but also in aspects such as the number of citations and cross-references, and the publication process (Brakman et al., 2011; Foster et al., 2007). At the same time, however, some associations and journals have acted as bridges between or ‘trading zones’ for economics and geography, with some scholars seemingly able to move between both worlds. In this section, we briefly review the evolution and the relationship within and between these groups since the 1980s.
Geography experienced a first important upheaval, the so-called ‘quantitative revolution’, at the end of the 1950s. Until this time, geography had been taught and researched as the geography of regions – a subject of synthesis of natural and human-made environments – with the region and questions of its definition central to geographical analysis. As such, geography remained idiographic in outlook and struggled to generate nomothetic or general theories as in the natural and some social (economics, sociology) sciences. With the quantitative revolution, geography began to divide not only into physical and human geography but also into specialized subdisciplines (Holt-Jensen, 2018; Johnston and Sidaway, 2015), opening something of a schism along the lines of idiographic and nomothetic theorizing – one that continues to make itself felt through the numerous ‘turns’ within the subdiscipline of economic geography (Peck, 2015; Scott, 2000). Thus, one of the traits that differentiates geographers and economists during our whole period of analysis, and which especially affects the possibility of dialogue and cross-fertilization, is related to the diversity of approaches.
In contrast, economics has remained as a more structured discipline with a clearly predominant epistemology based on methodological individualism and hypothetical-deductive reasoning. This single approach has been evident in the study of space and economy, since the pioneer contribution of Isard in the 1950s (Isard, 1956). Even New Economic Geography, despite its novelty, remained closely attached to the framework of mainstream economics (Marchionni, 2004) and, by no means, can be considered an epistemological or methodological turn. While heterodox versions of economics exist and have grown, it is probably fair to say that they have remained peripheral to the discipline. The change in economics most relevant to our concerns is the increasing interest in empirical research and, subsequently, a significant development of statistical and econometric methods, something that Angrist et al. (2017) 2 consider an opportunity for economics to become a less insular social science.
Mutual ignorance and beyond
One of the strands of geography’s quantitative revolution coincided with the appearance of regional science in the disciplines of both economics and geography. Indeed, Environment and Planning A began its life in 1970 as a regional science journal (Barnes, 2018b). Regional science was, to some extent, a movement that brought geography and economics close together. However, after a period of two decades of rapid growth, regional science had fallen into something of a malaise by the 1980s (Barnes, 2004). At the same time, in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, after a period in which political economy came to the fore within geography (Bodman, 2010), economic geographers focused their attention on global–local interactions in the guises of industrial restructuring and spatial divisions of labour (Massey, 1984), flexible specialization, post-Fordism and industrial districts (Phelps, 1992; Scott, 1988), challenging the ideas of physical space and Euclidean distance. It seems clear that during the 1980s the engagement between geographers and economists in the field of economy and space began to decline – not least because influential economic geographers such as Doreen Massey and Allen Scott, while shedding their regional science skins (Barnes, 2018b; Barnes and Christophers, 2018), retained the geography discipline’s twin idiographic and nomothetic facets (Phelps, 2008). In an early analysis of citations of leading figures in the geography discipline, Bodman (1991) notes how the impact of geography scholarship to that point had been largely within geography journals and not outside, especially for human geographers. The same concern applied to the subdiscipline of economic geography (Foster et al., 2007), where questions remained of the worldliness of scholarship, and continuing introspection.
The 1990s, as they wore on, were a period of relative conflict between geographers and economists. The advent of new economic geography at the beginning of the decade (Krugman, 1991) saw the reconsideration of space in economic analysis. Furthermore, at that time, there was a relatively broad agreement that human geography was a discipline in crisis, associated with a change of subdisciplinary focus from production to consumption and to the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in economic geography (Bodman, 2010) – a sense of crisis that appears to have heightened in the UK (Cumbers, 2018; James et al., 2018; Martin, 2018). The academic success and rapid growth of new economic geography together with some aspects of Paul Krugman’s extremely self-confident rhetoric gave rise to a unilateral reaction in the community of geographers (Martin, 1999; Martin and Sunley 1996). 3 This reaction was characterized by hostility on the part of geographers but indifference by economists. In any case, scholars on both sides began to distinguish between economic geography and geographical economics as distinct subdisciplines within the field of economy and space. While the new economic geography of the 1990s increased the dialogue between economists and geographers, it also did so in an asymmetric way. The inclination of geographers to publish papers outside of the geography discipline grew during that decade (Foster et al., 2007), yet economists tended to ignore these overtures.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the conflict between geographers and economists reached a turning point. While some sounded a retreat of economic geography into cultural economic geography (Amin and Thrift, 2000), another group of economists and geographers advocated a search for common ground within the field of economy and space (Duranton and Rodríguez-Pose, 2005; Duranton and Storper, 2006; Sjöberg and Söjholm, 2002). Important initiatives were taken to increase dialogue between economists and geographers, such as the publication of The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography (Clark et al., 2000), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography (Barnes et al., 2012) and the creation of the Journal of Economic Geography in 2001 (Garretsen and Martin, 2011).
Since this time, continuous changes have led to growing complexity and fragmentation in the field of economy and space (Bodman, 2010; Foster et al., 2007). While in geography the so-called ‘cultural turn’ has remained as a fruitful ‘trading zone’ of economic geography (Barnes and Christophers, 2018), macroeconomic geographical approaches have also flourished in the guise of: relational economic geography (Bathelt and Gluckler, 2011; Yeung, 2003) including global production networks (Coe and Yeung, 2015); evolutionary economic geography (Boschma and Martin, 2010); innovation systems (Asheim and Gertler, 2005); and processes of neoliberalization (Peck and Tickell, 2002). Notwithstanding their popularity as rallying points for the interests of economic geographers, and in contrast to earlier interests in industrial restructuring, these latter strands of research have resulted in some fragmentation of the field of economy and space among geographers (Phelps et al., 2018). Subsequent interest in financial economic geographies has come to the fore to promote dialogue within the geography discipline at the junction between economic and urban geography (Bieri, 2019). Conceivably, that part of the economy and space field most centrally concerned with the production of nature, ecological economics and the moral and geo-economics of the Anthropocene has been carved off into specialist journals – including a new Environment and Planning E – promising new engagements for geography but less obviously between economics and geography. Contributions to spatial statistics in geographic information science (GIS) conceivably present points of tangency between geography and economics. While economics continues to be a more stable and structured discipline, it too has experienced important changes, notably in its approach to the consideration of space. In this context, the marked shift in the field of economics towards empirical work, developments in econometrics and quasi-experimental research designs (Angrist et al., 2017) may produce a greater measure of connection between geographers and economists.
Recent calls for increased communication and pluralism in approaches to the study of space and economy have mainly emanated from the geography discipline. Particularly relevant for the purposes of this paper is the call for ‘engaged pluralism’ made by Barnes and Sheppard (2010) to promote the ‘trading zones’ of economic geography with other disciplines, in place of the ‘fragmented pluralism’ of different specialized approaches. To date, however, there has been little evidence presented to decide whether dialogue has increased.
Methodology
Unit of analysis and data base
In the initial terms of selecting those journals that best delineate the field of space and economy, the field reveals its increasingly inter- and transdisciplinarity. What are its borders when defined in terms of journals? Foster et al. (2007) talk about an increasingly polycentric economic geography. Defining all the journals that represent this field presents an important challenge. One problem emerges from the indexing algorithm of the WOS itself. 4 A paper can appear assigned to one or up to six different categories, sometimes theoretically unrelated. The second limitation to overcome is that there is not a general mechanism accepted by the scientific community to accurately define a group of journals as the only ones that represents a particular scientific field. The practical implication of those limitations is that any group of journals selected as a sample to draw conclusions of a particular field will always be somehow a partial sample or one based to some extent on convenience. We have adopted a broad conception of the space and economy field which includes some of the ‘trading zones’ of economic geography, such as cultural and political geographies, urban studies, economics and environmental studies. 5 In this sense, our sample is not restricted to the economic geography versus geographical economics controversy that took place at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, and allows us to analyse what directions calls for pluralism may have generated.
The previous studies of the economic geography field have resorted predominantly to either a focus on highly cited authors or particular journals (Bodman, 1991, 2010; Brakman et al., 2011; Dunford et al., 2002; Gorraiz et al., 2016; Pike et al., 2007; Sternberg, 2015; Wrigley and Overman, 2010). The main limitation of these approaches is their narrow scope and the likelihood that they will not include a representative sample, let alone all of the authors and journals that might constitute the field of inquiry. Studies of this broader scope are lacking in the literature, except in the case of Foster et al. (2007).
Our unit of analysis will be scientific journals, indexed in the WOS Journal of Citation Reports, 2016 edition, 6 of the research areas of ‘Geography’, ‘Environmental Studies’ and ‘Urban Studies’ whose main topics were related to the interaction between space and economy. For this reason, the journals of these areas focused on environment and resources analysis were excluded because they usually have a different approach to the topic and a significantly different bibliometric behaviour (Bodman, 2010; Gorraiz et al., 2016). The journals focused on history and pedagogy in any of these areas were also excluded from the sample. Finally, 55 top-tier journals were chosen as the source for the study (see Appendix 1 for names of and acronyms for journals). We select all those journals that had citation impact factors in the first and second quartiles (Q1 and Q2) in any of the abovementioned research areas. As this criterion could exclude some journals that were relevant in the field in the first decades of our analysis, we used our own judgement to include journals in the third and fourth quartiles that had been historically relevant in the discipline. Here, the dominance of English language has had a significant impact on the generalist journals of non-Anglophone geographical associations (Bosman, 2009; Rodríguez-Pose, 2006), and this is partly evidenced also by our own sample of the journals included in this analysis. Many of these journals of national geographical associations have a long history and have from time to time been influential but, for example, many no longer fall within the first or second quartiles of journal impact factors and have been excluded from our analysis here. Inevitably, these criteria are to some extent arbitrary and may be subject to some minor corrections, but we consider that the final list faithfully represents the main journals related to space and economy both from the geographers and the economists’ perspective.
Time span
The study covers a 38-year span from 1980 to 2017, inclusive. As the study is aimed at elucidating the dynamics of the evolution of the scholarly communication between geographers and economists, the data were segmented into four time periods of about 10 years each as follows:
1980–1989: a period that follows the rise of regional science and the quantitative turn in geography in the previous decades, and during which regional science seemed to decline (Barnes, 2004) and when political economy and global–local interactions came to the fore within economic geography (Bodman, 2010) (8611 articles and reviews). 1990–1999: a period in which new economic geography emerged and became a focus of attention in economic research and in the field of space and economy, and when the conflict between economic geography proper and geographic economics started (Martin, 1999; Martin and Sunley 1996) (13,022 articles and reviews). 2000–2009: a period in which that conflict seemed to finish, with many calls for pluralism and dialogue between economists and geographers and in which increasing complexity of approaches both in economics and geography became apparent, as well as a significant increase in the number of journals (20,663 articles and reviews). 2010–2017: a period of rapid growth in the number of journals and articles and whose characteristics are still relatively unknown in terms of the interaction among communities of geographers and economists (31,254 articles and reviews).
While this segmentation of time into four slices is somewhat arbitrary and may be a limitation for evaluating the evolution of particular journals, we use it for the sake of clarity as it allows us to examine long-term changes in the distance and cohesion within and among the different subfields of space and economy and to visualize the emergence of ‘micro conversations’ within this academic field.
Procedures
Type of analysis
Citation analysis methods entail counting the number of citations of specific papers. From this primary citation network, two secondary networks can be derived. The BC network and the Co-citation (CC) network (Van Raan, 2014). Two journals are bibliographically coupled if they have references in common; the more references they have in common, the stronger their relation is. Two journals are co-cited if they are commonly cited by papers published in other journals. The BC measure is static since new citations do not affect the network of citations. This is the most significant difference and advantage with respect to CC. CC is dynamic since the entrance of a new journal into the network changes the values that characterize the network at any point in time. We chose BC because the resulting network will not change over time. That is, the new papers that come to the network in a journal, and the citations of those papers included in the present study will not change the results of previous decades. Fixing the network shows the ‘photograph’ of the conversation of the slice of time under analysis. Replicating the study will get the same result. In the present study we use BC measures to create the relational networks among the 55 journals being analysed.
The citation counting method
Two counting methods can be used to analyse citation networks: full count and fractional count. Full count gives the same credit to each journal that appears cited together. Fractional count uses the normalization 1/n, with n being the number of journals cited. That way, if three journals are cited in a paper they will receive one-third of the credit. We used the full counting method since it is not necessary to weight the links among the journals in the network structure, because we are interested in the number of times a journal appears in the shortest path among all other journals in the network.
The clustering and mapping procedures
The identification of scientific communities within the field of economy and space was made using the Waltman et al. (2010) algorithm to map and cluster the bibliometric network of journals. The main advantage of this algorithm is that it brings techniques to mapping and clustering together. Previous techniques only bring either mapping or clustering. This technique avoids inconsistencies between results produced by the techniques since it relies on similar principles. It uses the Vos viewer mapping technique (van Eck and Waltman, 2007) and the clustering is based on a weighted and parametrized variant of the modularity function of Newman and Girvan (2004). We perform different estimations regarding the number and size of the clusters in each period (minimum number of journals and composition) and results were robust before collapsing in one unique cluster or being excessively fragmented into a very large number of clusters.
We have used a distance-based map procedure. Distance-based maps are maps in which the distance between two items reflects the strength of the relation between the items (van Eck and Waltman, 2010). The advantage of this method is that it makes it easy to visually identify the clusters of related items. In a map, two scientific communities or fields (represented in different colours) that have little relationship will appear far from each other in the map, while small distance between two journals indicates a stronger relationship.
Betweenness centrality as a measure to detect bridging journals in a scientific conversation
Currently there are four measures of centrality: degree (Bavelas, 1948), betweenness (Freeman, 1977), closeness (Bavelas, 1950) and information (Stephenson and Zelen, 1989). Betweenness is used in the present study because this centrality measure detects the shortest path between two nodes (journals) in the network. For every pair of nodes in a connected network, there exists at least one shortest path between the nodes such that the number of links that the path passes through is minimized. The betweenness centrality for each node is the number of these shortest paths that pass through the node. In the present study, betweenness is a centrality measure that is based on the geodesic distance – the closest distance – among the journals in the structure of a scientific community. The most central journal will be the one that is located on the shortest path among all journals in the network. In this sense, the journal with the higher betweenness centrality constitutes a bridge in the scientific communication among peers that share knowledge through the journals in the network. Furthermore, betweenness is a measure that can detect the emergence or the existence of multidisciplinarity in a field (Leydesdorff, 2007). The more multidisciplinary a journal is, the more probable it is that it will become a convergent space or bridge of consensus among scientific fields.
In the present study the betweenness value of a journal is the number of times it appears as the shortest path between all pairs of journals in the graph or network. The betweenness centrality, calculated according to Freeman (1977), estimates the probability of ‘communication’ among journals in the following way. Let
Results
In this section we map and analyse the contours of the economy and space field with the aim of describing the evolution of the main research communities that emerge from the BC network among journals. We also study the evolution of the distance between those communities with clearly defined economic and geographic perspectives as a proxy of the level of dialogue between them and the level of interdisciplinarity; and third, we focus on the role and evolution of those journals that act as bridges in the field to evaluate to what extent they have been able to promote the dialogue between geographers and economists.
1980–1989: Environment & Planning A – a bridge between disciplinary islands in the field of economy and space
During the 1980s, we find a clear-cut division of journals into two broad clusters, one of geographers (in yellow in Figure 1) and the other of economists (in green in Figure 1) (Table 1). According to our results, the dialogue between geographers and economists was almost non-existent. It is very unusual to find economics and geography journals related to the study of economy and space with references in common. A similar result is reported by Bodman (1991) and Foster et al. (2007) regarding the high degree of intradisciplinary scope in fields of geography and economic geography.
Bibliographic matching network 1980–1989.
Clusters of journals 1980–2017.
aOrganized according to clusters in 2010–2017. Cluster 1: geography; cluster 2: economics; cluster 3: urban studies; cluster 4: applied geographical analysis
bDuring the 1980s, we use information from the Political Geography Quarterly.
cDuring the 1990s, we use information from Ecumene.
Source: authors based on WOS.
Of note here is that Environment and Planning A stands out as almost the only relevant bridge between both communities and has the largest betweenness centrality in the sample. Environment and Planning A began life as a journal close to regional science, urban economics and quantitative methods, with this legacy surviving into our first time period. During the 1980s, Environment and Planning A belonged to the economics cluster and was mainly connected with journals of this group that included Urban Studies, International Regional Science Review, Geographical Analysis and Annals of Regional Science. At the same time, Environment and Planning A was connected to the journals of the geography cluster, such as Regional Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Annals of the Association of American Geographers (Figure 1).
The cluster of geography journals was much larger than the economics one (21 versus 10 journals). The latter cluster shows a high level of density in terms of bibliographic matching around four core journals – Land Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics and Journal of Regional Science – with almost no interaction with geography journals (Figure 1). This interaction mainly took place with the journals that belong to the periphery of this group, such as International Regional Science Review, Urban Studies and Environment and Planning A. The cluster of geography journals is also relatively dense, and three journals stand out as the intradisciplinary bridges: Habitat International, Professional Geographer and Area (Figure 1).
1990–1999: new journals in the troubled waters of economy and space
The 1990s was a period of significant change in the field of economy and space. First, new economic geography emerged as a focus of intense interest within economics, provoking a reaction on the geographers’ side. Moreover, the number of journals in the field significantly increased (from 31 to 45 in our sample). Finally, we find that a new cluster of journals appeared mainly related to the scientific areas of urban studies and planning (in red in Figure 2). In terms of the number of journals, the size of the clusters of economics (11 journals) and geography journals (18 journals) did not change significantly, while the cluster of urban studies and planning (16 journals) predominantly attracted journals from the previous geography cluster (7) and new journals (8) (Table 1).
Bibliographic matching network 1990–1999.
Perhaps the most notable finding is that, despite the interest and apparent disciplinary friction generated by new economic geography, the dialogue between economists and geographers did not seem to increase noticeably during this decade. Even, the ‘mutual neglect’ hypothesis gained force. The density of the group of economists increased around the same core of journals – Land Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics and Journal of Regional Science – while the peripheral journals of economists that in the past decade were closer to geographers tended to move away from this cluster. During this period Environment and Planning A moved away from economics and towards the cluster of geographers, while Urban Studies became part of the core of the new cluster (Figure 2).
A second finding of note in this context of growing isolation is that Environment and Planning A remained the main bridge between both communities but now instead facing other geography journals; it became more strongly connected to journals of this group such as Geoforum, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Regional Studies and Environment and Planning D (Figure 2). The remainder of geography journals also increased their density compared to the previous decade and their interaction with economists became almost non-existent.
During this period, Environment and Planning A augmented its betweenness centrality in the sample because it acted not only as the main ‘trading zone’ between geographers and economists but also as a bridge with the new cluster of urban studies and planning and was strongly connected with the journal Urban Studies. It is difficult to say whether this new cluster is more geographic or economic in flavour. According to the origin of many of its journals, it could be thought of as closer to geography. Furthermore, BC between both groups is stronger than with economists. At the same time, however, the core of this cluster, formed by the journals Urban Studies, Landscape and Urban Planning and Applied Geography was closer to the cluster of economists, in some cases more than Environment and Planning A. In this sense, it is plausible to partly consider this cluster as an in-between land where some sort of dialogue between geographers and economists was taking place and where Urban Studies played the role of the main bridge.
2000–2009: Journal of Economic Geography a new bridge in the increasingly complex field of economy and space?
The first decade of the 21st century saw calls for both the retreat of geographers from engagement with economists and calls for pluralism and greater interdisciplinary dialogue between these communities. At the same time, the number of journals increased significantly (from 45 to 55 in our sample), partly reflecting and contributing to the emergence of heterodox economic geographies (Foster et al., 2007) as foreshadowed by Lee and Wills (1997). In this context, the number of scientific communities identified in the previous decade remained constant (Table 1 and Figure 3), but while the size of the clusters of economists (13 journals) and geographers (16 journals) experienced only minor changes, the cluster of urban studies and planning grew significantly to become the largest in the field (26 journals), attracting journals from both the geography and economics groups, as well as new journals (Table 1). One of the most relevant changes in this period is related to the structure of the cluster of economics journals. In the two previous decades, this community had been very dense, while in this decade it became fragmented into two groups. The first contains its traditional core of journals related to regional science and urban economics, such as the Journal of Regional Science, the Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics and the Annals of Regional Science. The second group forms a new periphery of journals that, to some extent, seems to respond to the call for greater dialogue between geographers and economists (Figure 3). In this new subgroup, we find the Journal of Economic Geography, created explicitly to promote that dialogue, but also some journals that in the previous two decades were part of the cluster of geography journals, such as Regional Studies, Economic Geography, European Planning Studies, European Urban and Regional Studies and Environment and Planning C. This subgroup tended to have dialogue with the two main bridges of the previous decade – Environment and Planning A and Urban Studies – but not with the rest of the journals of the geography cluster. During this decade, the Journal of Economic Geography played a significant role in the field of economy and space, but it was not yet able to become a significant bridge between the disciplines of economics and geographers.
Bibliographic matching network 2000–2009.
The second important change during this decade is the high density of part of the geography cluster, which seemed to follow the ‘retreat’ strategy (Figure 3). In this sense, the two cores of the clusters of geography and economics were more separated than before, while dialogue took place through peripheral journals in economics and traditional bridges in the geographers’ field. Environment and Planning A increased again its betweenness centrality and acted as the main bridge between the three clusters, while Geoforum acted mainly as a bridge within the geography group.
The cluster of urban studies and planning journals deserves special attention not only because it became the largest in the field of studies on space and economy in terms of the number of journals, but also because of its broad scope (it is the less dense cluster), and the increasing complexity that characterizes this period. This cluster seems to have one core around journals such as Urban Studies, Landscape and Urban Planning, Cities, Environment and Planning B and Urban Geography that, at different levels, tended to allow dialogue with both economists and geographers about cities and urban problems, and reinforced its role as a land in-between both communities. There was also a very broad periphery with weak connections to both economists and geographers (Figure 3).
2010–2017: Bridges too far? Increasing fragmentation and distance in the field of economy and space
The first seven years of this decade have reinforced the trends observed in the previous period, but also show the emergence of a larger group of journals acting as bridges. The composition of clusters has not changed significantly and this period is characterized by growing fragmentation within and between clusters and increases in the distance between the core journals of each cluster. In this sense, the search for a ‘common ground’ between economists and geographers, called for at the beginning of this century, seems currently to be limited to a small number of journals peripheral to their clusters, many of them explicitly defined as pluralist in their approach to economy and society, while the remainder of journals tend to increase their level of specialization and to form small, very dense and relatively closed communities.
The first evidence of these trends is the emergence of a new cluster within the field (in blue in Figure 4). In fact, in this time period the cluster of urban studies and planning journals splits into two. The first one is relatively less dense than other clusters in the field and is formed by those journals related to the analysis of cities from a broad perspective, such as Habitat International, Cities and especially Urban Studies, that acts as the main bridges of this cluster with economists and geographers. This cluster of urban studies and planning reinforces its position as an in-between land in the field of studies about space and economy. The second and new cluster is concentrated around the journals Land Use Policy, Applied Geography, Journal of Transport Geography and Landscape and Urban Planning. All the components of this cluster are derived from the previous decade’s cluster of urban studies and planning, but have significantly different characteristics: it is a very dense cluster, which implies strong relationships between the journals within the cluster; it is also a relatively isolated cluster, which indicates a high level of specialization – tending to prioritize applied technical and quantitative approaches to analysis (Figure 4). Despite the relative isolation of this cluster, three journals stand out as bridges between the clusters of economists and geographers with high values of betweenness centrality: Land Use Policy, Applied Geography and Landscape and Urban Planning.
Bibliographic matching network 2010–2017.
Among the group of geographic journals, the ‘retreat’ strategy seems to be predominant around a core of the likes of Area, Gender, Place and Culture, Political Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Antipode and Environment and Planning D – some of them being notable as former venues for economic geography articles during the 1980s and 1990s. These journals form a very dense group and tend to increase their distance from the core of the cluster of journals frequented by economists – reducing the dialogue with this community to almost zero (Figure 4). In contrast, in the periphery of this cluster of geographers we find Environment and Planning A and Geoforum which increase its proximity to the periphery of the cluster of economists and remain as the main bridges between both communities (Figure 4). Environment and Planning A remains also connected to the clusters of urban studies and planning.
The structure of the cluster of economists is similar to that found in the previous period, and shows a fragmentation into two groups: first, a very dense and specialized core of journals related to regional science and urban economics, such as Journal of Urban Economics, International Regional Science Review and Papers in Regional Science; second, a group of peripheral and more dispersed journals, with a broader and more pluralistic methodological approach, that are the main bridges of this cluster with geographers and urban studies and planning (Figure 4). The group has some incipient bridge-building and trading zones among a whole set of journals that in the past had few interactions. In this group we find, on one side, Regional Studies, European Planning Studies, Land Economics and Journal of Economic Geography, closely connected to Environment and Planning A and Geoforum; on the other side we find Environment and Planning C and Regional Science and Urban Economics, closely connected to Urban Studies. In general terms, the role of these journals as bridges for the dialogue between economists and geographers is increasing but still weak, such as in the case of the Journal of Economic Geography, which increases its betweenness centrality but is not yet able to become a significant bridge. It is worth mentioning finally that the group of bridge journals is increasing and hopefully in the near future could become a larger pluralist community.
Conclusions
Our results confirm the idea of a proliferation of economic geographies proposed by Foster et al. (2007). We find an increasing fragmentation in the field of studies of economy and space rather than a growing dialogue among different approaches – a natural reflection perhaps of the fact that academic careers have long been predicated on a strong measure of teaching and research specialization. This fragmented pluralism is disappointing from the perspective of the desirability of dialogue between geographers and economists. Over the 38 years we have considered, the distance between the core journals of geographers and economists appears to have increased and mutual neglect seems the dominant position. The sort of ‘engaged pluralism’ (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010; Mäki and Marchionni, 2011) wished for seems to be an increasingly difficult proposition, given the continued fragmentation of disciplines into ever more specialized subfields. Although there are emerging spaces for dialogue, they remain peripheral to the core of journals related to space and economy both in geography and economics and not yet strong enough to create a distinct academic community. On the economists’ side, journals such as European Planning Studies, Journal of Economic Geography, Environment and Planning C and Regional Studies are much closer to the geographers than traditional journals more related to regional science and urban economics that have remained strongly isolated during the whole period of analysis; on the geographers’ side, Environment and Planning A stands out as the main bridge between both communities during the whole period, while the majority of journals in this group seem to have followed the ‘retreat’ strategy proposed by some scholars at the beginning of this century and are nowadays further away from economists than in the first two decades of our study. Interestingly, since the 1990s the subfield of urban studies and planning has emerged as a middle ground between economists and geographers, where the journal Urban Studies, together with Habitat International and Cities, play the role of bridges between academic communities.
Our analysis can be improved in many ways to obtain more refined measures of dialogue and pluralism with respect to the space and economy field. The study of the evolution of communities of authors working together and belonging to different disciplines can provide another perspective. With a view to understanding the extent to which pluralism is emerging, future analysis can also focus on a narrower sample of journals to understand in more detail emerging communities of journals where dialogue is taking place. More detailed analysis of specific journals can be another relevant venue for future research. In this sense, it is also important to consider that new efforts to promote dialogue and pluralism in this field have already started. On the one hand, the creation of the new Environment and Planning E is doubtless a reflection of, but will of course likely shape, the future emergence of a new subgroup centred on issues of political ecology and environmental sustainability with connections to journals that are not included in the scope of this analysis. On the other hand, there appears to be something of a dialogue between geographers and international business scholars (with their affinity to mainstream economics concepts and methods) that may yet indirectly spur greater engagement between geographers and economists and which has occurred alongside something of a ‘defection’ of economic geographers to business schools in the UK (Martin, 2018).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.