Applications of Evolutionary Economic Geography

famous example has been the rise of an environmental sector after the decline of the mining
industry in the Ruhr area. A broad engineering base in the Emilia Romagna region provided a
fertile ground for the emergence of a broad range of industries such as ceramics, food packaging,
robotics, car manufacturing and agricultural machinery during the post-war period (Boschma,
2004). Another example is the birth of the automobile industry in the Coventry-Birmingham area
in England, which was partly determined by the strong presence of the bicycle and carriage
industry (Boschma and Wenting, 2005). This policy captures the importance of creating ‘related
variety´ in a region, which broadens a region’s sectoral base, while fostering knowledge
spillovers between the sectors (Frenken et al., 2005, 2006).

Another domain of policy, which is of crucial importance for urban and regional economic
growth, is infrastructure provision. The growth of agglomerations is limited by the capacity and
quality of its infrastructure networks. For this reasons, successful regional policy always requires
a complementary transportation infrastructure policy. Again, Sophia Antipolis serves as a
successful example (Quéré, forthcoming), while Cambridge suffered precisely from a mismatch
between its economic development and infrastructure provision (Garnsey and Heffernan,
forthcoming). Adopting an evolutionary approach to transportation planning in the agglomeration
of Amsterdam, Bertolini (forthcoming) attempts to derive some general guidelines for planning.
Given the inherent and irreducible uncertainty about the future regional development and land-
use claims, urban transportation systems should be capable of resilience, that is, still function
properly in the face of change. At the same time, if necessary, the system must also be responsive
to change, that is, it must be adaptable. In transport systems, resilience is best shown by the
network morphology and multi-modality, while adaptability is foremost a property of the policy
system. The link between the two is important: in the case of Amsterdam, the resilience of the
transport network morphology has been a condition for the adaptability of land use and mobility
management policies, because it allowed a choice at all times between substantially different
policy courses.

4. Discussion

Using the micro-meso-macro scheme in figure 1 as a framework, we have discussed various
applications of evolutionary economics in the field of economic geography. The common

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