Ray Hudson

Durham University | DU · Department of Geography

Following the 2019 general election, the Prime Minister claimed that leaving the EU would enable him to ‘get Brexit done’ and introduce policies to “level up” inequalities in a post-EU UK. There still is, however, considerable uncertainty as to exactly what the government means by this, though it seemingly includes reducing differences in economic...

Analyses the claims by the UK government that it will 'level up' socio-spatial inequalities in the post-Brexit UK.

Based on 40 years of detailed research, this book charts the rise and fall of the Durham and South Wales coalfields, telling the 'deep story' of these processes, and relates this to the Brexit referendum vote and the decline in support for the Labour Party in those former coalfields.

Capitalist economies are structured around two fundamental contradictions. The first lies within the social relations of capital, and the second in the ‘metabolic rift’ between capital accumulation and nature. While the adverse effects of the first do create systemic existential crises, capital and its political representatives have discovered ways...

Following the confirmation by the UK Parliament that the UK would leave the European Union on 1 January 2021, this article analyses the likely impact of BREXIT on socio-spatial inequalities in the UK. It argues that inequalities will be further amplified, in contrast to Prime Minister Johnson’s claims that inequalities will be ‘levelled up’, drawin...

As part of the RegPol² Project “Socio-economic and Political Responses to Regional Polarization in Central and Eastern Europe” the authors were invited to hold a wide-ranging conversation about critical economic geography and regional development. The context for the conversation was an ongoing research programme involving scholars based in Leipzig...

There have been significant changes in the geographies of uneven development and a considerable literature documenting these, at varying spatial scales. There is, however, a significant absence in the urban and regional development literature as to the significance of illegal activities in the economies of successful cities and regions. In response...

Book review symposium

Discussions of the illicit and the illegal have tended to be somewhat restricted in their disciplinary range, to date, and have been largely confined to the literatures of anthropology, criminology, policing and, to an extent, political science. However, these debates have impinged little on cognate literatures, not least those of urban and regiona...

Volume 7 of Routledge Library Editions: Modern World Economy

This entry discusses some of the main ways in which, via state policies and the actions of various civil society organizations, attempts have been made to address the problems that result as one set of industries decline in a place via restructuring those industries in situ, attracting inward investment in new activities, or developing a variety of...

At a time of major changes in the geography of the global economy, and following the major financial and economic crises of 2007/2008, the European Union (EU) is marked by deepening uneven economic development, between and within the territories of its 28 (for now) member states. This is one expression of neo-liberalisation as the dominant politica...

The emergence of the rising powers has been seen as heralding a fundamental shift in global economic geography. It can also be seen as the latest expression of capitalist economic development. I first consider theorizations of this development as combined, uneven and crisis-prone, with an ongoing tension between processes of differentiation and equ...

Although the causal mechanisms and processes are specific to different forms of societal organization, uneven development is a characteristic common to more advanced forms of societal development. Uneven development is therefore integral to the crisis-prone development of capitalist economies. From the outset, such economies were and continue to be...

Hadjimichalis C. and Hudson R. Contemporary crisis across Europe and the crisis of regional development theories, Regional Studies. This paper explores the prima facie puzzling issue of why so much contemporary theory in economic geography and regional planning – specifically New Economic Geography (NEG) and New Regionalism (NR) – has so little to...

[Correction added after online publication March 16, 2011: The contact information for two authors was listed incorrectly. The email addresses for Farid Uddin Ahamed and Nasreen Akter have been corrected in this version.] This article both joins with recent arguments in economic geography that have made connections between work on industrial symbio...

The recent growing interest in 'learning' and 'knowl-edge' as a – maybe the (only) – route to corporate and regional economic success is one facet of the engagement between economic geographers and regional analysts on the one hand and evolutionary and institutional economists on the other. This focus on knowledge is often presented as a dramatic b...

The 1979 election heralded a political sea change in the UK, as Thatcherite ‘Two Nation’ politics regarded inequality as evidence of a vibrant capitalism. As a result, inter-regional inequalities were exacerbated as the effects of deindustrialisation, capacity reductions and job losses fell most heavily in the ‘North’. The lifting of restrictions o...

My purpose in this article is selectively to draw upon and use the available evidence to summarise the various forms/types of illegal activities, their relationships to the formal legal economy, their various spatialities and geographies, and to identify some of the theoretical and conceptual issues raised by recognising the absence of consideratio...

In this editorial we pose four questions about the functional economies of northern England in the context of demographic change. How will the northern England population change in the next quarter of a century? What shape will the old of northern England be in and how will we look after them? Are the economies of northern England ready to meet the...

This chapter explores the way that within a single elite university, the opportunity exists for community engagement to take place in a meaningful way, as a means of exploring how community engagement as a mission can be reconciled with other more urgent pressures facing universities to be excellent in their research and teaching. The chapter takes...

At one level, this paper centres on the closure of a steel plant in Germany, the closure and then reprieve of another in the UK and the expansion of a third in China, but at another level this changing geography of steel production can be seen as symptomatic of and symbolizing profound changes in the global manufacturing economy. The closures at Do...

Durham University has initiated a community outreach and engagement program based on an evolving multifaceted model. This article analyses the components of the model and looks at how our work at Durham has become increasingly embedded in the structures and processes of the university as it has developed. The strengths and weaknesses in what has be...

Against the background of claims made about the emergence of a new Knowledge-based Economy, I explore the role of knowledge, learning and innovation in the economy and in relation to regional economic development and to successive conceptions of regional development policies through the lens of the successive transformations of a particular regiona...

The starting point for this paper is that critical political economy needs to take up the challenge that originates in Marx's seminal contributions of conceptualising the economy as both processes of value creation and processes of material transformations. This is because, inter alia, the successful production of commodities requires knowledge of...

This chapter highlights a set of key policy issues around the export of hazardous activities, and contextualizes them within the wider process of globalization. The export of hazardous activities remains a problem despite attempts at international regulation via the Basel convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Wastes and their disp...

Drawing on detailed empirical research in the UK, in this article I explore the motivations that lie behind the formation of social economy organisations (SEOs) and the multiple trajectories that these can then follow and the tensions to which this can give rise as the ‘social’ runs up against the ‘economic’. This can, and often does, involve compe...

What might a resilient region look like in the face of an uncertainty about the global economy and environment? To begin to answer this question, the article first reviews existing concepts of resilience and critically reviews dominant neoliberal concepts of regional development. This forms the basis for seeking to specify the characteristics of re...

Processes of contemporary globalization generate a particular landscape of risk. This landscape is shaped by the economic imperatives that lead to the export of hazardous activities, processes and materials in combination with the uneven regulatory spaces within which these activities are placed. The perceptible neo-liberal shift in the regulation...

Through an exploration of UK municipal waste policy, this paper examines debates on environmental policy integration (EPI) and governance. We argue that this policy arena has been characterised by modes of vertical integration, which have failed to promote the horizontal integration required to move beyond the limits of anachronistic institutional...

In this article, I explore some of the implications of pursuing a cultural political economy (CPE) approach to the analysis of global production networks (GPNs). This raises three sets of issues: the current state of knowledge about GPNs; the current state of knowledge about CPE and the current state of relationships between analyses of GPNs and CP...

Industrial restructuring is a necessary element in the process of capital accumulation. Restructuring denotes decisive qualitative changes rather than just quantitative changes in the organization of production. In this paper the recent (broadly post-1974) restructuring of the West European steel industry is examined via consideration of the interp...

The Reproduction of Societies as CapitalistDefending Places: The Strategies of Capital, Labor, and the StateRoutinization, Deroutinization, and the Reproduction of Capitalist SocietiesSome Concluding Comments

Recently it has become clear that the scale of environmental pollution because of human activities is expanding on a scale previously unimagined. The growth of greenhouse gases is producing perhaps irreversible changes with potentially apocalyptic consequences to the ecological systems on which life on earth as we know it depends. In part this grow...

The concept of uneven development originally developed within Marxian political economy to describe – inter alia – relations between political classes, between the forces and relations of production, and between companies. Subsequently, it became generalized across a wide range of approaches in the social sciences and substantive domains, not least...

In recent years, for a variety of reasons, there has been a resurgence of interest in 'the region' from a variety of both intellectual and practical perspectives, with the somewhat surprising result that regional studies have come to be of central concern and the region has come to occupy a central place in social scientific discourse and political...

From recent debates on governance and governmentality, two key analytical imperatives arise: the need to engage simultaneously with the structures and processes of governing, and the need to recognise the plurality and multiplicity of governing sites and activities. In seeking to address these imperatives, we develop an analytical approach, the mod...

This article focuses upon the practicalities of what people actually do and can do in the present era of neo-liberal globalization to build more progressive local and regional development strategies in Europe. To do so, we introduce three examples of'alternative' local and regional development activities in Europe: (a) social economy projects to ta...

To discover whether Europe's regional economies were moving closer together, or whether new geographical differences and inequalities were being created, this research concentrated on developed and less developed parts of four countries: England, Italy, Poland and Slovakia. Data were collected on the performance of regional economies in each countr...

The networking literature has burgeoned in recent years within a complex cross-disciplinary field and particularly in economic geography and regional planning. Networks have been analysed both as organizational expressions of globalization, linked to claims about the rise of the network society, and as territorial and cultural systems of exchange....

The proposition that regional devolution in and of itself will lead to economic success has become deeply embedded in beliefs and policy discourses about the determinants of regional prosperity, and in turn has led to political demands for such devolution. In this paper I seek critically to examine such claims, using the case of the north-east of E...

Recently the value of Marxian approaches to human geography has again been called into question in the pages of Antipode. In this paper I review the reasons as to why geographers re-discovered Marx and then, from the late 1960s, began to engage with Marxian approaches. I then consider some of the reasons why Marxian approaches in their turn became...

This article focuses upon the practicalities of what people actually do and can do in the present era of neo-liberal globalization to build more progressive local and regional development strategies in Europe. To do so, we introduce three examples of'alternative' local and regional development activities in Europe: (a) social economy projects to ta...

This paper focuses upon the sustainability of the economy in relation to nature and natural ecosystems. There are two main aspects to this relationship: consumption of natural resources; and generation of pollution and wastes because of economic practices of production, exchange and consumption. The paper addresses the extent to which both consumpt...

The author reflects upon regional economic change and the ways in which this is conceptualised and understood, drawing heavily but not exclusively on some thirty years of research on economy, politics and society in the North East of England. The principal question that this paper addresses is: how are the long periods of continuity, punctuated by...

Recent years have seen a rapid rise in the political saliency of the ever growing volumes of municipal waste produced in the UK. In this paper, we outline the preliminary findings of a research project that is examining the nature and development of municipal waste policy (MWP) in north-east England. We provide an overview of the changing national,...

Technopoles of the World: The Making of 21st Century Industrial Complexes, M. CASTELLS and P. HALL, Routledge, London (1994). x+275 pp. £14.99 (pbk). ISBN 0 415 10015 1. Urban Policy in Britain: The City, the State and the Market, R. ATKINSON and G. MOON, Macmillan, Basingstoke (1994). xiii+306 pp. £11.99 (pbk). ISBN 0 333 56747 1. Small Business G...

‘The social and political power of the verity that there are no such things as economies, only economic geographies demands an analysis of the complex flows and relations implied by it. At last, here is a book - the book - which addresses the questions central to the critical understanding of economies and their formative geographies. This is a hig...