Economic Geographies: Circuits, Flows and Spaces

The version of the following full text has not yet been defined or was untraceable and may differ from the publisher's version. Please be advised that this information was generated on 2017-01-23 and may be subject to change. For a long time, we have been looking for a textbook for our theoretically oriented economic geography Course that suits the critical and cultural focus of our Masters Curriculum. In particular, we like to build on the current aspiration to combine political-economic and cultural forms of theorising and analysing economic geographies through a relational approach (Barnes, 2001). So we highly welcomed the way Hudson's volume pursues such an agenda covering a wide range of topics. After carving out its own position in the theoretical debate (Chapter 1) Economic Geographies presents a discussion on four types of flows and transformations, namely of value and capital (2), material and nature (3), knowledge and meaning (4), and people (5). After that, the book zooms in onto four types of spaces: regulation and governance, production, sale, consumption and identities, and concludes with contemplating the desirable but difficult conversion of space of pollution and waste into 'spaces of sustainability'. Because of the latter emphasis, Hudson's volume also offers scope for engaging with the debates on environment and sustainability, which constitute an important pillar within the wider teaching and research cluster in which our Curriculum is embedded. As a result, our opinion here is based not only on our own reading, but also on teaching experiences and feedback from the students. Indeed, it is not so much the way Economic Geographies meets our own interests, but the reception by our students that has informed us while writing this review. We assess this work as a textbook for graduate teaching (although the cover also recommends it for 'upper level undergraduates') primarily for economic geography students. A clearly positive point is that the book present good value for money, even with the markup for continental sales. But after the purchase, we quickly encounter a major problem. The initial feedback from our students, who are well trained in reading academic literature in English, point out that the book is hard to read. Many long and complex sentences, sometimes convoluted, only occasionally punctuated by limited textual and graphic illustrations. Another problem is that while Hudson takes great care to introduce and explain certain 1 van 3 concepts, such as those dealing with …