Locational Avoidance by Nonmetropolitan Industry

Abstract

The concept of locational avoidance is applied to the process of nonmetropolitan industrialisation by means of a periodisation involving two phases of locational avoidance. During the phase of Fordist mass production, certain labour-intensive industries decentralised to low-wage non-metropolitan areas to avoid locating close to other firms where there was a danger of wages subsequently being bid up. In the present phase, characterised by a tendency towards flexible accumulation, a new wave of more capital-intensive industries has sought out nonmetropolitan areas, again displaying a pattern of locational avoidance, but mainly in order to retain the human capital invested in their skilled labour force. This second dispersed arrangement of industry stands in stark contrast to the flexible production agglomerations that have been formed elsewhere in new industrial spaces during the same period, even though both were produced under regimes of flexible accumulation. A series of conjectures exploring these ideas is examined in light of the locational behaviour of firms locating in the Georgian Bay nonmetropolitan area north of Toronto.