Guest Editorial

The restructuring of old industrial areas in Europe and Asia Since the Industrial Revolution, the cyclical processes of the rise and fall of regional economies have been accelerating.The fall and necessary restructuring of regional economies have obviously had a long tradition in Europe, but are relatively new phenomena in some countries of Asia.Because this restructuring process is a recurring phenomenon, to describe and explain it is an important task for economic geography.However, as will be shown below, modern theoretical concepts in economic geography mainly try to explain the positive sides of geographical clustering of industries.Conversely, little of this literature attempts to explain the negative sides of geographical clustering.This is, to some extent, contrary to older theories on unbalanced regional development that addressed both positive and negative aspects of regional evolution (Hirschman, 1958;Myrdal, 1957).Because the lock-in concept is one of the few promising modern concepts which try to explain the negative sides of clustering (that is, the decline of old industrial areas) it forms the theoretical core of this theme issue.There are two sides of geographical clustering of industries: a positive ... Much literature in economic geography has been written about the positive sides of geographical clustering industries, such as the work on the rise of new high-tech regions, industrial districts, and regional production clusters in North America and Western Europe (Keeble and Wilkinson, 1999;Storper, 1997).Most authors have tried to come up with explanations for the rise of these regions in order to contribute to regional economic development theories and to learn policy lessons from these success stories for other regions.In the 1980s, for instance, geographers and sociologists launched concepts such as flexible specialisation, (Piore and Sabel, 1984), industrial districts (Pyke and Sengenberger, 1992), and the innovative milieus (Camagni, 1991).Furthermore, some well-known economists have been dealing with the question why internationally successful industries tend to concentrate in a few nations or regions (Enright, 1995; Krugman, 1991;Porter, 1990).More recently, Storper (1997), Morgan (1997), Maskell and Malmberg (1999), Boschma (1997; 2003), Essletzbichler andWinther (1999), andSchamp (2000) have tried to bring together economic geography with the evolutionary school of technological change, which, unlike neoclassical theory, ``takes history and geography seriously by recognizing the importance of place-specific elements and processes to explain broader spatial patterns of technology evolution'' (Essletzbichler and Winther, 1999, page 180).This school regards the mutual relations between innovations, firms, and the political and socio-institutional forces as conditions for an optimal diffusion process and thus for economic growth.Closely related to the evolutionary school are the regional innovation systems concept (Cooke et al, 2004) and the learning region (Morgan, 1997).These explanations share a focus on the origin and development of innovation and the significance of industrial organisation and interfirm linkages for regional competitiveness and regional innovation processes (Malecki, 1997;Schamp, 2000; Sternberg, 1995;To« dtling, 1994).Most of them belong to the recently coined family of territorial innovation models (Moulaert and Sekia, 2003).They increasingly turned from `economic' reasons for growth of new industrial agglomerations to `social' and `cultural' reasons (Amin, 1999;