Coevolution of Knowledge and Spaces? A Critical Review from Economic Geography

Looking at the emergence of knowledge and spaces in a time dependent, i.e., evolutionary perspective, could raise the question of how far both "coevolve". Coevolution in the neo-schumpeterian perspective of evolutionary economics, however, is a narrow concept: requiring precise preconditions. Knowledge and space are rather unclear, fuzzy concepts, neither self-evident on their own nor in their relationship to each other. The paper first introduces two different views on knowledge, i.e., knowledge as a resource and knowledge as practice. Then, different types of knowledge-intensive localities are discussed in order to understand whether these could he seen as coevolving with knowledge. Although the emergence of knowledge (and technologies) is the main focus in evolutionary economics, the idea of coevolving spaces has to be rejected.