Scott, Allen (1938–)

One of economic and urban geography's most influential contemporary figures, Allen J. Scott introduced some of the fundamental concepts of contemporary urban political economy, including industrial organization and change and, more recently, the cultural economies of cities.

British in origin, he attended Oxford University, completing his BA in 1961 and MA in 1965. He earned his PhD at Northwestern University in 1965. He taught for several years at the University of Toronto before moving to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1981, where he has since remained as a professor of geography and public policy. He has written 10 single-authored books and coedited 9 more, as well as numerous journal articles; has served as visiting lecturer in various locales; and is the recipient of numerous awards, prizes, honors, and distinguished fellowships.

While Scott's training and early work lay in the domain of mathematical modeling, including location-allocation analysis, the bulk of his contributions lay in dissecting the space economy of metropolitan regions. Specifically, he articulated views of cities as changing systems of production, incorporating older Marxist ideas of the division of labor in novel and intriguing ways. In reviving the older tradition of transactions costs analysis, he was instrumental in sketching the contours of industrial restructuring in the form of the rise of flexible production and accumulation (or “post-Fordism”) in the 1980s. His projects stressed the powerful role played by corporate vertical integration and disintegration in reshaping urban labor markets and spaces, including the rise of “new industrial spaces” distinct from the traditional spatialities of Fordism. Thus, the importance of agglomeration economies fluctuates over time depending on the predominant system of subcontracting, the degree of risk involved, and other factors that reshape the input-output relations among firms. In fusing circuits of commodity production and social reproduction, Scott revealed how the changing division of labor spins off various dimensions in the labor market, such as job gains and losses and the presence or absence of particular complexes of occupations, technologies, and spatial differences in skill sets. Concomitantly, such changes led to associated social geographies, as exemplified by urban gentrification on the one hand and low-income, workingclass ghettos on the other. Scott's efforts also helped discredit neoclassical economic myth of a “free market” by pointing out the inevitable role of the state and urban planning in rationalizing urban land use predicaments. His views thus provided a theoretically powerful, integrated synthesis of longstanding but undersocialized notions in geography such as input-output analysis, the product cycle, agglomeration economies, transactions costs, the geography of labor, state intervention, and technological change.

Scott brought these notions to bear on the specific case of Southern California through a series of detailed case studies on the aerospace, the electronics, and particularly the film industry, among others, thus becoming one of the informal founders of the influential so-called Los Angeles School of urban and regional analysis.

His works on Southern California became widely influential in the revival of regional analysis in geography in the late 20th century, a view that positioned local production complexes within wider national and global divisions of labor. Situating regions within worldwide commodity chains led to an informative fusion of the global and local in the analysis of particular places. Scott extended such analysis from iconic regions such as Silicon Valley and Italy's Emilia-Romagna to dense complexes of service firms at the core of large urban regions found worldwide.

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