Arriving at Airport City Manchester

Exporting" and "Importing" the Enterprise Zone, Entrepreneurial Governance, and the Geopolitics of Economic Development

Bibliographic Data

ID3776017
AuthorsKelly Ward (0000-0002-3810-0889, University of Manchester, corresponding author), Kevin Ward (0009-0009-7153-8872), Alan Wiig (0000-0002-6224-2633, University of Florida)
Year2025
Volume115
Issue8
Pages1867-1886
Publication date2025-09-14
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnnals of the American Association of Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2469-4452 • E-ISSN: 2469-4460
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/24694452.2025.2514033
OpenAlexW4411728576
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited70

The last four decades have witnessed the emergence of zones of various designations as a means of generating economic development and growth. On the one hand, a considerable amount of recent academic attention has turned to the various experiments with enterprise zones, export processing zones, freeport zones, and special economic zones in rapidly urbanizing areas of Africa and Asia. On the other hand, we see still zones of various stripes used in the United Kingdom and the United States, where their existence dates back to the early 1980s. It is to understandings of the latter that we contribute. Our article takes the example of Airport City Manchester to make three broad contributions to the wider extant academic literature. The first is to underscore the need to be attentive to the relationally interconnected nature of “local” policy experimentation. What we see in the case of the global chronology of zones is their complex, incremental, start–stop–start emergence. The second is that regardless of their spatial demarcation they exist outside of “normal” governance norms and regulations. Each zone is a creature of its geographical-cum-institutional state context. The third point is a reminder of the geopolitical nature of many economic redevelopment strategies, as cities enroll themselves, or others enroll them, in wider global issues

Business · Corporate governance · Economic geography · Economics · Economy · Geography · Geopolitics · Political science · Politics · Regional science · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Urban Planning and Governance · Finance

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access