Space, Growth and Development: a Historical Perspective and Recent Advances

After fifty years of its existence, regional economics embraces a large number of approaches, theories and models for the interpretation of location choices and regional development trajectories. Assuming an historical perspective, this work has the aim to underline the way in which the notion of space and growth has developed in theories of regional economics, leading to a higher interpretative capacity of theories and models. The work covers all groups of theories belonging to regional economics: location theory, regional growth theories and local development theories. Advances in theoretical approaches are highlighted. Aspects that run counter to general beliefs emerge by reading the original contributions of well-known theoreticians, and are presented. Advanced in merging different theoretical approaches have been made over the last ten years, and are presented in the chapter.