The Geography of Places and their Economic Activities: Agriculture, Regional Identity and Place-activity Association

Food and agricultural industries are at an exciting point in history in the United States. After decades of consolidation and narrowly focused commodity production, food and agricultural industries are once again emerging as a source for economic and community development, and as a foundation for building vibrant regional identities. Unfortunately there is little known about how these industries can achieve this. This research and dissertation seeks to help build this foundation to better understand, theorize and propose how these industries can create food and agricultural based economic development. This dissertation is separated into three articles. The first article analyzes food based community economic development in northern Vermont and highlights several theories that can be used to better understand the complex dynamics that are happening. The second article looks at the case of the Paso Robles wine industry and how it is transforming into a high value wine region. As part of this transformation, regional actors in Paso Robles are attempting to create a collective spatial reputation that communicates key attributes about the region, industry and community. We propose that this spatial collective reputation can be understood as a regional identity that incorporates insider cohesion and vision development, as well as outsider legitimization processes. The third article is the culmination of my research analyzing many different instances of regional identity creation in food and agricultural based industries, as well as other industry sectors. Many regional economies have unique economic and social dynamics, but these vary across many different dimensions. Some are "clusters" and industrial agglomerations, and some of these cluster have resonant regional identities, however not all regions have an identity or cluster like characteristics. We propose that a regional identity is one form of an association between a place and a type of economic activity (place-activity association). We propose eight different dimensions that are important for differentiating five "ideal" place-activity type associations that are: protected regional identity, regional identity, aspatial activity, regional brand and commodity activity. In sum, these three articles represent an attempt to better understand the unique dynamics that take place in regional economies. The first two are focused on agricultural industries, with the third article expanding these concepts to other industries outside of agriculture.