A reinterpretation of the agri-food system and its spatial dynamic throught the industrial district

Industrial district theory has brought to development economics the opportunity to interpret economic change through places where it actually takes place, as a result of join action of local and extra-local social, economic and institutional forces. This chapter sets out to discuss the contribution that industrial district theory can make to the debate on spatial dynamics of agri-food systems in the age of globalisation. The first part analyses the contribution of the industrial district approach in the relationship between industry and territory; the second part studies the evolution of the concept of agri-food system and the main determinants of the spatial dynamics in modern agri-food systems. The authors agree that the industrial district theory can shed new light on the spatial dynamics of agri-food systems, and can offer an alternative to the mainstream approach. In using the local community as a unit of analysis, industrial district theory gives a key role to human agents of production and their knowledge and the agri-food system can be seen as “a global network of places”, each place being specialized in a different component of the system.