Much has been written and theorized concerning the emergence of technologically dynamic industrial regions. These regions are characterized by the spatial clustering of small and medium-sized firms into flexible production networks. Economic growth models speak to the virtues of spatially concentrated, inter-linked firms and their ability to quickly respond to changing global market demands. According to these models, emerging industrial clusters and expansive competitive strategies emanate from the collaboration among firms within a region where cooperative yet competitive inter-firm relations create the ability to exploit certain "competitive advantages" in an uncertain global economy. Empirical case studies of industrial clusters in the United States have included the center of semiconductor production in the Silicon Valley of California and the concentration of mini-computer producers along the Route 128 Corridor in Massachusetts. These so-called "core clusters" have received the greatest attention due to their technological dynamism and global competitiveness. Home-based core clusters also hold an attraction because they offer the potential for comparative case studies with technologically dynamic clusters within other industrialized nations. Attempts to compare and emulate industrial development patterns in more celebrated geographic regions has limited scholarly research to more advanced industrial sectors of the economy. Mature industrial sectors have received far less attention, despite their growing vitality and contribution to the economic base of their respective regions. The empirical case study of the plastics industry of North Central Massachusetts uncovered a unique industrial cluster with a distinct spatial pattern and organization of production. The case study and contextual analysis offer a formative perspective on a reemerging industrial region that helped to explain the correlation between the spatial concentration of firms and the local production network. The conclusions provide a wider and more varied explanation of regional industrial development, and a meaningful framework for the formulation of appropriate reindustrialization policies and strategies. This has clear implications for industrial planning and development practice. Appropriate and successful economic development planning will need to rely more on grounded interpretive research, require greater local capacity building, and consider the development of more formalized networks of institutional support.

Progressive scholars have found in community-engaged research and participatory methodologies a synergistic approach for pursuing transformative co-production of knowledge to understand the complexity of critical social and environmental issues. According to Jasanooff (2004), the co-production of knowledge is "the simultaneous process through which modern societies form their epistemic and normative understandings of the world." This dissertation project has sought the co-production of geographic knowledge in socio-environmental research on stream restoration, co-produced between academics and community activists in Medellin, Colombia. Specifically, the intent of the research has been to examine the latent power of affect and feeling to promote the ecological care of streams and their surrounding basins, and to understand the possibilities of mapping the desires that local ecological actors have for stream restoration. Papers one and two also made key contributions to understanding how environmental and social actors surrounding La Honda stream are or could contribute to a scenario of the stream basin’s ecological care. In paper three I detailed my work on the ElAtlas initiative. There I documented the rich historical process we went through to build ElAtlas. I described how the initiative involved the convergence of different participatory approaches in GIS, such as Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS), and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and richly detailed the three different stages of the initiative. / Geography