This book introduces a radically spatialised approach to knowledge creation and innovation. Reflecting on an array of European urban and regional developments, it offers an updated notion of milieu as the conceptual and material space of knowledge and innovation in line with the interpretative turn in social sciences and humanities. In view of the unwillingness of mainstream economics to accommodate such a trend, the authors pursue a broadly understood hermeneutic approach that expands on the triad of knowledge-space-innovation. The book’s main findings are that space is an essential intermediary in the connection between knowledge and innovation, and that a renewed notion of milieu provides the knowledge-space-innovation triad with both an analytical basis and operational power. It also offers fresh insights into the significance and potential of the knowledge economy. A number of empirical European case studies on various scales (organisations, cities and territories) support the findings and suggest new policy directions.

Augusto Cusinato is Associate Professor of Urban & Regional Economics at the Iuav University of Venice and Director of the Research Unit “Society, Economy, Territory”. His main research interests are in urban economics, knowledge economics and informal economy. He is co-author of La genèse d’une culture locale d’entreprise au Nord-Est de l’Italie (L’Harmattan) and editor of Economia informale e istituzioni. Processi di reciproco adattamento (L’Harmattan Italia).

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is Professor of Law & Theory at the University of Westminster and Director of The Westminster International Law & Theory Centre. His research is interdisciplinary and includes phenomenology, autopoiesis, law and literature, geography, art, corporeality, environmental studies and so on. His previous edited volumes Law and the City and Law and Ecology and his monographs Absent Environments and Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society are published by Routledge.