All three questions cannot be answered satisfactorily during the short time of an in-class examination without an initial brief interpretation of the topic and some articulation of your response plans.

These kinds of broad and open-ended questions could potentially be the basis for many dissertations which would give candidates usually more than a year to respond. If you have 15 minutes only, and you want to reach some depth in your answer, you need to consciously break up one or more of the (very) general concepts (agglomeration economies, Hagerstrand's time-space model, "location", footlooseness etc.), identify the range of component parts or alternative perspectives (and make sure the reader gets a general overview of the issues and is convinced of your familiarity with this general but differentiated view of the topic, before identifying a more limited subset which allows you to reach the desired depth. This is an opportunity to direct your answer into a direction which suits your background, insights and preparations! Take it, but set it up first.

It is not advisable that you start with specific examples for something which you really have not identified yet. A general topic does not need examples directly, but only after specific arguments have been articulated which respond to the way in which you have interpreted and focused the question or topic and have broken it up into component parts. If you give examples for the same level of generality as the topic is presented, you are foregoing the opportunity to suggest that your answer may "depend on" further, more fine-tuned conceptual distinctions. It is only through these distinctions that you can present a sufficiently sophisticated response and provide evidence for your conceptual skills and depth of understanding.

At the end of the hour-glass approach, you want to make sure that you do not leave the reader with a very specialized view of the issues, i.e. you want to return from the depth selected by you back to a more general perspective which indicates that you are aware that you just gave one answer out of many possible answers. In a 15-minute statement, you may not have time for more than one sentence to do that....

Use the opportunity to test your evolving conceptual skills in Economic Geography by responding to one of these topics: (5 points). Do not hesitate to relate any of these questions (not just #2) to your consulting area if you wish, or to use examples from other areas for the important conceptual points and differentiations you are making. PLEASE USE THE BACK OF THIS PAGE FOR YOUR STATEMENT!

1. On the basis of your (required) reading of Berry's chapter 9 ("Scale, Externality, and Agglomeration...", pp.242-63 [for week 3]) and our frequent, increasingly differentiated discussion of "agglomeration economies", write a brief conceptual statement on "the role of agglomeration economies (and diseconomies) in the evolution of settlement patterns, urban landscapes and/or locational distributions of economic activities".

2. Give a brief explanation of how Torsten Hägerstrand's Time-Space model might apply (with appropriate modifications or extensions) to your anticipated consulting project(s). How might it help you to
(a) devise your own consulting strategy, OR
(b) explain to potential clients their own problems (for which they need your help) OR
(c) explain to clients some strategy which you may want to suggest to them to follow in order to tackle these problems. [If you are convinced that this does not apply to your present consulting plans, explain why. You have then the option to apply it to some other hypothetical situation of your choosing]

3. Try to reconcile the seeming contradiction between two frequently expressed propositions, namely
(1) that for many activities, the three most important business factors are "location, location, location"; and
(2) that the frictions of space have been reduced for many activities to the point of creating wide-spread "footlooseness".

  BONUS (2 points maximum):