Industrial Activity: Impact, Location Factors, and Spatial Organization in Chile

Importance of Industry in Contemporary Society

Industry makes a significant contribution to the economic structure and triggers a series of changes. Key concepts include:

• Industrial Area: The area occupied by the physical plant of industry.
• Industrialized Space: The network of visible and invisible flows generated by industrial activity.

Classical Theories of Industrial Location

On the Location of Industry by Alfred Weber (1909) proposes that the optimum location for any business is one that minimizes the costs of transporting raw materials and energy consumed at the factory, and processed products to markets, measured in tons/km (isodapana concept).

To explain industrial areas, the following should be considered:

1. Industrial activity occupies a definitive site that is part of its spatial structure, linked to other points by a given network flow.
2. As a consequence of the above, the behavior of companies does not have a random character, but rather follows relatively similar patterns that evolve over time.
3. Business profits and disutility are location-specific, resulting in frequent repetition of spatial strategies and the tendency to concentrate.

The Neoclassical Approach

• Moving activities to the periphery: use in situ of resources, decreased participation of natural resources in the final price. (Currently, water maintains its importance as a limiting factor).
• The development of the center depends on the capacity and capability to get rid of declining activities for the benefit of sophisticated activities.
• The best location, in an economic sense, is one that cannot be changed for any other without producing a favorable substitution.
• Development of urban areas: external economies (1) given the reduction in transport costs and the risks associated with it (economy of transfer) and the bulk of infrastructure and equipment.

Industrial System

A delimited set of elements endowed with certain properties, attributes, or values, functionally connected by links of various kinds and intensity, which lead to increasing specialization, hierarchy, and constant dynamism.

Consequences of Industrial Activity in the Area

• Migration
• Reorganization of national and regional urban systems
• Regional imbalances
• Structure and polarization of the transport system
• Environmental degradation
• Modernization of farming

Industry and Environment

Industry is an agent of major significance in environmental degradation. The environment becomes a locational factor. Industry generates externalities (2).

Geographical Distribution of National Industry

Spatial concentration: Metropolitan Region, Regions V and VIII.

With specialized production regions: XI, III, X, VII, IV, I, VI, IX.

Median regions of specialization: VIII, V, II, XII.

Regions highly diversified: Metropolitan Region.

According to the dominant locational factor, industries are oriented towards:

• Local or regional natural resources
• External economies
• Inertia or tradition

A high-interest industry in Chile is mining, which determines a characteristic spatial organization.

Spatial Organization

The distribution of all human activities within a geographical space, with the implicit recognition of a certain order inherent in this distribution, generated by the interaction of systemic factors that govern human activities.

This is based on the following questions:

• What is there? Why are descriptive theoretical approach patterns detected as they are? (Positivist theories)
• What should there be? (Theory of optimal models of settlement)
• How should we intervene to manage change? (The achievement of predetermined objectives)
• Points of scattered concentration of underdevelopment distortion.