Flexible territory in the semi-periphery. Mexican Northern Border

Abstract

A debate is proposed in this paper on the suitability of the regulationist proposal to explain the spatial implications of recent industrial processes. This suitability is questioned for a particular territory in a non-central Nation-State, the Mexican Northern Border, from the middle 1980Ás. At a theoretical level, the usefulness of this for parts of the non-central nations of the World-System. On the same level the main objections on its general assumptions when this theory is applied to the center of the World-System as well as to the rest of it. Are also developed he main characteristics of the new industrialization process in the northern Mexican territory are depicted. These features are then confronted to the underlying assumptions of the regulationist theory. And, from the critique to that school of though an interpretative proposal is generated, based first on the concept of space of flows and, second, on the concept of flexibility in the usage of the Mexican Northern Border.