Mariachiara Barzotto, University of Bath

Jennifer Clark, The Ohio State University

AI is increasingly understood as an emerging enabling technology with potentially far-reaching implications for regional development. As both an industry in its own right and a technology increasingly integrated across incumbent sectors, AI has the potential to reshape production systems, innovation dynamics, regional governance, and the organisation of economic activity across space. Its growth raises important questions about technological change, the spatial organisation of new industries, the evolving practices of regional development, and the transformation of existing sectors.

AI may also be understood as a technology that influences how knowledge is produced, legitimised, and acted upon. In this sense, its significance extends beyond industrial transformation alone: AI may also affect how regions are governed and planned. This perspective resonates with long-standing debates on technological change, digitalisation, and place-based adaptation, where innovation has been shown to reshape both regional economic trajectories and the institutional capacities through which development is pursued.

There is a growing and welcome interest in identifying the regional implications of new technologies, such as the impacts of AI as a platform technology integrated across incumbent industries. Recent scholarship has begun to engage some of these issues, including its role in green technology specialisation, global innovation systems and industrial rise, new path creation and the role of system-building agency in these new path creations. Yet these discussions remain fragmented across literatures, empirical domains, and scales of analysis. What remains missing is a more coherent research agenda that examines AI simultaneously as an emerging industry, as a tool and infrastructure of regional development governance, and as an enabling technology whose diffusion may alter the spatial organisation of existing sectors.

The Call for Papers invites conceptually robust, empirically grounded, and methodologically rigorous contributions that examine the regional development implications of AI as an emerging enabling technology. Contributions may address the economic geography of the AI industry, the effects of AI on the governance, administration, and planning of regional development, and the ways in which the diffusion and adoption of AI across incumbent sectors may reshape patterns of agglomeration, dispersion, and regional economic change.

Potential topics

• The economic geography of the AI industry: spatial organisation of AI production, agglomeration and dispersion patterns, factors determining spatial organisation (skills, capital, infrastructure, energy, regulatory regimes)
• AI and the governance of regional development: impact on administration and management, effects on decision-making processes and outcomes, effects on regional development and planning practices (citizen engagement, public administration, systems optimisation, transportation)
• AI diffusion and the restructuring of incumbent industries: how adoption and diffusion of AI alters regional geography of incumbent industries, changes to spatial logics of other sectors, substitution effects with other technologies, new patterns of concentration or dispersion, analogues from previous enabling technologies

Timeline

• October 16, 2026: Abstract deadline
• December 1, 2026: Manuscript deadline