Territorial Agglomeration and Industrial Symbiosis: Sitakunda-Bhatiary, Bangladesh, as a Secondary Processing Complex

Abstract [Correction added after online publication March 16, 2011: The contact information for two authors was listed incorrectly. The email addresses for Farid Uddin Ahamed and Nasreen Akter have been corrected in this version.] This article both joins with recent arguments in economic geography that have made connections between work on industrial symbiosis and agglomerative tendencies and recasts this work. Drawing on the case of Sitakunda-Bhatiary, Bangladesh, it shows that symbiosis is intricately bound up in the global circulation of wastes and their recovery through secondary processing. It draws attention to the importance of key places as conduits in the transformation of materials and secondary processing; emphasizes their importance as sites of symbiotic activity; and shows how such places exemplify economies of recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing, but in conditions of minimal environmental regulation. It therefore shows that contemporary symbiosis is not necessarily clean and green and may be very messy; that it can be generative of agglomerations, not just dependent upon prior agglomerations; that such agglomerations may be cross sectoral, not just interplant; and that symbiosis needs to be thought of not just through geographic proximity, but through the spatialities of globalization.