Michael Storper

Born in 1954 and trained at Berkeley, Storper is professor of economic geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, at the London School of Economics and at Sciences Po in Paris. In the 1980s and 1990s, with Allen Scott and Richard Walker, he formed the California school of economic geography, which explained the vertical disintegration of production and the rise of industrial districts, and The Regional World (1997) fixed his idea that a region's economy rests on relational assets that cannot be bought.

Keys to the City (2013) gathers his answer to the question of why some cities grow: the holy trinity of organisations, technologies and territories, and above all the institutions and networks that allow a local economy to learn and change. With that view he criticised both technological determinism and Richard Florida's creative class recipe, which he reproached for reversing causality: people follow jobs, not the other way round.

The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies (2015), with Thomas Kemeny, Naji Makarem and Taner Osman, compared Los Angeles and San Francisco since 1970 to explain why two such similar regions diverged: not because of geography or costs but because of the beliefs and networks of their business elites. He is one of the most cited economic geographers and his work guides the OECD's regional policies.

His more recent work studies the regional divergence that feeds political discontent. Since the 1980s the large, wealthy metropolitan areas have pulled away from the rest of the territory in wages, education and growth, and that gap has ended up showing in the vote. Storper argues that the market will not close it on its own and that subsidising places left behind is not enough either: what is needed are regional institutions able to learn, to connect their firms to wider networks and to keep their educated people.