I have contributed to debates on the nature of the present era of capitalist development and its forms of spatial governance. This work has proceeded from a close engagement with, and critique of, the two dominant approaches to this subject within geography and economics since the 1980s: institutionalist work on flexible specialisation and industrial districts (which I criticise as technologically determinist), and regulationalist work on epochs of capitalism and their economic and political geography (which I criticise as structuralist). I have developed an alternative approach, which focuses on the fundamental (spatial) contradictions of capitalist development and its consequent (territorial, scalar) crisis tendencies. Class relations and class conflicts, enacted geographically, are central. The state is viewed, through an Open Marxist approach, as deeply embedded in economic and social life and their tensions and conflicts, and thus a moment of the social whole, rather than as a distinct institution with distinct dynamics.