Spatio-economic implications of Industry 4.0 in relational perspective: innovation, evolution, organization and interaction; analyzed for the example of the German textiles industry

“工业4.0”这一口号标志着德国最近关于工业生产技术发展趋势的公开辩论。这一概念与对真正范式转变的期望有关：通过在工业价值链的所有阶段实施基于互联网的协调和通信技术（所谓的网络物理系统），生产过程中涉及的参与者、产品和服务以前所未有的方式相互联系。工业4.0为整个生产系统提供了提高效率和新商业模式的扩展选项。需要对这一问题进行研究，因为尽管公众对工业4.0给予了极大的关注，但对其选址要求和潜在影响几乎没有任何实质性的了解。虽然技术基础已经为人所知，并不断得到进一步发展，但对于技术应用如何在若干工业部门扩散，影响公司内部和公司之间的劳动力组织及其与体制和地点环境的相互作用，只有模糊的想法。因此，该项目通过经济地理学，纺织技术/工程以及经济，社会和技术历史的跨学科方法进行研究，这些空间影响可能与未来的工业4.0相关，涉及背景条件以及技术应用的影响。从概念上讲，研究借鉴了关系经济地理学框架，创新，演变，组织和互动的维度似乎特别适合分析有关的过程领域，可以广泛地解决跨学科项目团队。实证工作的重点是纺织工业部门与其长期的传统，技术引起的破裂在德国的位置。为了对工业4.0在企业和空间互动方面引起的变化进行可行的评估，经济地理学家需要与互补科学学科的研究人员联手。这就是为什么该项目整合了专业的工程科学专业知识，以捕捉纺织行业的基本创新/技术趋势及其在企业中的组织实施。在研究这一历史领域时，包括经济和技术历史科学的专业知识，可以从当前案例的早期范式变化和演变轨迹中学习。跨学科的方法将在概念和方法上创造性地激发项目工作;它提供了联合收割机的历史文献和数据分析（回顾性预测），地理经验社会研究，以及在情景分析的总体保护伞下对公司技术系统的深刻分析。

The catchword Industry 4.0 significantly marks recent public debates on technology based development trends of industrial production in Germany. This notion is connected with expectations of a veritable paradigm shift: By implementing Internet-based technologies of coordination and communication (so called Cyber Physical Systems) through all stages of the industrial value chain, the actors, products and services involved in the production process become interconnected in unprecedented ways. Industry 4.0 offers extended options of improved efficiency and new business models in the entire production system. Research on the issue is needed since, despite of the eminent public attention devoted to Industry 4.0, there is hardly any substantial knowledge about its locational requirements and potential effects. While the technology foundations are already known and constantly further developed, only vague ideas exist on how technology application could proliferate in several industry sectors, affecting the organization of labour within and between firms as well as their interaction with institutional and locational contexts. Accordingly, the project investigates through an interdisciplinary approach of economic geography, textile technology/ engineering, and economic, social and technology history, which spatial implications could be associated with Industry 4.0 in the future, relating to context conditions as well as effects of technology application. Conceptually, research draws on the relational economic geography framework, as the dimensions of innovation, evolution, organization and interaction seem to fit particularly well to analysing the regarded process field and can be broadly addressed by the interdisciplinary project team. Empirical works focus on the textile industry sector with its longstanding tradition of technology-induced ruptures at locations in Germany. For achieving a viable assessment of the changes induced by Industry 4.0 in terms of the corporate and spatial interaction of actors, economic geographers need to join forces with researchers from complementary scientific disciplines. This is why the project integrates specialized engineering science expertise to capture the essential innovation/ technology trends in the textile sector and their organized implementation in firms. And including expertise of economic and technology history science when studying this history-charged sector allows to learn from earlier paradigmatic changes and evolutionary trajectories for the current case. The interdisciplinary approach shall creatively inspire project work both conceptually and methodologically; it offers to combine methods of historical document and data analysis (retrospective forecasting), geographical empirical social research, and profound analysis of corporate technology systems under the overarching umbrella of scenario analysis.