Manufacturing: location, scale & industrial change

Every factory sits somewhere for a reason. In this AS lesson we treat manufacturing — secondary industry — as a system that takes raw materials and adds value to make finished goods, and we build a mind-map of the factors that decide where a factory locates: raw materials, market, labour, power, transport, capital, government, agglomeration and land. We apply those factors to three very different industries — motor-vehicle assembly (with the assembly plants of South Africa), footloose high-technology industry, and craft industry — then climb the ladder of scale from the cottage workshop, to the factory, to the multinational corporation. We weigh how much manufacturing matters to Namibia's economy through jobs, value added and exports such as meat and fish processing, examine the nature of industrial landscapes and their environmental costs, and finish with the causes and effects of industrial change, anchored in our required case study: the woodcarvers of Okahandja.