In an article titled “Mapping NASCAR Valley: Charlotte as a Knowledge Community” (Southeastern Geographer, Spring 2011), East Carolina University geographers Ronald Mitchelson and Derek Alderman explain,
We refer to the locational clustering of stock car racing’s industrial activities in and around the Charlotte region as ‘‘NASCAR Valley,’’ a term inspired by a similar regional concentration of racing-related firms in southern England called Motor Sport Valley. We show that the establishment of the cluster was hardly accidental. NASCAR Valley is illustrated to be a clearly defined uniform region just north of Charlotte with a major axis running northwest/southeast from Mooresville to Concord, North Carolina. The Valley contains about half of the state’s racing establishments, 60 percent of its racing employment, and 70 percent of its racing revenues. This empirical work confirms some key expectations associated with the creation of knowledge communities in which engineered technologies dominate. (p. 31)
One of my complaints with the article is that they give the NASCAR Hall of Fame – what they describe as a “memory community” – a pass. After all, the Hall’s dismal track record must say something about the limits of the NASCAR Valley “knowledge community.”
And, yes, I read Southeastern Geographer. Who doesn’t?