Entrepreneurship in Abandoned Places: From Ghost Towns and Vacant Cities to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

Entrepreneurs play a key role in the imagination – and sometimes in the re-imagination – of new socio-cultural, economic, environmental, and institutional possibilities. Through the commitment of non-trivial, irreversible investments of time, capital, and other tangible and intangible resources, business venturers engage in novel action to generate reproducible benefits. While a large body of scholarly literature examines the manner which entrepreneurs identify, develop, and exploit new commercial possibilities in untapped frontiers, entrepreneurs also have the ability to exert enormous regenerative influence upon abandoned, deserted, or even destroyed locales. Extending and enhancing recent work on “spatial entrepreneurship,” we develop and test a novel perspective concerning the entrepreneurial reimagination of abandoned places. We uncover potent implications for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the finding that without the involvement of entrepreneurs, efforts to reimagine, reclaim, and revitalize abandoned human structures are fruitless.