Import replacement refers to an urban free market economic process of entrepreneurs replacing the imports of the city with production from within the city.

The idea was invented by Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, was an American-Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities , a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States...

 who spun off from the idea of import substitution

Import substitution

Import substitution industrialization or "Import-substituting Industrialization" is a trade and economic policy that advocates replacing imports with domestic production. It is based on the premise that a country should attempt to reduce its foreign dependency through the local production of...

 developed by Andre Gunder Frank

Andre Gunder Frank

Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American economic historian and sociologist who promoted "dependency theory" after 1970 and "World Systems Theory" after 1984...

 and widely discussed during the first and second Latin American debt crisis

Latin American debt crisis

The Latin American debt crisis was a financial crisis that occurred in the early 1980s , often known as the "lost decade", when Latin American countries reached a point where their foreign debt exceeded their earning power and they were not able to repay it.-Origins:In the 1960s and 1970s many...

. Import substitution is a national economic theory implying that if a nation substituted its imports with national production the nation would become wealthier, whereas Jacob's idea is entirely about cities and could be called urban import substitution. However, even this would lead to confusion since, in practice, import substitution in India and Latin America were government subsidized and mandated, whereas Jacobs' concept of import replacement is a free market process of discovery and division of labor within a city.