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the subsidiary companies will be different: in the agro-food industry, diversified
subsidiary companies are adapted to the same regional national markets, whereas in
the car industry, subsidiary companies are directly specialized and integrated within
a global project. Therefore, the competition between cities is not on the same spatial
scale (it is on the regional or national scale in the agro-food industry and on the
global scale in the automotive sector).
10.3
Networked Cities Through a Corporate Firm's Network
To ensure their competitiveness, the multinational firms studied in this research
divide their activity according to localized territorial skills. These territorialized
skills are the result of local networks of cooperation between private and public
actors. The local scale allows close relationships between these actors (
Storper &
Venables
,
2004
). According to the classic definition of economies of agglomeration
(
Camagni
,
1999
;
Duranton & Puga
,
2004
;
Ellison & Glaeser
,
1997
;
Henderson
,
1988
;
Hoover
,
1937
,
1948
;
Jacobs
,
1969
;
Marshall
,
1920
;
Ohlin
,
1933
), these effects
of proximity allow the companies to realize different kinds of economies:
Economies of scale, allowing them to increase their productivity;
Economies of urbanization, related to the collective use of generic services in
the heart of the territories (e.g., grid systems, administration and unspecialized
services);
Economies of location, related to the collective use of specific agents (e.g.,
subcontractors, services, specialized infrastructures).
Economic actors such as multinationals will be based on these economies of
agglomeration and will stimulate them, thus reinforcing the capacity and/or the
specialization of the territory (
Rozenblat
,
2004
). The company networks use these
localized territorial properties and they are articulated in the heart of the network
(
Doz et al.
,
2001
). The networks of multinationals comprise hierarchical and
functional links between territories. Worldwide, the relations between territories
follow two simultaneous and articulated plans:
A hierarchical model that organizes the local market areas, as described by
Christaller (
1933
), which relies more on networks of proximity, facilitated by
close markets and regional hierarchies of cities.
A model of specialization between specialized cities encouraged by long-range
relationships defining “economies of archipelagos” (
Veltz
,
2000
).
The approach of the firms' networks, aggregated by cities, highlights the spatial
effects of the inherent strategies of the two sectors:
For the agro-food industry, except for the cities that contain headquarters with
broad functions, we observe that most large cities of the large economic regions
contain a large number of subsidiaries: Paris and London for Nestlé, London and
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