Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
is explicit and codified, is available to any local actor and organization,
and is generated outside firms' boundaries, being largely created in other
private and public organizations. Variety and promiscuity are distinctive
features of cities, in the sense of there being an absence of long term loyalty
between agents. The combination of different streams of knowledge there-
fore occurs across a broad range of sectors (Jacobs-type externalities), and
individual and organizational innovation linkages or relations are unpre-
dictable due to the low degree of knowledge cumulativeness. However,
even though in many cases the critical distance over which urban agglom-
eration externalities operate may be that of the broad city-metropolitan
area (Gordon and McCann 2005), as is assumed by many theoretical
models of agglomeration, there is also much evidence to suggest that for
many firm-types and industries the critical distances over which agglom-
eration externalities operate may be very much larger, and as large as that
of the city-region (Suarez-Villa and Walrod 1997; Simmie 1998; Arita
and McCann 2000; Caniëls 2000; Cantwell and Iammarino 2003). These
considerations come from observations of regional innovation systems,
the location and performance of MNE R&D facilities, the behaviour of
local and regional labour markets, and the structure of transportation
networks, particularly air-transport systems.
The combination of diverse kinds of knowledge into an interdependent
economic and technological base crucially needs a plurality of knowledge
sources and networking among those sources. These features of economic
systems, and particularly their opportunities for communication, play a
major role in determining the conditions of the production of new technol-
ogy (Patrucco 2001; Antonelli 2000, 2008). In this respect, urbanized and
metropolitan regions have been demonstrated to provide highly positive
institutional environments for technological progress, due to the variety
and availability of complementary economic activities, business services,
science and technology, institutions, and communication and network
infrastructure mechanisms. As we will see later in Chapter 7, these con-
siderations largely account for the extreme spatial concentration of MNE
headquarters in the major world cities, where the range, depth and variety
of the local urban transactions and networks are strongly information-
and power-intensive, and institutional connectivity is dense enough to
ensure that the MNE's corporate global control functions operate prop-
erly (Friedmann 1986; Sassen 2001).
In knowledge terms the industrial complex is quite different to the
agglomeration model. The industrial complex model is instead associated
primarily with highly cumulative learning from sources inside the industry
and the firm, such as in-house R&D, and on the basis of knowledge that is
specific to industrial applications. In analogy with the Schumpeter Mark II
