This paper provides a critical examination of the widely disseminated view that innovation in all or most activities is favoured by certain common characteristics in the local `milieu`, involving a cluster of many small firms benefiting from flexible inter-firm alliances, supported by mutual...

Growth of 'global cities' in the 1980s was supposed to have involved an occupational polarisation, including growth of low paid service jobs. Though held to be untrue for European cities, at the time, some such growth did emerge in London a decade later than first reported for New York. The...

In the urban resurgence accompanying the growth of the knowledge economy, second-order cities appear to be losing out to the principal city, especially where the latter is much larger and benefits from substantially greater agglomeration economies. The view that any city can make itself...

This paper uses evidence from the (British) Longitudinal Study to examine the influence on occupational advancement of the city-region of residence (an escalator effect) and of relocation between city-regions (an elevator effect). It shows both effects to be substantively important, though less...

This paper documents and seeks to explain the remarkably positive employment trends of a central area of London in the years since the onset of the financial crisis. The volatility of this economy since the 1980s had suggested the likelihood of a sharp loss of jobs, maybe followed by a strong...

This paper examines the relation between ambition, as a form of dynamic human capital, and the escalator role of high order metropolitan regions, as originally identified by Fielding (1989). It argues that occupational progression in such places particularly depends on concentrations both of...