The concept of industrial clusters has attracted much attention during the past decade, both as descriptive of an increasingly important phenomenon and as a basis for effective public intervention in the economies of lagging city-regions. However, there is much ambiguity in the way in which this...

This paper discusses the institutional and organizational assumptions underlying many of the currently popular notions of industrial clustering. By adopting a transactions costs perspective, we explain that there are three fundamentally different types of industrial cluster. We then discuss how...

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...

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...

This paper analyses the policy implications of territorial competition; that is the promotion of local economic development in competition with other territories. It does so both in analytical and empirical terms moving from a wider supranational and analytical standpoint to a more practical and...

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 A. J. Fielding. It argues that occupational progression in such places particularly depends on concentrations both of...

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...