Ann Markusen

Targeting Occupations in Regional and Community Economic Development

Abstract This article analyzes why and how economic and community development planners might target occupations as well as industries in shaping an economic development strategy. Key occupations can be identified on the basis of captura-bility, high relative employment growth rates, connectivity across industries, fit with underemployed workforce groups, and potential for entrepreneurship. I demonstrate the potential for targeting occupations with quantitative and qualitative evidence on performing arts occupations for a set of medium-sized metropolitan areas and make the case for occupational location and development theories analogous to those for industry. I close by outlining steps planners can follow to incorporate occupational targeting into their work.

Defining the Creative Economy: Industry and Occupational Approaches

This article reviews conceptual and operational issues in defining the creative sector and its arts and cultural core. Some accounts use establishment data to measure creative industry employment, some use firm-level data, and others use occupational data. The authors examine how cultural-sector employment is conceptualized in three pioneering cultural economy studies driven by distinctive policy agendas and constituencies. Choices about which industries, firms, and occupations to include affect the resulting size and content of the cultural economy. In comparing these three studies and others, the authors show that the Boston metros creative economy varies in size from less than 1% to 49%, although most cultural definitions range from 1% to 4%. The authors explore how policy makers might use a combination of methods to produce a richer characterization of the regional cultural economy and reflect on the relevance of good numbers to cultural policy and creative region formation.

Arts and Culture in Urban or Regional Planning: A Review and Research Agenda

Amid the buzz on the creative city and cultural economy, knowledge about what works at various urban and regional scales is sorely lacking. This article reviews the state of knowledge about arts and culture as an urban or regional development tool, exploring norms, reviewing evidence for causal relationships, and analyzing stakeholders, bureaucratic fragmentation, and citizen participation in cultural planning. Two strategies—designated cultural districts and tourist-targeted cultural investments— illustrate how better research would inform implementation. In guiding urban cultural development, researchers should examine and clarify the impacts, risks, and opportunity costs of various strategies and the investments and revenue and expenditure patterns associated with each, so that communities and governments avoid squandering “creative city” opportunities.

Generalizing New Industrial Districts: A Theoretical Agenda and an Application from a Non-Western Economy

New industrial districts occur in a number of forms, some of which are not subsumable under the flexibly specialized, locally embedded, and endogenously driven model based on the Italian case. In this paper, we critique the industrial districts literature, focusing on the role of the state, interdistrict mobility of labor, nonlocal externalities, and non-place embeddedness in district formation and character. We introduce the notion of the satellite industrial district, comprised of branch operations of nonlocally based corporations, as an example of a rapidly growing industrial district distinct from Marshallian and Italianate forms, and argue with evidence from South Korea that these types of districts may predominate, especially in developing countries.

Interaction between regional and industrial policies : evidence from four countries

After World War II, policies to promote industrialization-both to substitute for manufactured imports and to encourage exports based on unskilled labor-often successfully complemented regional polices to better distribute economic activity. The recent shift toward high technology, however, has strongly favored major urban areas, undermining efforts at regional decentralization and stabilization. Furthermore, countries are increasingly abandoning top-down regional policy and passing on responsibility for development to provincial and local levels, setting off vigorous interregional competition for economic activity and often favoring a few, relatively well-endowed regions. Evidence from Brazil, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the United States shows how the recent emphasis on high-tech exports and decentralized regional policy may reinforce polarization and slow progress toward eliminating regional growth and income differentials.

Gauging Metropolitan “High-Tech” and “I-Tech” Activity

In the past few years, a number of new studies have published high-tech rankings of American metropolitan areas that are used by many business consultants and local economic development organizations to advise firms on location strategies. In this article, the authors generate their own rankings based on an occupational definition of “high techness” and compare them with those of four other studies. The results rank larger and older industrial cities, such as Chicago, New York, and even Detroit, higher than many of the smaller places celebrated as high tech, such as Austin. The work demonstrates that the methodology underlying rankings is crucially important to the outcome. By abandoning narrow notions of high tech restricted to maturing technologies in computers, electronics, and telecommunications and instead using science and technology (S&T) occupations as a marker for high tech, it may be possible to tag the innovative potential of emerging sectors, including high-tech services.

City Spatial Structure, Women's Household Work, and National Urban Policy

This paper investigates the interrelationship between city spatial structure, womens household work, and urban policy. It first differentiates between two types of work in urban space: wage-labor production and household reproduction of labor power, generally and incorrectly ignored in analyses of urban spatial structure and dynamics by neoclassical location theorists and Marxist urbanologists alike. I contend that social reproduction, organized within the patriarchal household where an unequal internal division of labor favors men, profoundly affects and explains the use of urban space. The paper then presents a theoretical argument regarding the evolution of contemporary urban spatial structure. It argues that the dominance of the single-family detached dwelling, its separation from the workplace, and its decentralized urban location are as much the products of the patriarchal organization of household production as of the capitalist organization of wage work. While this arrangement is apparently inefficient and onerous from the point of view of women, it offers advantages to men and poses contradictions for capitalism. Challenging such patriarchal structuring of urban space are residential choices that certain demographic groups are currently making. New spatial developments-such as retirement communities, gentrification (urban renewal for upperand middle-income households), and the growth of small towns-suggest that the dominant urban decentralized form of housing and land use may pose major obstacles to efficient household production. A second, and less anarchic, challenge is from the womens movement. Since the 1960s women have organized to

Regional Occupational and Industrial Structure: Does One Imply the Other?

The product/profit cycle and new international division of labor theories hypothesize that establishments in a single industry may be undertaking different activities in different locations: innovative and developmental activities will be anchored in regions of origin, while more routine production and service functions will be dispersed to lower cost and downstream consuming regions. Disparities in occupational composition offer a test of these theories. In this article, we test whether a region’s occupational structure can be read off of its industrial structure. Using a data set created for eleven California metropolitan areas for 1997, we explore the extent to which the occupational mix within a specific metropolitan industry is dissimilar to the mix found for that same industry in other metros. We find that estimating a metro’s occupational mix by assuming that its industries mirror the national occupational structure for those industries often provides a reasonable approximation especially for aggregate occupational categories. However, this does not hold for a cluster of innovative industries and occupations that we tested, specifically in high-tech research and development and information technology activities. In such cases, pursuing industrial targeting will not achieve the same consequence as pursuing occupational targeting.

A Consumption Base Theory of Development: An Application to the Rural Cultural Economy

Export base theory, which posits that overall regional growth is a function of external sales of locally produced goods and services, dominates economic development practice. But the consumption base can also serve as a growth driver, especially in small towns and rural areas. Local investments may induce residents to divert expenditures into local purchases, attract new and footloose residents and tourists, and revitalize aging town centers. A consumption base approach is not reducible to import substitution, but seeks to serve latent demand and alter the broad portfolio of goods and services purchased locally. I present the analytics for a consumption base theory and demonstrate how cultural investments prompt regional growth, emphasizing the role of artists as catalysts. Three types of arts and cultural investments are explored: artists’ centers, artists’ live/work spaces, and performing arts facilities, with examples from rural and small town settings. I conclude with rural cultural strategy recommendations.

International Trade, Productivity, and U.S. Regional Job Growth: A Shift-Share Interpretation

To track the sensitivity of regional growth to international flows, shift-share components can be decomposed into import, export, and domestic market segments and a productivity component. By merging data on regional employment, national employment and output, and international trade, dynamic shift-share analysis is used to compare the experience of U.S. regions for the period from 1978 to 1986. Some regions, like New England and the Pacific, have relatively positive industrial mixes for both export and domestic market growth, while others, particularly the East North Central region, have negative ones. Dynamizing the model with annual data does not necessarily minimize the gap between national and regional growth rates, and results, especially for the competitive shift component, remain sensitive to subperiod designation. Regions have different stakes in national trade policy, and some would do better to target domestic rather than overseas markets.