Richard Shearmur

Urban Hierarchy or Local Buzz? High-Order Producer Service and (or) Knowledge-Intensive Business Service Location in Canada, 1991–2001

The location of high-order producer services has been extensively documented for the 1970s and 1980s when researchers turned their attention to the effects of tertiarization on regional development. In this article we propose, on the one hand, to update the spatial analysis of high-order producer services by investigating whether they have continued to diffuse away from the top of the urban hierarchy between 1991 and 2001. On the other hand, we also propose to incorporate certain hypotheses from the knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) literature, in particular possible spillover effects, synergies between economic sectors and labor market effects, into the spatial analysis. Over and above city size, do these factors contribute to our understanding of the spatial dynamics of high-order producer services? Overall we find that these services reversed their diffusion process during the 1990s, decreasing their presence in smaller cities in peripheral regions. Labor market, synergies, and spillover effects contribute, to some extent, to understanding their overall spatial distribution and its evolution during the 1990s, but region and urban size remain their principal organizing factors across space.

Intrametropolitan Patterns of High-order Business Service Location: A Comparative Study of Seventeen Sectors in Ile-de-France

The location of high-order service sectors outside traditional CBDs can be taken as a sign of the CBDs decline and there is evidence that such a process is occurring. However, all evidence does not point this way. In this paper, we study the Paris region in order to explore the location patterns of 17 distinct high-order business service sectors. The location patterns of high-order business services are found to be complex, each sector behaving differently and each sector displaying combinations of concentration and dispersal. Hypotheses are put forward relating the various interlocking patterns to the markets (producer-consumer; local-global), to the internal structure (large-small establishments, local branches, back-offices, small consultancies) and to the nature (technical-non-technical) of each sector.

Culture, Language, and the Location of High-Order Service Functions: The Case of Montreal and Toronto

Abstract Today, there is plenty of evidence of metropolization—the concentration of economic activity, particularly of high-order services—in the world’s largest cities. Furthermore, within most national systems, the urban hierarchy is stable, especially toward the top: cities that were the largest 100 years ago continue to dominate their respective systems today. In Canada, however, this is not the case. Over the past 40 years, there has been a reversal at the top of the urban hierarchy, with Montreal losing its dominance in favor of Toronto. In this article, we document the reversal and elaborate a model that accounts for the spatial shifts in high-order services. Our analysis reveals the continued relevance of culture and language and suggests that there are limits to the concentration of high-order service activity. This finding is corroborated by a more detailed look at occupational shifts within a variety of key economic sectors in Montreal and Toronto. We conclude by suggesting that these results and the model we put forward to explain them have implications that go beyond Canada: even in a globalizing world in which the constraints of distance are lessened, cultural and linguistic factors will continue to play an important role in determining the spatial distribution of high-order economic activity.

Urban Employment Subcenters and Sectoral Clustering in Montreal: Complementary Approaches to the Study of Urban Form

Since the late 1980s there has been renewed interest in the study of employment polynucleation within metropolitan areas, fed in part by the move to suburban locations of high-order service functions. In parallel, a growing body of research has underlined the role which proximity plays in information exchange, innovation and growth. So far there have been only limited attempts to merge these two approaches and investigate the degree to which local agglomeration economies and positive externalities may underpin the creation of suburban employment poles. In this paper a first step is taken in this direction by proposing an approach to systematically investigate the colocation of economic activities within a metropolitan context. It is found that the groups of economic activities which systematically tend to colocate closely mirror those activities which would be grouped together along sectoral lines.

The Geography of Intrametropolitan KIBS Innovation: Distinguishing Agglomeration Economies from Innovation Dynamics

Much has been written about innovation, territory, knowledge spill-overs and agglomeration economies, but neighbourhood-level processes of innovation have rarely been studied in a systematic fashion. This article explores whether knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) are systematically more innovative when they are located in employment clusters. In doing so, it distinguishes between the simple co-location of innovative firms with other activities, and possible dynamic effects (identified by controlling for firm-level innovation factors): most identified geographical patterns are resilient to controls, but the geography of innovation is not straightforward. In Montreal, whilst certain types of innovation occur in employment clusters, others display no spatial patterns. Furthermore, the most intensive KIBS innovators tend to locate away from high-employment and from high-KIBS zones. KIBS innovation does not behave as expected if innovation dynamics were localised in a fashion similar to agglomeration economies: it is therefore important to distinguish between the two.

Dazzled by data: Big Data, the census and urban geography

About five years ago I wrote an editorial describing the role that the census (and other data sources that are authoritative, open to scrutiny, representative of the entire population, and resting ...

Innovation Strategies: Are Knowledge-Intensive Business Services Just Another Source of Information?

The objective of this paper is to contribute to the empirical literature on innovation strategies and services, by analysing the use of knowledge-intensive services, and their impact on innovation, in manufacturing firms. The analysis is carried out at the firm level, on the basis of a survey covering 804 manufacturing establishments in the Province of Quebec (Canada). We investigate the extent to which existing internal capabilities and their interaction with external sources of knowledge, in particular the use of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), affect the level of innovativeness of manufacturing firms. Then we examine the extent to which different innovation strategies, and the way KIBS are integrated into these, are associated with innovation. We show that manufacturing firms adopt a variety of innovation strategies, none of which preclude innovation, even introverted strategies whereby firms interact little with outside agents. However, those strategies that incorporate KIBS have a considerably greater chance of leading to innovation.

Regional Planning Policy and the Location of Employment in the Ile-De-France Does Policy Matter?

Ongoing debate in North America concerns the effectiveness and efficiency of planning policy at the metropolitan level. Current quantitative research on the deployment of employment across metropolitan areas tends to assume that it is governed by market forces (as expressed through a variety of location factors). However,there are also calls for a form of metropolitan regionalism, for a consistent metropolitan policy framework to guide development and avoid sprawl. In the context of these methodological,interpretative,and policy debates,the authors examine whether the deployment of jobs across the Paris region,which has had a clear and consistent regional planning framework over the past 30 years,has been influenced by this policy. They conclude that over the 1978 to 1994 period,the suburbanization of jobs has been effectively channeled by the policy framework put in place in 1965. Hence, policy matters.

Editorial—A World Without Data? The Unintended Consequences of Fashion in Geography

The issue raised in this essay—the abrupt abolition, without consultation, of the census’s mandatory social questionnaire, by a minority government with a strong ideological bent—is primarily a Canadian one. However, in light of news from the UK and debates (of an admittedly different nature) concerning the U.S. census, it casts light on wider issues such as the nature of statistics, their role in constructing a shared social imaginary, and the role that academic fashions may inadvertently play in paving the way for such destructive political decisions. The outline of the story is simple. On 10 July 2010, articles ran in the Financial Times and the Telegraph (Hope, 2010; Pickard, 2010) announcing that the British government is going to abolish the national census. It is considered too expensive and intrusive, and the data are out-of-date before they can be compiled (data more than one year old are considered to be of no use, according to Britain’s Cabinet Office minister). Instead, it is proposed that administrative data and private data (such as credit ratings) can be relied upon to gather a quasi-instantaneous picture of the British people and society. Similarly, in late June 2010 during the G-20 riots, the Canadian Minister for Industry quietly announced that the Canadian census’s long form—the form distributed to 20% of Canadians and from which detailed income, housing, language, employment, occupational, family, and ethnicity information is gathered, all at a fine spatial scale—will be made voluntary (Proudfoot, 2010). The reason given is that an (unspecified) number of Canadians have complained that it intrudes on their privacy—probably while using Facebook and purchasing goods by credit card over the Internet. This should come as a relief to some geographers. Ever since David Harvey (1973) seminally put the first nail into quantitative geography’s coffin, a number of radical, postmodern, cultural, and other geographers have been hammering away, as indeed have social scientists in other fields. Thirty years of academic bludgeoning seem finally to have borne fruit: a generation of innumerate students, some of whom are now politicians,

Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) Use and User Innovation: High-Order Services, Geographic Hierarchies and Internet Use in Quebec's Manufacturing Sector

Shearmur R. and Doloreux D. Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) use and user innovation: high-order services, geographic hierarchies and internet use in Quebecs manufacturing sector, Regional Studies. Geographic proximity between users and suppliers of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) provides no advantage in terms of innovation performance. This paper first establishes that it is those KIBS most closely associated with innovation that exhibit the highest mean distance to their users. It then shows that there is no connection between distance to KIBS suppliers and propensity to innovate. These results point to a Christallerian logic whereby innovators seek out KIBS (irrespective of distance), but whereby mean distances tend to be greater between users and innovation-related KIBS suppliers (located in central places), reflecting the different geographies of manufacturing users and service suppliers.