Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Beyond the metropolis: new employment centers and historic administrative cities in the Madrid global city region

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 35; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02723638.2014.939538

1938-2847

Vicente Romero, Eloy Solís Trapero, José Francés,

Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis

AbstractGlobalization is constituted not only through interurban networks of global city regions, but also by intraurban linkages within city regions. In this article, we use the Madrid city region as a case study to analyze the emergence of new "globalization arenas"—dense agglomeration nodes of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBSs)—on the outskirts of large metropolises (METs). We focus on two distinct types of centers. New employment centers (NECs) are produced by intrametropolitan suburbanization and realignment of preexisting small agglomerations. Historic administrative cities (HACs) are created by suprametropolitan scale processes remaking historically autonomous centers beyond the MET, which are only now being articulated in metropolitan transformation. We use statistical, cartographic, and econometric techniques to analyze proximity and economic base characteristics of NECs and HACs. As KIBSs continue to evolve in patterns of decentralized concentration, HACs are becoming more important KIBS nodes amidst complex landscapes of functional specialization and repositioning.Keywords: global citiescity regionsedge citiesadvanced producer servicesknowledge-intensive business services AcknowledgementsWe would like to express our gratitude to the Spanish General Treasury of Social Security for providing employment data, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, and the editor, Richard Shearmur, for guiding the article through the revision process. We also thank Emma Abdjalieva for editorial refinements on the manuscript.Notes1. In our analysis, we use "high-order services" and knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) interchangeably.2. KIBS have been among the most dynamic segments of the service sectors in Europe and other advanced economies and developing countries since the mid-1980s (Borsdof & Salet, Citation2007; Hall & Pain, Citation2006; Sassen, Citation1991).3. The authors include New Towns such as Milton Keynes, as nodes in the London city region.4. Shearmur and Alvergne (Citation2003) identify satellite towns—similar but not the same as historic administrative cities (HACs)—at the outer reaches of the Paris metropolitan area, which they distinguish from other suburban employment concentrations. Halbert (Citation2007) identifies the role of the villes nouvelles as articulating poles of the more distant territories (Melun-Senart or Cergy).5. Technoburbs are introduced by Fishman (Citation1987) to designate suburban areas with high-technical and service equipment.6. Nondesignated subcenters are called satellite cities by Sorensen, who also does not consider their historic roles in the national city system.7. NECs designate settlements that did not play central roles before the twentieth century and became suburban commuter nodes from the second half of the twentieth century, while their role as employment centers started to develop during the 1970s.8. HACs designate settlements that were relevant centers to establish modern nation-states (provincial and/or regional capitals) since the nineteenth century and have housed relevant public and private institutions (legal, religious, economic, etc.). HACs are much smaller in size and in economic, political, and cultural importance than the MET. In this sense, one cannot speak of a polycentric region, but rather of a multicentric/polarity region.9. Globalization arenas here refer to dense agglomerations of APSs (KIBS) and key components of the metropolitan, national, and global economy (Hall and Pain, Citation2006; Pain, Citation2012; Scott, Citation2001a; Taylor et al., Citation2009).10. European POLYNET and COMET programs, initiated 10 years ago, started to define a research line on APSs in urban regions and cross-border structures of APS firms. Their results are contained in The Polycentric Metropolis coordinated by Hall and Pain (Citation2006) and in the special issues edited by Halbert, Convery, and Thierstein (Citation2006), Borsdorf and Salet (Citation2007), and Hoyler, Kloosterman, and Sokol (Citation2008).11. KIBS are strongly concentrated in the main metropolitan regions (Shearmur, Citation2010). KIBS are located in the same region as their clients but not necessarily in, or near, the same municipality. KIBSs seek out specialized labor forces and interact regionally, but not necessarily locally (Doloreux & Shearmur, Citation2012, p. 10).12. It is also important to acknowledge that distinct factors promoting KIBS concentration also combine and interact in locally contingent ways. Cities are regarded as privileged places for concentrating knowledge resources and promoting creativity and innovation (Jacobs, Citation1961). There are considerable differences between cities, in terms of how these distinct factors form connections.13. These are criteria used by Romero, Solís, Garmendia, and Ureña (Citation2010), demonstrating that the main territorial changes take place within 10 km from highways.14. These 40,000 resident and 20,000 employee cut-offs comprise a more restrictive threshold than the 10,000 jobs used by Giuliano and Small (Citation1991) and coincide with that used by Group for European Metropolitan Areas Comparative Analysis (GEMACA, Citation1996, Citation2002) and Hall and Pain (Citation2006), Bogart and Ferry (Citation1999), Cervero and Wu (Citation1998), or McMillen and McDonald (Citation1998) for other comparative studies.15. This group includes one new town (Tres Cantos, a service city created during the 1970s to decongest Madrid) and one historic economic city (Alcalá de Henares, a World Heritage City possessing a well-known university with research capacity).16. This source of information only provides a two-digit disaggregation and thus limits research possibilities. Some economic activities considered knowledge- and innovation-intensive include tasks that are not that innovative (i.e. a university professor or a medical researcher is also a lecturer or a doctor, respectively).17. This process has also been found in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region (Muñiz & García-López, Citation2009) and in other European city regions (Hall & Pain, Citation2006).18. A detailed characterization of these axes can be found in Méndez (Citation1990) and Solís et al. (Citation2013).