Zoning in on urban manufacturing: industry location and change among low-tech, high-touch industries in Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT

Contemporary policy attention to manufacturing revolves around a narrative of advanced, innovation-driven production. Often overlooked are “low-tech,” “high-touch” manufacturing, which engage in specialized and often urbanized labor-intensive production. These firms represent a missed economic development opportunity yet may be displaced due to major urban industrial re-zonings. We respond to this policy challenge by providing a detailed analysis of the growth, concentration and clustering patterns of cultural manufacturing and food and beverage manufacturing in Melbourne, Australia. These forms of low-tech, high-touch manufacturing are more likely to concentrate in central industrial zones while manufacturing at large is predominately in the outer suburbs.Our findings demonstrate the need for a more nuanced understanding of manufacturing geographies and suggest that a key yet overlooked feature of industrial agglomeration is zoning. We argue that industrial decline is not solely due to outsourcing, but also land use policies geared toward maximizing land values over other benefits.

KEYWORDS:

• Craft
• cultural economy
• industrial location
• industrial zoning
• manufacturing
• urban policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. CM produce material goods (e.g. furniture, clothing, jewelry) and specialized production services (e.g. printing, recorded media) strongly infused with cultural or semiotic meaning (2017).

2. We exclude employment that could not be coded to the four-digit level (i.e. where Census respondents provided incomplete, nonspecific, or imprecise details of their employment activities) (ABS, 2016). As a consequence, the study undercounts manufacturing employment across the three categories. Nationally, a total of 105,641 employees or 13.5% of manufacturing employment could not be classified at the four-digit level (ABS, 2019b).

3. The latter category may incorporate some activity that qualifies as low-tech and high-touch but does not fall into either CM or FBM categories. AOM tends to encompass more heavy industrial activity (see Appendix Table A3).

4. A complete list of location quotients and employment change 2011–2016 for all industries is available from the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP170104255].