Buzz, Archipelago Economies and the Future of Intermediate and Peripheral Areas in a Spiky World

Abstract

In a world where large urban agglomerations are increasingly regarded by scholars and policy-makers alike as the engines of economic development, the options at the disposal of intermediate and peripheral areas are dwindling. Doing nothing is, according to the dominating theories, likely to result in a steady decline which may jeopardize their very economic viability. Adopting active measures is thus the way forward. In this paper, we argue that the main solution being proposed—interactive learning through the promotion of local agglomeration (buzz option)—may yield limited results, if at all, as it would stifle the circulation of new knowledge and lead to lock-in. By contrast, promoting interaction outside the comfort zone of geographical, cognitive, social and institutional proximity (pipeline option) is more likely to succeed in generating interactive learning and in facilitating the generation, diffusion and absorption of innovation. We illustrate this point by resorting to the case of firm innovation in Norwegian city regions.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the three special issue editors, Karima Kourtit, Peter Nijkamp and Mark Partridge, as well as to two anonymous referees, for very useful suggestions to earlier versions of the paper. Comments by participants at the 2011 Barcelona ERSA conference have been also much appreciated. This research has been funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 269868 and by the Stavanger Centre for Innovation Research and the Regional Research Council for Western Norway.

Notes

The survey included firms across all sectors of industry located within the labour market regions surrounding Norway's five largest agglomerations. By design, it included 400 firms from each of Oslo, Bergen and Stavanger, 300 firms from Trondheim and 100 firms from Kristiansand. The distribution of firms across sectors was as follows: mining and quarrying, 1.9%; manufacturing, 18.5%; electricity, gas and water supply, 0.8%; construction, 16.1%; wholesale and retail trade, 17.2%; accommodation and food service activities, 8.1%; transporting, storage, information and communication, 7.7%; financial and insurance activities, 2.8%; and other services, 27.0%. More detailed information on the survey can be found in Fitjar and Rodríguez-Pose (2011).