Urban geography vs company geography. An analysis of location determinants in three European cities

ABSTRACT

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in urban areas are increasingly relevant, with a consistent impact on various territories. This research explores the re-territorialization processes, contextualized by the post-Fordism era, in urban areas. The objective of this work is to verify a hypothesis assumed at the base of the research relating to the presence of a uniformity of orientation regarding the settlement determinants of companies that are co-located in specific areas of the cities. This hypothesis is tested in relation to various industrial sectors. The availability of these survey elements constitutes a useful driver of awareness to be then translated into specific actions in urban planning in terms of policies, services and infrastructures to be dedicated to these urban spaces characterized by clusters of firms. From a methodological point of view, the followed approach is based on two aspects relating both to a cartographic comparison and both to a statistical comparison between the answers provided by the service companies of different sectors of some European cities selected for the sample survey.

KEYWORDS:

• Location
• urban geography
• companies
• clusters

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank all the companies that participated and their kind availability during the investigation phase. Also many thanks to reviewers for the dedication shown in the review of my work and for the precious suggestions of both, all really aimed at improving the scientific and communication structure towards readers, of my contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This phase was carried out with an e-survey with an agreement with the scientific Italian research company Solvendo (http://www.solvendo.net/).

2 Percentage of companies analyzed on the total and percentage of replies compared to those contacted.

Barcelona: AER: 41%; 67%; ENV: 43%; 74%; ICT: 28%; 69%. Berlin: AER: 38%; 72%; ENV: 19%; 51%; ICT: 23%; 63%. Milan: AER: 44%; 65%; ENV: 32%; 58%; ICT: 19%; 51%.

3 The geometries extracted from the GIS software show the total number of companies belonging to the cluster independent of the sector. Therefore, the thematic clusters were extracted using queries in the GIS attribute table, on which further analyzes were carried out on the scores detected by the survey.