Urbanization, Industrial Dynamics, and Spatial Development: A Company Life History Approach

Abstract

In our times the city is the economic, social, cultural, and political heart of a society. It provides new impulses and energy for new activities and initiatives. The nodal position of a city in a broader regional, national, and international network offers an enormous potential with many challenges, but involves at the same time also many risks and uncertainties, e.g., from competition. The potential of cities has always attracted urban in-migrants, in both the developed and underdeveloped world. However, the movement toward urban territory as a whole has at the same time caused urban sprawl. Both the land prices and the environmental externalities in central areas of the cities have become an impediment to new household and firm location, so that an outward shift has taken place. Industries have moved to the urban fringe or to special industrial parks in the neighborhood of cities. People have moved to suburban — and even more distant — locations, but this massive movement has meant essentially only an expansion of functional urban territory. Thus, despite a broadening of the spatial range, the urban system has still kept its original function and has even reinforced it in the past decades.