On the evolution of hierarchical urban systems

Historical trends of agglomeration to the capital region and new economic geography

“…It usually incorporates the population in a city or town plus that in the suburban areas lying outside of but adjacent to the city boundaries. Such an exogenous increase in population was modeled under the NEG framework by Fujita, Krugman and Mori (1999). Rather than focusing on these few exceptions, however, the present paper pays attention to the gradual increases in the largest agglomerations that started agrarian societies and then became industrialized societies.…”

The Practice of Industrial Policy

“…A cluster strategy can help overcome the constraints on the access to inputs, industrial land, finance, trade logistics, entrepreneurial skills, and worker skills that affect business and industrial development in low-income economies. Once a few firms in a specific industry have formed a cluster in a local community, the entry costs for followers are lower because of positive external economies (Marshall 1920;Fujita, Krugman, and Mori 1999). The agglomeration of similar firms creates a critical level of demand for specialized inputs and services.…”

The employment cycles of neighboring cities

“…8 The evolution of the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana MSA, for example, can be thought of as having followed something like the evolutionary process of Fujita and Mori (1997) and Fujita, Krugman, and Mori (1999) eventually becoming a more-unified system that could be categorized as a metro area.…”

“…Countervailing this notion, however, are models of urban systems, which allow the possibility that neighboring cities have divergent employment cycles. For example, in the evolutionary hierarchy models of Fujita and Mori (1997) and Fujita, Krugman, and Mori (1999), neighboring cities arise out of a single evolutionary process through which one agglomeration center becomes two, each serving a different set of functions within the metro-area economy. If cities with similar functions have similar cycles, and there is a consistent division of functions across metro areas, then cities in the same position on their metro areas hierarchy will have similar cycles.…”