The Impact of Land-Use Mix on Technological Innovation: Evidence from a Grid-Cell-Level Analysis of Shanghai, China

Abstract

While the benefits of land-use mix have been widely analyzed with regard to transportation, public health, and economic development, relatively little attention has been paid to empirically investigating the impact of land-use mix on technological innovation at the intra-urban level. Drawing upon a database of geo-coded patents that are used to reflect the capacity of technological innovation, this paper takes Shanghai as a case study and analyzes how the intra-urban distribution of technological innovation has been associated with land-use mix at the 1 km × 1 km grid cell level. Empirical results, which are robust when the grids are divided at the 2 km × 2 km level, show that the degree of land-use mix is positively associated with the number of patents for a given grid, suggesting that grids with a higher level of land-use mix are likely to have more patents, ceteris paribus. Moreover, the results demonstrate an inverted U-curve relationship between land-use mix and technological innovation, indicating that a too much higher level of land-use mix could lead to a smaller number of patents for a certain grid. In addition, the empirical results suggest the existence of spatial dependence in the effect of land-use mix on technological innovation.