The UK Space Economy as Practised by Advanced Producer Service Firms: Identifying Two Distinctive Polycentric City‐Regional Processes in Contemporary Britain

Abstract

Cities and city-regions are back on the research agenda in the UK. Taking the world city literature as guide, this paper uses advanced producer service firms to study contemporary inter-city relations in the UK space economy. We employ an interlocking network model, initally developed for global scale analysis, to assess signs that recent globalization is effecting a revival outside the London region, and to identify leading urban areas in the UK national economy. Two different analyses are presented: a connectivity analysis that indicates how well cities and towns are linked into the UK space economy, and a fuzzy clustering analysis that classifies the cities and towns to search out hierarchical and regional tendencies.From these findings, we identify two distinctive polycentric city-regional processes in contemporary Britain: a Jacobs-style polycentric mega-city regional process out of London that creates new important service centres and reaches selected smaller cities and towns; and a polycentric multi-city regional process beyond London that mainly enhances the service capacities of selected larger cities. A concluding section considers the implications of the two processes for spatial planning in the UK.2

Megaregions: foundations, frailties, futures

“…urban spatial form (Dühr, 2007;Faludi, 2009;Kunzmann, 1996), are now more commonly associated with functionally-dominant global-city inspired networked approaches (Hall and Pain, 2006;Hoyler et al, 2008a;Pain and Van Hamme, 2014;Reades and Smith, 2014;Taylor et al, 2009). Distinguishing between these two traditions highlights how the type of megaregion that is constructed varies depending on whether you take rapid urbanization (form) or global economic integration (function) as your starting point for framing globalized urbanization (Harrison and Hoyler, 2014).…”

Assessing the Functional Polycentricity of the Mega-City-Region of Central Belgium Based on Advanced Producer Service Transaction Links

“…In practice, this means that, rather than merely looking at apex of cities and APS firms in the world economy and measuring an urban network at the global scale, POLYNET includes cities and APS firms with a national or regional scope (for more information, see TAYLOR et al, 2006TAYLOR et al, , 2009). However, the measurement methodology (equation 2.1) remains the same.…”

“…To quantify the centrality of a city in an urban network of knowledge flows, POLYNET implements the GaWC methodology -originally devised to measure the world city network (WCN) -and extends its scope to the regional scale (TAYLOR et al, 2006(TAYLOR et al, , 2009. In this approach, the urban network is specified as an interlocking network with three levels (TAYLOR, 2001): a network level (i.e.…”

Governing the new metropolis

“…networks of knowledge, information, capital flows). Evident in accounts that show how large urban regions are comprised of polycentric structures (Hall and Pain, 2006;Hoyler et al, 2008b) economic function becomes the key determinant in identifying emergent, newly dominant and formerly dominant metropolitan spaces (Taylor et al, 2009(Taylor et al, , 2010(Taylor et al, , 2013. What often emerges is the identification of spaces that may function as a major urban region but that do not appear as such in the physical landscape or, for that matter, map onto politico-administrative territorial units.…”