Allen J Scott

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA

The objective of the paper is to trace out the effects of decommissioning of the Sellafield nuclear complex on the economy of West Cumbria. I seek to show how decommissioning expenditures are stimulating the formation of an agglomeration of advanced nuclear processing and engineering firms in the region and how this process is reinforced by a diver...

I examine the development and current situation of the woollen knitwear and woven fabric industry in the Scottish Borders. The paper opens with a brief theoretical exposition of the logic and dynamics of industrial clusters. An overview of the consolidation of the industry as a multifaceted spatial cluster or agglomeration in the 19th century is pr...

The discussion is focused on changes in the structure of the cotton industry and their effects on social and political life in Carlisle in the years from 1838 to 1861. The geographic framework of these changes is sketched out by investigating the interdependencies between factory locations in the city and the spatial formation of degraded working-c...

A theoretical account of the genesis and internal spatial structure of cities is given. The essence of the urbanisation process is described in terms of the following main developmental phases: (a) the emergence of relationships based on specialisation and interdependence in society; (b) the pre-eminent role of the division of labour within these r...

I seek to provide an overview of the historical and geographical emergence of city-regions and to reflect on some of the debates that have arisen in regard to the theoretical status of these phenomena. I briefly describe the growth and spread of city-regions in the world since the mid-1950s and I consider how contemporary capitalism and globalizati...

Há um crescente debate nas últimas décadas sobre o alcance e a substância da teoria urbana. O debate tem sido marcado por muitas afirmações diferentes sobre a natureza das cidades, incluindo declarações de que o urbano é um conceito incoerente, que a sociedade urbana é nada menos do que a sociedade moderna como um todo, que a escala urbana não pode...

Os estudos urbanos atualmente são marcados por muitos debates ativos. Em um artigo anterior, abordamos alguns desses debates propondo um conceito fundamental de urbanização e de forma urbana para identificar uma linguagem comum para a pesquisa urbana. No presente trabalho, faremos uma breve recapitulação desse quadro. Utilizaremos então este materi...

I seek to synthesize several different approaches to issues of urban land redevelopment and the built environment. The essay focuses on developments in the third and current historical wave of capitalist development. I describe the economic logic of land-use change with reference to both commercial and residential property. This logic has become in...

L’article vise à réfléchir aux logiques articulant, d’une part, la division du travail sous diverses formes et, d’autre part, la mondialisation et ses dynamiques spatiales. Il commence en retraçant la généalogie du concept de division du travail dans l’histoire de l’économie politique classique. Les différentes déclinaisons fonctionnelles de la div...

Knowledge-intensive economic resurgence and social restratification are evidently reshaping the intra-urban space of Los Angeles .In particular, the expansion of white-collar employment is inducing marked readjustments in the geography of housing for these workers, and is promoting significant gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods. Existing ac...

The third wave refers to the current phase of capitalist development in which urbanization is increasingly being driven by an emerging cognitive-cultural economy. This turn of events has had major impacts on the division of labor in cities and on the character of urban neighborhoods. It is also manifest in a number of dramatic shifts in the visual...

The advent of mass production saw the rise of major metropolitan areas in North America and Western Europe. This chapter shows in detail the policy and planning problems that were generated in the mass-production city and how the internal production and residential spaces of these metropolitan areas were structured.

The city is in essence a collectivity that transcends in deeply significant ways the sum of the individual firms and households that represent its constituent atoms. A concept of the commons is sketched out, with special reference to the increasing intersections between the urban commons, as such, and the wider global commons as embodied in various...

In this chapter, a theoretical argument is set forth in which the essential elements of the urbanization process are identified. Two main phases of urban development are stressed, namely, the tendency for many different kinds of human activity to gather together in functional complexes on the landscape and the intricate space-sorting crosscurrents...

This chapter sets out a broad contextual framework for urban analysis with special reference to three main phases of capitalist development. These are as follows: the nineteenth-century factory and workshop system, twentieth-century mass production, and the emerging twenty-first-century system of cognitive-cultural capitalism.

The theoretical ideas set out in Chap. 2 are now mobilized to provide a reasoned description of the emergence and form of cities in the nineteenth century. Special attention is given to the agglomerative tendencies of the workshop and factory system, and to the breakdowns of social reproduction in early capitalist cities.

The kaleidoscope refers to the changing detailed mosaic of production space and social space in the contemporary city, and, in particular, to the new forms of central city and suburban neighborhood development that are currently making their appearance in major urban areas. Considerable emphasis is placed on the dynamics of land redevelopment in ci...

As the cognitive-cultural economy has steadily concentrated in large cities across the globe, so the foundations of urban competitive advantage have also shifted radically. In particular, the creative and innovative potentials of the urban environment have been enhanced by major changes in the nature of production processes, the varieties of human...

This chapter explores in some statistical detail the growth and spread of cities in various parts of the world since the nineteenth century. It is argued that globalization has engendered a mosaic of giant city-regions that function increasingly as the motors of the world economy.

Urban social stratification has become much more polarized than it was in previous waves of capitalist development. Cities in the twenty-first century are also marked by complex patterns of social differentiation deriving in part from rapidly changing occupational structures and in part from the ways in which these structures are intertwined with t...

This book presents an exploratory account of the origins and dynamics of cities. The author recounts how the essential foundations of the urbanization process reside in two interrelated forces. These are the tendency for many different kinds of human activity to gather together to form functional complexes on the landscape, and the multifaceted int...

p> Purpose: I initiate the discussion with a statement about cognitive-cultural capitalism and its concentration in large global cities. This is followed by an argument to the effect that the specificity of the city resides in the manner in which the diverse social phenomena that it contains are brought into a composite pattern of spatial integrati...

This book forum reports an outcome of the authors-meet-the-critics session organized for the 2016 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, which took place coincidentally but appropriately, in San Francisco.

Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively further behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The u...

I initiate the discussion with a brief statement about cognitive-cultural capitalism and its concentration in large global cities. This is followed by an argument to the effect that the conceptual specificity of the city resides in the ways in which the diverse social phenomena that it contains are brought into a composite pattern of spatial integr...

Cities are unique in their connections, sizes and densities. These factors provide economic advantages for urban development starting historically with small networks of cities and then leading on to extensive urban development in traditional civilizations. Two major trajectories of historical urban development are described, the familiar “western”...

In this short book we have presented an overview of some of the most urgent issues and questions facing city dwellers, planners and scholars about the development and social significance of cities. We have examined how cities first appeared and evolved through historical time; we have considered the basic logic of cities in terms of work and liveli...

The expansion of urban economies has been accompanied by constant migration of people to cities in search of opportunities for work and livelihood, as discussed in the previous chapter. There are other reasons for living in cities such as seeking refuge from conflict, or being forced to move there when livelihood elsewhere is threatened. Urban dwel...

As we saw in the previous chapter, the history of urbanization all around the world is long and multifaceted. Thus far we have considered this history without paying much attention to the internal dynamics of cities. In this chapter, we set out to describe some of the production and employment features of cities. These features are not only of crit...

Urban studies today is marked by many active debates. In an earlier paper, we addressed some of these debates by proposing a foundational concept of urbanisation and urban form as a way of identifying a common language for urban research. In the present paper we provide a brief recapitulation of that framework. We then use this preliminary material...

This book presents an incisive outline of the historical development and geography of cities. It focuses on three themes that constitute essential foundations for any understanding of urban form and function. These are: (a) the shifting patterns of urbanization through historical time, (b) the role of cities as centers of production and work in a g...

Cities are very complex entities; our focus on housing and working provides a basic entry point for comprehending urbanization, past, present and future. This is an important area of study not just because most people now live in urban places but because it is in these places that solutions to the crises of the twenty-first century can often be fou...

In the mid-19th century, Baudelaire complained that Paris was changing more rapidly than the human heart. Cities are again going through upheavals, in their built environments, their economic activities, and their forms of life. When Baudelaire was writing about Paris, few large cities existed anywhere in the world and only a handful with one milli...

Uma problemática urbana é identificada acerca das características essenciais das cidades enquanto conjuntos de atividade humana espacialmente polarizados e marcados por simbiose interna elevada. As raízes da crise da metrópole industrial clássica do século XX são identificadas e o surgimento de um novo tipo de dinâmica econômica urbana ao longo dos...

Uma problemática urbana é identificada acerca das características essenciais das cidades enquanto conjuntos de atividade humana espacialmente polarizados e marcados por simbiose interna elevada. As raízes da crise da metrópole industrial clássica do século XX são identificadas e o surgimento de um novo tipo de dinâmica econômica urbana ao longo dos...

Allen J. Scott est professeur de géographie à l'université de Californie à Los Angeles. Il a publié en 2012, A World in Emergence: Cities and Regions in th 21st Century, oú il tente d'appréhender d'une manière renouvelée la très forte croissance métropolitaine de la dernière décennie, qu'il qualifie de troisième vague d'urbanisation, et les recompo...

There has been a growing debate in recent decades about the range and substance of urban theory. The debate has been marked by many different claims about the nature of cities, including declarations that the urban is an incoherent concept, that urban society is nothing less than modern society as a whole, that the urban scale can no longer be sepa...

Scott A. J. Beyond the creative city: cognitive–cultural capitalism and the new urbanism, Regional Studies. Creativity is a concept whose time has come in economic and urban geography. It is also a concept that calls for enormous circumspection. An attempt is made to show that the interdependent processes of learning, creativity and innovation are...

What is the role played by cognitive-cultural production? What are the meanings and the stakes of the "feminization" of labor? What is the meaning of "Digital Taylorism"? Is the metropolis today a functional substitute for the factory in the context of industrial capitalism? What is the role of universities in culturalcognitive capitalism? Is there...

In this response, I acknowledge that the theory of cognitive-cultural capitalism needs to pay more attention to problems of urban poverty. I also indicate how this theory provides critical insights into the Marxian idea of “general intellect.”

The argument in this paper is that we now need to move beyond the theoretical horizons of postfordism and to seek out a sui generis description of contemporary capitalism and its urban-economic geography. Three major characteristics of today's capitalism are singled out as exerting major impacts on the geographical reconstruction of the world as we...

This paper deals with the growth and development of the Orange County high technology industrial complex. At the outset, a simple empirical overview of the rise of manufacturing in the county is provided. How population grew in the county as a function of industrial development is shown. The spatial and social characteristics of this population are...

Our goal in this paper is to trace out the main lines of symbiosis that link the cultural economy with celebrity and glamour. We observe two trends emerging with great force in the 21st century: The commodification of celebrity and its trappings, and the democratization of celebrity across the globe. These phenomena emerge in the context of the mod...

Seeks to construct a composite theory of urbanization and planning in capitalist society through the development of 4 major themes. 1) The logic and dynamics of capitalism are identified as a broad enveloping structure out of which an urban process emerges. 2) The land-use patterns and problems that appear as firms and households interact among one...

"'This is vintage Allen Scott, but also a tour d'horizon of the state of urban studies, 2012, by one of its foremost global practitioners: compulsory reading.' - Peter Hall, University College London, UK. 'In this book, Allen Scott enriches his longstanding research into the ways in which city-regions function as the main economic engines of global...

I argue that three distinctive waves of urbanization can be recognized, each of them associated with a major historical phase of capitalist development. The leading edges of capitalism today can be typified in terms of a basic cognitive–cultural system of production that is transforming the economic foundations of many large metropolitan areas all...

A brief characterization of the cultural economy of landscape is provided, with special reference to the English Lake District. The early growth of tourism in the Lake District in relation to its natural, literary and artistic assets is described. I examine the cultural economy of landscape in relation to three critical social groups, namely, local...

The class of mathematical and geographical problems considered in this review is characterized by the following general structure: Suppose that there are given (a) a set of n points distributed in the plane, (b) a numerical weight to be attached to each point, and (c) a set of m indivisible centroids without predetermined locations; then, the locat...

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity, and an attempt is made to show how this can be unders...

This article examines the changing structure of human capital in U.S. metropolitan regions from 1980 to 2000. Data are drawn from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series. Intensive empirical investigation leads to three main conclusions. First, forms of human capital in the United States are becomin...

The paper analyses factors influencing the destinations chosen by 13 different categories of migrant engineers in the USA between 1994 to 1999. Migration patterns are analysed with the aid of fractional‐response regression models. The objective is to assess the relative weight of employment opportunities and selected amenities in guiding the migrat...

During the recent years, many prescriptions have been mediatized for successful urban regeneration and growth based cultural dimensions and activities. Large cities may well harbor unprecedented creative capabilities, but they are also places where striking social, cultural, and economic inequalities prevail, and there can be no truly final achieve...

A brief characterization of the cultural economy of landscape is provided, with special reference to the English Lake District. The early development of tourism in the region in relation to its natural, literary, and artistic assets is described. I examine the cultural economy of landscape in relation to three critical social groups, namely, produc...

Concerns the recent resurgence of flexible production organization and its impact on the shape of the space-economy. The analysis is placed in the context of the theory of regimes of accumulation. Argues that a transition has been occurring over the last couple of decades in structures of capitalist accumulation and that Fordism is being gradually...

: In this article, we explore the issue of industrial agglomeration and its relationship to economic development and growth in the less-developed countries of East Asia. We present theoretical arguments and secondary empirical evidence as to why we should have strong expectations about finding a positive relationship between agglomeration and econo...

The O*NET database provides a wealth of information on the qualitative aspects of different occupations. On the basis of these data, we carry out an investigation of the forms of human capital and work that can be found at different levels in the urban hierarchy of the United States. The study proceeds, first, by means of factor analysis of the ori...

Do jobs follow people or do people follow jobs? A number of currently prominent approaches to urbanization respond to this question by privileging the role of individual locational choice in response to amenity values as the motor of contemporary urban growth. Amenities, it is often said, have an especially potent effect on the migration patterns o...

This article is devoted to an investigation of the forms of human capital that characterize cities at different levels of the US urban hierarchy. Basic data on human capital are drawn from the O*Net information system. A first analytical exercise shows that for the USA as a whole, occupations marked by broadly cognitive human capital assets gained...

This book is about the renaissance of cities in the twenty first century and their increasing role as centers of creative economic activity. It attempts to put some conceptual and descriptive order around issues of urbanization in the contemporary world, emphasizing the idea of the social economy of the metropolis, which is to say, a view of the ur...

A world-wide mosaic of large city-regions seems to be over-riding (though is not effacing entirely) an earlier core-periphery system of spatial organization. The economic dynamics of these city-regions are analyzed with particular emphasis on the ways in which they tend to generate increasing-returns effects and competitive advantages for local pro...

An urban problematic is identified by reference to the essential characteristics of cities as spatially polarized ensembles of human activity marked by high levels of internal symbiosis. The roots of the crisis of the classical industrial metropolis of the twentieth century are pinpointed, and the emergence of a new kind of urban economic dynamic o...

A basic frame of reference for reconsideration of the urban question is presented, with an emphasis on the city as a collectivity whose character is derived from a spatially organised system of increasing returns effects and social needs. The logic of the city as a locus of accumulation and social reproduction in the modern economy is then discusse...

In this paper, I pursue the idea that large and small metropolitan areas are subject to distinctively different technological, organizational, and employment dynamics. This idea is considered both in general terms, and, more specifically, in the light of the emerging cognitive-cultural economy in the United States Two main bodies of empirical evide...

Scott A. J. Patterns of development in the furniture industry of Thailand: organization, location and trade, Regional Studies. A geographic description of the Thai furniture industry is offered. The locational structure and performance of the industry are then analysed on the basis of original questionnaire data. The investigation proceeds by means...

From Fordism to Flexible AccumulationFlexible Accumulation and Patterns of IndustrializationNew Industrial SpacesTowards a Theoretical Synthesis

The Software Industry of Toulouse : Development, Structure, Outcomes This article deals with the development of the software industry in the metropolitan region of Toulouse. This activity has emerged above all in tight interrelationship with the local aircraft and space industry. The detailed analysis of the economic geography of the Toulouse softw...

Le développement urbain dans la société moderne puise avant tout ses origines dans la dynamique économique de la production et du travail. Cette dynamique sous-tend les fortunes diverses de chaque zone urbaine, tout comme elle rend compte dans une large mesure des systèmes ou réseaux citadins plus vastes que l’on trouve dans le capitalisme contempo...

Las dimensiones cognitivo-culturales del capitalismo contemporáneo se identifican haciendo referencia a sus sectores dominantes, tecnologías básicas, sistemas de relaciones laborales y estructuras de mercado. los sistemas cognitivo-culturales de producción y trabajo se manifiestan predominantemente en grandes ciudades-regiones. Tal estado de cosas...

The paper opens with an identification of the phenomenon of employment relocation (runaway production) from Hollywood and the concomitant formation of satellite production centers in other parts of the world. A brief theoretical analysis of this issue is provided, emphasizing the role of scale effects and transactions costs. The empirical record of...

The cognitive-cultural dimensions of contemporary capitalism are identified by reference to its leading sectors, basic technologies, labor relations systems and market structures. Cognitive-cultural systems of production and work come to ground preeminently in large city regions. This state of affairs is manifest in the diverse clusters of high-tech...