Industrial Clustering and the Organization of Production: A Point Pattern Analysis of Manufacturing in Cincinnati, Ohio

The clustering of urban manufacturers occurs for a number of reasons: this paper focuses on the importance of production technology in understanding the degree of industrial clustering. The present analysis uses a sample of Cincinnati manufacturing plants to test several hypotheses that address the relationships between industrial clustering and industrial production technology. Most of the tests use second-order methods to distinguish between the spatial distributions of specified classes of industry. The analysis reveals that the functional disintegration of productive activity leads to increased degrees of industrial clustering in urban space. Furthermore, the dispersal that occurs through plant relocation is not a simple centrifugal process but a subtle modification of the clustered pattern of urban industry.