Patterns of Knowledge: The Geography of Advanced Services and the Case of Art and Culture

Much emphasis has been placed on the importance of agglomeration economies as a backbone to urban and regional growth. Case study research points out that particular cities and regions have a competitive advantage in industrial activity over others, yet we have little by way of a satisfactory means of formally studying the geography of these industrial patterns to demonstrate how the specific case studies fit into a larger pattern of agglomeration that can be applied to more than one place. Is the agglomeration itself in fact exhibiting statistically robust and significant patterns? What do the patterns look like and how do they differ by region? Using geographic information systems to analyze spatial autocorrelation and “hot spots” of industries, we compare the ten most populous metropolitan statistical areas across several “advanced” service sectors (professional, management, media, finance, art and culture, engineering and high technology). We find that much of the qualitative evidence on industrial clustering is evocative of broader macro patterns that are both similar and dissimilar across industries and geographies. Our results indicate that there are three spatial typologies of growth in the advanced services within U.S. urban regions. These typologies allow us to intimate qualities of place in general and of places specifically that drive the agglomeration of advanced services. New York City's art and culture and media industries represent key examples of geographically unique cases within advanced services that are explained relative to existing literature regarding the importance of density and cross-fertilization across industrial fields.