Spatiality, Built Form, and Creative Industry Development in the Inner City

Theoretical treatments of new industry formation within the inner city emphasise the significance of agglomeration economies, social relations, institutional factors, and representational (semiotic) features of the landscape. The author contributes to a larger understanding of generative processes of industrial innovation in the urban core by demonstrating through theoretical synthesis and case studies, the critical roles played by ‘material’ (or physical) space and form. First, Soja's idea of the ‘industry-shaping power of spatiality’ in the new economic spaces of the post-Fordist metropolis is interpreted as the boundedness of inner-city space, the intimacy of urban landscapes, and the integrity of urban form. Second, the cogency of Helbrecht's injunction regarding the complementarity of abstractive and ‘concrete’ dimensions of urban space in knowledge-based industry clusters is demonstrated by case-study references situated in London, Vancouver, and Singapore. Third, the author draws on Markus's incisive analysis of principal building types (and ‘durable taxonomies' of building function and social meaning) to link historic and contemporary industrialisation processes, including the comingling of production, housing, and consumption. The nexus of theoretical integration lies in the articulation of three-dimensional industrial landscapes comprised of physical space and form as well as symbolic constructs.