Richard florida has gained a strong following thanks to his books, The Rise of the Creative Class and The Great Reset. His ideas about urbanization have often included elements of geographic analysis, and he’s recently completed a paper for the Journal of Economic Geography along with colleagues that explores a geographic analysis of entertainment from 1970 – 2000.
In this paper about geographic clustering of economic activity, he analyzes the concentration of entertainment in the superstar cities of New York and Los Angeles, and coins a new term called geographies of scope.
Geographic economies of scope are different than simple economic diversity. It is not the collocation of many diverse inputs and capabilities that characterize geographic economies of scope, rather the geographic collocation of related capabilities at a sufficient scale to produce high-quality and efficient production at a reduced cost. Geographic economies of scope operate in conjunction with economies of scale. This is similar to conventional firm-level economies of scope, which take place when large firms leverage their marketing, R&D or assembly lines to produce different products. In the same way that conventional economies of scope mean we would expect to find a lower production cost for differentiated products in a larger firm, we would expect geographic economies of scope to set in as cities and regions become larger.
Read the full paper here.
