Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

No abstract

Cities are oftentimes seen as undergoing a process of “emergence” in the “new economy.” However, this process has largely remained empirically underdetermined. This article examines the intra‐city geography of emerging businesses in newly dominant sectors of the urban economy. The change in dominant sectors coincides with a shift towards small‐ and medium‐sized businesses, creating new economic opportunities for urban residential areas. The residential neighborhood is introduced as a place where supply and demand side drivers operate to attract or limit such new economic activity. Allen Scott's perspective of the cognitive‐cultural economy is used to analyze which neighborhoods are flourishing sites of the cognitive‐cultural sectors. His perspective on industries that are on the rise in urban environments and their growth potential proves very valuable. Social demographic characteristics on the level of the neighborhood are used as predictors of the composition of the local economy. The analyses show that in particular wealthy, gentrified neighborhoods are more prone than others to becoming “hubs” of the cognitive‐cultural economy. However, disadvantaged neighborhoods may under certain conditions serve as incubators for business start‐ups as they offer low‐rent office spaces. This has important consequences for their future economic growth potential as well as the distribution of successful businesses in the city.

Most existing research on advanced economic activities focuses on either inner-city milieus or suburban industrial parks. We contend, however, that residential neighbourhoods constitute a milieu for economic activities which require the input of high-skilled labour or, to follow Allen Scott, cognitive-cultural activities which are characteristic for contemporary urban economies.Based on a longitudinal data set of company-level data, we show that a significant share of economic activities in urban residential neighbourhoods can indeed be classified as cognitivecultural and that this share has been growing over the period [1999][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008]. We present an analysis of the spatiality of the embeddedness of these activities. In particular, we focus on their traded and untraded interdependencies. For this part of the analysis we use survey-data of 370 businesses based in Dutch residential neighbourhoods. Overall, cognitive-cultural activities maintain many untraded interdependencies on a local level, whereas they maintain most traded interdependencies on a supra-local level. They appear to be making frequent use of both local buzz as well as of supralocal 'pipelines', and are thus embedded on various spatial scales. Residential neighbourhoods, then, have to be taken more seriously not just as places of consumption but also as milieus of production for more advanced economic activities.

No abstract