The knowledge-based economy in new globalization arenas: metropolitan reorganizations in the Madrid city-region

Madrid is undergoing a major transition from an old economy to a new economy, whose importance lie in its knowledge content that returns a higher value added and productivity than other regular services, providing cities with higher wages, higher incomes, and higher fiscal capacity. This dissertation addresses the regional economic development challenge in the current New Economy that characterizes the beginning of the 21st century. Just like manufacturing during the 19th century, the New Economy is raising today some concern on what its best spatial structure (i.e. monocentric or polycentric, concentrated or deconcentrated) and urban form (i.e. in dedicated office buildings or in mixed-use buildings within the urban tissue) would be in order to maximize its productivity and positive externalities while minimizing any negative ones. The three main questions and objectives undertaken by this dissertation are (1) to understand the spatial location structures of the knowledge-based economy within metropolitan areas that are currently undergoing reconfiguration processes; (2) to compare the location of the knowledge-based economy in different global city-regions (with a special emphasis in Madrid and its extended city-region) and to shed light on the debatable validity of these development policies; and (3) to verify whether or not office spaces, as the natural realm where the knowledge economy unfolds, follow a similar location pattern as KIBS, and what is their urban form. The main contributions offered by this dissertation are the following. First, KIBS in the Madrid city-region locate in a concentrated and polycentric pattern. This dissertation considers the City of Madrid as a “gateway city” connecting the Madrid city-region to the rest of the world’s networked economy via Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS). Surrounding the City of Madrid, there is a series of medium-sized cities “in cooperation” with Madrid’s global role and, at the same time, “in competition” for the subsequent places in the hierarchy. They all complement each other as places feeding into Madrid’s global role. However, we observe at least two different types of medium-sized cities. First, modern suburban cities or NECs geographically closer to the metropolitan core are influenced by a morphological and functional polycentrism. Second, remoter HACs undergoing a metropolitan integration are subject only to a functional polycentrism through their connection to limited access infrastructures (i.e. highways, HSR, ICTs) and business and producer services relations with the rest of the city-region. The city-region network is largely shaped by the daily economic relations of business service firms that interweave and forge the links and interrelations between the nodes in global city-regions. Second, this dissertation analyzes the location and composition of the knowledge-based economy in six case studies, three European city-regions (London, Paris, and Madrid) and three U.S. city-regions (New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago) in order to understand whether their urban structure (polycentricity or monocentricity) is a help or a hindrance to KIBS development. We found that the more polycentric a city is, the more polycentric its KIBS will be, but the less amount of KIBS will agglomerate. Other key findings are that not all the centers are specialized in KIBS and that certain KIBS are highly concentrated in just a few centers, meaning that localization economies are more important in these KIBS than urbanization economies. Finally, this dissertation found that office spaces have a similar locational structure as KIBS in the Madrid city-region, with a surprising large proportion of offices in mixed-use buildings scattered within the urban realm. Office spaces are the natural realm where the current knowledge-based economy in city-regions is unfolded. The urban system transformations in metropolitan territories have led to their restructuring and to a new (re)distribution of economic activities between the urban cores and the suburban and peripheral areas. The results show two different location patterns depending on the built environment’s age: (1) older subcenters have central and denser office locations that develop organically in the same direction as the urban tissue does; and (2) more recent developed subcenters have office locations connected to closer roads and highway intersections. In addition, the urban form adopted by these spaces is analyzed, finding out that (3) offices in mixed-use buildings are a large proportion of the city-region’s office space complementing the single and multi-office buildings