Localisation Patterns of Knowledge-Creating Services in Paris Metropolitan Region

Based upon an hermeneutic approach, which explicitly takes into account the role space plays within the knowledge economy, the article is aimed at providing the geography of knowledge-based activities in the Paris metropolitan area and at depicting the shape of their external economies and agglomeration forces. The added value supplied by this paper consists in: a) the spatial extent covered (the Paris Metropolitan Region), in order to consider the role that the pivot city and the surrounding towns/cities jointly play within the urban regional structure; and b) the improved explicative capability of a hermeneutic approach descending from its cross-fertilisation with the “knowledge source-based approach”, which distinguishes between analytic, synthetic and symbolic services according to their prevailing source of knowledge. The proposed methodology makes it possible to depict the spatial relationships both within KCS and between KCS and manufacturing activities in a more appropriate manner.