THE INTRAURBAN LOCATION RATIONALE(S) OF THE KNOWLEDGE-CREATING SERVICES: TWO ITALIAN CASE-STUDIES

In recent decades, a lively debate has developed within economic geography about the changing contents and interpretations of the agglomeration economies. These changing contents refer to the ongoing transitions from the industrial to the knowledge-driven economy and from a deterministic to an evolutionary theoretical approach. While there is wide consensus about the leading position of the agglomeration economies with respect to the location economies in the new context, their nature is being still debated, especially between the New Economic Geography (NEG) and the Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG). In fact, unlike NEG, the EEG underlines the role of non-pecuniary economies, owing to the rising importance of the relational/meso factors compared with the techno-economic ones. The present paper aims at contributing to the debate by (a) using an ‘interpretive’ approach to the knowledge-driven economy; (b) focusing on its most representative branch, namely the Knowledge-creating Services and (c) considering the intra-urban scale, which is a decisive scale as far as meso-economic factors are concerned. To corroborate the theoretical frame, a spatial-econometric analysis on two very different Italian Metropolitan Areas is performed. Our results, while confirming the importance of the agglomeration economies also in the knowledge economy, suggest that they depend on wider milieu conditions, thus eventually substantiating the EEG approach. On the normative side, the results allow targeted urban policies to be devised in relation with the knowledgedriven economy.