Intrametropolitan Location

Abstract

At the intra‐urban scale, producer services initially located in the center of cities. This tendency was primarily explained using land rent theory. The development of more polycentric urban spaces and of producer services in the suburban employment centers since the 1990s has profoundly challenged this conceptual framework. New models explain producer service firm location choices as primarily dependent on their sensitivity to employee transportation costs, on the one hand, and to the economies of agglomeration, on the other. According to these models, decentralization of producer services can only occur after the outer metropolitan suburban centers have attained a required level of maturity and an appropriate set of positive externalities. These models also make it possible to consider the idea that the decentralization of producer services only involves those activities that are the least sensitive to informational externalities. These theoretical underpinnings are confirmed in the results of empirical studies in metropolitan areas in developed and developing countries.