Spatial-economic models to evaluate industrial agglomerations: novel instruments for urban-regional analysis

Industrial agglomerates are considered as drivers of the urban development, which contribute to the spatial-economic structure of regional spaces. The reiterative process of industrial growth, even though desirable from a development standpoint, may also increase territorial disparities, as the asymmetrical development of certain areas can lead to pre-existent productive spaces’ underuse or abandonment. Numerous spatial and regional economics’ studies about industrial distribution and territorial disparities were so far conceived. Still, those are often based on dated spatial methodologies, that consider space as an abstracted background where economic dynamics take place. These approaches, which consider space as an invariant in their framework, leave unexplored several spatial relations between production, infrastructural networks and how those influence industrial agglomerates organization. Awareness of these limitations and issues that pertain the current approaches of Regional Economics – and Economic Geography, which share these issues – ought to conduce to the development of novel spatial-economic models capable to address complex spatial behaviours and interactions that may influence on territorial disparities within urban-regional settings. Nevertheless, this outbound step depends on a transformation on how economics visualize and understand space, as well as create and interpret spatial knowledge. With these points in consideration, this thesis proposes to address these lacunae, and develop novel spatial-economic models that consider the territorial configuration – both in spatial and in network terms – and that are adapted to evaluate these structural aspects of where industrial agglomerations are placed. Hence, it is crucial to establish the “spatial-economic microfoundations”, economic and territorial endowments that that can differentiate the amount of support given to these productive spaces. The thesis is then structured on two paths of analysis, the spatial analysis and the economic analysis that culminate in the development of the indexes od Spatial and Economic Territorial Exposure and the Spatial Attractiveness. Using those indexes and their composing parameters to model space, we aim to provide novel instruments and approaches to an economic-based urban and regional planning.