Amenity, Firm Agglomeration, and Local Creativity of Producer Services in Shanghai

Published in Cities, 2022

Core contribution: This article distinguishes firm agglomeration from local creativity at the intra-metropolitan scale. It shows that urban amenities shape local creativity through co-location, accessibility, and amenity clusters, while their effect on general firm agglomeration decays with distance from the CBD.

Highlights
  • Moves creativity research from inter-city comparison to intra-metropolitan spatial mechanisms.
  • Shows that amenities explain local creativity more strongly than general producer-service agglomeration.
  • Identifies co-location, accessibility, and high-density amenity clusters as distinct spatial mechanisms.
  • Argues that industrial agglomeration theory and creativity theory have differentiated applicability within cities.
Conceptual poster showing amenities as selective mechanisms for local creativity in Shanghai
Graphical abstract