Migration and innovation in cities and regions: a review of the field

Do migrants, and urban diversity, help seed new ideas? Tom, Ceren, Abi and I have written an overview of the field.

It’s part of this excellent new book on migration and innovation, edited by Francesco Lissoni and Andrea Morrison, featuring many stellar contributors. You can read the introduction for free here.

Our chapter looks at how migration and innovation are linked, and how that plays out in city space. The urban scale is closely linked to the firm scale: economic activity clusters in cities, and cities create spillovers that help firms become more productive. At the same time, cities are hubs in larger systems of production and flow; so we talk about cities and globalisation too. We identify a number of gaps and spaces for future work. Finally we do some speculation how two rolling shocks to city economies — automation and hybrid working — might shift these urbanised diversity ~ innovation linkages.

Happy reading!*

[*] The piece is paywalled – so let me know if you’d like a copy.