That’s you, that is

Urban economists vs. economic geographers, and economic geographers vs. themselves

Last month Neil Lee, Helen Simpson and I recorded a Centre for Cities podcast on the state of urban economic research, expertly helmed by CFC boss Andrew Carter.

Two big things we didn’t have time to talk about were 1) how to define ‘research about urban economies’; and 2), how economic geographers and urban economists relate to each other.

I think this stuff is important — for academics, certainly, but also for those who are users of academic work.

We did try out some things we might say before hitting record, and if you *are* interested in this stuff, here’s what I would have said …

In the podcast we kicked off by reflecting on why the urban economies research space has got so much bigger in the last 20 years.

We agreed that a big part of that story has been the spread of better, more powerful quantitative frameworks, tools and data (new and old) to explore urban places. It also reflects big shifts in cities’ material reality and public perception. The 1990s and 2000s saw vast urbanisation, especially in South and East Asia, which has helped take the world’s population majority-urban. In the global North, many large cities stopped losing people and began economic recovery alongside high-profile physical regeneration. Both of these shifts helped thrust cities into the public, media and policy conversation, especially in the US and UK.

We could even — reaching a bit — trace a Line of Urban Influence through the commentariat, from the foundation of Brookings Metro in 1998 and The Rise of the Creative Class in 2002, the launch of The Atlantic Cities in 2011, the publication of The Triumph of The City in 2011, and the launch of Guardian Cities a few years later, in 2014. Centre for Cities itself falls neatly into this schema, launching within IPPR in 2005 and spinning out in 2007.

Academics also notice and respond to these shifts! But different urban research tribes have reacted in different ways. So I think it’s also useful to think about *how* the urban economies topic space has got bigger in different parts of that space. In turn, that helps give us a clearer idea of what we talk about when we talk about ‘research about urban economies’.

The two biggest parts of the topic space are urban economics and economic geography. Cards on the table: I’m an economic geographer, but I use a lot of economics in my work, both frameworks and methods. I like data, and mainly use quantitative designs, but I also do mixed methods work with co-authors from qualitative backgrounds. So in this debate, I’m econ-adjacent — but not a proper economist.

Over the past two decades, urban economics has become hugely larger as a field in econ. One metric of that is conferences. I was at the first Urban Economics Association event in 2009 in San Francisco — it was a couple of rooms in a much larger regional science conference. There were maybe 50 people there. Now UEA runs two conferences a year, one in the States and another in Europe, with hundreds of people at each.

One reason those events have got so large is that we have better theory, tools and data about cities to work with, a point we picked up in the podcast. The 90s and 00s wave of urban economics partly came about through a highly productive splicing together of 90s New Economic Geography models (coming out of trade and endogenous growth theory) with an older literature on urban systems and city models, dating back to the 60s and 70s (see here, here, and here). The current wave of urban econ has also got bigger because it’s more and more woven into other parts of economics, in very productive ways. In urban conferences — and on the job market — you now find macro people (often working on housing markets); public economists (working on government or place-based policies), IO people (working on firm structure and location, but also on urban structure), as well as labour and innovation folks. In other words, urban economics is now far more than its core interests of transport, infrastructure, real estate and local government.[1]

Back in 2004 Henry Overman identified two main weaknesses in urban economics — a lack of precision about places, and an under-use of case studies (and related bodies of evidence). Are these still problems? The first concern is attenuating somewhat: as spatial datasets have got richer, research designs are now better able to precisely specify appropriate units of observation (and indeed, to use these to define urban areas). The second issue is still live. To me at least, urban economics seems less insular in terms of citing outside the field, and drawing on ideas and frameworks beyond economics proper, even if these insights end up being converted into econ frameworks or formalised into models.[2] Jane Jacobs and Anna-Lee Saxenian are the classic examples of non-economists who’ve become canonical for urban economists. But it’s still hard to see many *spaces* today where urban economists and (say) urban sociologists might encounter each other and their ideas. In turn, that may limit cross-fertilisation of new ideas, as opposed to rediscovery of older ones. I come back to this at the end.

Economic geography is also larger and richer, but has evolved in a much more complex way. One way of understanding this is that economic geography is not just ‘where economic things happen and why’, but also the spatial footprint of many other fields. Everything has a geography! Again, conferences are a useful metric: you can see the breadth and richness of economic geography in the diversity of disciplines and methods on display at the huge, bi-annual global economic geography conferences.

This has consequences. Economic geographers proper have often reacted to that disciplinary overwhelm by working almost a-spatially; geography, or space, is in the background but is implicit, and rarely discussed either as a passive or active feature. This is not a new tendency — Andrés Rodríguez-Pose discusses it extensively in this 2011 piece — but it’s become increasingly embedded.

For example: I co-convene the UCL Economic Geography Group, an array of researchers interested in topics around urban economies. It’s a very rich and productive group. It’s also striking how few of us actively identify *as geographers*.[3] We have people who make maps and work with spatial data, think about urban governance, or explore economic / social formations in particular places. But usually these are planners, not geographers. The majority work on topics like global value chains; care homes; labour organising, industry 4.0; financialisation, or platform economies. Space and place are here, but are not not front and centre.

For me, economic geography’s heterodox nature is one of its major strengths: after all, the questions we look at mean that researchers will often need to draw on an array of perspectives and frames to think about a problem and develop a research design. This should lead to richer and better-grounded insights. But the shift to a-spatiality, coupled with that lack of a single, foundational body of theory, also creates a lack of definition and coherence.

The protagonists have responded to this in a variety of ways. Some have tried to create their own syncretic language or unified field theories; others circle the wagons, often defensively, especially against the more econ-adjacent parts of the discipline.[4]

Again, this reaction isn’t new, but it is still going. Last year, Henry Yeung’s otherwise magisterial review of the state of economic geography was notable — to me at least — for not engaging at all with quantitative geography, spatial data science, network/complexity approaches, or urban economics. Neither, tellingly, did any of the responses by Trevor Barnes and Shaina Potts published alongside it. We can also see these dynamics in the ongoing flame war about whether it’s even possible to do comparative urban analysis (the blue corner; the red corner): a dispute best understood as a proxy war between quant-adjacent and qual/critical parts of the discipline.

Where does this leave urban economists and economic geographers? Formally, it’s a situationship, fraught, but also very one-sided. Geographers — including me — spend much more time thinking about this than economists seem to. The last time I’m aware actual economists got involved is a while back now — Henry’s provocative 2004 piece in JOEG, and this thoughtful 2005 reaction piece from Gilles Duranton and Andrés in EPA.

But as I suggested above, this isn’t just about economists vs. geographers. The positions and dynamics within economic geography reveal another fraught relationship: economic geography vs. itself, or more specifically, the largely quantitative, econ-aligned vs. largely qualitative, critically-aligned parts of the discipline.

That might all sound a bit bleak. But I think the current picture is more encouraging, for three reasons. First, if we think about non-economists who have become canonical in urban economics, I suspect this is lagrely because their granular, qualitative work gives the microfoundations that quantitative researchers need to run regressions and build models. These kind of qual-to-quant designs can be both very rich, and an approach where boundary-spanning economic geographers should have a clear comparative advantage. Of course quants can do this too — one of my go-to econ papers on clusters, Arzaghi and Henderson’s 2008 study of ad firms in Manhattan, builds its analysis off of dozens of semi-structured field interviews with managers and workers in firms on the ground. With Georgina Voss and Emma Vandore, I tried to follow the same qual-to-quant pipeline in exploring the Tech City cluster in London (though we needed three papers to do this).[5]

Second, there is a connective web of individuals whose work and methods bridges these worlds — Maryann Feldman, Michael Storper, Dani Rodrik, Karen Chapple, Simona Iammarino and Ian Gordon, for example. All of these have been inspirational to me as I’ve threaded my way through academia. And third, just as important, there are many groups, departments and events that bridge. To name a few: the EGSE cluster at LSE, the LSE-Oxford International Growth Centre, the GEOINNO conferences, Liverpool’s Geographic Data Science group, the Turing’s SAD podcast and seminars, and the (sadly-missed) SEG group of early career researchers, have all created spaces for presentations and productive exchange across urban economics, economic geography and related fields like complexity/networks and data science. Newer urban labs like UToronto’s School of Cities are also starting to play these roles. And there will be many others I’ve forgotten or don’t know yet.

Now, perhaps it’s no surprise that a lot of the people and groups I’ve named are at LSE, which has a critical mass of spatial economists AND economic geographers. Clusters like this matter! But just as innovations slowly diffuse — through collaborations, interaction and career moves, and become mainstream over many years — so we can imagine a set of projects, groups and institutions gradually seeding more inclusive norms and ways of working across the wider system.

If you want to do work on urban economies that draws on geography *and* economics, in other words, there are many ways — and people, groups and places — to draw on. There is still a way to go. But this way is better for everyone.

Many thanks to Dani Arribas-Bel, Neil Lee and Liz Moor for thoughtful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.

NOTES

[1] The other crossover point for urban economics has been with the urban scaling literature developed by statistical physicists and empirical mathematicians, and the search for universal (or high-generality) laws governing systems of cities. I wrote about this productive but confusing topic space over here.

[2] That’s a pretty strong claim, and needs some caveats. In my experience this is a relatively recent change. It’s notably different from the picture Marion Fourcade paints a decade ago. We’re also going to see more cross-pollination outside the Top 5 journals (which Fourcade focuses on), and in specific subfields like urban. (It also strikes me as interesting that Fourcade’s highly critical take on top tier economics was published in a top tier Econ journal. You see the same with behavioural economics papers – many of Kahneman and Tversky’s key papers were published in Top 5s.) Of course econ as a whole has other challenges – with internal culture, especially toxic speech [see Alice Wu’s papers here and here, and Ederer et al here], and with discrimination in hiring and progression [punchily summarised by Nikita Sharma]. One bright spot is that urban economics is one of the most gender-balanced subfields, especially at entry level.

[3] My UCL colleague Lin-Fang Hsu has mapped this using keywords scraped from group members’ public profile pages.

[4] Anther strong claim. I’m going to speculate that this stance sometimes embodies: a) fear of number, and a worry that quantitative analysis (read: economics) is b) overly reductive, c) overly influential and d) typically used to assert right-wing political positions.

I feel sad about a). I talk about b) above; I’m sympathetic but fundamentally think this is a false binary. On c), I’m somewhat sympathetic, but I think it’s a lot more complex than this. First, I think it overstates the impact of academic economists on policy, as opposed to economists in government. Second, in some areas it’s obviously not true: the What Works Centre’s evidence reviews, for instance, show that the vast majority of economic development policy evaluations aren’t quantitative, and don’t use methods most economists would consider robust. Third, timing matters. In the short term, policymakers have set agendas, and are going to be more interested in evidence that helps them design and implement interventions. Over the longer term, there is usually greater interest in work that challenges or ‘unsettles’ that agenda. I find d) harder to grapple with, not least as studies of economists regularly show that the majority hold politically progressive views. My UCL colleague Mariana Mazzucato is a very visible example.

[5] Dani Rodrik’s book is also full of helpful ideas about how to do boundary-spanning work. See his 2023 industrial policy paper with Reka Juhasz and Nathan Lane for some real-world applications.