Technological innovation and spatial transformation

Abstract This article contains a comprehensive reflection on the role of technological change in generating spatial evolutionary patterns. In this context, technological change will be regarded as a continous proces of improving product qualities and underlying process technologies. From a spatial viewpoint, central (metropolitan) areas are—according to conventional wisdom—assumed to provide the incubation potential for the take-off of new life cycles of industries and technologies. These concepts are incorporated in a dynamic model which will be used for simulation experiments. Various simulation experiments and sensitivity results are presented in the paper. These experiments demonstrate the critical role of technological change in generating spatial concentration patterns in earlier life cycles, whilst in a similar vein they may lead to spatial deconcentration patterns in later phases.

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