Allen J. Scott

Scott inverted the usual question. Instead of asking which industries a city has, he asked why production agglomerates at all. His answer is transaction costs: when a sector fragments into many small interdependent firms, with orders that change weekly and short contracts, proximity stops being a convenience and becomes a condition of existence.

Out of that come the districts he studied for forty years: Los Angeles garment work, jewellery, visual effects, animation, Italian furniture. All share the same structure — many small units, a shared labour market, dense subcontracting, and a street where all of it happens. Scott called these new industrial spaces and showed they are not a craft exception but the dominant form of capitalism after the assembly line.

A British economic geographer born in 1938 and professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, Scott is, with Michael Storper and Edward Soja, one of the three figures of the so-called Los Angeles School. Metropolis (1988) and New Industrial Spaces (1988) set out his framework; The Cultural Economy of Cities (2000) extended it to sectors producing goods whose value is symbolic.

On Hollywood (2005) is his most detailed study of a single sector: how film vertically disintegrated after the end of the big studios and reorganised into a swarm of production companies, freelance technicians and suppliers that only works concentrated within a handful of kilometres. His last major argument, the «cognitive-cultural economy», holds that rich cities now live on design, creativity and the management of symbols, and that this economy produces brutal wage polarisation: very high and very low, with little in between.