Advances in Commercial Geography E-Book

Carlos Garrocho

• Herausgeber: El Colegio Mexiquense
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 427

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Por primera vez se reúnen, en una publicación, los principales exponentes de la geografía contemporánea, como Brian J. L. Berry, Neil Wrigley, Richard Shearmur, Luc Anselin y Jim Simmons con el objetivo de analizar el pasado, presente y futuro de la geografía aplicada a las actividades comerciales y de servicios. Participan también destacados estudiosos mexicanos como Carlos Garrocho, José Antonio Álvarez Lobato, Tania Chávez y Zochitl Flores quienes abordan el contexto de las estructuras urbanas, vinculados a los avances en el análisis espacial, orientados a las actividades terciarias en el espacio intra-urbano, particularmente en ciudades mexicanas. Los autores analizan casos de estudio con el objetivo de explorar el futuro de la geografía comercial dentro de las ciudades, centrando su atención en las actividades terciarias. Además, el trabajo muestra que en realidad no parece haber un consenso hacia el significado de la geografía comercial. Los autores señalan que los usos del término clúster se refieren a empresas aglomeradas terciarias y destacan que un clúster es la colocación de las entidades económicas independientes relacionadas de alguna manera, pero no están obligados por un solo propietario o administración específica, junto con la proximidad a los mercados de trabajo, el acceso a los clientes y los proveedores, reducir los costos de búsqueda de los consumidores, el seguimiento de los competidores, la disponibilidad de infraestructura y tierras a utilizar, la planificación, etcétera.

Leseprobe

El Colegio Mexiquense, A.C.

José Alejandro Vargas Castro

President

José Antonio Álvarez Lobato

General Secretary

Henio Millán Valenzuela

Research Coordinator

330.9 A2444

Advances in commercial geography: prospects, methods and applications / Editor Carlos Garrocho Rangel .-- Zinacante- pec, Estado de México: El Colegio Mexiquense, a.c., 2013.

270 p.: il., gráf., tables

It includes bibliographical references

ISBN: 978-607-7761-49-5

1. Commercial geography. 2. Economic geography. 3. Urban economy - Case studies I. Garrocho Rangel Carlos, Editor.

Translation and proofreading: Carlos Félix Garrocho RangelEdition: Ansberto Horacio Contreras ColínDesing and layout: Luis Alberto Martínez LópezLibro electrónico: Jose Carlos Ramírez

First edition: 2013

D.R. © El Colegio Mexiquense, A.C. Ex hacienda Santa Cruz de los Patos s/n, Col. Cerro del Murciélago, Zinacantepec 51350, México, MÉXICO Ventas: <[email protected]> Página-e: http://www.cmq.edu.mx

Queda prohibida la reproducción parcial o total del contenido de la presente obra sin contar previamente con la autorización expresa y por escrito del titular del derecho patri- monial, en términos de la Ley Federal de Derechos de Autor, y en su caso de los tratados internacionales aplicables. La persona que infrinja esta disposición se hará acreedora a las sanciones legales correspondientes.

Made in Mexico/ Impreso y hecho en México

ISBN: 978 607-7761-49-5 [print editión] ISBN: 978-607-8509-32-4 [digital editión]

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Radar Views

Commercial and Economic Geography: Past and Future Brian J.L. Berry

Towards a Policy Engaged Retail Geography Neil Wrigley

What is an Urban Structure? The Challenge of Foreseeing 21st Century Spatial Patterns of the Urban Economy Richard Shearmur

From SpaceStat to Cybergis: Twenty Years of Spatial Data Analysis Software Luc Anselin

Part II: Case Studies

Evolution of Commercial Structure in North American City: A Toronto Case Study Jim Simmons

Spatial Organization of Banking Branches city limits, includes fivein the Intra-Metropolitan Space in Toluca, Mexico Carlos Garrocho y José Antonio Álvarez-Lobato

Microspatial Analysis of Tertiary Activities in the Traditional Business Center of a big Mexican City Zochilt Flores, Carlos Garrocho, Tania Chávez y José Antonio Álvarez-Lobato

Introduction

Carlos Garrocho

Commercial geography is a subfieldof human geography, as are urban geography and economic geography, with which commercial geography has strong relationships (see chapter 1 in this book by Brian Berry). Some definitions could clarify what commercial geography is. According to Johnston et al. (1991), urban geography is particularly “concentrated on the patterns of urban settlements in a country or large region, thereby treating towns and cities as a-dimensional points on a map” and/or “focused to explain patterns within urban areas, thus treating them as areas rather than as points” (1991: 510). Economic geography, on the other hand, is focused on understanding “the production and use of environmental and technological conditions of existence” (1991: 117) and “the spatial dimensions of the productive aspects of economic activity” (p.118). O´Sullivan (2007: 1) defines urban economics as “the intersection of geography and economics…puts economics and geography together, exploring the geographical or location choices of utility-maximizing households and profit-maximizing firms…and examines alternative public policies to promote efficient choices.” This is the background to understand what commercial geography is.

Regarding commercial geography, Landini (1977: 25) points out: “The wholesale market is the place where demand and supply can compare themselves, with a perspective conditioned by balancing function: from the location that does or does not favor the meeting; from the infrastructures that determine their level of accessibility and their area of influence; from the equipment that qualifies the power and the specialization; from the density and buying possibility of the people whose socio-professional status and distribution on the urban and extra-urban territory must be studied; last from the influx of information to the way the operators intervene…the geographer must go beyond that, he must examine both the causes of inefficiency and the perspective in order to re-organize the sector.” (The issue of commercial policy is also pointed by Bullado, 2002, and by Wrigley in chapter 2 of this book) (Scorrano, 2005: 271). Landini (1981: 11-12) also stresses the role of the two geographical scales of urban geography (cities as a-dimensional points and as areas): “The geographic research to the problem of the commercial tertiary must regard two fundamental aspects: the analysis of the inner composition of the sector and of the major or minor standard and efficacy by which it covers and serves the territory…and to individuate the regional setting and the distribution of demand ‘weight’ among the different centers, according to the importance of their tertiary equipment and according to the amount of the commercial services to the eventual changes that the planning should make on the city network in order to create a hierarchical urban framework” (Landini, 1981: 11; Scorrano, 2005: 270). Clearly these commercial geography objectives also relate directly to the object of study of the urban economy, which is “to explore the geographical or location choices of utility-maximizing households and profitmaximizing firms…and the alternative public policies to promote efficient choices” (O´Sullivan, 2007: 1).

In short, commercial geography is at the center of the intersection of urban geography, economic geography, and urban economics, sharing their goals and much of their methods, but specifically targeting tertiary activities.

Objectives and pivotal axis of the book

This book aims to present a profile of the research done around the world in the field of commercial geography and to locate in this context the research done in Mexico, particularly that which is done in El Colegio Mexiquense, one of the research centers that has explored these issues with particular interest in Mexican cities. El Colegio Mexiquense is a research center in social sciences that is located in the Toluca Metropolitan Zone (1.7 million people), half an hour from Mexico City (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Toluca Metropolitan Zone.

The underlying theme in all chapters is to advance on the explanation of the spatial organization of tertiary activities in the intra-urban space and its social consequences in a range of geographical scales, from the large metropolitan areas to the micro intra-metropolitan spaces (i.e., micropolitan spaces) as the traditional business center (tbc). This is the first axis of the book. It articulates the positions of Brian Berry (chapter 1), who discusses the past and future of commercial geography; Neil Wrigley (chapter 2), who proposes a commercial geography highly related to public policy; Richard Shearmur (chapter 3), who places commercial geography in the context of urban structures; Luc Anselin (chapter 4), who links commercial geography with advances in spatial analysis (including statistics and spatial econometrics); and three case studies, one of Toronto by Jim Simmons (chapter 5) and the other two focusing on the Toluca Metropolitan Zone, by Carlos Garrocho, José Antonio Álvarez, Zochilt Flores, and Tania Chávez (chapters 6 and 7). Each chapter contributes to the explanation of the location of the consumer-oriented tertiary activities in the intra-urban space. This book does not attempt to synthesize the diverse findings into a single approach. The inability to integrate as many study results has been reviewed by Rudner et al. (2002).

A second articulator axis of the topics explored in the book is the agglomeration (or dispersion) of tertiary activities in urban areas. Except for the Berry and Wrigley collaborations, which focus largely on exploring the future of commercial geography, the other authors are mindful of the agglomeration (dispersion) of private tertiary activities (i.e., commercial clusters) within cities. There are many schools of thought regarding the cluster of firms cities. There seems to be consensus, however, that a cluster is the co-location of independent economic entities that are related in some way, but that are not bound by a single owner or a specific administration (Maskell and Lorenzen, 2004: 991; Keeble and Nachum, 2001: 30). This axis is fully justified because, despite the many efforts reported in the literature, there is no theoretical-conceptual finished interpretation that accounts for the factors that give rise to agglomerations of private firms and commercial services in the intra-urban space, the mechanisms through which they develop, the wedges of their change and transformation, and their number, specialization and hierarchy.1

The issue of the formation and dynamics of clusters of manufacturing firms and service-oriented production has been widely discussed in the literature2 However, the issue of spatial organization of tertiary firms within the city has received, in comparative terms, much less attention (Gong and Wheeler, 2002; Keeble and Nachum, 2001; Wu, 2000), perhaps because of the lack of disaggregated economics for intra-urban spaces.3 This probably explains the remarkably scarce research and knowledge about the spatial organization of tertiary firms in Mexican cities.

The available evidence shows that tertiary firms tend to co-locate both at regional and intra-urban scales, and contemporary research tries to understand why these agglomerations (commercial clusters) occur (Brenner, 2000, 2004; Britton, 2003; Hutton, 2004; Maillat and Kebir, 1999, Porter, 1990; Shearmur and Coffey, 2002a, 2002b). The traditional idea that the clusters are necessarily composed of firms that maintain customer-supplier relationships is no longer in force, and even less for the tertiary sector (Maskell and Lorenz, 2004; Simmie,1998; Suarez-Villa and Walrod, 1997). Currently other factors are mainly considered. These factors include proximity to labor markets, access to customers and suppliers, reducing search costs of consumers, monitoring by competitors, transmission of tacit and non-standardized information, availability of infrastructure, and land use planning, among many more. Thus, commercial geography uses the cluster term to refer to tertiary agglomerated firms (i.e., co-located) in the territory (Shearmur, 2007).4

In the end, this book offers some elements that help to better explain the spatial organization of tertiary activities within the city. On the one hand, it provides an abstract vocabulary that allows a more transparent representation of the spatial organization of tertiary firms in the intra-urban space, assuming that no perfect vocabulary exist for the re-description of reality, that the integration is an ongoing task and unfinished by nature, and that the abstract vocabulary will never achieve a perfect representation of the real (Barnes, 2001). On the other hand, the book offers a variety of methodological resources (even some of the last generation; see especially chapter 4) that allow to put into practice the abstract conceptual vocabulary on the spatial organization of tertiary activities within urban spaces.

Exposure Strategy

The book is divided into two parts and follows a deductive exposition strategy, which goes from the general to the particular. The first part (“Radar views”) includes broad spectrum contributions to commercial geography. The first chapter, by Brian Berry, focuses on analyzing the historical trajectory of commercial geography and explores its possible conceptual and methodological developments in the coming years. The second chapter, by Neil Wrigley, argues the imperative of linking commercial geography to the design of public policies. These are the two more general chapters of the book. The book then starts to focus on increasingly specific topics. Chapter 3, by Richard Shearmur, focuses on the urban context of commercial geography, i.e., the urban structures. Chapter 4, by Luc Anselin, closes the first part of the book by exploring various borderline methodological issues that are key to the analysis of commercial geography.

The second part of the book (“Case Studies”) is much more specific. It has three chapters: one on the evolution of the commercial structure of Toronto, by Jim Simmons, and two on the spatial organization of tertiary activities in the Toluca Metropolitan Area, where El Colegio Mexiquense is located: the spatial organization of banking branches in the intra-metropolitan space, by Carlos Garrocho and José Antonio Álvarez, and a microspatial analysis of tertiary activities in the traditional business center, by Zochilt Flores, Carlos Garrocho, and Tania Chávez, and José Antonio Álvarez. This sequence made it possible for the book to achieve its goal of presenting a profile of the research carried out by international leaders in the field of commercial geography and to place in this context the research done in El Colegio Mexiquense.

This introduction presents the context in which this book was generated. It highlights the main contributions of each of the contributions. The context of the book is told in a deliberately personalized style. The reader can then understand the conditions in which the book was originated and the path followed by a research center and a specific research team from the beginning origins to the current stage in which it produces a book with world-leading authors and publications in some top international journals. The intention is for readers to learn from the successes and mistakes of the research team in commercial geography at El Colegio Mexiquense. The analysis of each chapter is intended to facilitate the reading of the book, generate curiosity in the reader, produce questions, and highlight the contributions of each chapter.

Context of the Book

The interest of El Colegio Mexiquense in economic and commercial geography dates back almost to its foundation (1986), with the publication of Graizbord and Garrocho’s (1987) Sistemas de ciudades: fundamentos teóricos y operativos (Systems of cities: theoretical and operational fundaments), which used a 1964 article, “Cities as Systems within Systems of Cities” by one of history’s most distinguished geographers, Brian Berry, as a key reference.

In this article, Berry addresses the urgent need for solid theories regarding the city, which could be created and reinforced with the availability of more and improved information and the surprising progress burgeoning in information technology. For Berry, testing and creating theories about the city was and is the most significant dimension of urban studies (Berry, 2011). This powerful message is still absent in Mexico, where we have preferred to adopt, and in the infrequent and best of cases, to adapt theories created in other realities (as diverse and different from our cities as Los Angeles and Chicago, just to mention two examples) to the Mexican context.

One of the most important lines of research inspired by Berry’s work was that of the constant flux between the macro scale (i.e., regional, city systems) and the micro scale (the intra-urban space: the tbc or the periphery, for example). In other words, such research concerns the constant state between perceiving the city as an a-dimensional point (the regional perspective) and as an area (the intra-urban perspective). Berry’s studies relating these two scales are numerous and innovative, and still astonish us.

Berry’s geographical perspective has strongly influenced his numerous students, more than a hundred of whom he has served as doctoral thesis advisor. One of his most outstanding students in the University of Chicago, Jim Simmons, published Urban Canada in 1969. This work was fundamental for Graizbord and Garrocho’s Sistemas de ciudades: fundamentos teóricos y operativos.5 Simmons’ work summarizes, in only 165 pages, different theoretical and conceptual elements of city systems research and presents an impressive array of vanguard analytic methods at that time. The large majority of these methods were completely unknown in Mexico even in the 1980s and required in-depth study in order to apply them in the researching of Mexican cities.

In 1988 Boris Graizbord concluded his sabbatical year at El Colegio Mexiquense, and in 1989 I left for the University of Exeter (England) to begin my doctoral studies with a project thesis on socio-spatial planning of public health service. This project utilized and applied the main arguments of the city systems perspective.6

While researching point public services planning, such as health services,encountered the private service planning literature, that is to say, the economic and commercial geography literature that I was unacquainted with in Mexico in that pre-Internet time.7 I recall numerous books on the subject. One in particular, however, caught my attention because of its intelligence, clarity, enjoyable prose, diligent nature, and graphic support. This was Location, location, location (1987) by Ken Jones and Jim Simmons. The book was such a success in Canada that it was later slightly modified and, in 1990, distributed in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia as The Retail Environment. Because of its level of excellence it continues to be a basic text book of almost every commercial geography course in the world.8

The Retail Environment, in addition to other works I reviewed for my doctoral thesis, encouraged me to write a small locational analysis manual while at Exeter: Localización de servicios en la planeación urbana y regional (Location of Services in Urban and Regional Planning), which was published in 1992. Oddly enough, this manual was sold out in a very short time. This evidenced the interest of Mexican geographers in locational analysis techniques.

When I returned to El Colegio Mexiquense from my doctoral studies, I prepared my thesis for book publication. The result was Análisis socioespacial de los servicios de salud: accesibilidad, utilización y calidad (Sociospatial Analysis of Health Services: Accessibility, Utilization and Quality; Garrocho, 1995). Mathematical models of spatial interaction and localization-assignation were added to the city systems’ theoretical and operative elements, thus contributing to the locational planning of public and private services in El Colegio Mexiquense.

This book was the starting point for the organization in 1994 of an international seminar on metropolitan systems, where I had the opportunity to invite Jim Simmons (among other world-renowned researchers, such as David M. Smith, Harry Richardson, and Michel Batty), and thus confirm Simmons’ academic brilliance and discover his great integrity. Simmons published, with Wendy Evans, Commercial opportunities in Mexico City that same year. This was one of the first modern studies on the commercial geography of Mexico City and evidenced the great research opportunities in Mexican cities in this field.

At El Colegio Mexiquense, we continued to explore different topics of commercial geography in the subsequent years. By then, we had formed a research group with the active participation of Tania Chávez and José Antonio Álvarez. We began to work on joint publications that added geographic information systems (gis) to the theory and mathematical models. In 2002, we jointly published La Dimensión espacial de la competencia commercial (The Spatial Dimension of Business Competition), in which we presented a software program that created different spatial interaction models in a gis environment. The software was used for different locational hypermarket analysis in the Toluca metropolitan area. The multiple exercises and simulations conducted to put this book together allowed me to publish, in 2003, “La teoría de interacción espacial como síntesis de las teorías de localización de actividades comerciales y de servicios” (“Spatial Interaction Theory as a Synthesis of the Theories of Localization of Commercial and Service Activities”), one of the ten most referenced articles of Economía, Sociedad y Territorio, the first academic journal published by El Colegio Mexiquense, which ratified me the Mexican and Latin American interest in economic and commercial geography.

In 2005 Juan Campos Alanís joined the research team. He is a specialist in, among other areas, GIScience and has an academic background in the Geography Faculty of the University of the Sate of México. His joining the research team allowed us to incorporate the thesis work of numerous undergraduates and graduate students to our economic and commercial geography projects, and publish different papers on public and private service localization and accessibility.

It was during this period that we discovered Neil Wrigley’s work. We first found Reading Retail: A Geographical Perspective on Retailing and Consumption Spaces (Wrigley and Lowe, 2002a) and then, in a retrospective search review, Retailing, Consumption and Capital: Towards the New Retail Geography (1996).

Wrigley’s perspective was not only original but also lucid, although perhaps too profoundly theoretical for our predominantly applied research. So we breathed a sigh of relief when we read his articles “Food deserts’ in British cities: policy context and research priorities” (2002) and “Deprivation, diet, and food-retail access: findings from the Leeds ‘food deserts’ Study” (2003), which were closer to the research we were conducting in El Colegio Mexiquense.

The idea of food deserts (city areas that lack suitable access to food supply points, mainly supermarkets and hypermarkets) gave us a new vision of the city. We thought we should modify our scale and, instead of conceiving commercial units as isolated firms, consider their forms of spatial organization, both their traditional forms (such as those in the tbc) and their contemporary forms. The latter forms are clearly visible in the more recent sections of the modern city: commercial corridors, shopping malls, power centers (i.e., planned concentrations of big box stores), and power nodes (i.e., unplanned concentrations of big box stores plus, at least, a shopping mall), which lead to a whole typology of elements that make up the commercial structure of the city (Hernandez and Simmons, 2006).9

Berry’s work (again the necessary and refreshing return to Berry) from 1963, Commercial Structure and Commercial Blight, and from 1967, Geography of Market Centers and Retail Distribution, were essential for studying intra-urban commercial structure. Nevertheless, the commercial landscape had changed significantly since the 1960s, so the work of Simmons and Kamikihara, The Commercial Structure of Canadian Cities (2003) and Location strategies in Quebec (2007), as well as that of Hernández and Simmons, “Evolving Retail Landscapes: Power Retail in Canada” (2006), all published by the Centre for the Study of Commercial Activity of Ryerson University, allowed us to begin to make sense of the Toluca metropolitan area’s commercial structure.10

However, we found it complicated to continue this line of research without information on the economic-spatial structure of the metropolitan area. In this broad and turbulent area of research, we discovered a light that pointed us along the path we needed: the excellent work by Richard Shearmur, especially “The Clustering and Spatial Distribution of Economic Activities in Eight Canadian Cities” (2007) and “Urban Hierarchy or Local Buzz? High-Order Producer Service and (or) Knowledge-Intensive Business Service Location in Canada, 1991-2001” (2008). These works gave us an important basis to define Toluca’s metropolitan structure (Garrocho and Campos, 2007, 2009) and to analyze some of its main elements (Garrocho and Flores, 2009).

With this more comprehensive vision of the city, it was then possible to explore the spatial structure of some concrete activities, such as pharmacies (Garrocho and Campos, 2011a) and bank branches (Garrocho and Campos, 2011b), using quite simple but powerful, spatial analysis techniques.11 We learned many things, mainly our need for more precise and robust spatial statistic techniques. We again had to turn to the best literature. We found authors we were unacquainted with, among which was the towering figure of Luc Anselin.

Luc Anselin is one of the world leaders in the field of spatial econometrics and spatial analysis. His work is astonishing... and complex. However, his generosity is greater. He has developed very specialized software that he distributes to everyone for free through the Internet. Noteworthy, of course, is his software OpenGeoda, used by close to 80,000 researchers worldwide. The works compiled by Anselin et al. (2010) in their book Perspectives on Spatial Data Analysis showed us how much we did not know. Although this work was overwhelming, it helped us to create a long-term working plan. Fundamental for these tasks were Professor Anselin’s works Spatial Data Analysis with gis: An Introduction to Application in the Social Sciences (1992) and “Local indicators of spatial association” (1995), among many others, that today we continue to discover, rediscover, and study.

Our planned route led us to study exploratory techniques of point patterns. We began with the planar K function and then went on to experiment with space-network K function. The support of researchers from other latitudes was essential during this phase. Adrian Baddeley and Rolf Turner helped us from Perth (Australia) and New Brunswick (Canada) respectively, and professor Okabe and his team from Tokyo (Japan). Among other texts, “Spatstat: an R package for analyzing spatial point patterns” by Baddeley and Turner (2005), and SANET: A Toolbox for Spatial Analysis on a Network, Version 3.3 by Okabe et al. (2007) were fundamental. Without their help we would never have been able to publish “Calculating Intra-urban agglomeration of economic units with planar and network K-functions” (Garrocho, Álvarez, and Chávez, 2013).

In 2011, with the groundwork of this earlier experience, we proposed a fouryear project to the National Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt) to study the spatial behavior of tertiary firms in the intra-urban space of Mexico’s large cities (those with more than a million inhabitants). We wanted to test the available geo-economic theory and, if it be the case, begin to generate theoretical elements for the Mexican metropolis, just as Brian Berry had recommended in the United States since the 1960s (Berry, 1963: of course, the permanent and necessary return to Berry’s work). The project was approved, and the first funds were assigned in September 2012. The project will conclude in 2016.

This academic context coincided with the 25th anniversary of El Colegio Mexiquense. As part of the celebration we organized the international seminar “Cities, Globalization and Development.” To our surprise, we were able to gather Brian Berry, Neil Wrigley, Jim Simmons, Richard Shearmur, and Luc Anselin to the economic and commercial geography sessions. They all agreed to provide original texts for this book. The members of the El Colegio Mexiquense research team completed the line-up.

Looking Towards the Future

Because of its theoretical and technical complexity, the El Colegio Mexiquense project authorized by Conacyt in 2011 requires the support of first-class international experts. The international seminar helped us to enlist Richard Shearmur as the project’s international consultant. Luc Anselin, currently director of the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation of the University of Arizona, offered us his support and that of his team.

We initially discussed the project’s methodology with Richard Shearmur and Luc Anselin, separately, during the seminar. Interestingly, both agreed on the general strategy. In February 2013 we detailed the project methodology with Richard Shearmur. Work is ongoing. Thus, members of the commercial and economic geography research team of El Colegio Mexiquense will be busy at least until 2017 explaining the spatial behavior of tertiary firms in the intraurban space of Mexico’s largest cities.

Content

This book puts together original texts written by authors specialized in economic and commercial geography, especially participants in the international seminar “Cities, Globalization and Development.” For the first time, Berry, Wrig-ley, Simmons, Anselin, and Shearmur, all international leaders in their scientific fields, appear together in a publication. The interrelated texts of very high academic quality found in this book will surely be of use to those interested in the spatial dimension of the tertiary economy on the intra-metropolitan scale.

The texts are divided into two main sections. The first presents wide spectrum (Radar View) perspectives of economic and commercial geography, with works by Berry, Wrigley, Shearmur, and Anselin. The second focuses on case studies with texts by Simmons, Garrocho and Álvarez, and Flores, Garrocho,Álvarez and Chávez. This book is organized with a deductive perspective that goes from general themes to particular topics.

Part I: Wide Spectrum Studies

Economic and Commercial Geography and its Ties to Each Generation’s Personality

The book opens with a chapter by Brian Berry, who ensnares us not only with the clarity of his analysis of the evolution of Anglo-Saxon commercial geography, of which he is one of the main architects, but also with the elegance of his reasoning. Berry ties the evolution of the discipline to the generational characteristics, ideology, values, and aspirations of the usa population during the 20th century: the Traditional Generation (those born before 1945, to which Berry belongs), the Baby Boomer generation (1945-1964, to which this book’s coordinator belongs), Generation X (1965-1980, to which, for example, the collaborators Álvarez and Flores, belong), and the Millennium Generation or Generation Y, which covers those born after 1980 (the generation of many of the current doctoral geography students in Mexico and around the world).

Although Berry recognizes the difficulty of exploring the evolutionary tendencies of economic and commercial geography, he thinks that these will be directly linked to the personality profile of Generation Y, since this is the generation of the future geographers. In other words, the way of being and thinking of Generation Y will create the new paradigms of economic and commercial geography.

Surveys in the United States show that Generation Y is the generation of connectivity, digital technology, social networks, instant communication, environmental protection, diversity (racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and lifestyle), vanguard education, fear of terrorism, aversion to authority and rigid working environments, and the belief that the government should play a more active role in the solution of collective problems.

Using these features of the Generation Y personality, Berry identifies different implications for economic and commercial geography in the next decades. He assumes that what he calls the Millennium Geography will be the depositary of mathematical approximations and the desire to close the distance between the social sciences and science of matter (physics or chemistry, for example), as economy has unsuccessfully attempted to do for some time and the new economic geography for some decades.

Berry cautiously anticipates that Generation Y will push for a more humanistic and qualitative rather than quantitative commercial geography. It will be quite different in the new economic geography field that, with the support of new and spectacular databases, will generate the millennium commercial and economic geography.

Commercial Geography, Theory and Public Policy Design

The second chapter, by Neil Wrigley, analyzes the evolution of commercial geography, especially in Great Britain, drawing from the author’s wealth of experience in regional, national, and international projects. Wrigley argues that commercial geography has been reinvented. It has evolved from a very powerful applied discipline with a somewhat weak theoretical base as far as very powerful discipline in both theory and practice.

For Wrigley, during the 1990s and the beginning of the following decade, the theoretical contributions to commercial geography, especially those linked to retail business, repositioned the discipline as one of the most stimulating fields in the social sciences. The challenge today, he says, is to take advantage of the opportunities offered to link commercial geography to public policy design.

Wrigley demonstrates that the retail business is one of the most powerful forces reconfiguring global economy, which explains the strengthening ties between academic retail business research, large enterprise, and government at all levels, especially in the United Kingdom.

Nevertheless, Wrigley recognizes the significant challenges linking commercial geography research to public policy design. Firstly, people believe that they are well acquainted with the retail business sector and are convinced of certain ideas, promoted in part by the mass media, which are difficult to modify even if there is convincing evidence that points in new directions.

Secondly, moving into public policy design from commercial geography research is frequently like walking into a mine field. Researchers are at permanent risk of being seduced or co-opted by those who finance their studies, which can be large companies, governments, international agencies, or commerce associations. Finally, researchers have to be aware that their findings will always be viewed with suspicion, because these findings are perceived as being linked to the interests of the study’s sponsors, or researchers will meet with obstacles if they encounter any inconvenient findings for business owners.

Nevertheless, for Wrigley, the link between commercial geography and public policy design is practically inherent to the discipline, given its enormous influence on domestic and global economy. From his experience as a researcher and consultant, Wrigley is convinced that governments, international agencies, and large companies are highly receptive to the great capacity of commercial geography to support policy design and public and private strategy.

He has one warning: commercial geography researchers should maintain and broaden the theoretical platform that has been built in the last three decades, which is what will allow the discipline to consolidate as an essential study field.

What is Urban Structure?

The spatial organization of tertiary economy depends to a large extent on how the city functions, i.e., on its urban structure. Strangely enough, however, the term “urban structure” lacks conceptual clarity. The third chapter of this book, written by Richard Shearmur, focuses precisely on the question of defining urban structure.

By reviewing the literature, Shearmur realizes that there are different perspectives of the meaning of urban structure. This prevents concept homogenization. For example, Axelrod (1956) refers to sociological structures of urban communities. Harris and Ullman (1956) understand it as the configuration of land uses. Guiliano (1993) conceives it as the relative localization of housing and jobs. Anas et al. (1998) study it as the spatial distribution of the city’s economic activities. Morgan and Pelissero (1980) approach it as the sum of governmental management. Wong and Zhou (1999) think of it as the geography of population densities.

Shearmur sees the idea of urban structure as multidimensional. His analysis is therefore focused on the spatial structure of the city’s economy, in order to contrast theory with empirical evidence (it is interesting how Shearmur also inevitably returns to Berry, 1964).

Richard Shearmur’s central theme is why urban structures change through time and whether these changes can be even partially anticipated. He begins by addressing some of the ways in which the term “urban structure” has been used, and exploring their theoretical implications.

The complications of the urban structure concept lead Shearmur to conclude that it would be very difficult to define urban (which explains why a conventional and arbitrary definition is usually used), but perhaps more importantly, that there is no unique structure in the city. Rather, there are multiple interrelated urban structures that mutually affect one another (economic, social, cultural, administrative, and political structures, for example). These structures are linked to internal processes and agents (for example, land use regulations, the city’s history, its economic profile, the relative localization on the territory) and external processes and agents (changes in the global economy, to mention just one) that can be urban (the localization of certain city activities or infrastructure, for example) or extra-urban (such as technological change or discontinuities in transportation or data transmission).

Shearmur goes on to review the main generic explanations for the distribution of the city’s economic activity. He does a comparative analysis of the different urban economic analysis perspectives, and proposes a perception of urban structures in economic terms. Shearmur uses these two sections to explore the possibility of anticipating changes in urban structures, which, he claims, can be very difficult (but perhaps not totally impossible), since the city is an open complex system.

Shearmur suggests that the possibility of anticipating the evolution of the intra-metropolitan economic structures lies in the fact that these structures originate in a few key processes (transportation technology, the city’s historical footprint called imprint, its economic specialization and its social structures, to mention a few). The problem is that the results of these processes can be unique to each city, since cities, he insists, are open complex systems.

Shearmur proposes that “an urban structure is a group of processes and relationships that guide the city’s evolution through time”. Therefore, if the interest is in the spatial organization of economic activity, then “urban structures are revealed by observing the geography of the economic activity and identifying the key processes that guide its evolution”. This idea of the city remains a concept without defined dimensions, which should find solutions according to each context, and it is a given than each definition of city can lead to the revelation of different urban structures.

He does propose, however, an option: the city can be operatively defined by identifying the key processes of each case, in such a way as to maximize the effects of the internal processes and agents (such as those already mentioned: land use regulations, the city’s history, its economic profile, its localization) and minimize those from external processes and agents (such as changes in domestic or global economy).

According to Shearmur’s proposal, the first step to studying urban structures is to isolate specific structures to be studied in the intra-urban space. For example, to study the structure of economic activities, understood as jobs and economic units, the structures of interest are those related to the locational behavior of these actors, their spatial patterns, and their evolution in time, which constitute essential information to understanding and improving the city’s spatial, economic, and social planning. Shearmur concludes that it is possible that the urban structures of different cities coincide in the most general features, but that there will inevitably be singularities inherent to open complex systems.

This conclusion is where Mexico should prioritize the empirical exploration of the urban city structures, contrast them with existing theories (that are inevitably generic and almost all created in realities very different from the Mexican reality), identify the differences, and propose more suitable generic explanations for Mexico’s urban reality.

Economic and Commercial Geography and Spatial Econometrics

Methodology has proven central to the progress of economic and commercial geography. Spatial econometrics is among the most advanced of the contemporary methods. One of the world leaders in this field is Luc Anselin, the author of the fourth chapter of this book.

Anselin examines the incorporation of software tools into spatial data analysis and shows that the software platform that supports spatial analysis has diametrically changed since its beginnings in the last part of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s.

Anselin identifies some key processes that have detonated spatial analysis software development, as, for example, the constant methodological and technical advances (that produce increasingly efficient algorithms and powerful computers that can manage increasingly robust data bases and more complex analysis), the appearance of the gis (that facilitates storage, management, calculation, and visualization), the techno-ideological movement of free software (that freed researchers from working in gis environments designed by large companies), the arrival of the Internet (whose potential no one foresaw and that allows huge databases and graphic information to flow, although still with challenging limitations for research), and the rise of what Anselin calls the cyber infrastructure (which refers to social and technological solutions that create efficient networks of research centers and facilitates their exchange of information in order to accelerate knowledge creation and application).

Anselin goes on to mention some of his research team’s activities in the research, development, and application of SpaceStat, GeoDa and PySAL, which are, perhaps, the most relevant advances in spatial analysis developed by the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation, headed by Anselin at the Arizona State University.

Anselin argues that spatial econometrics and spatial analysis have followed a path that begins in the most stringent mathematical fields and ends by positioning itself as a key element of social science research. He is convinced that developing friendly and accessible software is one of the major contributions for the advance of certain social science research fields, such as commercial and economic geography. Many of us are grateful for this and think he is right.

Anselin feels that today, the lack of commercial software is no longer an impediment for applying spatial analysis methods, especially when there are various highly efficient free software programs that can easily be connected to commercial gis. Nevertheless, there are still enormous challenges to broadening the use of spatial analysis methods, perhaps because analysts always aspire for more: more data management, more spatial units, more localizations, more images, more speed.

The first challenge Anselin identifies is the rapid transfer of enormous databases from high-performance computers (supercomputers) to desktop computers, and then to guarantee the efficient information flow (of numbers and images) over the Internet. This will require important technological and methodological advances, and is a condition for the daily use of computer programs that support complex spatial decision-making.

The second challenge Anselin identifies is more related to the social science research culture than with new technology and statistical methods. In the twenty-first century, many research problems are so complex that they need to be addressed by a group, which implies at least sharing knowledge, data, and instruments. Achieving this collaborative work between researchers who sometimes are thousands of kilometers apart is a huge cultural challenge, although it is also technological since it implies standardizing database administration, techniques, and programs. In other words, it implies building an entire open, shared cyber-infrastructure.

Finally, Anselin sees the third challenge as related to the formation of specialists. Building and managing systems that lend support to spatial decisionmaking requires a complex mixture of geographic, mathematical, and computational skills. It is highly probable that there is no educational program in the world that prepares someone for the task of building spatial decision-making systems, which complicates the access to and operation in this research field.

Readers will appreciate that this chapter, unintentionally, places Anselin’s enormous contributions to spatial analysis in the proper perspective, and highlights his academic and human generosity by freely allowing everyone to access the marvelous spatial analysis software created by his team at the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation.

Part II: Case Studies

As mentioned above, Part II involves case studies in which some of the theoretical elements analyzed in Part I become operative. The chapters of this second section move forward in empirical analysis and tender bridges to the first section.

The chapters are organized deductively, from the more general to the more specific. Jim Simmons explores the evolution of the commercial structure of Canada’s most populated metropolitan area, Greater Toronto. Garrocho and Álvarez focus on revealing the spatial organization of a particular financial activity (bank branches) inside Mexico’s fifth most populated urban center (Toluca metropolitan area). Flores, Garrocho, Álvarez, and Chávez examine the retail business patterns in the tbc of Toluca metropolitan area.

The Commercial Structure of Greater Toronto

Jim Simmons, with his characteristic precision, examines the evolution in the past sixty years of Toronto’s commercial structure, revealing three key structures and reflecting upon the most probable tendencies of its medium-range evolution. This prospective sense of Simmons’ work reinforces Shearmur’s position (discussed above) that urban structures can to some degree be anticipated.

Simmons’ three key structures are as follows: (a) traditional commerce (its key elements are the small family-style stores and its highest expression consists of the TBCs that emerge with the city’s foundation); (b) the planned shopping centers (the malls that appeared in the 1960s); and (c) the power retail, which is the spatial agglomeration of big box stores and includes power centers (i.e., planned concentrations of big box stores) and power nodes (i.e., unplanned concentration of big box stores plus, at least, one shopping center).

As Simmons indicates, these three forms of retail business spatial organization have appeared in Greater Toronto at different times and places, and each one has its own profile designed to offer different goods and services to different market segments. In spite of the clear differences in their spatial organization and their relationship to the market (or perhaps because of this), these three commercial structures exist simultaneously in the city.

Simmons’ hypothesis is that each of these structures emerges as a reaction to the earlier structure in an attempt to create greater economies of scale, increase productivity, and adapt to the constant changes in consumer behavior and preference within a context of broader transformations: economic (i.e., higher income levels of the population), technological (i.e., the appearance and availability of one or more cars per family), and lifestyles (i.e., the search for new buying experiences such as “do it yourself” and others that imply a sense of adventure).

For example, Simmons looks at how the highest expression of traditional commerce, the department store located in the tbc, is a predecessor of the planned shopping center but without parking. Thus, the department store depends on the flow of public transportation or pedestrian traffic to achieve the sale thresholds necessary for its development. These types of stores have existed for a century or more and could have more than 100 square meters of sales areas, which increased their economy of scale and their productivity.12

The planned shopping centers appeared at a time of rapid economic growth (after the Second World War), which allowed many families to purchase a car. At the same time, the Toronto’s tbc (and those of many cities) were saturated with low-quality businesses, overpopulated with low-income groups and had increasing levels of crime. The middleand high-income resident population consequently decided to move their homes to the suburbs. Simmons examines how these planned shopping centers appear in order to satisfy the demand of these new peripheral housing developments.

This new form of spatial organization of commerce considers at least one large anchor store (a department store or a supermarket, for example) that serves as a main magnet for middleand high-income consumers with a car (and therefore includes extensive parking areas), and a group of smaller stores that benefit from the anchor store’s attractiveness and increase their ability to attract consumers more than they would if each small business were to work as an isolated entity, among other reasons because they reduce the consumer’s cost of looking for goods and services.

To some degree, the planned shopping center is a replica, on a smaller scale, of the tbc, but with the main variables planned and controlled to increase efficiency and sales volume: the store features, the types of goods and services offered, the uniform decoration of the exterior areas, the controlled atmosphere, the extensive parking areas, and the guaranteed security within the shopping center and in the parking lots, among others.

The smaller stores, Simmons points out, depend significantly on the anchor store or stores, which often own the shopping centers. These small stores must accept the conditions imposed by the anchor stores in order to become part of and remain in the shopping center, such as absorbing a great part of the rental costs of the anchor store’s space.

Simmons argues that big box stores and later chains of big box stores (i.e., Costco, Sam´s, Home Depot, Office Depot, Walmart, among many others) appear as a reaction to this great imbalance between the powerful anchor stores and the smaller stores. These new stores rely on low construction costs, limited investment in decor, efficient inventory management, creation of significant economies of scales, and greater productivity. They are located in the peripheries to attract enormous volumes of consumers without needing to submit to the guidelines of any anchor store. This phenomenon happened in the United States in the 1980s and in Canada in the 1990s.13

As was to be expected by urban economy and economic geography, these big box stores later began to spatially agglomerate. The physical interconnection between them was achieved through an open air common parking area, creating the spatial structure of a very efficient financial cluster, which has been called a power center.

Since the agglomeration tendency is self-reinforced through time (O´Sullivan, 2011), other groups of big box stores (and other power centers) and even shopping centers soon became part of the power centers, which gave rise to the formation of enormous commercial clusters called power nodes. According to Simmons’ micro data, power nodes can extend up to 350,000 square meters of sale area in Greater Toronto. The need for large extensions of land by power centers and nodes implied locating them outside the city, especially on main highways in the surrounding areas.

Since 2001, Simmons says, the sale surface of power centers has grown at a rate of 93% a year and represents more than half of Toronto’s retail commerce surface. The surface for traditional commerce sales grows at just 10% a year and that of planned shopping centers at 15% a year.

Based on micro data analysis of the past years, Simmons concludes that the power nodes have passed their phase of explosive growth in Greater Toronto and that in the future they will only grow at market rhythm, maintaining their localization outside of the city. Traditional commerce will grow stronger in the city areas undergoing a revitalization process (i.e., gentrification) and where there is growth due to immigration. The shopping centers are responding to the competition by integrating big box stores in their periphery, which sooner or later can, if they have enough available land, turn them into power nodes.

For Simmons, one of the main evolutionary trajectories of retail business will be defined by new technology. Internet purchases are growing exponentially, as can be seen with Amazon, e-Bay, and Groupon.14 Simmons also sees that retail business will continue to move towards increasingly large stores managed by large-scale organizations that rely on global supplier chains.

Simmons anticipates that the objective of business leaders in the future will continue to be to increase their economies of scales to compensate for the reduced profit margins resulting from the constant price war within the framework of the growth and expansion of each region’s cities. Nevertheless, Simmons considers it unlikely that the new commercial structures will replace the earlier ones, because they are aimed at highly different market segments and city areas (targets).

The Spatial Structure of Banking in the Toluca Metropolitan Area

If the previous chapter focused on the spatial organization of retail activities, especially those in the urban periphery and outskirts, this chapter zooms in on the intra-metropolitan spatial structure of banking.

Financial intermediation, through commercial banking, is an essential service for an efficient economy and for its growth benefits to spread among all members of society. The incapacity of Mexico’s financial system to cover the entire population, as well as micro and small businesses, has created a minority group that has access to the services of the financial system (the banked) and a majority that has only partial or no access to these services (the unbanked).15

Access to financial services in Mexico is limited, costly, and has a low penetration level: in 2006, 74% of the municipalities (with 22% of the country’s population) had no bank branches, and 85% of adults who lived in cities had never used formal financial sector services, which is serious given that Mexico is predominantly urban.16

The low usage level of the formal financial sector throughout the country means that the unbanked face elevated transaction costs when paying for public services, sending remittances, and cashing checks (even those included in anti-poverty government programs such as Oportunidades). They also face very high interest rates charged by alternative credit instruments (i.e., pawn shops, moneylenders) and a very low or absent return on savings and investments (they use saving mechanisms such as tandas – group savings – or simply keep their money at home).

Being unbanked (as an individual or a micro or small business) directly affects income (and therefore the standard of living), because money is more expensive, business opportunities are limited, there is no interest on savings, and more time and energy are needed to pay bills and change checks.17

The phenomenon of the unbanked can be attributed to different barriers that prevent the use of banking services and can be grouped into two large categories: cost barriers and location barriers (Connolly and Hajaj, 2001; Graves,2003; Solo, 2008).18 The first category refers, for example, to bank service commissions and minimum balance requirements to open an account or the minimum average balance without surcharges. The second category is mainly related to access restrictions due to the spatial localization of points of service (i.e., bank branches). Location barriers are very important even on the intraurban scale: 30% of Mexico City’s unbanked say that the location of the branches is a key factor that prevents their access to the banking system, even though the number of branches increases systematically and rapidly.19

Garrocho and Álvarez argue that the agglomerated localization of banks largely contributes to their low spatial accessibility, which favors unbanking. They emphasize two key questions: Do bank branches attract, repel, or have no effect on the localization of new bank branches? What features of the demand have more influence on bank branch localization? If these two questions regarding bank spatial organization are clarified, they argue, the locational behavior of the banking system in the intra-metropolitan space and their effect on the unbanked population due to location barriers can be more clearly understood.

Garrocho and Álvarez reveal a spatial banking structure (taking all banks into consideration) using the planar K function. They statistically discover (including significance levels) if the spatial structure is agglomerated, dispersed, or random. They then apply the cross K function to examine the spatial attraction, repulsion, or indifference between bank branches of different banks. The advantage of K