Average Places I: Context Conditions of Growth Pathways

Keywords: urban-regional development, average city-regions, QCA, U.S. urban system, growth pathways
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Research on urban-regional economic development has devoted much attention to two types of places: On the one hand, successful places, such as superstar cities and high-tech centers, have been a core focus to understand exponential growth patterns. On the other hand, declining or “left-behind” places, and the factors that lead to their negative development, have also received significant scholarly attention. In contrast, relatively little is known about those places in-between, i.e., average places that do not stand out. We believe that neither of these strands of work nor conventional economic modeling speak to the contextual conditions of these places. To contribute to a better understanding of average places, we focus on all stand-alone micropolitan and metropolitan areas with under 250,000 people in the United States. We examine the trajectories of two groups of city-regions that were characterized by similar median income levels in 1993 but by 2017 had experienced markedly different development dynamics. Using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), we conduct a systematic comparison of economic, connectivity, demographic, and skills indicators that characterize the institutional conditions in these city-regions. Our analysis in this paper, the first in a series of two related papers, focuses on fast-growing average places and identifies four pathways of growth. We refer to these as (i) high-connectivity energy towns, (ii) high-immigration energy towns, (iii) skilled energy towns, and (iv) public administration centers. These are characterized by different combinations of present and absent socio-economic and institutional conditions.