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Agglomeration

Agglomeration may have two general meanings to geographers. To urban geogra-
phers, it is a term that designates a large urban concentration. To economic
geographers, the word refers to the tendency of producers in a given industry to
cluster together in a given space.
In urban geography, agglomeration is abroad term that is used to identify a
large, extended area of urban development. It is often used as a synonym for similar
terms, such as conurbation, metropolitan area, or metropole. There is no estab-
lished definition for how large an urban concentration must be to be classified as
an agglomeration, and scholars of urban geography tend to use the term in a general
sense, frequently employing it in a case where two or more significant urban clus-
ters have fused to form a larger urban space. Agglomeration may even occur across
political boundaries, as in the cases of Detroit (United States) and Hamilton,
Ontario (Canada); Brownsville, Texas and Nuevo Laredo (Mexico); and Spokane
(United States) and Vancouver (Canada). While these units actually occupy differ-
ent sovereign spaces, they neverthelessfunction as a single urban unit in many
respects, especially in the case of economic linkages between U.S.–Canadian
agglomerations.
For economic geographers, agglomeration signifies the tendency of units of
economic production to group together in the same location. This clustering pro-
vides many potential economic advantages, including achieving economies of
scale, utilization of a common transport structure, lower shipping and transport
costs between firms making specialized products, concentration and transfer of
capital and labor, and increased communication among various units. Typically
agglomeration occurs near or in large metropolitan areas, facilitated by the large
pools of capital, labor, and consumers located there. Agglomeration increases the
advantages brought on by so-called network effects, which often result in lower
operating costs from increased competition among suppliers, a larger and more
diverse pool of potential employees, and attracting a larger number of consumers
to a central location. The latter may be simply illustrated by the grouping of gaso-
line service stations around a central intersection in a town. Although each station
is in direct competition with the others at this location, the stations cluster due to
the large number of potential customers who frequent the location.

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