Agglomeration

Agglomeration may have two general meanings to geographers. To urban geographers, 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 a broad 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 established 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 clusters 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 different sovereign spaces, they nevertheless function 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 provides 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 gasoline 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.