Paper short abstract:

The reality of urban economic agglomeration is one of the concentration of businesses. Rarely do concentrations coincide with the boundaries of imagined communities or the borders of administrative spaces of governments. The paper examines these ideas in relation to Indonesia.

Paper long abstract:

The reality of urban economic agglomeration is one of the greater or lesser concentration (or dispersal) of businesses and their linkages. Although the extant literature on agglomeration continues to be invested with a strong sense that the economic development benefits that flow from agglomeration and external economies are place bound, rarely has the scale of such places been the subject of explicit consideration. Moreover, rarely do concentrations of business and their linkages coincide with the boundaries of imagined communities or the borders of administrative spaces of governments. In this paper we explore the development implications of the varied relationships between these three senses of space, including the evolution of these relationships over time. We develop stylized typologies of the geographical and temporal relationships between these three senses of place. We illustrate these typologies with respect to industries and their relationship to kampongs as imagined and more or less cohesive social communities and administrative spaces of local governments in the Indonesian cities of Bandung, Semarang and Solo. The causal connections between these geographical and temporal relationships are ambiguous and highlight the limits of 'one size fits all' policy advocacy with respect to urban economic agglomeration.