Knowledge-Bases, Places, Spatial Configurations and the Performance of Knowledge-Intensive Professional Service Firms

In recent years both economic geographers and innovation scholars have paid considerable attention to knowledge-intensive-business-services (KIBS) and professional service firms (PSFs). Both communities have also shown a strong interest in knowledge, and ‘knowledge-bases’. Considering architecture to be based on symbolic and synthetic knowledge, and engineering to be based on analytical and synthetic knowledge, and using a panel dataset, this paper examines the different geographies of performance amongst architecture practices and engineering consultancies active in the UK construction industry. We find that architecture practices are significantly more concentrated in inner London, whereas the engineering consultancies are much more dispersed. Locating in inner London provides significant financial benefits to the architects, but not for engineers. Ultimately various the drivers of performance are rather different, with a Christallerian logic applying to architects but not to engineers. We consider that different knowledge bases are fundamental to understanding these differences between architects and engineers.