Synopsis of the dissertation Industrial Location and Culture: A comparative study of the video games districts in Montreal, Lyon, and Los Angeles

Introduction: The aim of this research was to examine the role of the culture of urban regions, and to a larger extent, of local society in industrial location. According to the so-called location paradox, despite the globalization of the economy, polarization of industrial development in certain geographic areas is persistent. Consensus (and debates) from a substantial literature on industrial location emphasized that economic and knowledge externalities (or spillovers), from the agglomeration of skilled and creative labor, related firms, users, technological and institutional infrastructures, explain the distribution of industrial development among urban regions. Empirical evidence of “learning regions”, led us to bring to the fore an original additional explanation of industrial location from an unexploited perspective, the anthropology. Indeed, the concept of culture is often treated as a residual that could potentially explain industrial development in some urban regions. However, as DiMaggio (1994, p. 7) mentioned “Since all economic processes have an irreducible cultural component, taking culture seriously not only can enrich our interpretive understanding of economic phenomena, but can help us explain them better.” Than, if some regions provide the underlying environment for industrial development, and, according to the field of anthropology, culture manifests itself within social groups, a cultural analysis of the genesis and the evolution of industrial districts, may provide, a better understanding by going beyond economic location factors of why industrial districts emerge in certain, not all, urban regions. This is what I intended to accomplish in this research.