The electronics, tech and gaming cluster in Vancouver

One of the topics I will never get tired of reading about or studying is the geographical agglomeration of industries (also called industrial district or cluster). While I was writing my PhD dissertation, I had to write about clusters ALL THE TIME. The funny thing is – I never even thought about writing about Vancouver’s own industrial clusters. Now that I am more than ever immersed in the tech community, I thought I should write about Vancouver’s very own clusters.

The trigger for this post came from a recent article in Business in Vancouver about the electronic games cluster in Vancouver. In the article, the author mentioned that not even the gaming industry was invulnerable to recession.

“Some bright spots remain in the video game industry, but year-end job cuts at Electronic Arts and more recently at smaller video game development shops are revealing that the video game industry may not be recession proof.”[Business in Vancouver]

My interest in cooperation started long ago, however, when I did my Masters. My thesis was a game-theoretic model of cooperation between small biotech firms and large pharmaceuticals. Since then (almost 10 years ago) I’ve been fascinated by cooperation and geographical agglomeration.

The concept of clusters (or industrial districts) is predicated on the benefits (mostly intangible) from having numerous firms co-located within short geographical distance. Agglomeration yields “localization economies” and it is argued that it also leads to knowledge spillovers (thus cities where there are many of the same industry enjoy a shared pool of well-trained human capital).

Credit: Kris Krug on Flickr

I actually do think that there is a high-tech cluster in Vancouver (particularly in Gastown and less so perhaps in Yaletown). Dr. Tom Hutton (with the Centre for Human Settlements at UBC) has conducted much research about this cluster, and you can read some of his results in his most recent book on The New Economy of the Inner City, or a paper he published in 2006 called “Spatiality, built form, and creative industry development in the inner city” in the journal Environment and Planning.

I am planning to write some journal articles out of my PhD thesis which will touch upon the literature on industrial districts, but with all the work I’ve got accumulated with the wastewater project and the environmental mobilizations project, I am just asking myself when will I be able to write that many papers! *sigh* Perhaps I’ll just have to write more blog posts about the topic and then summarize them in a more academic format!

For an overview of a project undertaken by CPROST a few years back on clusters in Vancouver, click here.

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