Making Markets

Abstract

We analyse how and why Central Places come to dominate particular markets for goods and services. Goods, labour, skills and data all move in different ways and at different speeds through the networks, with different ‘ranges’: critical in determining how much centrality matters in each sector. This connects to the challenges of risk and uncertainty, and to the patterns of search and signalling which firms and their people deploy in different types of market: vital for the ‘opaque’ markets in the most dynamic sectors of the 21st century economy, where data on its own will not be enough, and where judgement and confidence are crucial. The chapter then homes in on the relationships between access to information, signalling and proximity in helping to acquire certainty and reduce risk. The density of the information ‘surface’ is why cities are so often the key locus of rare skills, of sites for the exchange of complex information, and of high-value markets.