Urban Economic Structures as Multidimensional Networks: A Complex Systems Framework for Analyzing Economic Development Trajectories

Urban and regional systems often face the difficulty and necessity of structural transitions. These transitions, which can be imposed by external circumstances or initiated by a city itself, include energy transitions, transitions to a circular economy, transitions following a pandemic or natural disaster, or intentional policies meant to “move” an urban economy toward a desired state. However, what does economic structure mean in these cases? Traditional notions of economic structure are ambiguous and simplistic and typically consist of simple distributions, such as number of workers per industry. Yet to better understand, guide, or respond to system transitions, planners must move beyond these nebulous notions toward a theoretically grounded, quantifiable definition of economic structure. A recent trend emerging from the nexus of complexity science and urban science has been to operationalize urban economic structures as networks of interacting economic components. Typically based on colocation patterns of some type of entity, these networks have previously been constructed using economic entities such as products, occupations, or labor skills. Yet different types of entities also exhibit colocation patterns with each other, such as patent technology classes and industries. Here, those cross-entity colocation patterns are used to merge multiple types of entities into a single network representation of urban economies, offering a granularity not possible using a single node type. Occupations, industries, college degrees, and patent technology codes are merged into one multidimensional or multinodal network. As in previous studies, a dense core of highly connected entities emerges in this network. The network locations of individual cities are contrasted, and community detection algorithms are used to identify clusters of highly connected economic entities, showing that the densely connected network core is associated with science, technology, and business-related economic entities. Proximities between individual cities within the network are also measured revealing that many cities that are close to each other in the network are also close to each other in physical space. This framework offers potential applications including the ability to quantify structural change over time in response to a shock or to assess the relative difficulty of future desirable trajectories. More broadly, this framework might be applied to the study of structural change in other complex adaptive systems from human institutions to ecosystems.