Davila Silva, JD; (1999) Small-town factories and the metropolis: Manufacturing dispersal in Bogotá, Colombia, 1958-1990. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The research focuses on the capital city of Colombia, Bogota, where, somewhat unusually in Latin America the nation's population and wealth continued to concentrate at a markedly faster and more sustained pace than in most large cities in the country in the period 1958-1990. Contrary to evidence from large cities in both the developed and the developing world there was little sign of a major dispersal of employment beyond a relatively small central sector. The research aims firstly to document shifts during the study period in manufacturing production and employment within what it defines as the 'Bogota metropolitan area' (BMA); and secondly, to examine the possible reasons behind the lack of a more marked spatial dispersal of manufacturing jobs. Thus, the study seeks to answer the question: Why, despite Bogota's sustained economic and demographic growth in the period 1958-1990, did manufacturing industry disperse only very moderately within the Bogota metropolitan area? Apart from an extensive coverage of the theoretical and empirical material on the subject, the study uses a combination of secondary material represented by a range of studies on the subject, and primary information, which includes spatially and sectorally-disaggregated official data on manufacturing industry, information collected through a specially-designed survey of a sample of manufacturing establishments equally distributed between the core and the rest of the BMA, and interviews with national and local government officials. A series of hypotheses are tested for the case study using well known techniques such as shift-share and correlation analysis. The results of the field survey are used to examine how a range of factor costs are linked to the locational trends of a group of randomly selected establishments both in the core of the BMA and outside it. The study examines in turn the market orientation of the interviewed establishments, their present and future space needs, the incidence of labour factors upon their location, and an array of variables that may collectively be labelled 'government factors' as their availability is directly or indirectly dependent on official policies.

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