EUREuropean Urban and Regional Studies0969-77641461-7145SAGE PublicationsSage UK: London, England10.1177/096977642097584510.1177_0969776420975845ArticlesThe networked economy of firms in city-region peripherieshttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-7103-9178SalderJacobThe University of Manchester, UKJacob Salder, Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, Booth Street West, Manchester M15 6PB, UK. Email: jacob.salder@manchester.ac.uk15122020283195212© The Author(s) 20202020SAGE Publicationshttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

City-regions have become a core unit of analysis for spatial economy, providing an explicit link between bounded administrative units and more networked spaces of production. Too often, however, such analysis is focused on the core of the city-region, applying presumptions of gravity-based agglomeration. This paper examines these networked spaces of production from the city-region periphery, using a firm-based approach as critical determinants of spatial economy via their key interactions. Focused on the Greater Birmingham city-region, UK, the paper explores the integration of city-regional geography with firm-based networked economy. In doing so, it applies a set of networks of practice, focused on firms’ factored, transactional, and transitional dependencies. Using these networks of practice, it critically analyses the spaces of production formed through firm-based interactions, and their concomitance with city-regional designations. It makes two key contributions. First, it enhances the call for greater understanding of the relationship between core and periphery in the context of city-regions. Second, it argues that network-based approaches, which form spatial economy around firm interactions over administrative configurations, offer useful insight into understanding firm–place relationships which more conventional place-based approaches cannot.

City-regionsfirmsnetworked economyperipheriesspatial economyEconomic and Social Research Councilhttps://doi.org/10.13039/5011000002691650742typesetterts1