The question arises as to why all cities do not replace their imports from time to time. Why do some, like Scranton, do so significantly only once while others, like London, do so again and again? The answer is that if a city stops generating new exports after an episode of import replacing, it will not earn many more imports to replace. It will

Offhand, one might suppose that large organizations with their many divisions of labor would be much more prolific at adding new work to old than would small organizations. But this is not so. In a large organization, nearly all the divisions of labor, no matter how many there are, must necessarily be sterile in this respect. The various goods and

When cities that have already had import-replacing episodes in their past, and thus already have large and comprehensive local economies, go on to replace imports rapidly yet again, they garner an economic margin in their local economies for adding extraordinary, even unprecedented, goods and services. It was just such cities, already big but

In all the cases so far mentioned, the export work not only arose upon the different local work; it was suggested by the local work. The producers, when they began their local work, had no foreknowledge of the export work they were eventually to create. But sometimes the sequence of suggestion is reversed. That is, a person planning to create an

While all but the largest enterprises in a modern city are apt to use local producers’ goods and services, new exporters depend especially heavily, for a reason, upon this local supply. To produce something for a city’s own local market, and at the same time build up a reasonably complete organization to do the work, without extreme dependence upon

So what we have here, if this summary is correct, is another reciprocating system of growth, though more complex than the one described in the preceding chapter. Its workings can be stated this way: a city builds up its imports and thus becomes capable of replacing many of them. By doing so it becomes capable of generating more exports. It thus

At the time Washington was designated to be the capital of the young United States, Americans seem almost universally to have believed that because it was to be the capital, it was destined to become a great commercial and industrial city too, a London, Paris or Rome. But cities simply cannot be “explained” by their locations or other given

We have been considering three different processes by which organizations can first become exporters: • They can add the export work to other people’s local work. • They can add the export work to different local work of their own. • They can export their own local work. The significant fact about these processes is that they all depend directly on

Rural production is literally the creation of city consumption. That is to say, city economies invent the things that are to become city imports from the rural world, and then they reinvent the rural world so it can supply those imports.