TWICE THE SIZE - DIT Update - Dublin Institute of Technology

Intermediate industrial regions. This group of territories seem to be benefiting from the
greater mobility of production factors. This type of places usually combine labour cost
advantages with respect to core areas, with human capital and accessibility benefits
relating to peripheral areas, making them attractive locations for new industrial
investment.
Tourist regions. Such places have built their economies on the tourist industry, which
usually has developed around unique environmental and heritage qualities or a specific
tourism product.
Another aspect of the contemporary economic model is the fact that localities and regions are
now in direct competition with each other, both globally and nationally. In consequence, they
must compete on the basis of local and regional competitive advantage in order to attract
mobile investment. Camagni (2002) believes that two orders of factors and processes count
nowadays. First, at a cumulative, macroeconomic level it constitutes the increasing returns
linked to increasing development processes and the agglomeration of activities. Second, at a
microeconomic and micro-territorial level, with which the Irish gateways can be associated, it is
the specific advantages strategically created by the single firms, regional synergies and
cooperation potential enhanced by an imaginative and proactive public administration, exterior
prerequisites provided by local and national governments and the historical, cultural and
environmental heritage of the locality.
The world’s economic polarisation is also being reproduced within countries, and Ireland is no
exception. The Celtic Tiger phenomenon has not affected all places equally. Some areas have
especially benefited from foreign inward investment and domestic indigenous growth, while
others experienced a sluggish growth at most. The regions that benefited most from the foreign
direct investment in manufacturing were Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway. The Greater Dublin
Area, like other global metropolitan regions, in addition to holding various manufacturing
functions has also been a ‘magnet’ for producer services concentrated mainly in three sectors:
software, financial services and back-office services (Bartley & Kitchin, 2007).
As the pace of globalisation increases and informationalisation burgeons, a new phenomenon,
the polycentric mega-city region, is emerging in the most highly urbanised parts of the world.
Such an entity is usually a series of anything between 10 and 50 cities and towns, physically
separate but functionally networked, clustered around one or more larger central cities, and
drawing vast economic strength from a new functional division of labour. The places within a
polycentric urban region operate both as separate entities, in which most residents work locally
and most workers are local residents, and as parts of a wider functional urban area. They are
connected by dense flows of people and information carried along motorways, high-speed rail
lines and telecommunication cables (Hall & Pain, 2006).
Over recent years, the concept of Ireland as a polycentric city has been emerging. Given the
comparatively small size of Ireland’s population (that constitutes approximately half of London
or Paris’s population), its present urban structure with one dominant large city and relatively
short distances between different parts of Ireland that favour linking regional centres with fast
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