【正文】 ed by puterisation) and the search for wider product variety (supply and demand driven) started off a shift towards more flexible modes of economic production and anisation – such conditions have bee real for an increasing number of economic sectors, including many of today’s frontrank sectors such as hightechnology industries, cultural products and multimedia industries and many types of professional service industries. Firms that operate in such environments are generally forced to anise production and maintain relationships with suppliers of input (including employees) and clients in a far more flexible way. Much stronger than firms that are involved in fairly routinised kinds of production, producers in uncertain environments ‘must be prepared to change and rebine equipment and labor and to monitor shifts in the market, often on a daytoday basis’ (Scott et al., 2021, p. 16). For their operations, they need to have excellent access to a wide variety of information, skills and resources. Complicating the matter is the fact that crucial parts of this information4 are often hardly codified and in many cases transferred through facetoface interaction only. In addition, the skills and resources required by such firms (. highly skilled labour / knowledge) are often relatively scarce because of their specia lised nature. In sum, such flexible production systems can be described as rather transactionsintensive and highly susceptible to externalities. The dense patterns of nonstandardised interaction maintained by such economic agents, provides them with a strong intensive to seek mutual proximity. After all, while rapid developments in transport, telemunications and information technology have certainly resulted in the sharp decline of many kinds of transaction costs, the costs of transactions that involve facetoface contacts have remained relatively high, and, most importantly, tend to rise significantly as distance increases. The susceptibility to externalities, on the other hand, provides an incentive to seek mutual proximity especially in large urban regions, as these are the environments that produce many of such externalities. Altogether, co presence in large urban conurbations or global cityregions enables such firms to manage their relationships with suppliers and clients more efficiently, to tap into wide and differentiated pools of labor and experience, and to arrange relatively easy access to the many kinds of useful information that circulate in both formal and informal businessrelated and other kinds of circles. Moreover, since global cityregions often also function as important and wellequipped nodes in global transport and munications works, they give their residents excellent access to world markets and other significant places. Such factors will contribute positively to such firm’s productivity, performance and innovative capacity and, consequently, to the petitiveness and economic motor function of the city regions they are embedded in.