Spatial quality, location theory and spatial planning

This paper deals with spatial quality as a possible factor in location choices made by companies. Actual location decisions as well as location theory have changed over time. In the industrial era primary “hard” cost factors were dominant, to be supplemented by agglomeration factors ever since the 1950s. Over the last decades “soft” tertiary factors (like institutional “thickness”) became important, as reflected in behavioural and institutional theories on location choices. In this paper it is argued that due to socio-economic developments like globalization, the emergence of network societies, of knowledge-based economies and of creative economies, spatial quality has become a powerful factor in location choice. Because of an ever increasing level playing field, increased footlooseness of organizations and the post-scarcity effect, hard as well as soft primary, secondary and tertiary location factors are of increasingly limited importance. Consequently, spatial quality may be considered to be the dominant location factor of our time.