地域資源としての都市型産業集積

─大阪機械金属工業集積史の視点から─

抄録

This paper examines the prospects of industrial agglomeration in Osaka as a regional resource from a historical perspective. Industrial agglomeration has been seen as a source of high competitiveness for the Japanese manufacturing industry for years. However, the Japanese manufacturing industry and industrial agglomeration in Osaka have been in decline for about 30 years since the collapse of the bubble economy. Despite their decline, the manufacturing industry and industrial agglomeration are still important to Osaka’s regional economy.

We therefore explored the prospects for industrial agglomeration in Osaka when manufacturing industries were emerging in developing countries （especially in China） and information technology/modularization was being deployed in product architecture.

The first feature of industrial agglomeration in Osaka was the emergence of a diverse group of small and medium-sized enterprises （SMEs） to support the production of finished goods in the machinery industry during the period of high economic growth. The second feature was the segregation among the SMEs based on their skills in a particular field. The third was the formation of cooperative relationships between large companies and SMEs as well as among SMEs based on their skills, which led to process innovation and quality improvement in manufacturing. The development of these features was based on the unique experiences surrounding the development of manufacturing industries in Japan and Osaka during the period of rapid economic growth, and they are still in place today. They are needed even as China progresses and experiences industrial development. We believe that it is necessary to consider measures for economic revitalization that take advantage of these characteristics of industrial agglomeration in Osaka.