Abstract:
This paper examines the claim that the North Ryde-North Sydney arc is
Australia’s ‘Silicon Valley’, seeking firstly to identify the empirical validities behind the
claim, and secondly to ask how the documented patterns might be explained. The paper
evidences the fact that this area indeed provides the pre-eminent site for Australia’s
information technology and telecommunications (ITT) sector. However, examination of
this industry suggests that its expansion in Sydney has been motivated primarily by the
increasing centrality of advanced producer services within the high-order business sector. It
is Sydney’s attributes for multinational business, as opposed to the propulsive dynamics of
local clustering per se, which appears to explain the spatial concentration of these activities.
Thus, it is the urbanisation economies of Sydney more than the localisation economies of
the ITT sector which account for the growth of this sector in the city. Nevertheless,
localisation economies are sporadically significant, suggesting that Sydney’s ITT sector is
to a certain extent a hybrid product of the two types of economies.
