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Research about ethnic businesses primarily focuses on the urban context; yet, contemporary immigrants in North America have increasingly been settling and establishing new businesses in suburbs. This paper explores emerging suburban ethnic retail clusters in the Greater Toronto Area by comparing them to established urban business enclaves. Drawing on extensive field research, surveys, and interviews in more than 100 suburban Chinese and South Asian retail clusters, this paper explores entrepreneurial experiences in suburban retail spaces, the role of ethnic entrepreneurs in suburban placemaking, and the opportunities and constraints affecting entrepreneurs' interaction with other key players. It demonstrates the need to build on the mixed embeddedness model when exploring ethnic entrepreneurship in a suburban context, as well as the need to consider how the institutional framework plays a role in shaping ethnic retail places and the spatial and physical outcomes of ethnic entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space is not an ontologically given entity; following this line of reasoning, the paper explores the concept of ethnic/immigrant entrepreneurship in Berlin relying on the yellow pages directory Gelbe Seiten – İş Rehberi (IR, published in German and Turkish). This particular yellow pages directory has become a spatial reflection of migrant entrepreneurial activities since 1996. It has also been playing a crucial role in the self‐representation of migrants after the fall of the Wall. In this context, the paper explores how individuals construct themselves as ethnic/immigrant entrepreneurs by using the IR, which serves as a networking tool for them. To achieve this goal, it looks at three advertisement strategies of entrepreneurs in the IR between 1996 and 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Studies confirm an inverted U‐shaped relationship between age and entrepreneurship. This paper deepens the understanding of this relationship by analysing how the relationship varies across time and across different types of regions, aspects often overlooked in the current literature. An individual perspective is taken, and the probability of starting a firm is expected to increase as individuals' age but at a decreasing rate. The results show significant differences in the relationship between the age of individuals and the rate of entrepreneurship across time and space. The age‐entrepreneurship profile has shifted to the left over time such that individuals are younger when they start firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The development of start‐up communities is seen as critical to the successful development of entrepreneurship in a region. However, it remains unclear what exactly start‐up communities are and how they can be facilitated. Ambiguity concerning the geographical scale and membership of start‐up communities leads to different conceptualisations. In this paper, we apply communities of practice (CoP) theory to understand how conceptualisations of start‐up communities work and how they can be facilitated. To this end, we qualitatively study start‐up communities in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, Australia. Our results show that start‐up communities that are confined to a particular workspace strongly resemble a CoP. Furthermore, many elements of CoPs can also be found in regional start‐up communities. Finally, we find that workspace communities have more direct and top‐down facilitation activities, while regional start‐up communities have more indirect and bottom‐up facilitation activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of the research on functional roles of European towns conducted by a group of researchers gathered around the ESPON project 'TOWN'. Building on the systematic analysis of the socio-economic dynamics of 31 European small and medium-sized towns (SMSTs), we identified three profiles of their local economies. The first profile is defined as a dominant 'residential' economy that mostly relies on local activities that satisfy the needs of people in an area (residents, commuters or tourists). The second profile corresponds to a dominant 'productive' economy based on the production of goods and services to be mainly exported and consumed out of its area. The third profile is the mixed type that is characterised by an important share of activities in productive and residential sector with a complementary 'creative-knowledge' dimension, based on entrepreneurship, creativity and collaboration in innovation. Moreover, we analysed the economic performance and the shift in profiles in order to detect in which way towns make choices between residential economy, competitiveness and innovation for their local development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative research on gentrification is on the rise, especially since gentrification is no longer confined to historical, central neighbourhoods in First World countries, but also appeared in rural, new-built areas and Second World countries. In this paper we present our comparative approach to investigate gentrification processes in four European cities (Arnhem, Istanbul, Vienna, Zurich), which differs from previous studies in its use of assemblage theory as research framework. The multi-layered framework discerns three levels: 'metrics', 'interpretations', and 'practices'. We argue that many comparative studies mainly focus on metrics, while researching interpretations and practices instead - and how these three levels influence each other through processes of actualisation and counteractualisation - would enhance our knowledge on gentrification. In doing so, we aim to provide a precise account of the nested relations of different layers of empirical reality and thus respond to various calls in the debate to intensively examine 'geographies of gentrification'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]