Reflecting Factors of Urban Production: A Text Mining Approach

In the past, production sites left urban areas due to constraining factors like land costs, lack of space and emission restrictions. In addition, acceptance problems by the population (e.g. due to emissions and traffic) counteracted the settlement of industrial sites in urban areas. The emergence of new production techniques as well as the demand for more individualized and regionalized products may have changed that recently. New expectations towards sustainability, urban life quality and attractive work places by the population as well as politics advance an increasing (re-) integration of production in urban areas (Fraunhofer IAO, 2015). For this reason characteristics of the paradigm shift towards urban production have to be examined. Previous publications described the development of a research design aiming at identifying key factors of urban production (Stiehm et al., 2016). The approach is based on an explorative mixed method design containing both qualitative and quantitative methods. This publication addresses the reflection of developed factors using text mining approaches. The aim is to review and classify the validated factors with respect to scientific publications. What can be determined concerning the development of the factors or rather the paradigm shift over the last decades? Different measures are used to address the development of the factor occurrences defining urban production. The results are intended to extrapolate future developments and provide a basis for recommendations.