Mapping NASCAR Valley Charlotte as a Knowledge Community.

Mitchelson, Ronald L.; Alderman, Derek H.

The past two decades have witnessed rapid growth in the popularity of stock car racing and its major sanctioning body, NASCAR. While the consumption of the race-day spectacle is increasingly dispersed, the production side of the sport displays a very different geography, one built upon increased agglomeration rather than decentralization. We refer to the locational clustering of stock car racing’s industrial activities in and around the Charlotte region as ‘‘NASCAR Valley,’’ a term inspired by a similar regional concentration of racing-related firms in southern England called Motor Sport Valley. We show that the establishment of the cluster was hardly accidental. NASCAR Valley is illustrated to be a clearly defined uniform region just north of Charlotte with a major axis running northwest/southeast from Mooresville to Concord, North Carolina. The Valley contains about half of the state’s racing establishments, 60 percent of its racing employment, and 70 percent of its racing revenues. This empirical work confirms some key expectations associated with the creation of knowledge communities in which engineered technologies dominate. First, such communities are spatially cohesive. NASCAR Valley is tightly regionalized with surprisingly few holes and islands. Second the spatial expression of such a knowledge community is not large. We estimate NASCAR Valley to be no more than 400 square miles. Third, the spatial expression of such an industry is not well explained by reference to traditional lists of site and situational factors. Statistically, the appropriate response to ‘‘where?’’ resides with reference to external scale economies.

CHARLOTTE (N.C.); NORTH Carolina; NASCAR (Association); AGGLOMERATION (Materials); DECENTRALIZATION in management; EXTERNALITIES; AUTOMOBILE racing; ECONOMICS

Southeastern Geographer, 2011, Vol 51, Issue 1, p31

0038-366X

Academic Journal

10.1353/sgo.2011.0001