For a long time, the phrase “company city” has been used to describe cities in which a significant portion of their population works directly or indirectly for a large local corporation. It is a phenomenon we have known in the United States, Europe and also in Italy, where Fiat largely determined Turin’s economic fate.
In the northeast, the city of Valdano has long been associated with Marzotto, Torviscosa was born thanks to the creation of Snea Viscosa, the name Agordo remains synonymous with Luxottica today, and Benetton has put Treviso on the global clothing map for several decades. But in the past decade, the shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy and the rapid globalization of markets have put many “company cities” in crisis. In many cases, large local firms have become multinational corporations and distributed their activities (producing and otherwise) across a variety of distinct geographic regions.
In some cases, multinational corporations have moved manufacturing jobs to emerging countries to take advantage of lower labor costs; In other cases, what has been kept local are production activities, while intangible functions such as design, marketing and finance have been moved to urban centres. When this happens, the region is emptied of those jobs that attract and retain the most qualified specialists, produce added value and contribute to generating innovation.
In other words, it is dangerously heading towards a decline that could lead it to a state of marginalization compared to the new major centers of global innovation. However, the city of La Coruña in the northwestern province of Spain tells us that you can remain “central” and important even when you are geographically far from the capital. In this case, the centrality of the Galician city is ensured by the world’s largest fast fashion group, Inditex. Founded by the legendary Amancio Ortega in the 1980s, Inditex is today best known for its flagship brand Zara. As we learned from the labels, almost all Zara-branded clothing is produced outside national borders, especially in Portugal, Morocco, Turkey and China.
However, in La Coruña, the president of the group has been retained, along with the skillful hands of designers and prototypes that fuel the fast fashion model that is the basis of the group’s success. We’re talking about about 700 designers from all over the world, of which only a small fraction are based in Barcelona, probably the most innovative city in contemporary Spain.
Today a real fashion ecosystem in Galicia is being built around design and product development jobs. This can be seen through the “indirect” influence, that is, the economic and cultural contamination that also changes La Coruña through entrepreneurial activities such as Sansoeurs by Cristina Sanchez and Complementos by Manolo Cremalera. Above all, you can experience this first-hand by visiting the industrial design department at the local university which attracts future Inditex designers from all over the country. What lessons can the Northeast learn from this remote Spanish province? First of all, large companies can still determine the economic success of a region, even when it does not have a large urban reference city as is the case in Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia. Second, to maintain the “intangible” jobs in the territory, a critical mass of qualified professionals is needed to create those flows of people and ideas that fuel the cultural and economic dynamism of the territory.
In the case of La Coruña, it is the hundreds of designers who inhabit the city and contribute to the creation of a creative community with a strong identity, now recognizable throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Finally, we observe with great interest how universities and companies can work in harmony and invest in high-quality training in some specific “industrial sectors”, in this case training that is not limited to manufacturing or vocational schools or whose ambition is to create new generations of professionals, creatives and managers who will be employed after That in local multinational companies, there is no shortage of universities or large multinational companies, it is a unique opportunity that must be exploited with urgency and determination Come again.
* Dublin Trinity College
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