Michael Storper

Storper's research focuses on why certain city-regions prosper while others decline, emphasizing the role of specialized industrial clusters, knowledge networks, and institutional context in shaping regional economic trajectories. He has written extensively on the divergence between successful tech and creative hubs like the San Francisco Bay Area and regions that have experienced industrial decline. His work bridges economic geography, urban studies, and political economy, drawing on both quantitative analysis and case-based comparison.

Storper holds positions at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the London School of Economics, and Sciences Po in Paris, reflecting his deeply transatlantic intellectual profile. At UCLA he has been part of the Department of Urban Planning, while at LSE and Sciences Po he has contributed to geography and urban studies programs. This multi-institutional presence allows him to compare urban development patterns across North American and European contexts.

In books such as Keys to the City (2013) and The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies (2015), Storper argues that regional success depends on accumulating specialized knowledge, skilled labor, and institutional relationships that are difficult for other places to replicate. He warns that divergence between elite city-regions and the rest is self-reinforcing, as talent and investment cluster in already-successful hubs. His analysis pushes back against the idea that any declining city can simply copy the playbook of Silicon Valley or London.

Storper's work overlaps significantly with that of Allen Scott, his UCLA colleague, in emphasizing the geographic clustering of cultural and technology industries, though Storper places greater emphasis on institutional and political divergence between regions. Compared to Richard Florida's 'creative class' thesis, which emphasizes amenities and tolerance as urban growth drivers, Storper is more skeptical that lifestyle factors alone explain regional success and focuses more on industrial organization and path dependency. Storper's analysis tends to be more pessimistic about the ability of lagging regions to catch up through policy alone.