Il ruolo della prossimità nella geografia dell’impresa. Un’analisi comparata plurisettoriale tra le città di Napoli e Novara

[Machine translation] The acceleration of the phenomena related to globalization and the pervasiveness of new digital technologies have led, in the last two decades, to a paradigm shift in the geography of the company that has implemented logics based on relational distance instead of spatial distance. Although, by virtue of the innovative nature of these dynamics, the exclusivity of the a-spatial dimension is often more emphasized in different contexts, the perspective of geographers, on the contrary, highlights the importance of geographical proximity even in the digital era., In this contribution, this value is emphasized in the context of the geography of the company with reference to a comparative case study between the cities of Naples and Novara. In particular, an empirical analysis is conducted aimed at determining the influence of proximity, broken down into its various components, on the phenomena of relationship in homogeneous sectoral clusters of companies. The comparison between cities with different characteristics makes it possible to purify the analysis from the peculiarities of local systems.