How Location Factors Influence Economic Activity Across Industries

in today's video i'm going to be looking at location factors and how they affect economic activity this is for the igcse

geography spec and i've highlighted um that we're going to be talking about location factors but also how those

factors can change over time so location factors is the idea that all economic activity

needs certain things to be able to exist um they we can call them needs or we might call them

more technically inputs though they need inputs to be able to exist as that type of economic activity companies and

businesses will locate where those inputs are very very easy to be able to access and this is what we

call location factors and whether it's farming or industry or retail they will all have

slightly different needs and therefore they will locate in slightly different areas to meet those needs

i'm going to go through the different major kind of industries to show you how the needs are slightly different but

also how they're quite similar so if i'm looking at farming the most important thing for farming to exist is they need

the physical conditions to be right whether that's producing food and arable farms or livestock farms you need to

have various factors where it could be fertile soil it might be a good climate

soil conditions or if it's arable land it would be flat land those are the most important things to actually exist the

most important location factors secondary factors that are also important but probably the not the most

important would be once those raw produces made can it be sent off to manufacturing centers um to be processed

and are there markets nearby where they can sell those products that they've produced

heavy industry has slightly different ones it's a very energy intensive industry and therefore it would require

very cheap energy but also access to the raw materials to make those products

if i'm building a ship or making steel or producing cars they will all require a

lot of energy so energy supplies whether it's coal or hydroelectric power if they're readily nearby that would be

very very important for my business but also things like coal and iron and the things

that make up a lot of these products they are very hard to transport and expensive so having them readily

available is really important to a company similarly they have secondary needs and once they've actually made

those products they need good transport links to be able to ship them away to to markets

retail the the main focus of retail is customers you need products to be able to sell to customers

but also secondary kind of important issues would be they need people to work it's a very labor intensive sector they

need workers and they need again transport links to to ship products you can see in all of these having good

accessibility is really really important to all of these industries to be able to get the products in or out from the area

research and development um it's this is what we call the quaternary sector and therefore the most important factor is

the high skilled workforce um if i'm working in software design medical research i'm going to be dealing with

really complex problems that need people with degrees it's going to be data problems often so

they are going to require a high level of education to be able to do that therefore

if i'm a research and development i will often go near very high end universities where they can get access to that

skilled labor or also that universities often have research facilities that they can use and partner up with

obviously these factors don't just stay the same and as you can see through most of those

those main industries accessibility is really important in a city um the cbd is often a place where accessibility is the

best and therefore a thing like services retail will often be in the center because that has the best accessibility

why does that the best accessibility this is because lots of the major roads and railways

ways to access the city converge in this area and therefore it's easier for people to go and access

however as society has progressed we're seeing that um slightly change and therefore

it's changing where companies actually base so the rural urban fringe has become more popular with lots of

economic activity which i'll go over in a second and where we see people moving out from traditional areas like the cbd

to the royal urban fringe we call this process decentralization and i'm going to go over some of the the

factors why people are moving out this is an example of the oxford rural urban fringe where we can see there is

activity in the forms of science parks and business park retail parks but also housing is starting to

come in this area so an example of something that has maybe moved out from the center to the

rural urban fringe would be a science park this is a growing sector so they need lots of space those greenfield

sites are a lot cheaper to be able to build on because you don't have to remove all of

the kind of infrastructures already there it's also a cleaner nicer environment so if you're trying to

attract the highest end graduates it's a nice place to be able to go because it's a greenfield site you can also design

your campus from scratch therefore you can put very modern buildings in again these are all features that are

very attractive to getting high-end graduates and investment into this area another example it would be retail parks

again on those greenfield sites um lots of room to be able to put lots of different shops under one roof so people

can all go and access them i can also build very large car parks for customers because most people are going to be

commuting it's close to the suburbs so that means i've got workers but also potential customers and people from

outside of the town can access it because on that rural urban fringe we have motorways and ring roads and

therefore i can get customers who can access it from other places

i'm not going to go through all of them but business parks is another one to consider

again cheap greenfield land lots of room motorways can access products um into the area shipping it in and out

and you can also build you know accommodation for people who want to stay there and do business and then

maybe go somewhere else so there's lots of different reasons why the rural urban fringe has become really popular

and therefore location factors are starting to change as time has progressed and countries

develop