Images of factories, ports, and pipelines tend to capture the imaginations of elected officials when they discuss job growth in Philadelphia, but the reality is that almost all of the job growth occurring in the fastest-growing parts of the city is coming from the service economy, specifically the kinds of person-to-person services cities excel at providing.

As economist Joe Cortwright put it in the Storefront Index report we wrote about yesterday, “in effect, the city is an important labor-saving technology…[C]ities reduce the amount of time households need to spend searching for and traveling to different locations to select, acquire and consume many goods and services.”

The service economy feeds off of proximity, and Center City—-comprised of the office district but also Philadelphia’s densest mixed-use neighborhoods—-has this in spades. At a time when more and more of the retail market is moving online, it’s no coincidence that the types of businesses most interested in setting up shop in Center City (professional and business services, real estate, finance, hospitality, and more) are sectors that still require face-to-face interaction.

“Continue urbanizing” is probably the world’s least inspiring jobs program, certainly less exciting than natural gas pipelines and eminent domain adventures. But by all accounts it’s the process that seems to bear the most responsibility for attracting the kinds of jobs that Philadelphia has been producing, and it’s striking how little attention this gets as part of the official jobs conversation.

Center City growth is neighborhood economic development