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and cultural fields.
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. The old industrial metros of Boston and New York are well
advanced in this transition to Knowledge economies and Washington, D.C. (with
large public, health, and scientific sectors) is emerging as a vibrant creative region.
These and other metros are the 'Creative regions' or the 'Knowledge Economies',
yielding jointly a Mega Knowledge Region of Megalopolis.
What sorts of processes have been at play and how do they interact in the birth of
this Mega Knowledge Region and its continuing evolution? How did these metro-
politan areas make this transition from a trajectory of decline to “creative regions”?
Such questions have predictably attracted theoretical interest from a broad range of
academic disciplines. To make such a transition successfully, key economic,
political and social actors in the metropolitan region have to unravel the complexity
of change. Such actors should be able to engage in shifting mindsets, changing
behavior of various urban agents, evolving and sustaining innovation, and
maintaining the dynamics of change. A tall order of evolutionary change disciplines
have been harnessed to this effect: Economic Geography, Business Economics,
Innovation Studies, Growth Theory, Evolutionary Economics and Urban Studies.
This paper focuses on two interactive theoretical streams of inquiry on the origin
and evolution of 'Creative Regions'
5
:
1. Models of Nurture and Commercialization of Industrial Innovation and Regional
Industrial Adaptation and
2. Analysis of Evolutionary Processes towards a Knowledge-Intensive Service
Economy
This part of the paper can only highlight the key concepts and the evolutionary
processes emphasized in this vast literature of the rise of knowledge-intensive
production and services, in order to set the stage for an empirical review of the
recent economic resurgence of the Megalopolis metros. Further, this empirical
assessment of the models of economic structural change presented here is largely
limited in this paper to the experience of the Boston metro region—supplemented
by some key indicators of structural change and evolution in other major Megalo-
polis metropolitan areas.
4
Other examples of such creative regions or knowledge economies are: Bay Area and Silicon
Valley, Los Angeles, Seattle, London, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, Sydney, etc.
5
Other theoretical formulations of
the dynamics and evolutionary response of various spatial
systems-economic, social, and ecological
—have been proposed. One such is the notion of
“Resilience”. Reggiani et al. (
2002
) proposed the notion of 'Resilience' as a major dimension of
the dynamics of spatial economic systems, especially how these systems respond to shocks,
disturbances and perturbations. Martin (
2011
) examines the usefulness of 'resilience' as an aid
to understanding the reaction of regional economies to major recessionary shocks (which are
typically a shorter time scale than in our paper)—arguing that the notion of resilience can usefully
be combined with that of hysteresis in order to fully capture the possible reactions of regional
economies to major recessions. Rose (
2007
) uses the resilience notion in the analysis of natural and
man-made disasters.
