A New Strategic Approach to Science Cities: Towards the Achievement of Sustainable and Balanced Spatial Development - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 7

This shift in EU regional development policy is generally built upon (EC 1994 ):
1. A bottom-up approach, giving emphasis on the regional technology demand.
2. A regional approach, focusing on the development of a territorial entity on the
basis of a consensus between the government, the private sector, the univer-
sities and the research centres.
3. A strategic approach, combining the analysis of the regional technological
development and the definition of long-term priorities and short-term actions.
4. An integrated approach, linking the efforts of the public and private sectors towards
the common goal of increasing regional productivity and competitiveness.
5. An international approach, considering the global market trends and enhancing
international technology and economic cooperation.
In this approach the region is the key level of concrete action, and the elabo-
ration of any strategy involves real actors and is meant to take into account the
strengths and weaknesses of specific productive systems and the real capabilities
of the research and academic community in the region (Komninos 2002 ). In this
way, the development outcomes should be secured not only by projects such as
science and technology parks, but also by the institutions in the region which can
offer some guarantee of continuity and implementation. It is also acknowledged in
this approach that there is no simple panacea for less developed regions, but rather
the active searching to achieve these outcomes develops the institutional and
cultural-based innovativeness of a region that in turn is necessary to trigger
adaptation and flexibility required by the knowledge economy.
The relationship between regions and between regional and nation state policies
on innovation and technology also underpinned the geographically wider study of
technopoles by Castells and Hall ( 1994 ). A concern with wider systemic processes
rather than individual projects is illustrated by their comment that: ''What we are
witnessing is the emergence of a new industrial space, defined by the location of the
new industrial sectors and by the use of new technologies by all sectors…para-
doxically, cities and regions are increasingly becoming critical agents of economic
development, offer flexibility in adapting to changing conditions of markets,
technology and culture.'' Against this context, Castells and Hall ( 1994 ) claim that:
''technopoles in fact explicitly commemorate the reality that cities and regions are
being profoundly modified in their structure, and conditioned in their growth
dynamics by the interplay of three major, interrelated historical processes'':
1. a technological revolution, mainly based on information technologies;
2. the formation of a global economy, that is, the structuring of all economic
processes on a planetary scale, even if national boundaries and national gov-
ernments remain essential elements and key actors in the strategies played out
in international competition;
3. the emergence of a new form of economic production and management that can
be termed informational. Characterised by the fact that productivity and com-
petitiveness are increasingly based on the generation of new knowledge and on
the access to, and processing of, appropriate information.