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 11

initiatives were adopted within state policies at a larger scale, the effectiveness of
the approach to tackle uneven spatial development was not fully or adequately
considered.
The use of science cities, the technopolis programme and regional innovation
strategies can therefore be seen as a significantly different approach within state
policies towards uneven spatial development. They represented a shift in inter-
vention logic, expressed in changes in desired governance structures, in concep-
tions of the relationship between the local and global, in the extension of
interventions to labour, capital and institutional assets, and in the reproduction of
scientific and technological knowledge. Although it would be rather simplistic to
attempt to classify a series of complex and highly varied policy responses, two
broad strategic approaches can be drawn out of these practices. First, the various
initiatives might be construed as a means of regionalising or localising national or
pan-national policy goals. In such logic, the support offered to science and tech-
nology developments, and more broadly innovation, was seeking to secure com-
petitive advantage over other nation states (Japan) or trading blocs (European
Union). Sub-national uneven spatial development may have been made explicit
within such measures, but even when it was, it might be regarded as a secondary
policy objective in the absence of any redistributive measures (such as national/EU
scientific research programmes) or attempts to set up some form of control or
regulation over high growth areas and mobile high-tech capital.
Second, the logic of these new forms of intervention might be seen as based on
a new regionalism, where the promotion of competitive advantage might be
criticised for creating a 'winner takes all' or a 'zero sum game', and instead should
be replaced by initiatives and policies that seek to create regional comparative
advantage. If these interventions are based on supporting endogenous growth, they
might again have limited value in tackling uneven spatial development, but instead
have potential to respect the diversity of regional economies and the possible
plurality of values and outcomes that can arise from a similar diversity in tech-
nological developments. However, where structural factors persist, such as insti-
tutional weakness and path dependency, the policies may at best simply reproduce
current patterns of uneven spatial development, and at worst, reinforce and further
exaggerate economic inequalities.

2 New Challenges in Regional Development for Science
Cities

Goldstein and Luger ( 1992 ) see the science city as a prominent instrument to
establish an innovative milieu or core area of regional development. Oh and
Masser ( 1995 ) broaden this notion by seeing science cities—incorporating the
ideas of the technopolis, research park, science or technology park—as a way of
linking high-tech industries with regional development through economic