Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
11ď»˝2
Origins of the Concept
The contemporary Knowledge City concept stemmed from attempts in the devel-
oped world to understand and resolve the pressing economic problems that faced
many cities and societies after the stagnation of the 1970s and recessions of the
1980s, especially the loss of so many industries from the western world to competi-
tors in less developed countries. This led many researchers to argue that developed
countries should accept that they would never be able to compete with these new,
mostly low-cost production locations; instead they should move up the value chain
by
applying knowledge
to create new innovations in the development of goods,
services and processes, rather than dealing with the routine production of goods.
This would not only result in new employment in these activities, but new markets
for these innovations, as well as reducing the cost of existing goods and services
(Porter
1990
). The evidence at the time seemed to show that the western cities that
had followed this route had prospered—especially those based on newly emerging
computer and science-based technologies, information processing or management.
They worked on the product development of these innovations, with the actual as-
sembly carried out in low wage-cost locations. In addition, the last half century has
seen a rapid expansion in the numbers of people with tertiary and university level
education, which has led to increasing numbers of people working in research and
development activities which are concentrated in a small number of locations. At
the same time the explosion in new communication devices produced an informa-
tion revolution that allowed rapid contact between people in different locations,
creating new jobs in information processing and the media, and, in the last two
decades, allowing greater access to knowledge through the Internet. All these varia-
tions provided an example in economic terms of what evolutionary biologists have
called 'punctuated evolution', a stage of rapid burst of evolutionary change in or-
ganisms, not the slow, incremental progress that is often assumed, incorrectly, to
describe progress. They also contributed to the emergence of what has been called a
new Knowledge Economy (KE), which is being regarded as a transformative phase
in socio-economic development, world views and basic values (Drucker
1993a
).
Urban and economic growth theorists also began to appreciate the increasing im-
portance of the application of knowledge in the productive cycle, realizing that this
could not be regarded just a subset of the labour component in the three traditional
factors of production: labour, land and capital (Feldman
1994
). So knowledge, or
intellectual capital, should be seen as a primary and distinctive factor in the de-
velopment of many of the new innovative activities, both in production and ser-
vices (Edvinsson and Stenfelt
1999
). The growth of the KE ideas soon spread to
the urban case through several key works, such as in: pioneering individual papers
(e.g. Knight
1995
); special issues of journals (e.g. Urban Studies 2002; Journal of
Knowledge Management 2004); investigative reports on the impact of knowledge
and innovation on economic growth (OECD
1999
) and increasingly by new con-
tributions from management theorists (Carillo
2004
,
2006
; Viedma Marti
2005
). In
addition, the reviews of more practical attempts to create growth based on the KE in
