Developing Knowledge Cities - Theme Cities: Solutions for Urban Problems - page 381

energy to industry and transport; in some places the replacement of government
regulations, monopolies and extraction, with a more laissez-faire and entrepreneur-
ial economy. They led to the explosion of new and modified goods production in
the period now known as the Industrial Revolution. Throughout this period, knowl-
edge was increasingly applied to 'doing'. This led to the invention and improve-
ment of tools, processes and products, based on the new technologies that were
concentrated in the many new industrial towns and cities, as well as being applied
to 'work' in many industrial plants by pioneering researchers such as F. W. Taylor
from the 1880s (Drucker 1993a ), creating new, more efficient work practices that
led to greater productivity.
The last half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of another phase in
knowledge creation, the application of ' knowledge to create new knowledge' , in
other words not just 'doing', but to 'knowledge' itself, in order to produce new in-
novations, in production as well as services and organizations (Drucker 1993 ). This
has also led to huge increases in the numbers of people in education and research,
as well as a management revolution in the 40 years after the mid-twentieth century,
with large numbers in the organization of production and services, as well as gen-
erating innovations in products, processes and organizations. It has resulted in the
explosive growth and availability of codified knowledge via new electronic com-
munication sources and through unprecedented access to this storehouse of infor-
mation by the Internet. These changes led to the realization that knowledge, through
its acquisition, creation and applications, has become the key resource, if cities and
economies in the developed world are to increase their productivity.
11﻽4 The Location of Knowledge Activities
11.4.1 Disaggregation of Productive Processes
This new focus upon knowledge as a distinctive factor of production is one of the
key features of the current economic phase. However, it must be emphasized that
from the Industrial Revolution onwards many industrial towns had concentrations
of the specialised technological and organizational skills that enabled their enter-
prises to produce new machines and industrial processes, as well as new goods and
services, over many years. Hence the towns and often the regions in which they
were located were centres of innovation in the industrial period, not just of produc-
tion but also organization, since the headquarters of most firms were also there.
In the last century or more many changes have led to the spatial disaggregation of
the various parts of economic activity, including sites of innovation. First, firms
have got bigger and more complex, producing many products and in different parts
of the world, which has led to many manufacturing units, whether material goods
or services, in a large number of locations. Although there are some exceptions,
the main HQ or regional HQs and the research centres are now mainly separate
from most, if not all of the production units, because they have different locational