Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
centres increased in importance. Another example of this type of concentration in
a different knowledge industry was revealed by a study of global financial services
location (Zaheer and Manrakhan
2001
). The number of cities in which firms were
engaged in currency trading increased from 103 in 1973 to 154 in 1993, only 11
years after the introduction of the B2B electronic network, illustrating that the elec-
tronic changes facilitated more access to global markets and a wider dispersal of
participating cities. However, even though a dispersal occurred, banks in the four
major centres, London, New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong, increased their share of
trading from 22 % of the total in the base year to 33 % in 1981 and have maintained
that degree of concentration ever since. This trend of greater concentration has also
been also revealed in the studies of financial and producer services that have been
used to define what amounts to the world's economic command city locations, as
shown by the various studies of the World Cities group based in the University of
Loughborough (Beaverstock et al.
1999
).
However, each knowledge sector has its own locational pattern, so one must be
careful of over-generalisation, although it seems clear that the spatial concentration
of most of these activities in a limited number of places has been intensifying. Yet
one knowledge sector, the location of higher education, displays a much greater
dispersal. Many early centres, from medieval universities to state universities in
the U.S.A. were located away from the assumed corruption and temptations of big
cities, although from the late nineteenth century the bigger cities also acquired new
universities at this time, a matter of prestige and a recognition of their need for
more educated workers in their new industries and the expanding professions and
bigger bureaucracies in government and corporations. From the late 1950s another
expansion occurred, with a veritable explosion of university and higher educational
foundations in western countries, so that most centres with populations over 50,000
obtained some type of college or university. Many of these institutions still have a
big emphasis upon a liberal education, rather than on research development, so their
research output is limited, whereas others have specialised in science and the new
technologies. This period of growth also saw an increase in the number and size of
universities in the biggest cities. However, despite the growth and dispersal of the
higher education sector, the main centres of
university research
is still concentrated
in a limited number of places, especially the older universities and those in or near
the big cities, as was seen by the list of the cities with the largest research paper
outputs shown in Fig.
11.1
.
Another example of dispersal rather than concentration in the knowledge sector
can be seen in those research centres deliberately created by governments to act as
the base for secret science-based activities, such as Oak Ridge in the U.S.A. or the
originally 'closed' scientific Soviet cities in the former U.S.S.R., some of which still
operate as major research nodes in Russia. These centres do represent exceptions,
for most government and corporate research activities have usually been either add-
ed on to existing urban centres, primarily the largest cities, or very near to them. In
1962 something very different occurred when the Japanese government announced
their intention to develop a new town based on research and learning at Tsukuba 25
miles from central Tokyo, although this is clearly within the metropolitan built-up
