Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
area. During the 1980s 46 major national research laboratories were moved to this
new town, two new research-based universities were created, and many major firms
were encouraged to establish their research facilities in the centre. By 2012 the city
contained 217 thousand people. It is not simply a traditional centre of learning. It
is also one of Japan's premier research nodes, for there were 240 private research
facilities and 60 national research facilities located there by 2000, when the centre
absorbed half of Japan's public R&D budget. A smaller scale pattern of deliberate
locating knowledge-based activities, this time in towns, can be seen in the devel-
opment of Technopolis centres in Japan, where 18 nodes were established after an
act of 1983 (Edgington 2008 ; Okubo 2012 ). But as their name implies, they were
far more technologically based, and most clustered existing government research
activities, rather than creating many new activities. Similar attempts to develop re-
search clusters can be seen in the post 1970s creation of many Research or Science
Parks , around university campuses. These are the knowledge-based equivalent of
the branch factories established in industrial estates in the late 1930s in Britain, al-
though these were designed to alleviate areas of high unemployment. Most science
parks are relatively small compared to the Tsukuba example, but some, in places
such as Lund and Cambridge, have a really significant research presence. These
areas contain research spin-offs from the university laboratories, and in the really
successful areas, have also attracted corporate and government research centres. At
a smaller scale, so-called Incubator Units have been created in many countries to
provide premises in small purpose-built buildings for 'start-up' companies in the
knowledge sector, in the hope that they will expand.
11﻽5 The Locational Imperatives of Knowledge-Based
Activities
11.5.1 Headquarter and Research Locations
If knowledge industries are to become the cornerstone of the economies of many
cities of the future then the reasons for their location in a limited number of places
need to be understood. This has led to studies of the geographical clusters found
in knowledge-based areas (Maskell 2001 ), analyses of the extent to which urban
regions provide effective contexts for the development of knowledge (Lambooy
2002 ; Musterd et al 2010 ) and the trends in the territorial patterns of innovation (Ca-
pello 2013 ). In many ways the spatial pattern of concentration of so many knowl-
edge activities flies in the face of the popular belief in the idea of the increasing
dispersal trends in contemporary society. This dispersal has been lubricated by the
transport revolutions that have led to the greater sprawl of cities, the rapid move-
ment of people and goods throughout the world, as well as the communication in-
novations that has enabled people with access to computers, and the infrastructure
of high speed fibre optic and satellite links, to send information and interact almost
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