Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to negotiate treaties and support a network of ambassadors and contacts which
provided advance knowledge of political problems as well as trading opportunities,
and the ability to negotiate trade concessions. Even in the Industrial Revolution it
could be argued that many industrial towns were creative, for they had concentra-
tions of the specialised technological and organizational skills, enabling the enter-
prises to produce new machines and industrial processes as well as new goods and
services over many years. So the towns and often the regions in which they were
located were centres not just of production, but also of organization since the firm's
headquarters was there, as well as being centres of nascent producer services and
of knowledge-creation and innovation in the sense of knowledge as 'doing'. Yet the
last century has seen the increasing disaggregation of the functions of organization,
producer-services and innovative activity from many of the places where produc-
tion occurs, a consequence of the fact that each of these parts of the productive cycle
have their own locational imperatives.
Since the emphasis in this chapter is upon knowledge and innovation in cities,
the question that must be asked concerns the conditions that help places attract and
keep these activities, not knowledge as 'being' or 'doing', but as the deliberate at-
tempt to foster knowledge-based innovative activity. This is based on the manage-
ment and encouragement of continuous innovative activities and which need to be
initiated and organized by co-operation between the various stakeholders in the city.
Since it has been recognized from studies of the concentration of knowledge-based
activities that some cities have been the vital seed-beds in which these activities
have been nurtured and grown, then it seems critical to understand the assets, ad-
vantages and disadvantages of these locations, especially the problems associated
with converting knowledge into innovations. This has led to new paradigms to un-
derstand the role of the city milieu, including the attitudes within it, for facilitat-
ing knowledge-based development. These models of development reject the old
material-based paradigms of urban and economic growth that explained the location
of activities only by the differential costs of assembling the traditional factors of
production (land, labour, capital) and taking the products to market (transport). Al-
though some of these factors are still important for many industries, the discussion
above shows that they are not the only, or even the primary factors in the location of
the knowledge-creation sector. The new approaches also deplore the old dichotomy
between economic growth and overall social value. Instead, they focus on the utility
of the assets of cities as potential seed-beds for knowledge-based growth, seeking
to identify the factors that underlie and assist this development of what amounts to
a selective environment. Most research on the topic tends to focus on showing the
effect of a few variables for particular types of knowledge industries. But in the last
decade there have been more attempts to provide more comprehensive summaries.
Some focus on developing indicators that index the range of key assets that aid
some sector of knowledge development, usually in particular types of knowledge-
creation activity. Others, such as Florida's (
2002
) indexes, purport to measure the
creativity of American cities, although they concentrate mainly, although not exclu-
sively, on the characteristics of people that he considers to be creative, issues that
were discussed in Chap. 10. More general approaches seek to look more widely
at the features that help cities attract and retain knowledge-development activities
