Geography Reference
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nodes were too small to attract significant growth and needed strengthening. Most
of these nodes achieved subsequent growth by large regional incentives and the de-
velopment of high speed train connections. Toulouse has been one of the most suc-
cessful of these growth poles, being transformed from a rather sleepy and stagnant
large regional node of the 1950s into one of Europe's premier knowledge centres
due to the addition and expansion of its universities and a focus on aerospace (Mu-
rayama 2002 ). It is a classic example of what directed government investment can
do. More recently the city has added a new industrial cluster based on research into
cancer and bio-medical activities. Canc←rp￴le Toulouse has been created at a cost of
over a billion euros and by 2013 employed over 4.000 people on a 220 ha site. This
type of development has involved the co-operation and support of city, regional and
national agencies as well as from the European Union. Apart from improving all
internal transport routes, good long distance connections through airports with lots
of destinations are also crucially important, as few knowledge activities are found
in remote and small towns, unless engaged on secret research. The importance of air
transport in urban growth has led to the concept of an Aerotropolis, a city founded
around an airport, rather than the other way around (Kasada and Lindsay 2011 ).
The necessity for cities to invest in accessible and cheap broad-band high speed
computer networks, as well as excellent schools, training schemes and universities,
is obvious. In the case of universities there have been few examples of the type of
bold initiative practiced by Japan in the creation of the knowledge hub of Tsukuba
city described earlier, but again this was a national government, not locally inspired
development. However, some cities around the world have been trying to duplicate
this approach to create knowledge hubs, but not on the same scale. The city state of
Singapore is one of the most impressive with its focus on biotechnology and other
research sectors. An ambitious city initiative is New York's knowledge hub, on
Roosevelt Island in the East River, although again it is supported by state and fed-
eral funding. Formerly a hospital and low income housing site, much of the island
is being redeveloped as a new science-based university campus. The campus was
initiated by New York city when its development authority realised that the city had
lost three-quarters of its manufacturing jobs since 1960 and that the 2008 financial
collapse showed how dependent the city had become on the financial industry, with
over a third of the city's private payroll coming from Wall Street-related businesses.
The city invited major universities around the world to make a bid to create a new
science-technology university. Cornell University, in partnership with the highly
successful Technion University in Israel, won the bid. Their plans envisage spend-
ing $ 2 billion on creating a new campus on the island, one that is also sustainable in
being dependent on solar and geothermal energy for its operation. The plans call for
the university to have 8,000 permanent jobs and it is anticipated that various spin-
off companies will generate 30,000 more jobs in 600 new technological companies
within a few decades. The objective is for this new 'knowledge city' (actually with-
in a city) to provide the basis of a new science-based industry in New York, having
some similarities with the planned science-based town of Tsukuba, or the informal
growth of knowledge-based hubs (Mackun 2013 ) that developed in Silicon Valley
(Stanford, California) and around Boston's Route 128 (near Harvard and MIT).
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