Technopoles of the World: The Making of 21st Century Industrial Complexes.

Worldwide, the rush is on to build "technologies"--places where researchers and production workers can collaborate on new ideas and inventions.

In Technopoles of the World, urban planning professors Manuel Castells and Peter Hall offer a systematic study of global efforts to promote and

The authors identify four distinct kinds of technopoles: industrial complexes, science cities, technology parks, and the research/manufacturing centers of Japan's unique Technopolis program. Each type of technopole has advantages, but none seems universally successful.

* Industrial complexes are areas where many small research and manufacturing facilities develop and grow side by side. The most successful example to date is Silicon Valley. Once a sleepy agricultural region in Santa Clara County, California, Silicon Valley transformed itself between the 1950s and the 1990s, arousing the admiration and envy of the world. Birthplace of both the microchip and personal computer industries, the Valley has become a model for all other technopoles, giving it a status that has assumed almost mythic proportions. But in fact, Silicon Valley, located close to Stanford University and the city of San Jose, benefited from many factors that may never be duplicated, Castells and Hall point out.

* Science cities are planned communities built around a complex of new or relocated research facilities. Three of the four science cities that Castells and Hall describe have failed to meet their aims. For example, Akademgorodok, the prototype science city championed by Nikita Khrushchev in 1962, promised young Soviet scientists and technicians access to state-of-the art facilities and escape from the bureaucratic control. But the reality was forced relocation, the rapid rise of a new bureaucracy, and isolation from both the mainstream of Russian life and the outside world, with little benefit or cooperative impact even on the surrounding region, western Siberia. Even Japan's first science city, Tsukuba, has suffered from being too narrowly focused on research with few links to commercial manufacturers.

One success story is Japan's newest science city project, Kansei. Located in the highly urbanized industrial region between Tokyo and Osaka, Kansei comprises government research labs, commercial manufacturing plants, and university facilities that are active in many related and potentially revolutionary areas.

The Kansei-based Ion Engineering Center Corporation creates new materials with unique properties that combine metal, ceramics, semiconductors, and organic matter. The Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATRI), also in Kansei, designs experimental products that might make immediate use of ion-engineered materials, such as automatic interpreting telephones and equipment to generate three-dimensional virtual reality displays. The nearby International Institute for Advanced Studies hosts scholars from around the world who come to Kansei to study broad applications of technology in social contexts.

* Technology parks offer various incentives (usually tax breaks, low rents, and publicly funded infrastructure) to persuade both large, established firms and promising smaller ones to cluster together. Castells and Hall cite examples from England, France, and Taiwan, where such efforts have boosted regional economies through new job creation and local spin-off in construction and service industries. But technology parks seldom succeed in generating breakthrough discoveries or new consumer applications. The problem seems to be that, while established firms may locate a branch facility in a technology park, they remain largely independent. Smaller firms in the same park can seldom form mutually beneficial partnerships with the larger firms and merely remain dependent subcontractors.

* Japan's Technopolis program, the most ambitious and (so far) unique approach to technopole development, was first proposed in 1962 by the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). This long-range strategy to create a nation-wide chain of new research and manufacturing centers seeks to boost the economy of backward regions and retool noncompetitive rust-belt industries for new twenty-first-century markets. While leading Japanese companies obligingly set up branch plants in these new locations, most keep their management and top research facilities in the Tokyo-Osaka corridor. This brings some local benefit from new jobs, but keeps outlying regions dependent on distant headquarters for planning and direction.

The problem stems in part from a fundamental conflict within MITI itself. As the Japanese government's official planning agency, MITI publicly promotes decentralization for regional development. But MITI remains equally determined to do nothing that might make Japan more vulnerable to outside economic pressure. The real goal of "regionalization" often seems to be to discourage "offshoring" of production facilities to cheap-labor countries and to keep Japan's factories in the home islands.

This contradictory policy may be explained by the uncertainty of the planning process itself. While prepared to invest heavily in regional projects that may emerge as successful technopoles in another 10 or 20 years, MITI hesitates to apply any real pressure that might disrupt the existing concentration of human resources and facilities in the Tokyo-Osaka area that is fueling Japan's economy today.

Castells and Hall conclude that older cities often function more successfully as technopoles than do newly planned constructions. Established infrastructure, good communications and transportation networks, top-flight university research and training facilities, and proximity to government offices, banks, and other sources of venture capital all make major cities natural places for young technicians and promoters with ambition and talent to congregate. The prestige and glamour of great cities are also important lures to the young and talented in any field.

Why, then, do some cities (notably, metro Tokyo) maintain or improve their status as technopoles, while others (such as the New York City area) decline? Castells and Hall offer no definitive answer, but contributing factors include how cities perceive their own identity and what kind of future they desire. Cities like London and Boston have suffered from a staid reluctance to move beyond the defense-related industries that led to their first high-tech successes. Paris has seemed more concerned with boosting its prestige than fostering real innovation in its efforts to attract new emerging industries and research firms. And Munich became a technopole after World War II almost by default because Berlin remained divided and isolated for more than 30 years.

But the most provocative effort yet at technopole development is the so-called Multi-Function Polis or MFP--a planned city of 100,000 to be built near Adelaide on Australia's southern coast as a joint venture with the Japanese. Controversial from its inception in 1987, the MFP has been described by its supporters as "an international futuristic and high-tech resort," and by its detractors as a bonanza for Japanese construction firms that are running out of space for mammoth building projects in Japan.

The true nature of the MFP plan remains confusing from the few details Castells and Hall provide. But it appears to combine the residential amenities and attractions of a futuristic resort (like Disney World's EPCOT) with a highly interactive technopole where Japanese and Australians would mingle after hours and on the job, stimulating one another to achieve new breakthroughs in science, business, and intercultural harmony.

It is easier to laugh at the daring of this plan than to demonstrate with any hard evidence why it should not succeed. The motives of MFP's Japanese and Australian promoters may be visionary, imperialistic, or simply venal. Certainly, the technical hurdles to be overcome are enormous, and public support for the project does not yet seem great enough in Australia or Japan to muster the political clout that will be needed to pay for it.

Yet, revolutionary projects have succeeded before now, and a blend of Japanese long-range vision and team effort with Western independence and initiative might just be the next world-winning model lifestyle.

This is a heavy book on a weighty subject. Castells and Hall pack a lot of information on every page. They write with a clear style, but this text-dominated volume contains just 25 regional maps and 18 tables of statistics as illustrations.

Not everyone will care to know in detail how 42 concentrations of high-tech industry in 11 countries stackup against each other. But if the life and fortunes of Silicon Valley and Route 128 are important to you, you should also be aware of places like Seville's Cartuja '93, the Sophia-Antipolis complex in southern France, and Japan's 26 technopolis areas. As Castells and Hall make clear, these technopoles and others like them are the mines and foundries of the Information Age.

How to Build a Technopole

The implications for technopole policy makers can be summed up in 12 aphorisms:

1. Build a clear development strategy.

2. Branch-plants are better than no plants.

3. Synergy as the source of innovation is crucial in the long

4. Develop a long-term vision.

5. Sources of innovation must be identified.

6. Networks must be established early on. There must be networks and channels for information to flow.

7. Short-distance strategies may be easier. But even short-distance moves can be negative if the institutions do not communicate with each other. Private laboratories should be encouraged to move at the same time as public research, or there will be no spin-off.

8. Longer-distance strategies require selectivity. Building synergistic relationships in outlying regions requires one or two target areas that appear to offer the best prospects in terms of preexisting facilities, such as universities, industrial traditions, entrepreneurial capacities, and political leadership, according to Castells and Hall.

9. Major central inducements. Defense spending played a key part in Silicon Valley, for instance.

10. Identify new niches. The Ruhr developed specialized high-tech industries to meet local needs, then exploited their export potential.

11. Keep consistency. A techno-park, for instance, should not be allowed to degenerate into a pure office park just because it might be profitable.

12. The best may be the enemy of the good. "Countries and regions should not seek to judge all their efforts by the most rigorous, exclusive criteria," Castells and Hall conclude.

Source: Technopoles of the World

Lane Jennings is production editor for Future Survey and editor of Futures Research Directory: Organizations and Periodicals 1993-94.