Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

Knowledge-based urban developments (KBUDs) are an increasingly common element of urban planning and strategy making: policy makers and developers set out to stimulate economic prosperity by promoting the integration and concentration of research, technology, and human capital. But KBUD is, by its advocates' own admission, a fuzzy concept, assuming that local physical development will drive urban upgrading within wider innovative production networks. We seek to address one element of this confusion by exploring how physical developments actively create innovative connections between local actors, drawing on the microscale science park and incubator literature. Using the case of one knowledge precinct, Kennispark in the east of the Netherlands, we investigate how active and passive elements of KBUDs drive integration of knowledge infrastructure in the urban fabric, as a prerequisite to building cross-city connections. On the basis of both qualitative and quantitative data, we conclude that there is a dynamic interrelation of proximity and connectivity within the precinct that contributes to building within-city knowledge communities that may in turn lead to improved cross-city connectivity and hence urban upgrading.

Does a high-tech economy create fundamentally different places from other employment areas? In this paper I propose a typology of small to medium-scale high-technology districts in terms of their physical environments rather than their economic features (which is the more common basis of such classifications). I define a set of recognizable high-tech places: corridors, clumps, cores, comprehensive campuses, tech nology subdivisions, and scattered technology sites. I argue that there are many overlaps in design and layout with generic urban industrial and office development, and with planned new towns, university campuses, and garden suburbs. However, as this part of the economy grows, so too will the effect of such places on long-term urban sustainability and livability. It is important that planning and design for such developments consider larger effects on issues such as transportation options, energy use, housing balance, and sense of place.

The South East of England is Britain's ‘problem region’ of unsettled administrative and political arrangements centred on a dense web of generally small settlements and their complex interrelations. Surrounding and tied to the international finance and political centres of London, much of the rest of the semirural South East region nevertheless exhibits a degree of polycentricity. Notably, within the South East of England are a series of ‘high-tech’ hot spots critical to future UK economic growth. However, the achievement of significant growth in and around high-tech spaces is challenging, given the context of semirurality and historic infrastructure shortfalls in some of these locations. Growth is therefore associated with significant planning dilemmas, a situation which has prompted the introduction of ‘soft’ planning spaces as a means to transcend sclerotic governance structures and planning policy stasis. Yet, these subregional arrangements may also represent a vehicle for the reassertion of territory, refracting and reinforcing local political conflict rather than cultivating an unambiguous form of postpolitics. We illustrate these issues with regard to the emergence of the ‘Science Vale UK’ area in southern Oxfordshire, and consider some of the broader implications of planning for growth in such a distinctive settlement pattern.

This study examines how the Daedeok Science and Technology (S&T) Park, built as a national R&D center, has evolved over time from the perspective of a complex adaptive system. We argue that the Daedeok S&T Park—a planned park exhibiting path-dependent, self-reinforcing trajectories led by the government—has gradually evolved over time, undergoing some tension between nationalizing and regionalizing forces instead of encountering an imminent and radical transformation through the replication of a new model each time. The state's role is highlighted as a creator that ironically leads to the process of the planned park's evolution toward a more cluster-based park by strengthening regional actors' capabilities and changing the structure of governance. The study contributes to the literature on S&T parks by providing an in-depth analysis of an S&T park from an evolutionary perspective, and not from a typical static evaluation, and is based on archival analyses and case studies of ten firms as well as on in-depth interviews with key actors.

The ‘cultivated’ nature of the Chinese science parks, against the background of a transitional economy, differentiates them from spontaneous and cooperative Western models, and is a phenomenon deserving close examination. We study the dynamics and features of the so-called Optics Valley of China (OVC) in Hubei, aiming to explore the characteristics of an embryonic local innovation system constructed in a less-favoured region. The results show that institutional factors are the leading forces in a cultivated science park like the OVC. However, along with the shifting focus of the local government, the OVC's industrial scale has remained small and its industrial chain has remained incomplete. Moreover, the lack of trust and interactions between various components in this innovation system has been highly noticeable. All these features may be seen as warnings to the OVC that a revision of this innovation system is needed in order to avoid the fate of becoming an ‘optical illusion’.

The term ‘science park’ evokes a “you know it when you see it” consensus among policy experts. Although the function of science parks is broadly understood as collaborative applied research between universities, industry, and governments, the physical and institutional form of these ‘cooperative research centers' shows significant variation. In this paper I present a typology of such centers in the current US context and discuss how they are changing. Using evidence from one high-tech industry, I underscore the agglomerated nature of basic and applied science—a key argument in the rethinking of decisions around public investments in scientific spaces. Finally, I conclude that US innovation policy is shifting to a more explicitly metropolitan orientation, recognizing the importance of proximity and agglomeration. Implicit in this shift is a reevaluation of the geography of public investment in technology infrastructure as it pertains to cities and regions.

Designated high-tech spaces such as science and high-technology parks have come to the fore as vehicles for promoting local and regional economic development in many nations. The evidence of their efficacy is mixed and reflects contradictions in the roles they are asked to perform in the service of national economic modernization. Indeed, in this respect and in many instances, their value may be largely political and rhetorical. Malaysia is a case in point and one we focus on in this paper, where we discuss the contribution of high-tech spaces—Kulim High-Tech Park, Technology Park Malaysia, BioXCell, and the multimedia supercorridor—to the political economy of economic modernization. Drawing on original interview material, we highlight the tangled intraterritorial and extraterritorial geographies in which these privileged high-tech spaces are positioned.

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) were introduced in England just over ten years ago, and their adoption in over 180 locations all over the country owes a great deal to their potential ability to raise private funds to invest in the development of business areas. However, much of the academic literature on BIDs has been critical of what it sees as an expansion of corporate control of urban spaces and the weakening of elected local government, often on the evidence of a long-running North American debate. On the basis of ten case studies of English BIDs, in this paper I address the evolution of those organisations as private stakeholder-led instruments for the governance and management of business areas in England. I discuss whether and to what extent English BIDs constitute private government of urban areas, and the attendant issues of accountability and spatial inequalities in the distribution of public services and investment. I conclude by examining the implications of its findings for the future of urban governance.

This paper analyses contrasting academic understandings of ‘equilibrium resilience’ and ‘evolutionary resilience’ and investigates how these nuances are reflected within both policy and practice. We reveal that there is a lack of clarity in policy, where these differences are not acknowledged with resilience mainly discussed as a singular, vague, but optimistic aim. This opaque political treatment of the term and the lack of guidance has affected practice by privileging an equilibrist interpretation over more transformative, evolutionary measures. In short, resilience within spatial planning is characterised by a simple return to normality that is more analogous with planning norms, engineered responses, dominant interests, and technomanagerial trends. The paper argues that, although presented as a possible paradigm shift, resilience policy and practice underpin existing behaviour and normalise risk. It leaves unaddressed wider sociocultural concerns and instead emerges as a narrow, regressive, technorational frame centred on reactive measures at the building scale.