PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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elements are knowledge control, information, innovation, the capacity to quickly renew
products, as well as “the capacity to reduce the friction of distance and time” through the
use of informatics, advanced telecommunications and transport systems. Moreover, as
Banister and Berechman (1993:11) point out, in the modern economies of Western and
Central Europe, “industry can now locate almost anywhere as it is not dependent on a
single source of raw material inputs.”
Regarding infrastructure development, the shift towards a post-Fordist,
“networked” industrial model has elevated the importance of high-tech services and
technologies over traditional rail-, road- or water-based transport systems. Investment
into the general infrastructure of regions and cities, such as communication, education,
training, and R&D capabilities is often needed more than investments into traditional
transport systems. With the advent of the Information Age, the lines between social and
economic overhead capital are becoming increasingly blurred. Especially in less favored
regions, successful capitalist restructuring is thought to depend more than anything on
“building local institutional capacity” (Amin and Tomaney 1995:218). Within these
institutional settings, post-Fordist scholars stress the importance of territorially bound
linkages, and predict “an increase in the regional embeddedness of firms and, hence,
benefits even for peripheral regions” (Giunta and Martinelli 1995:246). Note that such an
emphasis on the vertical disintegration of firms and the emergence of new spatial
structures is somewhat at odds with the two-way roads argument (see 2.5.4 “Rethinking
the theory on transport investments”). More importantly, if it were true that the new
capitalism was no longer based on economies of scale, it would give smaller, flexible,
interconnected firms in less central locations better opportunities to compete through