ancient cities

Further Readings
Castells, Manuel and Peter Hall. 1994. Technopoles of
the World: The Making of Twenty-first Century
Industrial Complexes. London: Routledge.
Fishman, Robert. 1987. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and
Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books.
Garreau, Joel. 1991. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier.
New York: Doubleday.
Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin. 1996.
Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces,
Urban Places. London: Routledge.
———. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked
Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the
Urban Condition. London: Routledge.
Sassen, Saskia, ed. 2002. Global Networks: Linked
Cities. London: Routledge.
Soja, Edward W. 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies
of Cities and Regions. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Wheeler, John, Barney Warf, and Yuko Aoyama, eds.
2000. Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The
Fracturing of Geographies. London: Routledge.
Te c h n o p o l e s
Technopoles are generally planned complexes of
advanced technology firms, linked to research
laboratories and developed to foster regional economic
growth. The concept is based on the role
that globalization and the rise of information- or
knowledge-based economies play in regional
development. Technopoles are designed to promote
interactions among high-tech firms, research
centers, and often universities to create synergy
that generates knowledge, innovation, products,
firms, and thus regional growth and development.
Through these synergistic effects and the agglomeration
economies produced by innovative
advanced technology firms, spinoffs and development
occur in the region where the complex is
located.
Technopoles usually are established in new
industrial areas, outside core manufacturing centers,
with the goal of attracting companies to
locate at the site. Some technopoles are formed of
new companies, some of branches of existing companies.
Local governments, often through public–
private partnerships, are the main promoters of
technopoles as regional development policy.
Technopoles
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The term technopole gained prominence in the
1990s, with the publication of Manuel Castells
and Peter Hall’s book Technopoles of the World:
The Making of 21st Century Industrial Complexes.
Their definition describes a technopole as a planned
place to promote innovation and advanced technology
production. Technopoles do not simply
emerge in a capitalist economy; they are a form of
regional planning through deliberate attempts to
promote innovation and advanced technology
and, thus, regional development and economic
expansion in specific places. Technopoles are typically
spatially defined places such as science parks
and advanced technology business parks. The
physical place encourages mutual cooperation
among firms, which then may attract more firms
to the location. The region where the technopole is
located captures the broader benefits of economic
growth and development.
The technopole is derived from the idea of the
innovative milieu—a set of social, economic, institutional,
and organizational structures that creates
a place that engenders innovation and development.
Innovative milieu is most often associated
with the French economist Philippe Aydalot, whose
ideas were taken up extensively by regional economists
and regional planners in the 1980s and 1990s.
Indeed, a whole research network was established
to bring these ideas to light and refinement, the
Groupe de Recherche Européan sur les Milieux
Innovateurs (GREMI). GREMI’s focus was the territorial
implications of the relation between innovation
and regional development, mainly in Europe
and North America.
The bases of these theories were observations
of unprecedented changes in regional development.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a diverse set of
regions emerged as places of investment, innovation,
and growth, largely spatially removed from
traditional manufacturing centers and their attendant
sociopolitical and labor environments. Silicon
Valley in Santa Clara County, California, became
the model of an innovative industrial space through
its lead role in the electronics and information
revolution, with specialization in advanced technologies
such as semiconductors, computers, the
Internet, and the life sciences. More than products
emerged in these innovative regions; new ways to
conduct research and make products contributed
to important process and management innovations