Technopoles of the UK, unite!

While the widespread assumption that a Silicon Valley can be anywhere high technology policy makers choose to put it provides ample scope for amusement, there are some very serious consequences of misunderstanding the Silicon Valley model and of failing to appreciate the nature of high technology…Because high technology is seen as a multi-purpose economic nostrum, high technology policy is easily confused with employment, education and, particularly, regional development policy…The world cannot sprout hundreds of new Silicon Valleys, each created oblivious of the others, and each exploiting a presumed comparative advantage in biotechnology, microelectronics and information technology to supply the same international market. The situation has become quite preposterous.

Macdonald, 1983, HIGH TECHNOLOGY POLICY AND THE SILICON VALLEY MODEL: AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE, in: Prometheus

We are all familiar with policy prescriptions that argue for investment in R&D as a means to encourage local economic growth, often in rust-belt type areas. The latest term for these is place-based interventions. In so much as these are merely attempts to mobilize taxpayer-funded cash to those areas (pork-barrel), who could argue with them (a little bit of something is better than nothing, right?).

But as always, when one looks into these matters, things get complicated and political. I find the whole discourse so confused; in truth, I really struggle to understand what is going on (& not much seems to be about science & research). I brought together some more or less unconnected notes and readings below that explore some of the areas I have yet to understand.

Problems with technopoles & information economies

There is an image of the nineteenth century industrial economy, familiar from a hundred history textbooks: the coal mine and its neighboring iron foundry, belching forth black smoke into the sky…there is a corresponding image for the new economy [which] consists of a series of low, discreet buildings that go under a generic name, technopole…[its function is] to generate the essential the basic materials of the information economy.

Castels & Hall, Technopoles of the World (1994; updated 2014)

The well-known book cited above, by Castels & Hall, presents scientific activity as a benign influence on the local environment (unlike the black smoke belched forth by the foundry). This view has apparently inspired the development of science & technology parks, start-up incubators, etc. and, indeed, a whole agenda that seeks to use R&D investment to spur local economic development based on supposed spill-over effects. But we must also admit that scientific activities are not the sure road to riches, & can have more ambivalent impacts on a local community as well.

The above quotation refers to the information economy. The term and variants such as knowledge economy have been used for 50 years – referring to a great diversity of situations, to the extent that they have probably been robbed of meaning. In 1969, the management guru Peter Drucker stated that knowledge economies were a core means for African-American empowerment – the economic partner of the civil rights movement. But one must admit, the term also has dystopian features. Today, ‘actually existing’ knowledge economies seem to depend on an underbelly of insecure workers, often undocumented migrants, to supply the food, brew the coffee, and deliver the parcels. The goods being consumed in the knowledge economy are made elsewhere in low income settings, often with atrocious labor and environmental standards.

If the term refers to anything, it might be simply that there have been geographical shifts in the location of different parts of the value chain (which have perhaps been confused with shifts in the mode of production). One of the greatest confusions around the information economy was probably that knowledge production would accumulate in developed countries. But as we can observe in the world today, the re-distribution of productive activities has been much more fluid.

Some other observations (referring to table at end of article):

• Correlation between taxpayer investment in scientific activities, and economic growth is, as many have noted, tenuous to say the least. The jury seems still very much out on whether technopoles ‘work’. One observation is that many of the places cited were relatively prosperous even before the technopole kicked in (i.e, wealth begets R&D, not vice versa).
• Not a lot of evidence to suggest ex-ante policy design was motivated by sincere goals of creating development via R&D (in the Tsukuba example, it was actually to reduce urban pressure on Tokyo by creating a new town; in the South Korean case, Park, the dictator, wanted to deliver patronage to his home region). Policy execution over long periods tends to vacillate; ex-ante analysis risk putting motivations into the minds of policymakers that did not really exist at the time.
• There is not much to connect the places together – what evidence is there of actual legal, institutional, inspirational, personal, etc. links between the various sets of policymakers involved? How we can talk in the same breath about the Park dictatorship (South Korea), 1970s Japan, 1990s Barcelona, 1950s Silicon Valley, etc.? The political, economic, and historical contexts are different; it is quite confusing.
• To call great manufacturing centers such as Japan, or South Korea, knowledge economies, seems to stretch the word’s meaning to breaking point.

The North of England; amnesia about past efforts

Much of the agenda around using R&D & ‘innovation’ investments to spur regional growth appears to be concerned with designing strategies that produce economic development in deprived areas of otherwise wealthy places. This means, in Europe, talking about places like the south of Italy, & former industrial regions such as NE France, Southern Belgium, the East of Germany, the North of England, ex-Warsaw Pact countries, etc.

In the North of England, we are talking about 90 years in some instances since heavy industry faltered during the Great Depression, & around 40 years since the supposed ‘final’ collapse, so to speak. A lot of history has happened. Numerous different efforts to ‘regenerate’ the region have also occurred over time; some succeeded, some not so much (all of which, by the way, provide intriguing analytical material – plenty of books and papers on this topic).

It is one of the great oddities of UK policy discussions today (Northern Powerhouse, et al.) that the North of England is talked about like a tabula rasa which no one has ever tried to ‘fix’ before. I mean, does no one recall Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 2004 effort to introduce regional devolution in the North East – knocked down, ironically enough, by the citizens of the North East themselves through a referendum (the ‘anti’ campaign run by one Dominic Cummings)? It seems to me Blair had the right idea; and the decision taken against it by the public themselves was a body-blow to their own prosperity.

Conclusion? None from me – other than to say that economic activities disappeared from a particular location, or were sought anew, and policymakers over several generations worked on the problem. Projects probably did not always work out exactly as intended, possibly because policymakers were trying to control factors that were outside their grasp. Individuals found their own accommodations; the most prominent was acceptance of relative poverty; another was to leave (thereby producing a more-or-less socially stable solution).

Town & gown

The claim in the science policy literature, based on macroeconomic analyses, seems to be that expansion in local R&D, innovation etc. *could* produce positive spill-over effects. We must admit though that is also a deeply political statement; installing more scientific activities in a given location could have highly equivocal or even detrimental impacts, & might additionally carry burdensome opportunity costs (as viewed from a more left-wing perspective; accounting for the full range of cultural, social, & micro-economic impacts). This is not an abstract point – consider the example below.

Johns Hopkins University (US), a site of knowledge production, sits surrounded by an economically-deprived area of Baltimore. In the last two decades, the university, which is a private institution, has sought to develop its surroundings via a scheme known as the East Baltimore Development Initiative (EBDI).

While some analysts consider the scheme excellent, Gomez (2013) draws the opposite conclusions. Certainly, the long-standing presence of a major center for medical research, Johns Hopkins, had evidently not benefited local residents in the ways one might hope or expect.

In the year 2000…the community was primarily African-American…its social, economic, & health characteristics among the worst in the city…[including] lead poisoning, heart disease, strokes, cancer, diabetes, & other chronic health conditions.

Gomez, 2013, Race, Class, Power, and Organizing in East Baltimore: Rebuilding Abandoned Communities in America, pp. 2-3

The development plan proposed at that time by Johns Hopkins & the local government was apparently to demolish the entire neighborhood (>1500 houses) and replace it with new houses & a biotech park (of course, also displacing thousands of primarily African-American residents). Herein, therefore appears to have been a plan to install more R&D facilities. The area was duly acquired via eminent domain laws and buildings knocked down.

They say that Johns Hopkins is taking over everything. It’s just like the slavery days. They take your land and you got to go.

Rita Berry, long-term resident of East Baltimore, cited by Hummel, undated

The community fought back. The wrecking balls were halted. Yet this was only a temporary respite; from what I could gather from Gomez, promises made by the developers have been left unfulfilled.

Gomez draws the conclusion that community organizing is crucial if developments such as EBDI are to produce genuine local benefits. Regrettably, I guess, we could not realistically expect community organizing to develop as a matter of routine during policy implementation in all cases, but in an ideal world the leaders of development schemes would be alert to it, and would work towards it.

The above is not uniquely Baltimorean; albeit the case being particularly large scale, egregious, & well-documented. It is, of course, hard to say if there is a difference between the university doing the above, and any large-scale developer or government agency. But I think there is meaning behind the term ‘town and gown’ which is specific to the university. As should be obvious, a university is not an unalloyed glory for the inhabitants of a place, but something far more complex & ambivalent.

The informant had left school at fourteen…he had come to bitterly regret & resent has lack of higher education. He also thought the lack of educational opportunity in society generally to be a great social injustice. Living and working daily under the massive presence of the University [of Oxford] was a constant reminder of this injustice, and a chafing of his own personal disappointment.

Collison, 2009, Oxford Town and Gown

There are presumably social and cultural histories of association with the local community; pride, resentments, grudges, accommodations, concerns about expansion & planning permissions, power relationships, etc. A complicated picture neither good nor bad necessarily in all cases, but emblematic of people living together.

Research institutes in suburban & rural locations

Moving beyond the university, one could ask questions about how a sample of research institutes impacted the local economy, social conditions and culture. The point to note is the long running nature of them all, and the fact they are located in places with small populations (suburban & rural areas), suggesting impacts could be particularly marked. Presumably through time a whole range of relationships pertained between the institution and the local community – from indifference or ignorance, to support, to active dispute.

Most of these institutions have now closed; the closures tended to be couched, at least in the press, around job losses (often thousands). This highlights the impacts of the institution on local employment.

The decision by Imperial College (2004) to close an agricultural research station (Wye College), however, shows a much richer account of relationships between a scientific institution and the local village. This is evidenced by fierce & well-orchestrated local resistance to the closure (the institution was, though, eventually closed & the property sold to developers) – tied up with worries over commercial development, local identity, & the role of an outside force (Imperial College). Oddly, perhaps, the campaign to stop the closure galvanized support from all parts of the local community, even environmentalists who might previously have disavowed the institution with its connections to post-WWII pesticide development.

The village had once hosted another application-oriented agricultural research institute, ADAS, which was shut in the 1990s. As such, the closure of Wye College seems to have delivered a decisive, final blow to a rural community that had distinguished itself by a connection to scientific activity for many decades.

One preliminary reflection on the science that went on in many of these places, particularly the commercial ones (such as we know it), is that it will have responded exclusively to non-local issues such as company strategy; there was no local democratic governance as such. But perhaps there was also a local ‘manifestation’ which is a bit hard to characterize.

It’s tempting to make the point that universal knowledge is not the sole province of the center. Possibly one can detect in current policy prescriptions a certain element of that patronizing elision that the center is about universal knowledge while the periphery only deals with locally-applicable knowledge. Evidently, there are connections between local and universal that are worked out over many years, not always successfully.

The specifics of the science

If the content of the science turns out to be nefarious and so forth, it could damage society – locally, and elsewhere (obvious). There are, of course, specific examples of research – infectious diseases, nuclear power and weapons development, animal testing, etc., which are either morally objectionable to parts of the community, or could present a mortal threat to public health in the vicinity if not conducted properly.

The comments above possibly illustrate the fact that public concerns about the dangers or ethics of particular types of scientific activity are not free-floating or abstract, but can fix on specific locations.

In 1990, undercover filming by activists at the UK’s National Institute for Medical Research revealed malpractice in animal experimentation by two staff (a government inquiry later confirmed some of the allegations). This led to long-running protests outside the building by what were presumed to be local groups. Protests have also been held, more famously, outside the Porton Down lab, given its warlike R&D on nerve gases and biological weapons, but also against animal testing.

Of course the biggest of these ‘controversial’ or divisive cases is nuclear. Nuclear waste is unlike any other type of pollution. We also know about the many egregious examples where indigenous people had their land stolen for purposes of nuclear testing – the Navajo (US) being one well-known case.

Discussions in the UK about a deep storage facility for nuclear waste have gone nowhere because no one wants the waste; the only viable solution is to keep on trucking, so to speak – i.e., keep talking about it. Davies (2012), Sellafield Stories: Life In Britain’s First Nuclear Plant, offers a very interesting account of the complex local responses one observes to a nuclear facility; and in my view is exemplary in this regard.

Conclusion

I can’t point to any serious conclusions; the above are just a jumble of thoughts. Most of the time I have no idea what is being argued about, or what issues are really at stake, and generally therefore feel very dis-empowered as a citizen.

I think that taxpayer-funded investments in scientific activities will have very small effects on local economic development besides direct employment (which could be large according to funding scale). But it could also have significant cultural, and sociological effects, not all of them positive.

The discussion in this area is obviously entirely political; few though, are prepared to be sincere about this fact, thereby spreading a good deal of misunderstanding.

It is obvious that some schemes get dumped upon deprived areas under *guise* of economic development. ‘Cleaning up’ the neighborhood requires it to be deemed terra nullius (hence, perhaps, the persistent amnesia in regard to past development schemes in the North of England). In other cases, the rhetoric is probably just masterful inactivity (a common goal for taxpayer-funded R&D); in essence, as sop, or performance art; pork barrel. Insincere discussion, one and all, though, & not really worth the time of day from an analytical perspective.

It must be said, also, that even the *apparently* simple act of establishing a new R&D institution & sustaining it for more than a few years proves elusive (as witnessed by repeated UK failures such as within the Regional Development Agencies).

The design of R&D investments that provide genuine benefits to the local community seems, accordingly, very hard. If the UK’s experiences teach us anything, some of the reasons for this problem would include remarkable levels of amnesia by policymakers (precluding learning by doing), an over-emphasis on economic dimensions, & that the *actually-existing* local community will typically be ignored.

Technopoles as identified by analysts

Example	Appraisal
Silicon Valley	‘Great historical exception…for the first time an innovative milieu was created by deliberate human action’
Boston’s Highway 128	‘High technology re-industrialization’
Taedok, South Korea (1970s-1980s)	Re-location of government R&D institutions due to decision of Park, the dictator; ‘caprice of a prince’ (No mention is made of the Vietnam War in boosting the S. Korean economy, a glaring example of how badly informed innovation policy-type analysis can be.)
Tsukuba Science City (1962-1980)	Reduce population pressure in Tokyo by relocating activities out of the city. ‘The only fair answer is that the verdict is not yet in’
Japan’s Technopolis Program	‘Distinctive by being vast…a national plan’
London, Paris, Tokyo	‘The state played a crucial role for reasons of defense or national prestige’
Munich	Direct benefit of collapse of Berlin electro-technical industry & WWII
Southern California	‘The warfare state, not Hollywood or Disneyland, is the foundation on which the economy has built huge prosperity.’
Barcelona*	‘Catalan government pursued vision of high R&D, high tech, knowledge economy with Barcelona as the leading city in the Mediterranean’ e.g., by building Barcelona Biomedical Research Park; ‘some significant achievements to show for considerable expenditure’.
Queensland Smart State (1998-2012)*	AU$3b initiative to establish Queensland as ‘a global leader in innovation in 10 years’ by building ‘university-research-business precincts’ in the state capital (Brisbane); ‘some significant achievements to show for considerable expenditure’
English Science Cities*	Resources modest; large science parks with rapid growth of ‘science-based industry’ absent; ‘changes of existing science infrastructure towards local collaboration’