6. Constitutive Power of New Technology in Imagining and
Remaking Cities
• Urban planning has long
invoked new communications
technologies as normative or
utopian visions
• E.g. Two modernist utopias
from 1930s: Le Corbusier’s
Ville Radieuse and Frank
Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre
City
7. Now Such Imaginative Work Now Centres on ICTs
• Paradox: distance-transcendence, space-time
compression leading to a growing salience of
urban place in economic location
• Urban entrepreneurialism incraesingly centres
on using material and discursive value of ICTs
to try and add value to places in globalized
economy
• Place marketing, aggressive supply side
inducements, to try and influence flows of
investment in context of neoliberal global
economy
8. Embedded Within Stark Geographical
Divisions of Labour
• But, defined by stark spatial divisions of
labour
• ICT-mediated geographies used to refine
such divisions, not overcome them
• Ann Markusen defines “Sticky
Places” (high-value added, ‘creative’ and
central locations) and “Slippery
Space” (peripheral locations where
routinised work and labour are located)
9. Markusen’s “Sticky Places”
• High value-added and creative locations
within or near core, global cities
• Excellent transport and telecoms
connectivity provided by market and sunk
investment
• Minimise risks to major finance, legal,
headquarter and media/high tech
companies through cutting-edge skills and
highly diverse labour markets
• ‘Soft’ social and cultural services and
‘cool’ urban ambience
• Sustain and support continuous innovation
and research and development through
intense face to face and online contact
11. Revalorised Urban Cores:
Highly Localised Geographies of Dot.Com Activity
• Self sustaining cycles of
innovation, speculation,
venture capital,
investment, migration
create boom cities
• Competitive advantage
overcomes high costs
• Gentrification and
“cappuccino urbanism”
leads to social exclusion
12. Urban ICT Initiatives for “Sticky Places”
e.g. “Glocal” logic of Sohonet Network providing extreme
broadband services only to core media enclaves in
selected global cities
16. New Urban Zones and
‘Teleport’ infrastructures
• Decreasingly relevant as
private market supplies
intensely competitive
property, services and
infrastructure
• E.g. Tokyo ‘Teleport
Town’ (top) and New
York teleport (bottom)
17. ‘Technopoles’ on Peripheries of Global Cities
• Main high-tech and corporate
research and development
centres
• Campus style, suburban
environments
• Relate very closely with major
technology universities
• Highly dualised labour markets:
well rewarded technological
elites and often invisible support
workers
18. Silicon Valley is Archetype
• But technopole spaces actually
develop organically through
endogenous research and
development by entrepreneurs
and small firms
• Can boost dynamics once
underway
• But very difficult to engineer or
create through planning and
public policy alone, especially
in peripheral locations
19. Major national technopole strategies 1970s-1990s in
France and Japan
• Sophia Antipolis France) Tskuba Science City (Japan)
21. Strategies for “Slippery Space”
* Global peripheries in global N and S:
Areas of low wealth and/or high un and
under employment
• Ruthless cost-based competition for
globalizing, routine activities
• Call centres, logistics hubs, free trade
zones for manufacturing and assembly
• Supply side inducements widespread:
tax breaks, grants, free land, property
and infrastructure
• Such investments often intensely
mobile. Often not self-sustaining,
fragile. and require continuous subsidy
23. Data Processing, ‘Back Offices’ and Call Centre Parks
with ‘Digiports’/ ‘Teleports’
• Global North and South
competing with each other
• Global “off-shoring” going on
as mobile call centre
investment moves from low
cost regions in global north to
rapidly growing high-tech
cities in India, caribbean,
Africa e.g. Bangalore (top),
which are moving up the
value-added chain
24. Comprehensive Attempts to Rework National and Urban-Regional
Economies
• Especially common in Asia
• Top-down and semi-authoritarian strategies to
try and use ambitious urban technology plans
to “leap frog” up value added chain from
slippery space to sticky space
• Whole new urban centres created with
comprehensive inducements to tempt in
foreign investment from ‘blue chip’
companies in high tech research and
development and innovation
• Malaysia’s Multimedia Supercorridor (MSC)
is exemplar
25. In reality a “slippery
space’ masqeurading as
“sticky place”
27. A “Ubiquitous City”: A new city plan exploiting comprehensive vision of wireless
and remediated urban life
28. Utopian Urban Design Vision: “Digital Media Street - The World’s
First Ubiquitous Boulevard”
29. Remediation/ Wireless
brings discursive Shift
in Cybercity Strategies:
From fixed and
material connectivities
to Cities of “Ubiquity”
and “Infinity”
(as here in Taipei)
32. Conclusions and Critique
• New wave of urban entrepreneurial planning where
discursive and material power of ICTs are used to add
value to, differentiate or revalorise specific places within
increasingly globalised and competitive contexts
• Wide range: from simple place-labelling (‘cyber’,
‘silicon’, ‘intelligent’, ‘digital’, ‘E-’ prefixes),
through infrastructure supply, to comprehensive urban
planning and design strategies symbolising national
economic transformation
33. • 1. Highly problematic. Technological determinist and utopian rhetoric means they
often fail spectacularly, even in own terms.
• 2. Often use glamour and utopian resonances of ICTs to portray plans as
unproblematically beneficial to all. Motors of utopian arrival, renewal, which bring
equal benefits to all people and places
• 3. Therefore deny politics. Obfuscate erased or negelcted places, excluded
people, and alternative possibilities
• 4. Extremely costly and often socially regressive: public finances and subsidies go
to affluent elites and rich multinationals and infrastructure suppliers
• 5. Spatially highly divisive: Often investment concentrates exclusively within
increasingly fortified landscapes of techno-elites and is withdrawn from social and
public services supporting wider (especially poorer) city
• 6. Finally, symbolic power often more important than material. E.g. teleport in
Edinburgh, which was nearly built in 1980s, where fake satellite dishes would not
actually have been connected to actual telecoms network !
