Crafting Innovative Places for Australia’s Knowledge Economy

Edward J. Blakely, Richard Hu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789811336171
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811336188
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Gestione

This book integrates planning, policy, economics, and urban design into an approach to crafting innovative places. Exploring new paradigms of innovative places under the framework of globalisation, urbanisation, and new technology, it argues against state-centric policies to innovation and focuses on how a globalized approach can shape innovative capacity and competitiveness. It notably situates the innovative place making paradigm in a broader context of globalisation, urbanisation, the knowledge economy and technological advancement, and employs an international perspective that includes a wide range of case studies from America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Developing a co-design and co-creation paradigm that integrates governments, the private sector and the community into shared understanding and collaborative action in crafting innovative places, it discusses place-based innovation in Australian context to inform policy making and planning, and to contribute to policy debates onprograms of smart cities and communities.

 

© The Author(s) 2019

Edward J. Blakely and Richard HuCrafting Innovative Places for Australia’s Knowledge Economyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3618-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Rediscovering Places

Edward J. Blakely¹ and Richard Hu²

(1)

University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

(2)

University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia

Edward J. Blakely (Corresponding author)

Richard Hu

End Abstract

In this book, we call for rediscovering the role of places in incubating innovation to drive Australia’s knowledge economy, drawing upon experiences and practices around the world. We unpack the new imperatives and paradigms of innovative place making within the contemporary forces of globalisation, urbanisation, and especially innovation. We integrate planning, policy, economics, and urban design to forge a ‘crafting’ approach to co-creating and co-designing innovative places. The world is changing fast, with mounting uncertainty and unpredictability. The power to solve the problems of a post-industrial society lies in communities (Katz and Nowak 2017). This shifting of power towards a local level is occurring not only in the United States and Europe, but also in Asia and other developing regions. Australia is no exception.

Cities have drawn much attention as we have sought to understand and respond to contemporary transformations and challenges. ‘Cities are the new countries’ (OECD 2016) is not an exaggerated claim. As of 2018, the world urbanisation rate is 55 per cent, and is projected to reach nearly 70 per cent in 2050 (United Nations 2018). More than two-thirds of us will be city dwellers by the middle of this century: our world is urban. There has been a power restructuring from nation states to cities, and this trend will continue with further growth of cities. But cities are still complex systems and are often too large a spatial unit to allow us to fully understand our society’s diversity and nuances. Places—within and outside cities—deserve attention, in both knowledge building and policymaking. Numerous places are innovative nodes interlinked globally and digitally. Place-based innovation capacity is shaping the global competitiveness of nations and cities.

In this introductory chapter, we contextualise the macro forces that underpin our interest in places. We start with the popular thesis of ‘a flat world’ and argue that the world is also more uneven than ever, socially, economically, and environmentally, and especially in terms of innovation capacity. The increasingly uneven world is interlinked with the two interweaving contemporary forces of globalisation and urbanisation. Both have been widely discussed and debated, but our concern is with their impacts on cities and places. We then move on to our focal point of innovation and its disruptive effects. We briefly outline the challenges for Australia’s economy within these broad contexts. The chapter concludes by describing the overall approach and organisation of this book.

A Flat and Uneven World

‘The world is flat’, as claimed and popularised by Thomas Friedman (2007): people around the world are on a more even playing field today than ever before. Individuals have easier access to stocks of knowledge worldwide due to information and communication technology (ICT) advances and accelerated globalisation. This has increased expectations for standards of living and access to opportunities. Commodities and services have global outreach, with a level of ease and efficiency unimaginable decades ago. A tribesman in Kenya uses his mobile phone to communicate the number of cattle he has in his herd. A New York banker uses the same technology to price her goods and commodities for trade around the world, which may even involve the tribesman’s herd. Knowledge access is being democratised. It promotes business exchange and social interaction at unprecedented speeds and scales. For the first time in human history, we all share the same ideas, ambitions, abilities, and problems.

Technologies have transformed and are continuing to transform the labour-intensive agricultural and industrial sectors. These sectors traditionally consumed an enormous amount of energy, paired with tremendous use of human resources. Technology has been liberating human beings, physically and intellectually. Recent advances in information technology have particularly brought about intellectual liberation. Frey and Osborne (2017, p. 258) observe that ‘historically, computerisation has largely been confined to manual and cognitive routine tasks involving explicit rule-based activities… [it] is now spreading to domains commonly defined as non-routine’. The exponential advance of technologies poses questions about the future roles of both people and places in situations not experienced before in human history.

In previous eras, physical and natural endowments largely determined economic outcomes. Port Kembla in the city of Wollongong on Australia’s east coast contained the country’s largest steelworks. This area was one of the wealthiest in Australia with a significant economic advantage at its peak in the 1980s. The comparative advantage this area possessed in natural resources could not be simply imitated elsewhere. But while these sorts of mineral and infrastructure advantages were central to the economies of the industrial era, in the new information era, goods and services can be produced and accessed anywhere. We live in an age of minimal barriers to economic activities. Goods and services are more fluid than ever before. Even raw materials such as steel can be fashioned from recycling waste, or transported at low cost, as seen from the production of automobile frames and ship hulls in resource-poor nations like Japan and Bangladesh. The ability to cheaply transport resources and goods across borders has allowed industries to thrive in places where this was previously impossible.

Physical locations continue to enjoy useful advantages, but a location’s natural endowments no longer determine only its economic destiny. While natural settings such as rivers, streams, seashores, and valleys remain useful, their present utility differs from the past. These idyllic venues now attract talented and creative people, who produce goods and services for transmission and consumption globally. It is in the context of this transition from resource to knowledge primacy that we need to re-examine our economic development strategies. It is now possible to reduce our need for and use of raw materials and mineral resources, which require rivers, airports, rail yards, and other infrastructure to transport. More and more, we are substituting lighter and smarter goods composed from materials that do not require as much energy either to create or to transfer to the end user.

Technology has enabled global outreach of and access to products and services, creating ‘a flat world’:

Whenever civilisation has gone through a major technological revolution, the world has changed in profound and unsettling ways. But there is something about the flattening of the world that is going to be qualitatively different from the great changes of previous era: the speed and breadth with which it is taking hold…This flattening process is happening at warp speed and directly or indirectly touching a lot more people on the planet at once. The faster and broader this transition to a new era, the greater the potential for disruption, as opposed to an orderly transfer of power from the old winners to the new winners. (Friedman 2007, p. 49)

But the technological capacity and innovation that have enabled this remarkable change is much more ‘uneven’. Technologies agglomerate in certain places that enjoy a global competitive advantage. ‘Speed and breadth’, as argued by Friedman (2007), are not the only attributes that make the current changes different from those of the past; there is also the ‘scale and impact’ of the changes. One important attribute of the flattening process is that the world is, at the same time, becoming increasingly uneven and volatile. Fewer barriers to trade and immigration have meant greater flows of information and people across the globe, giving certain locations higher concentrations of wealth and innovation capacity, while other locations are deprived of those assets. This technology-enabled unevenness is place-based, and makes understanding places much more critical in a technology age than in earlier times.

An oxymoron seemingly: the world is flat and uneven. One manifestation of this dichotomy is a global human capital imbalance, as knowledge workers flow from less desirable to more welcoming ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Rediscovering Places
• 2. The Lucky Country Still?
• 3. Australian Cities in Competition
• 4. Global Innovative Places
• 5. Dissecting Innovative Places
• 6. Pursuing Innovation in Australian Cities
• 7. The Art of Crafting
• 8. The Smart Way Forward
• Back Matter