Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley available in Hardcover
Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley
- ISBN-10:
- 0691117160
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691117164
- Pub. Date:
- 10/04/2004
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691117160
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691117164
- Pub. Date:
- 10/04/2004
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley
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Overview
At the heart of the story is the American research university, an institution enriched by Cold War spending and actively engaged in economic development. The story of the city of knowledge broadens our understanding of postwar urban history and of the relationship between civil society and the state in late twentieth-century America. It leads us to further redefine the American suburb as being much more than formless "sprawl," and shows how it is in fact the ultimate post-industrial city. Understanding this history and geography is essential to planning for the future of the high-tech economy, and this book is must reading for anyone interested in building the next Silicon Valley.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691117164 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/04/2004 |
| Series: | Politics and Society in Modern America , #27 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cities of Knowledge
Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon ValleyBy Margaret Pugh O'Mara
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2004 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-11716-4
Introduction
DISCOVERING THE CITY OF KNOWLEDGE
In the second half of the twentieth century, a new and quintessentially American type of community emerged in the United States: the city of knowledge. These places were engines of scientific production, filled with high-tech industries, homes for scientific workers and their families, with research universities at their heart. They were the birthplaces of great technological innovations that have transformed the way we work and live, homes for entrepreneurship and, at times, astounding wealth. Cities of knowledge made the metropolitan areas in which they were located more economically successful during the twentieth century, and they promise to continue to do so in the twenty-first. Magnets for high-skilled workers and highly productive industries, cities of knowledge are, in fact, the ultimate post-industrial city.
Plenty of people know about the city of knowledge, but they do not call it by that name. It's a "high-tech capital" or a "science region"; it's Silicon Valley; it's Boston's Route 128. Business leaders across the nation and globe want to become cities of knowledge and replicate their economic success. The allure of high-techdevelopment does not diminish in economic downturns; even as the high-tech economy languished in a long and painful economic recession after the burst of the Internet bubble, CEOs and state and local politicians from Washington, D.C., to Albany to Shanghai continued to try and turn their metropolitan areas into the next high-tech boom town. In doing so, these local leaders followed more than half a century of tradition. Ever since the growth of the Cold War defense complex and the consequent expansion of American scientific research and high technology sectors, cities, states, and regions have sought to imitate the magic formula that Silicon Valley and Route 128 seemed to have stumbled upon. Few have succeeded.
Understanding why high technology thrived in certain places, and why these regions have proved so hard to replicate, requires looking at their evolution historically and spatially. In doing so, it becomes clear that these places are not simply high-tech regions that resulted from fortuitous combinations of capital and entrepreneurship. They are cities of knowledge: consciously planned communities that were physical manifestations of a particular political and cultural moment in history, and shaped by the relationship between the state and civil society in late twentieth-century America. The city of knowledge was a creation of the Cold War, whose policies and spending priorities transformed universities, created vibrant new scientific industries, and turned the research scientist into a space-age celebrity. And it was a product of the suburban age, when economic realignments, demographic changes, and public subsidies transformed patterns of living, working, and economic opportunity. Suburbanization created ideal environments for science to grow and prosper, creating spaces where university, industry, and scientist could create new networks of innovation and production, away from the distractions and disorder of the changing industrial city. The Cold War made scientists into elites, and mass suburbanization reorganized urban space in a way that created elite places. The result of this intersection is that cities of knowledge did not just spring up anywhere, but rose up amid the larger landscape of the affluent postwar suburb.
The American research university was at the heart of this process, as economic development engine, urban planner, and political actor. Universities and their administrators were central to the design and implementation of cities of knowledge, and successful scientific communities often depended upon the presence of an educational institution that not only had extensive research capacity, but was also an active participant in state and local political power structures. The government-university relationship that emerged as a result of Cold War politics did not simply affect the "inside game"-the internal workings and research priorities of universities-but transformed the "outside game" of land management and economic development in the communities in which these institutions were located. This relationship was a two-way street in which federal programs influenced university choices, and academic institutions and traditions had an important effect upon the design and implementation of public policy.
These intersections of policy and place, and the role of universities within this process, are evident in the highly particular industrial geography of high technology at the beginning of the twenty-first century-geographic patterns that endure in times of high-tech bust as well as high-tech boom. For most of the twentieth century, the places that provided desirable residential environments for high-tech workers were suburban in look, feel, and location. High technology grew up as a world of office parks, freeway commutes, and proximity to residential subdivisions; high-tech workplaces looked more like college campuses than factories or downtown high-rises. This was more than a case of suburban "sprawl," however, for high-technology activities grouped together in distinct clusters-a pattern particularly evident in Silicon Valley, which one observer labeled a "remarkable petri dish of industrial innovation."
High-technology location choices also take into account where educated workers prefer to live, and as a result, these sectors cluster in some of the most affluent, and economically homogeneous, places in the country. The connection between patterns of wealth and of high technology explain the infrequent exceptions to the suburban trend at the end of the twentieth century, which occurred after cities began to regain some of the wealth and middle-class residents they had lost to the suburbs decades earlier. Multimedia districts like Lower Manhattan's "Silicon Alley" and San Francisco's South of Market district-that grew during the 1990s Internet boom and shrunk significantly in the subsequent recession-emerged only after these city neighborhoods had become attractive to educated professionals. But changing urban economic dynamics have not been enough to trump the powerful connection between high technology and the suburb. Would-be Silicon Valleys, domestically and internationally, follow the model established by existing high-tech capitals and create homes for industry in largely affluent areas at the fringe (or beyond the fringe) of cities.
American high-technology activities cluster in defined communities, simultaneously decentralized and proximate, diverse in function but not in socioeconomic composition. Communities of scientific production are places to live as well as work, home to a range of related and complementary production activities, cultural amenities, and services. In metropolitan areas with high concentrations of science-based industry, the rise of this kind of community has served to shift the focus of economic activity away from the central cities that dominated the regional economy up until the middle of the twentieth century and turned sleepy agricultural areas and bedroom suburbs into internationally influential concentrations of industrial production and commercial capital. By placing the history of high technology within the larger history of postwar urban and industrial change, we can trace the institutional and political origins of these fundamental-and inherently contradictory-geographic and socioeconomic characteristics and understand why they have been so economically important. This investigation shows how the process of high-tech growth was actually a process of city building. The suburbanization of science in the late twentieth century helped to urbanize American suburbs by making these places closer to classic definitions of cities in terms of their economic diversity and self-sufficiency. No longer adjuncts to the central cities around which they grew up, the high-tech suburbs of the early twenty-first century are a new and influential kind of urbanism. They are not just amorphous "regions," but cities of knowledge.
* * *
Discovering the city of knowledge requires moving between the national scale and the local, identifying the complex interaction between public and private, and taking the story of high technology and giving it clearer geographic dimensions. The development of the city of knowledge has been so hard to see because it stemmed from choices made not only in Washington, D.C., but at the local level as well. And the role of policy in this process is difficult to trace because it involved programs that did not dictate, but encouraged, certain institutional and industrial choices. This study traces these programs from inception to implementation, beginning with the Cold War politics of the late 1940s, moving through the local economic development efforts of the 1960s, and taking an intense look at the experience of three very different metropolitan areas and their research universities. It finds that:
Cities of knowledge are products of Cold War spending patterns. The Cold War defense complex created new hierarchies of political influence and a giant new source of capital, both of which came with geographic strings attached and created fierce competition among regions and institutions for these funds. Cold War geopolitics prompted new political attention to science-not just the kind of research that could build better bombs, but also basic scientific exploration of the kind going on in universities. Scientists and university administrators became key political players in Washington, and unprecedented amounts of money began to flow to research laboratories and universities. In turning university science and industrial research into "big science," Cold War politics took an inherently elite and historically independent scientific sector and made it an increasingly public and governmental one, supported and shaped by national political priorities. It also reinforced long-standing hierarchies of scientific excellence, giving the vast majority of research money to a small pool of elite institutions that already had significant scientific capacity. Pork-barrel politics compounded this favoritism by steering the bulk of defense research and development dollars to certain regions of the country. For reasons both strategic and economic, deliberate and accidental, Cold War politics privileged a select number of places and institutions, leaving them much better situated to build economies of high-tech production.
While institutional and regional favoritism might be a familiar story to students of Cold War history, its effect upon the intra-metropolitan geography of science has been little explored. However, there are some important connections. The patterns of national defense spending that funneled the majority of investments to certain regions of the country had the ancillary effect of shifting scientific activity to the suburbs because the Sunbelt states receiving the bulk of the funds were places experiencing rapid and largely untrammeled suburban growth. Federal defense spending-the "seed money" for later high-tech development-went to parts of the country where state and local leaders were particularly hospitable to the idea of this industry being located in the suburbs. Civil defense policies provided another connection between Cold War defense spending and high-tech suburbanization. Concern about the vulnerability of central business districts during nuclear attack prompted officials to build in a number of powerful incentives into federal defense contracting policy that encouraged contractors to choose suburban locations over urban ones. The structure of these "industrial dispersion" policies, built around tax incentives and other private-sector encouragements, was quite similar to other federal mechanisms that indirectly encouraged postwar decentralization. In this case, such subsidies explicitly targeted the expanding research-based industries that did business with the federal government. Although the civil defense concerns that prompted these incentives diminished in political and strategic importance over time, the preferences served as a federal endorsement of the idea that those sorts of industries should be decentralized and suburbanized and helped set in place enduring geographic patterns. The Cold War gave scientific institutions the money and clout to generate vibrant high-tech economies, and the geographic and institutional preferences embedded in Cold War defense contracting and research grant competitions contributed to the fact that these economies were more likely to emerge in suburban settings than urban ones.
Cities of knowledge are the product of university-centered economic development policies. As Cold War investments in research and development grew, state and local economic development policies began to increasingly orient themselves toward attracting clean, productive, and progressive businesses of science and technology. Because of its new wealth and research capacity, and its ability to act as a magnet for high-tech industries and workers, the research university became the economic development engine at the center of these efforts. Seeking in part to rectify the skewed economic geography of Cold War scientific research programs, by the early 1960s federal policy makers had created new public subsidies encouraging universities to expand their campuses and form collaborative partnerships with government and industry. States and localities complemented these programs with further incentives of their own. Many of these strategies centered on leveraging the power and resources of the university to create a very particular kind of industrial district, the research park. Through high architectural standards, extensive landscaping, and careful tenant selection, the research park mimicked the aesthetics and demographics of both the American college campus and the white-collar suburb.
Although university-based economic-development strategies often aimed to shore up the declining economic fortunes of inner cities and poorer rural areas, and even though many prominent universities were in fact urban in location, the engagement of the university in economic development was crucial in mapping high-tech's exclusive and decentralized-but-clustered industrial geography. These efforts promulgated an industrial model that was immensely well suited to a suburban setting, and that complemented the larger trend of industrial decentralization-a phenomenon that was itself heavily subsidized by public funds. Federal, state, and local governments provided tax breaks, infrastructure subsidies, and other persuasive mechanisms that pulled all kinds of firms out of central cities; public efforts to foster the growth of high-tech regions thus occurred amid a giant suburban building boom spurred in part by these federal incentives.
The presence of these other policies indicates that science would have likely suburbanized to some degree, regardless of the geographic biases of Cold War defense spending and science-based economic development policy. The degree of this suburbanization, and the clustering of these institutions and firms in affluent places, however, are patterns that reveal the influence of science-based industrial development campaigns and the engagement of the university in these processes. By placing the university at the center of their high-tech development strategies, policy makers made an economic development model out of institutions that-despite often being located in cities-had long-standing preferences for low-rise, intensively landscaped campuses. And by making inherently exclusive and inward-looking institutions into agents of social and economic change, public policy reinforced the idea that communities of science should be places reserved for a highly trained and highly educated class of people.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cities of Knowledge by Margaret Pugh O'Mara Copyright © 2004 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and Tables ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction Discovering the City of Knowledge 1
PART ONE: INTENT
1. Cold War Politics 17
Frameworks, 1945-1950 18
Policy and Geography, 1950-1965 36
Conclusion 55
2. "Multiversities," Cities, and Suburbs 58
The Scientist in the Garden 60
Economic Development Solutions 75
Conclusion 92
PART TWO: IMPLEMENTATION
3. From the Farm to the Valley: Stanford University and the San Francisco Peninsula 97
A Western Retreat 99
Hot and Cold Wars 103
Land Development 110
A Model City 127
"The Battle of the Hills" 132
Conclusion 139
4. Building" Brainsville" : The University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia 142
Franklin's University and Its City 143
From Computers to Medicine 146
Industrial Decline and Urban Renewal 151
Building University City 158
Scientific Industry Comes to West Philadelphia 166
Controversy and Protest 172
Conclusion 180
5. Selling the New South: Georgia Tech and Atlanta 182
The New Industrial South 185
Postwar Growth and Postwar Power 190
Expansion and Entrepreneurship at Georgia Tech 201
Selling Atlanta in the Space Age 207
Research Parks, Office Parks, and Another Stanford? 216
Conclusion 221
PART THREE LEGACY Conclusion The Next Silicon Valley 225
Notes 235
Index 291
What People are Saying About This
Margaret Pugh O'Mara has written a timely and brilliant exposition of the powerful forces that helped create the great suburban 'centers' of America's knowledge economy. This book is essential reading for every American metropolis imagining a high-tech future.
— Bruce Katz, Director, Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, The Brookings Institution
Can American cities survive in the twenty-first century? Margaret Pugh O'Mara puts forth a blueprint, not only for their survival, but one that could lead to an economic resurgence that restores cities to their traditional leadership role.
— Edward G. Rendell, Governor, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
An original, compelling, and important book, Cities of Knowledge is at once a work of deep empirical research and of creative interpretation. O'Mara's study will make major contributions to economic history, political history, and the cultural history of suburban development in post-World War II America.
— Bruce Schulman, author of "From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980"
"Can American cities survive in the twenty-first century? Margaret Pugh O'Mara puts forth a blueprint, not only for their survival, but one that could lead to an economic resurgence that restores cities to their traditional leadership role."—Edward G. Rendell, Governor, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
"Margaret Pugh O'Mara has written a timely and brilliant exposition of the powerful forces that helped create the great suburban 'centers' of America's knowledge economy. This book is essential reading for every American metropolis imagining a high-tech future."—Bruce Katz, Director, Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, The Brookings Institution
"An original, compelling, and important book, Cities of Knowledge is at once a work of deep empirical research and of creative interpretation. O'Mara's study will make major contributions to economic history, political history, and the cultural history of suburban development in post-World War II America."—Bruce Schulman, author of From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980
"O'Mara tells you why the search for the next Silicon Valley has been so difficult and so important. By placing the history of Silicon Valley and its would-be imitators in Philadelphia and Atlanta into a larger history of postwar America, she challenges us to think about whether conventional cities can compete with emerging cities of knowledge and if so, on what terms. Urban planners may not find her four lessons easy to implement, but they have plenty to learn from them."—Stuart W. Leslie, author of The Cold War and American Science
"Cities of Knowledge is an important work that reframes our understanding of the relationship between science, metropolitan development, and the Cold War state. O'Mara's creative synthesis of international, national, regional, and local perspectives combined with her explication of the tension between public and private development charts a course for future work in this field."—Brian Balogh, University of Virginia, author of Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975
O'Mara tells you why the search for the next Silicon Valley has been so difficult and so important. By placing the history of Silicon Valley and its would-be imitators in Philadelphia and Atlanta into a larger history of postwar America, she challenges us to think about whether conventional cities can compete with emerging cities of knowledge and if so, on what terms. Urban planners may not find her four lessons easy to implement, but they have plenty to learn from them.
— Stuart W. Leslie, author of "The Cold War and American Science"
Cities of Knowledge is an important work that reframes our understanding of the relationship between science, metropolitan development, and the Cold War state. O'Mara's creative synthesis of international, national, regional, and local perspectives combined with her explication of the tension between public and private development charts a course for future work in this field.
— Brian Balogh, University of Virginia, author of "Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975"
Recipe
"Margaret Pugh O'Mara has written a timely and brilliant exposition of the powerful forces that helped create the great suburban 'centers' of America's knowledge economy. This book is essential reading for every American metropolis imagining a high-tech future."—Bruce Katz, Director, Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, The Brookings Institution
"Can American cities survive in the twenty-first century? Margaret Pugh O'Mara puts forth a blueprint, not only for their survival, but one that could lead to an economic resurgence that restores cities to their traditional leadership role."—Edward G. Rendell, Governor, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
"An original, compelling, and important book, Cities of Knowledge is at once a work of deep empirical research and of creative interpretation. O'Mara's study will make major contributions to economic history, political history, and the cultural history of suburban development in post-World War II America."—Bruce Schulman, author of From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980
"O'Mara tells you why the search for the next Silicon Valley has been so difficult and so important. By placing the history of Silicon Valley and its would-be imitators in Philadelphia and Atlanta into a larger history of postwar America, she challenges us to think about whether conventional cities can compete with emerging cities of knowledge and if so, on what terms. Urban planners may not find her four lessons easy to implement, but they have plenty to learn from them."—Stuart W. Leslie, author of The Cold War and AmericanScience
"Cities of Knowledge is an important work that reframes our understanding of the relationship between science, metropolitan development, and the Cold War state. O'Mara's creative synthesis of international, national, regional, and local perspectives combined with her explication of the tension between public and private development charts a course for future work in this field."—Brian Balogh, University of Virginia, author of Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975