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CRAFTING
INNOVATIVE
PLACES
for Australia’s Knowledge
Economy
Crafting Innovative
Places for Australia’s
Knowledge Economy
Edward J. Blakely Richard Hu
University of California, Berkeley University of Canberra, Canberra
CA, USA ACT, Australia
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
Foreword: Smart Cities, Smart People,
and Smart Jobs
This is a book about creating places in smart cities that attract the kind of
work and workers Australia needs to be globally competitive and provide
a sustainable and liveable environment. It sounds kind of silly trying to
suggest that we need smart, innovation-driven cities—who would want a
dumb city that fails to attract creative people and knowledge jobs? But you
ask anyone about what worries them in the city where they live, and they
will come up with a long list of things that just seem dumb to them—like
why heavy traffic is dominated by so many single occupant cars, why the
heck can’t we be innovative by turning more to the sun and hydrogen for
making power, and why don’t we use these technologies to create local
jobs. We don’t have to be big like the United States when small nations
like Sweden and Denmark are doing this. Why do we have such boring
shopping centres, why don’t we solve poverty and crime in our cities, and
why don’t we make more goods in Australia? The truth is that unless we
develop our cities, we lose our best talent to overseas firms and cities, and
we cannot develop a sustainable and competitive economy that will main-
tain our high standard of living. Making good coffee and exporting coal
will not be good enough.
This book is not an instruction manual, but it does come up with some
serious suggestions that help to answer these kinds of questions. These
suggestions are based on analysis of the data and experiences in both
Australian and international cities. The authors look at how we compete
not just on economic criteria—we always do OK, but only just, on those
criteria—but on sustainability criteria. Qualities related to sustainability
get to the heart of why we like living and working here. The book identifies
v
vi FOREWORD: SMART CITIES, SMART PEOPLE, AND SMART JOBS
We thank the following people for their contribution to this book at dif-
ferent stages of its preparation. James Rousell, William Harris, Joseph
Sutton, and Sajeda Tuli provided research assistance with case studies, lit-
erature reviews, data collection and analysis, and map making. Coco Liu
helped with improving many of the illustrations. Henrik Bang reviewed a
draft of the Copenhagen case study. Britt Nichols at the Canberra
Innovation Network and Yimin Zhou supplied images, and Cécile Lefort
at the Reserve Bank of Australia provided data for our use. Justine
McNamara provided editing and copyediting assistance. We also thank
numerous colleagues and friends, whose names are not acknowledged
here, for their good thoughts and advice in our conversations and com-
munications with them, which informed the idea for this book and encour-
aged its fruition.
vii
Contents
1 Rediscovering Places 1
A Flat and Uneven World 2
Globalisation: Decentralising and Centralising 5
Urbanisation: Quantitative and Qualitative 7
Innovation: Disrupting and Disrupted 10
How Should Australia Fit In 13
It’s All About Places 15
Approach and Organisation of the Book 18
References 21
ix
x Contents
Index257
Abbreviations
xiii
xiv ABBREVIATIONS
xv
xvi List of Figures
xix
CHAPTER 1
Rediscovering Places
ferent 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 win-
ners 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 immigra-
tion 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 under-
standing places much more critical in a technology age than in earlier
times.
An oxymoron seemingly: the world is flat and uneven. One manifesta-
tion of this dichotomy is a global human capital imbalance, as knowledge
workers flow from less desirable to more welcoming places and cultures.
Attracting globally mobile human capital is the key to a strong and com-
petitive local or national economy. Growing a creative culture and
enhancing liveability have been primary urban policy goals in recent
decades. Cities brand globally as creative, sustainable, and liveable places.
Technological advancements and policy liberalisation have spurred flows
of people and information, generating global inequities in human capital
and wealth. Successful cities are human capital magnets, attracting people
from less competitive and attractive cities and countries. In this sense, we
live in a flat and uneven world. This has been driven by three contempo-
rary transformative forces: globalisation, urbanisation, and innovation.
The third of these forces is a central focus of this book but must be
understood and examined in the context of both globalisation and
urbanisation.
REDISCOVERING PLACES 5
Fig. 1.2 Urban and rural population percentages in the world, 1950–2050
Source: United Nations (2018), created by the authors
8 E. J. BLAKELY AND R. HU
owers of cities and nations are shifting: cities are emerging as dominant
p
spatial scales and are superseding nation states as the central nodes of the
global economy (Sassen 2001). Networks of cities are overriding purely
political boundaries, expressed through their economic, political, and
social relations with one another; the integrated global economic system is
then a city-centred world of flows, in contrast to the traditional state-
centred world of boundaries (Taylor and Derudder 2016).
Sassen (2001) contends that global cities have grown out of both the
decentralisation and the centralisation of global economic activities, in line
with the decentralising and centralising effects of globalisation discussed
above. Production and retailing activities are spreading across the world,
but at the same time the specialised services to support them tend to con-
centrate within a few global cities. The transnational corporations (TNCs)
are increasingly important actors in the global economy, accelerating
global competition. The transition to a knowledge economy has led to
greater complexity in managing, controlling, and coordinating global
activities and organisations. In such a system, greater access to advanced
and specialised services is required. Such services are often referred to as
‘advanced producer services’ (APS), including financial, insurance, bank-
ing, legal, business, and professional services. The APS both benefit from
geographic proximity and act within the global network. Their complexity
and their intermediary nature require immediate access to communication
and simultaneous inputs and feedbacks (Sassen 2001). Global cities are
central places and provide the geographic contexts for these APS. Global
activities are further concentrated in the central business districts (CBDs)
of global cities.
Cities link with one another, forming a network of urban nodes to
underpin an integrated global economy. This intercity network comprises
complex relationships embedding competition, cooperation, and connec-
tivity (Taylor et al. 2011). To aspire to global city status and enhance
global competitiveness is the primary strategic goal for many cities in the
world, an important manifestation of the dominant neoliberal policy direc-
tion discussed above. Because the global city is defined by its role in the
global economy, an understanding of and approach to global competitive-
ness has been economy-centric. However, an economic focus is too nar-
row to capture the multiplicity of a city’s competitiveness and is likely to
hamper or limit effective policy responses. A city’s global competitiveness
lies in the level of integration of its capacity and assets. This includes not
only economic performance, but also liveability, human capital, i nnovation,
10 E. J. BLAKELY AND R. HU
infrastructure, and sustainability. This is truer today than ever before, due
to the nature of the knowledge economy and the necessity of nurturing
innovation and attracting talent to remain competitive, which we will fully
discuss in Chap. 3.
People claimed the death of cities and irrelevance of geography in the
early days of the ICT revolution several decades ago. This judgement was
based on a surface understanding of what the new technology would bring
to the world, but it failed to appreciate the underlying transformative
impacts. What we have seen is a growing urbanisation trend and the
increasing importance of cities. Cities accommodate and shape the way we
live and how we work, and more important, cities incubate the most valu-
able asset in a global knowledge economy—innovation. This qualitative
attribute differentiates today’s new urbanisation from the old urbanisation
that was marked only by the quantitative indicator of people’s movement
from the countryside to cities.
s ervices and products (Hamari et al. 2015). It is not entirely new since it
does not challenge classic economic theories about transacting the unused.
However, the sharing economy’s recent surge has benefitted from
improved information technology that puts users in instant contact, and it
grew rapidly in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. Through
online connections, collaboration, and consumption, users access the shar-
ing economy to loan a product or service to another individual for a lim-
ited time (Hamari et al. 2015). The global financial crisis called into
question the notions of economic ownership and materialism, and led to a
push for more sustainable use of resources. The growth of the sharing
economy has involved a renewed belief in the importance of community,
driven by the global recession, concerns about the environment and
advances in technologies, and supported by the growth of peer-to-peer
networks (Botsman and Rogers 2010).
Uber is a prime example of the sharing economy. Uber is at its core a
digitally enabled mobile automobile service that moves people, goods, or
other materials to an end user or destination on demand. Nothing is new
in calling a car and paying to have yourself delivered to your desired loca-
tion. This has been practised for many years with taxis. The disruptive
innovation of Uber is the implementation of time-demand queuing using
digital technology. Uber is doing what Federal Express in the United
States did with packages two decades ago, using the taxi platform.
12 E. J. BLAKELY AND R. HU