The importance of Place

by Stefan Lazarevski


The emergence of the so called Age of Mass intelligence, sponsored by the rise of Internet, Social Networking and Reality TV, has exposed an ongoing debate, within the sociologists, economists and urbanists, of whether place really matters. In a world where modern economy is powered not by labor and production, but by knowledge and communication, the question of importance of place is very liable.
In 2005, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman published a book (Friedman, 2005), where he outlined a picture of the global economical shifts. He announced: “The World is flat!” What he referred to was the global shift of the economies from local to global scale, resulting in increasing trend of the outsourcing, off shoring, supply chaining and in-sourcing; this proved that the creative class has established networks which are not place based anymore.
On the other hand, the explosive growth of cities and urban areas worldwide, the rise of the creative centers, and concentration of economic and cultural activities has exposed the clustering force as a strong factor that keeps the value of the location very high. The World’s economical landscape according to Florida (2008) is anything but flat; on contrary it is a spiky World that we live in, today!

The discussion of whether place really matters is especially fierce within the contemporary knowledge-economy based societies. In such a society, the knowledge is the driving force for overall development; there, the economical and political evolution, the social relations and habits of the citizens as well as, the urban growth and the physical form of the city are just a reflection of the level of accumulated knowledge. To understand how these cities work, we must first define and understand what knowledge economy and knowledge – based societies are?
Etymologically, the phrase Knowledge Economy was introduced by Peter Drucker in his book “The Age of Discontinuity” (1968). In the late 60s of the XX century, speaking about the brain drainage in economically inferior countries, Drucker identifies the knowledge as the key factor in future economical development of the western civilization. “For the intellectuals knowledge is what is in a book. But as long as it is in the book it is information if not “mere data”. Only when man applies the information to doing something does it become knowledge.” (Drucker, 1968) Therefore the emergence of Knowledge Economy, according to Drucker, is not only a product of intellectual activities, as it is normally conceived, but rather part of “history of technology” which recounts how man puts tools to work. Today, the economies must be knowledge based in order to perform, to grow and to compete. The question remains what is the basic economic, social and political unit that stages such progress.

sketch of the core-principles of the Saraswati knowledge-economy based city in India, Calthorpe Associates, 2008

The artificial political boundaries of the nation states cannot be taken as the framework for analyses of the knowledge-economy based societies. The cities on the other hand, being endowed with knowledge infrastructure, human capital, widely spread communication, social and financial networks and ultimately being decision making centers, are the actual focal point of knowledge economy in many respects. Over the history, the most serious force to challenge the endurance of the cities was the Technological Progress. Every technological invention, throughout the history was a promise to a boundless world. The invention of telephone, car, air plane even the World Wide Web, were step forward in freeing people from geography. But, as compelling as it sounds, this notion repeatedly proved its self wrong. The cities kept the high concentration of the main economic factors: talent, innovation and creativity or what Florida refers to as the “clustering force” (2008). In the knowledge economy, talented people tend to go where other talented people are, because one of the drivers of innovation is the exchange of implicit knowledge among actors. Cities can be good environments for this type of exchange, which ultimately sponsors the competitive and creative edge of the society. Face to face contacts also enhance the mutual trust which only proves that proximity is vital in terms of preserving already established networks or conceiving new ones. Finally, cities, with their urban diversity, are the promoters of creativity. Namely, places which are able to attract diverse groups of people by ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexual orientation, argues Florida (2000), are an environment that is easy to plug into; such places can be said to have low entry barriers for talent. Therefore these places - cities are fertile ground for establishing and maintaining the knowledge economy and ultimately they are our “playground”.

This is why the place and the city, as most conflictual place of them all, is and will be very important and immanent to our self-identification.


reference:
― Drucker, Peter, 1968, The Age of Discontinuity, Chapter 12, Harper & Row, New York
― Florida, Richard, 2000, The Economic Geography of Talent, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
― Florida, Richard, 2008, Who’s Your City, Basic Books, New York
― Friedman, Thomas, 2005, The World is Flat, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York