Postindustrial East Asian Cities: Innovation for Growth

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World Bank Publications, 2006 M01 1 - 352 pages
Throughout East Asia, the growth process and its sources are changing in a number of important respects, especially for middle and higher income economies. Growth will increasingly come from the strength of innovative activities. Such innovative activities, especially in producer services and the creative industries are concentrated in high-tech clusters in globally-linked cities. A successful transition from export-oriented manufacturing to a service economy that is competitive and integrated with global systems, will involve a reshaping of the urban landscape so that providers of business services and the creative industries perceive it to be value augmenting for their purposes and a basis for competitive advantage. Drawing on a wide literature review and interviews of firms, this title explores these issues and suggests how policies and institutions can induce and furnish an urban environment that supports innovative activities with a focus on four cities in East Asia: Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. This title provides researchers, students, urban planners, urban geographers, and policymakers interested in East Asia as well as other middle income countries with an in depth review and analysis of the role of high-tech manufacturing, creative industries and business services in urban economic growth.

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Page 231 - The tyranny of fashion itself has in fact never been stronger than in this period of visual pluralism...
Page 214 - Federation Francaise de la Couture, du Pret-a-Porter des Couturiers et des Createurs de Mode...
Page 232 - However, flows have begun to be reversed, primarily through migration but also through other cultural forms shifting from South to North and East to West. Music, food, ideas, beliefs and literature from the South and East have been percolating into the cultures of the West, creating new lines of cultural interconnectedness and fracture" (Held and others 1999, 368-69).
Page 213 - France's national image was the product of a collaboration between a king with a vision and some of the most brilliant artists, artisans, and craftspeople of all time— men and women who were the founding geniuses in domains as disparate as wine making, fashion accessorizing, jewelry design, cabinetry, codification of culinary technique, and hairstyling.
Page 19 - This strategy was all the more attractive when the new media was becoming identified as the first new industry to form in the city in half a century. Their provision of subsidized wired space in fourteen buildings played a major role in causing some seven hundred tech firms to settle Downtown (Indergaard 2004, 7).
Page 27 - No place—city, suburb, hamlet, or farmstead—is secure against the emergence of a new economic geography that drains vital populations and investments in the space of a few decades. In seeking ever fresh forms of production, ever larger markets, ever higher returns on investment, capitalism routinely destroys older technologies, older plants—and in so doing, profoundly transforms the communities that have formed around them.
Page 19 - cultural mobilization of new media districts complemented the financial mobilization. The districts not only produced visions of epic forces, but also artifacts attesting to the material reality of a new kind of firm: loft workplaces, a distinctive social scene, and employees with quirky looks and attitudes
Page 231 - In the past, imperial states, networks of intellectuals, and theocracies were the key agents of cultural diffusion. In the contemporary world their role has been displaced by that of large media industries as well as by greater flows of individuals and groups.
Page 19 - In fact, large-scale deindustrialization of Lower Manhattan over the last four decades was not only the result of changes within industrial sectors, but also the product of commercial redevelopment (and related rises in real estate prices) that dislodged manufacturers.
Page xii - As we have argued in the previous volumes in this series, future growth in East Asia will increasingly come from the strength of innovative activities instead of factor accumulation. Such innovative activities—especially in producer services and the creative industries—are concentrated in hightech clusters in globally linked cities.

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