Technopolis: High-Technology Industry and Regional Development in Southern California - Hardcover

Scott, Allen J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520081897 ISBN 13: 9780520081895

Verlag: University of California Press, 1993

Inhaltsangabe

Technopolis is a timely theoretical and empirical investigation of the world's largest high-technology industrial complex—Southern California. Allen Scott provides a new conceptual framework for understanding urban and regional growth processes based on a combination of inter-industrial, labor market, and geographical factors. He presents case studies and original data on three major industries that have become synonymous with Southern California: aircraft and parts, missiles and space equipment, and electronics. The business community will be particularly interested in Scott's diagnosis of post-Cold War economic ills and his suggestions for possible remedies.

In good times or bad, knowledge of how Southern California's high-tech industry and regional development have interacted in the past and might interact in the future will be invaluable for regional and economic planners everywhere.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Allen J. Scott is Director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His Metropolis (California, 1988) has been called "a classic achievement of industrial and urban geography in the 1980s."

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"By far the most sophisticated treatment of industrial structure and spatial organization in the Southern California manufacturing system. The analysis powerfully combines cogent historical narratives, revealing statistical profiles, and incisive empirical and theoretical discussion. . . . Long overdue given the region's obvious importance to the American and world economies."—Richard Gordon, University of California, Santa Cruz

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"By far the most sophisticated treatment of industrial structure and spatial organization in the Southern California manufacturing system. The analysis powerfully combines cogent historical narratives, revealing statistical profiles, and incisive empirical and theoretical discussion. . . . Long overdue given the region's obvious importance to the American and world economies."Richard Gordon, University of California, Santa Cruz

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Technopolis: High-Technology Industry and Regional Development in Southern California

By Allen J. Scott

University of California Press

Copyright 1994 Allen J. Scott
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520081897
Chapter 1
The Southern Californian Technopolis in Context

Introduction

Southern California is today one of the world's largest and most dynamic manufacturing regions. Over much of this century, and especially since the end of the World War II, the region has grown at an extraordinary pace, and it now comprises an enormous sprawling conurbation in which some 17 million people make their home.

Southern California began to grow in earnest at the beginning of the twentieth century as irrigated agriculture developed and as rich local petroleum resources were brought into production (Starr 1990). The motion picture industry also contributed to early expansion, and it remains today, along with a constellation of television, recording, and video production activities, one of the mainstays of the region's economy. In the interwar years, a small aircraft industry took root in Los Angeles and to a lesser extent in San Diego, and it soon came to be an important focus of employment. After World War II, the aircraft industry blossomed into a great aerospace-electronics manufacturing complex whose growth was fueled by large-scale federal defense spending over the postwar decades. By the early 1960s the complex had become the dominant element of the entire local production system. In addition, since the 1970s, the region has emerged as a major center of low-technology labor-intensive forms of manufacturing such as clothing, furniture, jewelry, and printing, just as it has also grown to be one of the major financial and commercial centers of the Pacific Rim.

This saga of regional growth and development poses innumerable puzzles to the theorist and the historian alike. On the one hand, the available conceptual frameworks of urban and regional analysis seem quite inadequate when faced with the sheer breadth, intensity, and durability of Southern California's rise to industrial preeminence. On the other hand, the narrative sorting out of the detailed empirical events that collectively define the region's trajectory over space and time is a task of daunting complexity. In particular, the circumstances surrounding the birth and subsequent expansion of the many individual industries in the region are frequently quite obscure, as are the ways in which different industries evolved in relationship to one another. I cannot hope, in this book, to achieve much more than a preliminary sketch of some approaches to these questions. Moreover, the focus of the book is on just one ensemble of industrial activities, namely, the high-technology manufacturing complex, and most of the other forms of economic production in the region will be considered only in passing. That said, the great advantage of this concentrated focus is that it allows us to pursue one or two major theoretical and substantive themes with some degree of detail.

In the present chapter, I shall briefly sketch out some of the empirical background to these themes. The chapter that follows enlarges on a few general ideas about problems of industrial organization and regional development, and on this basis I hope to be able to pinpoint a number of important aspects of industrial complex formation. These ideas have been more fully adumbrated elsewhere, and I shall therefore not attempt to argue them out at length in this book. They depend in essence on an effort to capture the logic of the production system as a dynamic complex of interconnected producers articulated with a series of local labor-market activities. This logic, I shall argue, leads under specifiable conditions to geographically agglomerated economic growth and hence to the formation of densely industrialized and urbanized regions.

In the light of this conceptual apparatus I shall in subsequent chapters lay out an extended series of empirical studies of high-technology industry in Southern California. Special attention will be paid here to the genesis and growth of the region's aerospace-electronics complex, its changing technological foundations, its structure and organization, its labor force, its extraregional connections, and its evolving geographical pattern within the region. These empirical studies are important in their own right as stories about the development of high-

Figure 1.1
The seven principal counties of Southern California. The primary built-up area
 is shaded.

technology industry in Southern California. But they are also intended to be read as attempts to operationalize a specific theoretical perspective, and the entire bookdespite its profusion of empirical references to Southern Californiais meant in the last analysis to stand (or fall) as a series of wider claims about regional development processes in general.

Southern California:
A Brief Overview of Its Geography and Population

Southern California can be roughly defined as consisting of the seven counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Ventura. These seven counties are shown cartographically in figure 1.1. The actual built-up area of the region is also indicated in figure 1.1; it forms a virtually continuous tract of urbanized land sweeping some 230 miles in an irregular band around the Pacific coastline from Santa Barbara in the north, through the central pivot of Los Angeles, to San Diego and the Mexican border in the south.

The whole seven-county area is further subdivided into 188 different independent municipalities so that despite its continuous pattern of land uses it is marked by severe fragmentation of local government and urban-planning activities. These municipalities are connected

Figure 1.2
Southern California: Freeway system and primary place-names used in
the text. Mountainous areas are shaded.

together into a regional system by an extensive network of freeways (fig. 1.2). Over the decades, this network has induced concentrated growth at the core of the region while simultaneously facilitating an enormous shift of both population and industry to peripheral suburban areas. Southern California's growth can in significant degree be traced out as a series of ever-widening ripples of lateral urban expansion and outer-city formation.

Population trends in the seven counties are presented in table 1.1, which provides data on each individual county at ten-year intervals since 1970. In terms of total population, Los Angeles County clearly dominates the whole region, with San Diego and Orange counties trailing far behind in second and third places, respectively. The most striking feature of the data presented in table 1.1 is the enormous and steady growth of population in the region in recent decades. The second striking feature is the vigorous population surges of peripheral areas as manifested in the explosion of Riverside and San Bernardino counties in the 1970s and 1980s, and now most recently of all in the incipient expansion of the population of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. All of this growth has been fueled by the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1993
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520081897
• ISBN 13: 9780520081895
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 322
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar