Recent literature concerning regional development has placed significant emphasis on local institutional structures and their capacity to ‘hold down’ the global. Conversely, work on inter-firm networks – such as the global commodity chain approach – has highlighted the significance of the organizational structures of global firms’ production systems and their relation to industrial upgrading. In this paper, drawing upon a global production networks perspective, we conceptualize the connections between ‘globalizing’ processes, as embodied in the production networks of transnational corporations, and regional development in specific territorial formations. We delimit the ‘strategic coupling’ of the global production networks of firms and regional economies which ultimately drives regional development through the processes of value creation, enhancement and capture. In doing so, we stress the multi-scalarity of the forces and processes underlying regional development, and thus do not privilege one particular geographical scale. By way of illustration, we introduce an example drawn from recent research into global production networks in East Asia and Europe. The example profiles the investments of car manufacturer BMW in Eastern Bavaria, Germany and Rayong, Thailand, and considers their implications for regional development.

Globalizing regional development: aglobal production networks perspective

The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business

THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present

Edward Glaeser, Basingstoke and Oxford, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 338 pp., £25.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780230709386 This is a book that was waiting to be written—a popular book on the contemporary urban co...

Triumph of the City

This paper argues that contemporary smart city visions based on ITs (information and tele- communication technologies) configure complex socio-technical challenges that can benefit from strategic niche management to foster two key processes: technological learning and societal embedding. Moreover, it studies the extent to which those processes started to unfold in two paradigmatic cases of smart city pilots ‘from scratch’: Songdo (South Korea) and PlanIT Valley (Portugal). The rationale and potentials of the two pilots as arenas for socio-technical experimentation and global niche formation are analysed, as well as the tensions and bottlenecks involved in nurturing socially rich innovation ecosystems and in maintaining social and political support over time.

Smart cities from scratch? A socio-technical perspective

Uber and Airbnb have advanced into emblematic cases in debates in which the new digital capitalism is framed in terms of the so-called sharing economy. While this strand of inquiry has produced a w...

Uber-production: From global networks to digital platforms:

Urban Agriculture (UA) has gained popularity in cities all over the world. In this paper, we explore the concept of UA and discuss it along various locational and strategic dimensions. The article aims to provide insights into the chances and challenges of UA for sustainable city development. By making use of case examples from cities worldwide we show that UA can contribute to the social, environmental, and economics pillars of sustainable city development. However, there are limitations which should be taken into account for cities that want to invest in urban agriculture.

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Opportunities and Challenges of Urban Agriculture for Sustainable City Development

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This thesis deals with upgrading: a process of learning and knowledge sourcing in order to generate value added. We analyse how upgrading takes place across various organisational configurations: formal collaboration, clusters, projects, and events. Moreover, we investigate the process of upgrading within, as well as between, different spatial scales, and analyse the role of different actors, upgrading mechanisms, and the symbolic and synthetic knowledge bases. We study the upgrading process in a number of empirical case studies of the Chinese automotive industry.

We find that in addition to upgrading in formal collaboration – through joint-ventures in particular – upgrading also takes place in other organisational configurations. We unveil that clusters and events are of particular importance for upgrading via ‘monitoring’ and ‘buzz’. Hereby, we stress the critical role of event organisers as ‘temporary cluster managers’, acting as a bridge between the global and Chinese automotive industry. We also show the importance of the project configuration which crosses over other organisational configurations, and upgrading in projects takes place via nearly all upgrading mechanisms. In addition, we provide new empirical evidence for the importance of physical co-presence of different specialists in the automotive industry on the (temporary) local scale to enable non-verbal communication, while on the other hand, we demonstrate that upgrading of the synthetic and symbolic knowledge bases has a global dimension as well.

https://repub.eur.nl/pub/78224/EPS2015349S-E9789058924056.pdf

Upgrading across Organisational and Geographical Configurations

Part I: 1. Introduction 2. History and Trends in Knowledge Locations: an Urban Turn? 3. Empirics: What do we Know About the Success of Knowledge Locations? 4. Building Blocks of an Integrative Framework 5. Methodology and Research Design Part II 6. Dublin: Digital Hub 7. Eindhoven: Strup-S 8. Helsinki: Arabianranta 9. Incheon: Dongdo International City 10. Munich: Maxvorstadt 11. San Sebastian: Pl@ Part III 12. Key Findings from the Case Studies, Policy and Practice 13. Assessing the Added Value of Knowledge Locations 14. Theoretical Framework and Propositions

Creating Knowledge Locations in Cities: Innovation and Integration Challenges

1. Cities and Manufacturing: Setting the Scene 2. Manufacturing and Urban Development: A Frame of Analysis 3. Dortmund: Metal-Electro Sector 4. Eindhoven: Automotive Industry 5. Munich: Automotive Industry 6. Ostrava: Automotive Industry 7. Paris: Automotive Industry 8. Porto: Metal-Electro Sector 9. Rotterdam: Food Industry 10. Sao Paulo: Automotive Industry 11. Shanghai: Automotive Industry 12. Turku: Shipbuilding Industry 13. Synthesis: Conclusions and Recommendations

Erwin van Tuijl

Papers

Uber-production: From global networks to digital platforms:

Opportunities and Challenges of Urban Agriculture for Sustainable City Development

Upgrading across Organisational and Geographical Configurations

Creating Knowledge Locations in Cities: Innovation and Integration Challenges

Manufacturing in the New Urban Economy