Architecture Commons^™

Much of the literature and debate over the last decade has been on understanding service-based economies, neglecting manufacturing and its effects on the economy. The current financial crisis has been associated with political debates that revolve around the ‘real’ economy and a call for rebalancing regional and national economies. Over the last decade or so, manufacturing has been transformed but academic understanding has not kept pace with these alterations. Many of these alterations revolve around the development of new forms of expertise-driven manufacturing, new geographies of production, jobless growth and new forms of financialisation applied to manufacturing. These on-going transformations …

One of the great challenges facing large, diverse metropolitan economies is how to build and maintain sustainable and resilient cities. For several years now, people have recognized the critical and expanding role of “global cities.” Although Saskia Sassen’s initial conceptualization focused on leading financial centers---London, New York, and Tokyo---the notion has developed to encompass broader ideas about how diverse metropolitan economies serve as regional nodes in a global network (Sassen 2001) . These global cities serve as the engines behind national and regional economic growth. Increasingly, academics and policy advocates have argued that global cities constitute the most important interconnected …

Working Regions focuses on policy aimed at building sustainable and resilient regional economies in the wake of the global recession. Using examples of four ‘working regions’ — regions where research and design functions and manufacturing still coexist in the same cities — the book argues for a new approach to regional economic development. It does this by highlighting policies that foster innovation and manufacturing in small firms, focus research centers on pushing innovation down the supply chain, and support dynamic, design-driven firm networks. This book traces several key themes underlying the core proposition that for a region to work, it …

Manufacturing has long been the focus for progressive reforms. But these reforms, pushed by labor in the 1930s and 1940s, did not particularly involve city planners, and the idea of “progressive planning” that emerged in the 1960s focused on community and neighborhood struggles over urban renewal, highway clearances and the depredations of real estate developers—not necessarily manufacturing. The question now is whether, with changes in manufacturing, and new initiatives from the Obama administration, progressives can make a contribution through the manufacturing sector, and whether professional planners can play a role at all.We asked a group of geographers and planners—academics and …

Since the early 1980s, the region has been central to thinking about the emerging character of the global economy. In fields as diverse as business management, industrial relations, economic geography, sociology, and planning, the regional scale has emerged as an organizing concept for interpretations of economic change. This book is both a critique of the "new regionalism" and a return to the "regional question," including all of its concerns with equity and uneven development. It will challenge researchers and students to consider the region as a central scale of action in the global economy, and at the core of the …

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The optics, imaging, and photonics industry in Rochester demonstrates strong potential to develop as an engine of economic expansion in the region. The industry, with its international markets and multiple applications, can provide the region with cutting edge technology and help to regrow a strong manufacturing sector. This report and action plan focus on the small and medium size firms (SMEs) in the industry and on how this “cluster” can fulfill its promise and realize its full capacity. There is no shortage of talent in the photonics workforce or in Rochester firms and institutions engaged in new optics …