Which of the following is a technopolis ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Silicon valley. A technopolis, or technopole, is not simply a big city with computers in it: economic geography uses the term for a planned or deliberately nurtured concentration of high-technology research and production, built around universities and research institutes, in which firms, laboratories, venture finance and skilled labour cluster and feed one another. Silicon Valley is the textbook case and is widely described as the world's leading technopole. It occupies the Santa Clara Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, the belt running south-east from Palo Alto through Sunnyvale and Santa Clara to San Jose. Its origin is exactly the university-industry linkage the definition demands: Frederick Terman, professor and later dean of engineering at Stanford University, encouraged his students — among them William Hewlett and David Packard — to found companies nearby, and in 1951 helped establish the Stanford Research Park, which anchored the cluster. Semiconductors gave it the name; the informal movement of engineers between small firms, and the social networks that survived those moves, gave it the knowledge spillovers that later writers identified as the real engine. London, Moscow and Paris are ancient multifunctional capitals whose economies rest on administration, finance, culture and trade; each has technology districts inside it, but none was created as a technology pole and none is offered in the literature as the defining example.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A global financial and administrative capital whose defining function is banking and services, not technology manufacture. Britain's recognised technology clusters lie outside the historic city — the 'Western Crescent' counties of Berkshire and Hampshire, Hertfordshire to the north, and 'Silicon Fen' around Cambridge — with East London Tech City a district within London rather than the city's identity.  (c) A political and industrial capital whose primacy comes from being the seat of government and the hub of a centralised transport network. Russia's attempt at a purpose-built technology city, Skolkovo, is a separate planned development on the city's outskirts, not Moscow itself, and nothing about Moscow's economic base fits the technopolis definition.  (d) Another multifunctional primate capital. Tellingly, France's own technopoles are named separately from it — Sophia Antipolis near Nice, Cannes and Antibes was the first, and there are others near Rennes, Grenoble, Toulouse and Lyon. The Paris-Saclay cluster south of the city is a distinct planned science campus, which is precisely the point: the technopole is the campus, not the capital.

Concept: Settlement geography classifies towns by dominant function — administrative, commercial, port, industrial, mining, religious, garrison, resort — and the technopolis is the newest of these functional types, a product of the shift from manufacturing to quaternary, knowledge-based activity. Four conditions are usually required: a critical mass of research and development facilities; physical proximity to universities so that research and teaching reinforce each other; firms competent enough to demand and absorb that research; and investment willing to back start-ups and spin-offs. The term 'technopole' was coined by the geographer Allen J. Scott in 1990 for the fast-growing high-technology regions of Southern California, and was given wide currency by Manuel Castells and Peter Hall's 1994 study of technology complexes worldwide. Japan gave the idea its most systematic state expression: from 1983 its Ministry of International Trade and Industry designated more than twenty-five technopoles, among them Okayama, Hiroshima, Yamaguchi and Kumamoto.

State PCS 2024 Q63 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q63 — Geography PYQ with Answer