Medio ambiente y recursos naturales renovables

From the historical beginnings of capitalism, cities have functioned in important ways as sites of agglomeration and specialised production activities (Scott, 2000:23). Hall (1998) has documented in great detail the privileged role cities have

57 played across the world as centres of economic activity. Not only are cities places of economic activity, they are hives for creativity and innovation, hosting a rich diversity of people, especially in western economies (Florida, 1995, 2007; Howkin 2010; Lowe and Gertler, 2005; Scott, 2000; Tay, 2005). Many cities host a variety of actors and institutions that have the capacity to develop and exploit knowledge bases (Asheim and Gertler, 2005; Asheim and Coenen, 2005). However, we have to acknowledge the city is also a site in which there can be deprivation and decline but also renewal (Harvey, 1997). A critique we can raise is that when analysing these sites we are only seeing a cross section through a developmental trajectory, emerging out of a path dependent evolutionary process, structured by phenomena occurring within and beyond the city (Scott, 2000). It is difficult to overcome this without the use of longitudinal studies and a continued empirical investigation. However, using the theoretical framework in Chapter Two and shown in Chapters Four and Five the empirical research has sought to interrogate the path dependent processes and the emergence of particular ecologies, institutions and actors in Liverpool (David, 1985, 1994). So, we have to accept that we are seeing a cross section in time but we are aware that in this chapter and shown in previous chapters that we address, as best practice, the trajectories that have led to current contextual configurations (Bathelt and Glückler, 2011).

Cities can be understood and analysed in relation to their history, culture and economy requiring a multidisciplinary approach, therefore attracting attention from across the special sciences (Harvey, 2006; Jacobs, 1986; Knox and Pinch, 2006). Westernised thinking behind what a city is and what it should look like has changed significantly over time in relation to broader political economy and academic paradigm shifts. To begin, the seminal work of Mumford (1937) titled ‘what is a city’ has gained significance, particularly in urban geography and planning studies, as a foundation towards more contemporary thinking of the city. Mumford (1937) introduced a social element to the theorisation of the city, moving beyond the fixed measures, reducing cities to population size, density and attributes of the built environment. These where deemed inadequate by Mumford (1937), arguing that cities are social dramas. The metaphor of the theatre is used in his work and this

58 runs as a narrative in current work on urban settings. For Mumford (1937) cities are the stage in which people play out their social interaction, enriched by diversity in people, education, commerce, art and other institutions found in cities. Understanding the seminal work of Mumford (1937) here underpins the ideas of more recent analysis, proving that new farmworkers are indeed novel yet built on principles set decades before. Hence, cities have long been sites made up of institutions such as government citadels, economic markets but conceptualisations and planning has strongly recognised and included community.

Soja (1980) argued that cities have a socio spatial dialectic, meaning people change the place (the city) as they live and work, yet the place conditions their behaviour. Cities have a dialectic process, where social relations are constituted, constrained and mediated throughout the city. The fundamental link between people and place goes beyond Mumford (1937) and has been taken up by urban geographers such as Harvey (2010), Dear and Wolch (1989) and Knox (1996). This thesis, in its efforts to understand the city, embraces the connection between people and place through the post structuralist lens taken in much of the human geography literature (Knox and Pinch, 2006). The approach strongly opposed the idea that the world, or in this case the city, can be explained through one single hidden underlying structure (Duncan, 1980; Knox and Pinch, 2006). This research suggests that cities have numerous shifting and unstable dimensions that we should understand as evolving and changing. Ingersoll (1992) stated that cities are almost impossible to describe, noting that they are not as they used to be, with physically defined boundaries, (usually a wall) instead their boundaries are increasingly ambiguous with flows of people and capital permeating their geographically defined boundaries. Over the last 30 years there has been significant economy change that has led to urban restructuring and the way in which we can conceptualise our cities (Knox and Pinch, 2006). Economic change has been one of the defining factors in the trajectories of cities, propelling those cities able to capture and nurture high value, creating activities and leaving other cities behind, having to pick up low value activities (Sassen, 2006a). The most significant change has been the shift in cities being dominated by manufacturing activity to being dominated by service sector activity.

59 In short, the change has been driven by the wider changes, such as political economy in the post Fordism era where mass production fell to more flexible methods of production and organisation (Piore and Sable, 1984). Table 3 summarises the main economic changes and as a result the main characteristics of the city for that era.

Table 3 Changing contexts and cities

Economic context Main Characteristics

Preindustrial cities Small Scale waling cities

Vertical differentiation based on social divisions

Core - elite of the city

Periphery – mass of population

Industrial capitalist city Fordism paradigm

Dominated by mass production and consumption

Rigid production systems

Elite migration to periphery or suburbs Poor/working class occupy inner city

Post Fordism to flexibility Increasing use of technology in production Flexibility in workforces

Deindustrialisation of cities

Move towards service based economy New industrial spaces – clusters

Globalisation Emergence of global cities and global

command centres (Sassen, 1991, 2006) Knowledge economies and information cities

Intensified social polarisation

Increased competition between cities

(Adapted from Knox and Pinch, 2006)

Sassen (2006a) argues that ICT has played a significant role in the development of cities and what we have seen more recently is the emergence of global cities. Global

60 cities are characterised by social polarisation, the presence of large financial institutions, multinational headquarters, a stratum of well paid workers who in turn demand particular consumer services and provisions such as restaurants and shops and bars that in turn utilise a large number of low paid workers. Hence, there is a cycle in global cities feeding a growing inequality. Sassen (2006a) argued in her work that with increased globalisation and the adoption of ICT the global capital is becoming increasingly reliant on global command centres of the world. These are places where large financial institutions exist such as London, New York and Tokyo. Based on Sassen (2001, 2006a) and Beaverstock et al’s, (2000) analysis and characteristics of global cities, Liverpool does not represent a high-ranking global city able to call upon the resources of alpha cities such as London or New York. However, Southern (1999:13) argues that the global cities framework does little to explain the roles of those places that cannot call upon the resources, or centralised activities of global command centres. The work that has been done surrounding global cities focuses on focal cities in the global economy, arguing that peripheral cities are left to pick up what is left, such as back office activities that can be done over greater distance (Sassen, 2006a). The framework does not help to explain the precise role of non-global cities but allows us to place the city of Liverpool into a wider context and thus answer the question raised by Southern (1999) as to what the role of northern English cities is, or for this thesis, how can a city such as Liverpool host two innovative and dynamic industries? One of which requiring large amounts of capital not found in the local and both requiring a labour market of highly skilled innovative and creative people that we typically find in global cities (Beaverstock et al, 1999; Scott, 2000; Cook et al, 2011; Faulconbridge et al, 2011).

Knox and Pinch (2006) highlight that many social scientists have used similar metaphors describing the city as a body; a living organism with a system with a hierarchy of cells and circulation through various arteries, often portrayed as sick or unhealthy. Cities have been referred to as networks defined by a conjunction of many overlapping webs of social and economic interaction. More recently ecology has been used as a more holistic and adaptable narrative to capture the functions and environment of cities, as well as the multiple industries and people within it

61 (Howkin, 2010). However, the use of the ecology metaphor is developmental and is rather abstract with few conceptual or empirical underpinnings, yet it does help us to make sense of how the processes of the city can be imagined. This chapter will use empirical studies to show the interconnectedness between firm ecologies and place, showing how the geographical context city of Liverpool is the place where the ecologies are situated. Following Soja (1980), not only is there a dialectic between people and place but also the industry, as people make up the workforce, firms and institutions found in cities that in turn influence place and are conditioned by place. This requires a framework that does indeed focus on the city, both the people and the physically built environment, but can also be used in order to understand the city in relation to a particular industry.

Howkins (2010) argues that for ecologies to flourish, we need a place that can offer diversity, change, learning and adaption in both scale and scope. Furthermore, these places will have the most people, active markets, an appropriately built environment and a modern infrastructure such as broadband communication. It has been outlined above; that an ecological perspective provides more than what Howkins (2010) initially looked for in terms of conceptual frameworks on composition of ecologies. It is no surprise that cities have been the location offering these traits and why many firms across many different industries locate within them. The creative industries have been noted for their concentrations within cities and for cities becoming beacons of creativity (Howkin, 2010; Scott, 2000). The video games industry falls within the wider creative industries sector. There are several papers looking specifically at video game firms within cities, noting its uniqueness from other actives such as software development for commercial use (Cohendet et al, 2010; Cohendet and Simon, 2007; Grandadam et al, 2013; Howkins, 2010; Scott, 2000). What are less well documented especially in UK cities, are the concentration of life science based activities and the anatomy of a ‘science’ city. There is a body of literature that has investigated why we see the concentration of life science firms.