City and Technological Innovation

• Main Author: Manuel de Forn
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) 1999-10-01
• Series: Revista CIDOB d'Afers Internacionals
• Online Access: http://www.cidob.org/es/content/download/5553/54533/file/47forn.pdf

This article follows a trajectory along a series of ideas with the objective of establishing relationships between city and technological innovation: concretely, those that refer to the impact of technological innovation on urban life; the effects that urban crowds have on the production of knowledge; and, the necessity for cities to center their attention on innovation as a fundamental element to guarantee balanced, continued development. The article analyzes, among other things, the great transformations that have evolved in the city over the past decades, the significant changes that have occurred in the concept “production of wealth”, and the change in the space-time logic. The city, as presented here, is now no longer a determined geometric space, rather it is a network of variable geometric spaces. The article also studies the relationships between city and territory, the new role of the State before the increasing role of the cities, and the access mechanisms that should be given to cities so that these reach an appropriate level of globality. For cities not world-wide known, there is no alternative other than to create the necessary conditions for those elements and services to thrive that enable the particular city to be a leader in a determined sector. The big problem facing large cities lays in determining the processes of “what I know how to do” and inidentifying which elements ensure them to be truly competitive.