Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley by Margaret OMara

Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley Reviews

• 
  Raghu

  Two scientists, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, working independently of each other, invented the Integrated Circuit in the late 1950s. It revolutionized the electronics industry and started off the explosive rise of Silicon Valley as a place of innovation and invention in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the late 1990s, the computer and communications technology companies in the Bay Area were at the forefront of the Internet revolution. It inspired many countries to want the magic sauce that would create a Silicon Valley in their cities. At various times, other states in the US have wanted to replicate the success of the Bay area. However, creating their own Silicon Valley has proved elusive to all of them. In this book, author and researcher Margaret O’Mara, looks into the essence of California’s Silicon Valley. She explores why it succeeded in California and why its replication elsewhere in the US didn’t.
  
  O’Mara begins with dispelling the notion that places like the Silicon Valley are just high-tech regions resulting from fortuitous combinations of capital and entrepreneurship. Instead, she calls them ‘cities of knowledge.’ They were physical manifestations of planned communities at a particular political and cultural moment in US history. The relationship between the state and civil society in late twentieth-century America shaped them. First, it was the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s that created Silicon Valley. The Cold War’s policies and spending priorities transformed universities, created vibrant new scientific industries, and turned the research scientist into a space-age celebrity. Second, America was suburbanizing after the Second World War. It created ideal environments for science to prosper, creating spaces where university, industry, and the scientist could create new networks of innovation and production. The suburb shielded them from the distractions and disorder of the changing industrial city. Third, though Federal policy built the framework for the city of knowledge, translating this framework into real economic success depended on local implementation. The suburban areas of the South and the West had huge competitive advantages. They had large defense industries, the ability and willingness to develop modern research parks and desirable residential areas. The large industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest, with less defense money and an aging and declining infrastructure, faced huge hurdles in attracting high-tech industry. Given this context, the author analyzes three examples in (i) Bay Area & Stanford University, (II) Philadelphia & Upenn, and (III) Atlanta & Georgia Tech. She shows why the Bay Area succeeded while the other two didn’t and identifies four criteria for those who want to build the next Silicon Valley.
  
  First, you need a lot of money. The Bay Area attracted massive federal defense investments during the first two decades of the Cold War. This money enriched Stanford as an elite research university, allowing it to enlarge its academic scope and physical size, prompting an explosive upswing of industrial research and high-tech production. Federal R&D funding declined after 1965. As it receded, the consumer market for high-tech products grew. From the 1970s onwards, sophisticated technologies that once only had military applications became tools used by millions. Silicon chips, personal computers, and the Internet turned technology into a mass-market commodity. Venture capital replaced Cold War as the prime funding agency.
  
  Second, you need a powerful University. Stanford University was a giant landowner in the Bay Area. It had the political clout and institutional ability to play a leading role in local economic development. It embraced corporate partnerships and had lobbyists in Washington, DC. Stanford created many university-industry alliances, making it normal to have corporate America’s presence in universities.
  
  Third, you need control over land in the right location. Stanford owned almost 9000 acres of land in the Bay area, amid one of the fastest-growing and most affluent areas of the country. Having land was important, but location was pre-eminent. Silicon Valley has worked because it provides an exclusive environment. O’Mara says this reality may make many people living here uncomfortable, but the growth of hi-tech in the United States has never been a democratic or an egalitarian process. It is a system that worked because it concentrated money, power, and privilege among certain groups, certain institutions, and certain places. As planners and policy makers look toward creating the “next Silicon Valley,” they must accommodate the fact that success has always been contingent on creating an exclusive environment.
  
  Fourth, you need to make high-tech development the end, not the means. Stanford was lucky, with many institutional and geographic advantages, that its administrators had the luxury of focusing their energies on creating a community of science. It applied all its energies to building university research capacity, generating industrial research and production, and attracting white-collar scientists and engineers. Silicon Valley did not have to use science-based economic development as a tool to rejuvenate the region. Nor did it have to present a secular, inclusive image to deal with social issues like race, immigration, etc.
  
  Looking at all the above criteria, it seems quite plausible that others can create the next Silicon Valley. However, we know that there has been only one Silicon Valley, even though cities like Seattle and the Route 128 outside Boston are also cities of knowledge. The Bell Labs in New Jersey have been a phenomenal powerhouse of research, innovation and invention for decades. So, why didn’t New Jersey become a Silicon Valley with Princeton and the Bell Labs as the fulcrum? Looking farther beyond, we can see that the Chinese Communist party satisfies three of the four criteria. They own immense wealth, own all the land in China, have control over the best locations in China and want to build their Silicon Valley in earnest. The only criterion they perhaps don’t fulfil is that high-tech development is not the end for them, but a means for more domination and control. Is this one failing the reason they have not created their own Silicon Valley so far? That is why I am tempted to think that California has much more, the ‘je ne sais quoi’ which has made Silicon Valley possible only in the Bay Area! The criteria identified by the author are important, but there may be other intangibles which are perhaps necessary for a Silicon Valley’s birth.
  
  Author O’Mara discusses other cities of knowledge like Philadelphia and Atlanta and shows where they failed compared to the Bay Area. I shall not go into detail here, but mention a couple of points. Upenn is in the western suburbs of Philadelphia. Its plan for developing a city of knowledge came tied with urban renewal because this part of Philadelphia was very much Victorian when Upenn moved there. Much of the manufacturing decline in the US and the population moving to the Sunbelt and other suburbs in Pennsylvania were other reasons. With regard to Atlanta, O’Mara points the finger at political differences between the city and state politicians and the management of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Besides, Atlanta, being a southern state, saw intense civil rights battles in the 1960s. Politicians felt dampened in their enthusiasm to create a new, industrialised, science-based city of knowledge in Atlanta as the black-white divide loomed large.
  
  O’Mara notes that for more than half its existence, Silicon Valley has been a citadel of well-educated scientists and engineers who are white males from select universities. In the past three decades, the profile has changed and more Asians are a part of the mix in the twenty-first century. Engineers from India and China are more visible than others, but women, African-Americans and other minorities do not reflect their share of the general population. Unlike the 1960s, employees in companies like Google and Amazon have revolted against Pentagon projects and the management’s punitive response to democratic dissent. Sexual harassment cases have been hushed up by paying out millions of dollars. Silicon Valley’s AI-driven products have affected its users by applying racial, gender and other bias. Hence, in the future, cities of knowledge may not have it easy to stay away from contentious social issues.
  
  Living in Silicon Valley for a long time, I have always been interested in this subject. There is an enduring myth here that Silicon Valley’s success and uniqueness results from American free-market capitalism and that everything has happened despite the government. O’Mara bursts this myth and emphasizes the pivotal role that federal government contracts played in the economic development of the region. She shows how the close co-operation and interaction between public institutions and private enterprise fashioned the lay-out and demographic composition of Silicon Valley. Without the US government’s support of technology and investments, there wouldn’t be a Silicon Valley.
  
  I found the book insightful and educational, if a bit of a slow read. The general reader who is not familiar with Silicon Valley or its impact on America may find it less interesting.
  
  
  
• 
  Tianyu

  This is a brilliant story about how dispersion policy, federal funding, and the fusion of academia and industry contributed to the emergence of suburban knowledge centers in the postwar (and Cold War) decades. The first three chapters are critical to understanding American suburbanization and the history of Silicon Valley; the chapters on Philadelphia and Atlanta, as failed examples, could be quite dry especially if you don't know much about the geography and history of the two cities. A bit of a dense read with lots of details. I wish the author had devoted at least a chapter to Boston's Route 128 as a case study, since she references it rather frequently.
  
  I finally finished the last two chapters of this book on my one-year anniversary of moving to the Bay Area, so cheers to that!
• 
  Leah

  This book argues that a particular pattern of development during mid-20th century america can largely explain the rise of high-tech hubs. The pattern: research university + cold war funding, often in tandem, often in cahoots with each other. O'Mara states her pattern, and then gives three examples: Stanford, Philly, and Georgia Tech, and a conclusion in which she gives some suggestions for how to create more high-tech hubs. I don't know anything about history, so I won't say anything on that front, except she cites a lot of newspapers and stuff and thus doesn't really earn any street cred for being archivally rigorous...BUT, the structure of this argument really bothers me. Starting with a pattern and then matching various situations to the pattern does not "prove" the pattern. This is selection bias played out in text. At best, one might conclude that this pattern is often coincident with a certain kind of development, historically situated and so on. To claim that this is how you build cities, moreover, is not only bad history (we are not in the cold war moment!), but feels like pandering.
• 
  Tony

  a great read...i recognize there is a small audience for such a history: comparing three cities which leveraged their major research universities to create a regional plan for economic development with science and technology as the foundation.
  I love this stuff, and found the history and comparison between Palo Alto and West Philly pretty great stuff.