Science Cities

Planning scientific campuses is a major issue for all metropolises seeking to attract and hold on their territory innovative and creative activities based on interdisciplinary exchanges. In a world pulled by the "knowledge economy", it is generally assumed that these places play a critical role in the development of high-tech firm clusters, which are the vectors for the creation of economic value and highly qualified jobs. Yet, this is not always the case, as the mild successes in terms of start-up and R&D job creation of the Berlin-Adlershof or Paris-Saclay projects seem to indicate.

Scientific campus and cluster developments abound abroad. In north American, European and Japanese metropolises, already well endowed in this realm, they more often deal with extension or modernization schemes than with creation per se, except perhaps for the accommodation of R&D centers of large companies or technology SMEs, which is increasingly undertaken in new research parks planned and managed by private developers, often in close partnership with universities. Newly industrialized countries of Asia are catching up very quickly thanks to very proactive state policies and large-scale development projects, yet their metropolitan governance is not at all comparable to the French and European contexts.

The IAU île-de-France has recently published several works on related topics among which "Clusters mondiaux" in 2008, "Entre projets et strategies. Le pari économique de six métropoles européennes" in 2007 and "Grands projets urbains en Europe" ("Large-scale Urban Development Projects in Europe : Drivers of change in City Regions") in 2007. In 2005, we published an issue of our journal "Les Cahiers" on the universities of Ile-de-France. But so far, we have not looked that closely at the relationships between the vibrancy of academic/research campuses and the dynamism of cluster ecosystems.

This benchmarking study aims at analyzing the urban design of academic campuses or science parks and "mapping" innovation's ecosystems of 6 metropolises across the world, in order to gather best practices from Europe, SE Asia and North America. In 2009, we have studied two cases of "pocket-size" yet highly dynamic metropolises in Europe: Helsinki and Zurich. In 2010, we'll look into much larger metropolises of South-East Asia: Singapore and Seoul.