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Regional development in Crete - some reflections by Phil Cooke
Phil Cooke, Regional Planner at University of Cardiff
I am sometimes reminded, reflecting on these Balkan experiences how ancient trade and cultural connections can be as profitable as any high-tech planning efforts, if not more so. Crete was at that time evolving its ‘Silicon Valley’ having established ICT and 5
biotechnology research institutes, also having attracted returning Greek scientific migrants who had worked in the eponymous US cluster, but my guess is that more profit was made from the Byzantine processes of gun-running than anything coming out of the newly seeded laboratories. We see this today with the sudden rise back to prominence of the older resource-based economies like Australia and Canada prospering from the massive increase in demand for minerals and fuels from the likes of China and India. My interest in innovation arose from the very context into which I had been born and chosen to work. Wales had once been one of the world’s early and great coal, iron and steel producers at the dawning of the industrial revolution. 95% of UK tinplate was produced at ‘Tinopolis’ (Llanelli) which was one of the first ‘industrial districts’ written about by Alfred Marshall (Marshall, 1918). Most American and Argentinian railroads were built with rails forged in the giant ironworks not far to the north of Cardiff, at Merthyr Tydfil, whose Dowlais works actually migrated to that coal port, the largest in the world where, in 1908, the first million pound cheque was signed by a coal merchant to pay for one massive shipment. When I have travelled by train from Hong Kong into China proper at Shenzen, both before and after unification, I have been delighted to see at each junction the points controllers bearing the name of South Wales Switchgear a still extant circuit-breaker company that is now part of the Hawker-Siddeley aerospace combine. Much of world shipping was for a time fuelled by Welsh steam coal, the economies of France, Spain, Italy and other carbon-poor countries similarly. But this innovative region, which pioneered modern steel making through the Gilchrist-Thomas process was, in Marshallian terms, massively over-specialised and vulnerable to global competition and any downturn in world markets. After the first world war this vulnerability was realised and a ‘long emergency’ of slow industrial decline began – with, crucially – no significant back-up. This, of course, was the essence of the Marshallian industrial district and remains so to this day in those industrial monocultures that still survive in, for example, parts of Italy. Except, perhaps, even if they may often be based on, for example, engineering applications, they occur in variety between clusters.
Understanding and making hopefully intelligent alternative regional development proposals about improving regional developmental capabilities has thus been my main intellectual interest and professional activity throughout my academic career. It now seems to me that the whole of the Industrial Age was constructed on the basis of a mistake. For the problems that interested me were by no means unique to Wales, but repeated with remarkable similarity throughout many such industrial monocultures. But, worse, the ending of that era was also constructed on a possibly larger mistake. Mistake one was over-specialisation and mistake two was over-diversification. For new industries were eventually attracted in to mop up underutilised and therefore cheap labour, but typically they were totally unrelated to what went before. I noted this in relation to the restructuring of the Belgian Limburg coalfield region in Cooke (1983), Gent in particular. I surmise that such was the surprise that, in those days, a remote Atlantic-facing and obscure Welsh academic should even know where Gent was, that it may have assisted the process by which a couple of years later I had been appointed a visiting professor in Louis’ ISRO graduate centre.
Source: International Encyclopedia of Human Geography
http://www.dime-eu.org/files/active/0/Cooke_07_Louis.pdf
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