By 1980 few could doubt that something important was happening in the San Francisco Bay Area. Stanford University Provost Frederick Terman, who believed “the business of engineering is business,” had graduated two students, Hewlett and Packard, who started a company we all know. 

The invention of the transistor, which replaced certain vacuum tubes in circuits, had enabled (after drastic miniaturization) the new semiconductor industry, an industry that blossomed first in the part of the Bay Area that was coming to be known as Silicon Valley. The Xerox PARC facility was pumping out innovations – though not commercializing them well, a fact profitably jumped upon by two guys named Jobs and Wozniak, founders of Apple.

Though other cities were slow to realize it, these events meant metro areas needed to attend to a third kind of technology. It – along with the first and second kinds – are introduced below. The relationship between cities and technology continues to evolve. The evolution presents continuing challenges for cities, most especially as they concern climate change and pandemics.

Rise of Technopolis  

These above-mentioned developments made Silicon Valley the first true technopolis, though the name didn’t yet exist. The phenomenon did not escape notice in Japan. Understanding the importance of sci/tech progress for economic well-being, the Japanese government built science cities from greenfield. Inexplicably, they turned to the Greek language to describe these cities: Techne (craft, household) + Polis (city) = Technopolis. 

Sheridan Tatsuno, a Fellow of the University of Texas at Austin’s IC² Institute, documented the Japanese efforts. His 1986 book The Technopolis Strategy served as blueprint for city projects around the world, notably in China, Korea, France, and the United States.

Austin, Texas, was experiencing a wave of entrepreneurship and technology development in the ‘80s and ‘90s, encouraged and mentored by IC² Institute founder and U.S. National Medal of Technology winner George Kozmetsky and his advisors, whom he called his Institute “Global Fellows.” Prominent successes included Dell Computer, Whole Foods, National Instruments, MCC (Microelectronics and Computer Consortium), the Austin Technology Incubator, the Austin Technology Council, and SEMATECH. Large firms like Samsung and AMD flocked to Austin to absorb the ample tech talent churned out by UT’s enormous engineering school.

Austin hadn’t duplicated Silicon Valley, but it had gone much farther than other cities in emulating Silicon Valley – and with a Texas twist. The IC² Institute hosted delegations and visiting scholars, from governments and universities far and wide, all of whom came to learn: How did Austin do this?

Late in the noughties and for ten years after, IC² Fellows David Gibson and Fred Phillips joined Profs. Deog-Seong Oh and B.J. Kang in the training and publication activities of the World Technopolis Association. WTA, supported by Daejeon City and UNESCO, brought representatives from scores of countries, mostly in the developing world, to South Korea for annual training sessions on how to create metro-area knowledge-based economies. 

So what happened?

Given all that, why is the whole world not blooming with tech parks, techno-cities and entrepreneurial glory? Many regions did succeed, in fits and starts, and in certain niches. But a disappointing number did not. Some of the reasons are:

• It takes “social capital,” i.e., people willing to form voluntary associations that are beyond family level yet not government level. Too many countries lack this social capital.
• Regime change. Delegates go home to find a new mayor or president has taken office, who believes any initiative taken by her/his predecessor is ipso facto a bad idea. (Ironically, a new mayor of Daejeon shut down the WTA in just this way. The International Association of Science Parks now carries on much of the same work.)
• Monoculture. New-venture teams in which all members are of the same age, gender, and ethnicity are bound to miss the bigger picture, and bound to misread diverse markets. A common consequence of “good old boy networks,” this is a frequent reason for business failure in the US and worldwide.
• Tradition is slow to change in many locales, with parents pressuring ambitious offspring to give it up and stay down on the farm. 
• 
  

Downsides appeared

Though many regions are still trying, leaders and citizens in other locales now think they might not want a technopolis after all. Why not?

• By boasting a high quality of life (QOL), i.e., music, art, outdoor recreation opportunities, and good education for their children, a potential technopolis attracts knowledge workers. Subsequent tech booms create choking traffic, and high rents that drive the creators of QOL - artists, musicians, teachers - out of the housing market and out of the city. The metro may now have more high-end restaurants, but the other cultural aspects of QOL decline.
• Real estate developers respond to the housing shortage by paving over the natural features that drew people to the city in the first place. That’s more QOL down the drain.
• Businesses come to town with good environmental intentions, but do end up throwing off heat (even more of it recently, what with AI, blockchain, and crypto), toxins, and litter. And citizens realize that techies don’t always have good intentions, viz. the recent misdeeds of tech firms, with CEOs paradoxically exhibiting behavior that is at the same time lawless and authoritarian.
• Cyclical tech industries leave city centers hollowed-out on the down-cycle, as happened very visibly in San Francisco.

These problems of success imply the Technopolis idea is showing its age. The concept called for governments and communities to grease the skids for private innovation and entrepreneurship. 

Today’s problems, though, are not problems to be solved by purely private tech innovation. Climate change, pandemics, wars in Europe and the Middle East, and US-China tensions call for new relations between industry and government, and between governments. The Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act have brought Asian-Tigers-style industrial policy back to America, even as Congress is deadlocked on other matters and the Environmental Protection Agency remains weakened.

Technopolis to Gaiapolis

For the above reasons - and because cities use the lion’s share of generated energy and emit, well, the other lion’s share of pollutants - responsibility for climate action reasonably rests with cities, with ensembles of adjoining cities (known in the United States as Regional Councils of Governments), and with the corporations, entrepreneurs, and citizens located in them. Unlike a national one-size-fits-all, the metro area as a nexus of responsibility allows realistic adaptation to local conditions.

Again borrowing from the Greek (Gaia, the Earth goddess), Sheridan Tatsuno proposed The Gaiapolis Strategy in a 2024 book, positioning Gaiapolis as the successor to Technopolis. Leading cities of the future, says Tatsuno, will:

• Continue to be innovative, especially in the molecular and bio-x industries that are most likely to affect society in coming decades. 
• Open more paths for increased human happiness, creating rewarding jobs (e.g., not stuffing engineers into cubicles a la Dilbert, as was common under technopolis), providing opportunities for populations segments that technopolis left behind, and smoothing urban mobility.
• Focus intensely on environmental remediation and regeneration, and
• Include not just metros’ surrounding exurbs, attending to agri-tech and environmental regeneration (Technopolis’ attention stopped at city limits), but to the still wider region. It would be senseless, for example, to smooth traffic in Austin’s stretch of the I-35 corridor only to have it jam up again in Waco and San Antonio.

Technopolis’ emphasis on cohesive communities is central also to the Gaiapolis scheme.

In Smart City 1.0, cities blindly paid tech companies to lay cable, erect cell towers, and emplace intrusive and expensive smart features that nobody wanted. SC1.0 was about top-down digitalization and surveillance. People were the product, not the beneficiaries; personal data were hoovered up and went who knew where. 

In contrast, Gaiapolis means listening to a city’s varied population segments, and designing smart features from the bottom up. Only robots and “autonomous” vehicles will be surveilled – not people. This is Smart City 2.0. Far from being anti-tech, Gaiapolis/SC2.0 requires smart infrastructure, data-intensive analysis, and support from artificial intelligence. But it will guard data privacy, and liberate data for citizens’ creative uses.

In these days of controversy over immigration to the United States, it’s worth mentioning that when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1957, a number of of talented Hungarian engineers made their way to the U.S. and eventually to Silicon Valley. Andy Grove was prominent among these immigrants who were instrumental in creating the semiconductor industry. Sheridan Tatsuno’s family emigrated from Japan to California a hundred years ago. The current wave of refugee immigrants will include, or produce, the next brilliant minds that will benefit America.

Just as the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web, enabled cities’ Technopolis transformations, intelligent infrastructure underpins the Gaiapolis transformation. The first two decades of this century were about digitalization. Intelligent urban mobility is just one illustration of the next decades’ character: The beneficial collision of the digital and the material worlds.

Cities may pursue the above principles independently, or may join a sophisticated TANDO Gaiapolis Academy learning platform that allows AI-assisted training delivery and knowledge-sharing among cities. (The ninety IC² Fellows are now operating as the independent think-tank TANDO Institute.)

Climate resilience in the Gaiapolis requires, for example, green energy as well as stormwater capture and water purification. Not more desalinization inventions, there are plenty of those, but effective scaling up, to large markets, of desalinization tech that presently works only in small-batch mode. Other technologies face a like scaling challenge: An MIT-designed super-capacitor made of modified concrete promises to store energy in roads and buildings. "If it can be scaled up, the technology can help solve an important issue – the storing of renewable energy," the MIT researcher told the BBC.

To meet such needs, TANDO Fellow Steve Walsh has for some years conducted an international scaling competition, in which existing but new-ish firms present plans for growing their technologies and their companies. Knowledge about starting companies has become widespread; at present, knowledge for scaling them is not. Walsh’s yearly event starts to fix this.. 

Cities attend to advanced technologies of three kinds. First, technologies for cities’ operations. These range from gunshot detection to urban VR/digital twins (Tatsuno’s current initiative) to garbage trucks that automatically empty householders’ bins into the truck bed. Second, cities as technology. Cities are the oldest open-source technologies! Ideas like the 15-minute city aim at reducing the number of moving parts in the intricate urban machine. Third are technologies that enhance a city’s wealth and environment, when turned into products, services, and value-added exports, by companies new and old, large and small. 

Few cities are skilled at dealing with all three. The three categories are not completely distinct, making organizing for them difficult. Success on all three fronts, though, can underpin progress on all urban challenges, from homelessness to traffic jams to disaster resilience.

There are obstacles to Gaiapolis-building. A city may need to tell a polluting company, “We don’t want you here.” Likewise, when a company – egged on by investors to dominate markets, to “grow fast and break things” – goes too far, tryingto control markets by taking over the government. Fatal for a Gaiapolis to host such cancerous growth firms, much less to offer them development incentives and tax breaks. 

Something happened in Silicon Valley. It shook the world, and it’s still evolving. It’s taught ambitious cities to attract and grow innovative companies, to communicate across business, government, and educational sectors, to share knowledge with other cities, to be inclusive, and environmentally responsible, and yet to deal with tech’s downsides. The newest urban frontiers involve humanistic green growth, and continued adaptation.

Readings:

D.S. Oh and F. Phillips (eds.) Technopolis: Best Practices for Science&Technology Cities. Springer, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4471-5507-2. 

D.S. Oh, F. Phillips, and A. Mohan (eds.) Smart City 2.0: Strategies for City Development and Innovation. World Scientific, Singapore, 2023. 

W. Moulton, F. Phillips, S. Tatsuno, Technopolis to Gaiapolis. TANDO Institute White Paper, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371636174_Technopolis_to_Gaiapo...

F. Phillips, Social Culture and High-Tech Economic Development: The Technopolis Columns. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2006. 

S. Tatsuno, The Gaiapolis Strategy: Designing Bionic Cities For Pandemic, Energy and Climate Resilience in the Coming Bio Renaissance. Dreamscape Global, revised edition 2023. 

Author:

Fred Phillips is President of TANDO Institute. In the 1990s he was Research Director of the IC² Institute. He is Editor-In-Chief Emeritus of Elsevier’s international journal Technological Forecasting&Social Change.

Acknowledgements:

The author thanks Jeff deCoux of Autonomy Institute, and Sheridan Tatsuno and Julian Gresser of TANDO Institute, for valuable ideas that informed this article.