Much literature suggests that knowledge-production activities are still heavily dependent upon geographically proximate sources of information, in spite of rapid development in telecommunications technology. Some analysts believe that the importance of proximity in knowledge production will eventually disappear with the continued development of telecommunications. The authors analyse patent citations and find that, after controlling for the existing distribution of knowledge-production activities, the proportion of local citations has increased over time. This finding reinforces the notion that in contemporary knowledge production and innovation the role for geographical proximity is increasing.

While the US, UK, France, Italy, and many other countries ended up implementing complete lockdown after tens of thousands of deaths from COVID-19, South Korea kept factories and offices running, flattened the curve, and maintained a low mortality rate. Extensive media coverage has focused on South Korea’s testing capacity as the primary reason, but there has been little discussion of the vital role of the smart city. In this paper, we describe how smart city technologies form a crucial part of disease control in South Korea, explain the social conditions for the extensive use of smart city technology, and offer critical insights into contemporary discussions on the issue of smart cities and surveillance.

This study approaches the politics of urban development from within the framework of the emergence of a new multiscalar growth regime and the path dependence of the Korean developmental state. Through a case study of the Songdo New City development in South Korea, this study looks at how the scalar division of labor among various actors has interacted with the emergence of a multiscalar growth regime. We focus on the logic by which different scales of governmental and nongovernmental actors cooperate and, at the same time, compete with one another for authority over economic development. Our findings demonstrate, first, that the new regime resulted from the emergence of downward state rescaling to the local scale and of private business as a key actor. Second, the regime actors have been involved in scalar tensions and have constantly negotiated the scalar divisions of labor among them. This research provides a contextualized example of a spatiotemporal logic in which statehood has been transformed into a network.

(2020). Smart city technologies for pandemic control without lockdown. International Journal of Urban Sciences. Ahead of Print.

This paper asks whether the technological development of a nation reduces the inter‐regional hierarchy in knowledge flow. We examine two scenarios that are the alternative to each other. The first is what we call the globalization of regional innovation system/weakening of inter‐regional hierarchy scenario: As many regions develop their niches in the global economy, the national “anchor” region loses its relative importance as the importer and distributor of new knowledge, rendering the domestic inter‐regional hierarchy less significant as a result. The second scenario is the globalization of national innovation system/persistence of inter‐regional hierarchy. The nation’s traditional anchor region becomes even more active in importing technology and distributing it to other regions of the country. To test which scenario is closer to reality, we employ social network metrics to analyse inter‐regional technology diffusion networks using Chinese patent licensing data for the 1998–2013 period. Our findings support the second scenario, showing that the influence of the traditional anchor region persists in the hierarchical network structure as new cities enter the network. We found five anchor regions: the three usual suspects—Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen—plus two that were slightly less expected—Dongguan and Suzhou.