Geographies of knowledge-creating services and urban policies in the Greater Munich

The interpretative analysis of the new knowledge economy, through the Munich case study, is part of a research that is located in a relatively unexplored area of urban milieu studies and has been carried out in strong sinergy with a group of scholars from various disciplines. This research, in investigating the activities that characterize the tertiary transiction of the urban economy, raises interesting epistemological, methodological and normative questions starting from the classification of knowledge and innovation generating activities (kcs-knowledge generating acrivities), in this creative sense, which is based on a logical-formal model. The research puts different perspectives in tension and in the case-studies seizes the opportunity to adjust the specific classification, adapting it to the contexts. It proposes and empirically tests an interpretative model of the relationships between business, city and territory and defines synthetic policy lines at the regulatory level. In this perspective, the Durkheimian concept of generative milieu is updated with particular reference to collective learning and an analytical frame is provided for recognizing milieus on three scales (dialogical, organizational and urban). The test and case studies concern the third type of milieu. Significant are the implications at the regulatory level emerging in the case studies. They refer to the possibility of a new economic policy, the emergence of new figures and functions and the possibilities of intervening on the milieu and landscape also with planning tools, as confirmed by some tests, in particular in the case of Munich. Some empirical evidence of the concept of milieu is proposed, in support of the general hypothesis, with spatial classifications of knowledge service activities in some European cities and metropolitan areas. The response provided by the empirical exercises is differentiated and a certain interpretative effort was required to recognize the milieu specific capacity to generate knowledge. Interesting references are the physical-functional and policy characteristics that can be used as a proxy for conditions and opportunities. The peculiarity of Munich case is that it is an alpha-city and a strongly connected node according to the Global and World Cities Research Network (GaWC). Effective urban planning, infrastructural and transport policies together with aggressive territorial marketing have strengthened the polycentric structure, qualifying it as a reputational node. The contiguity of industrial decision-making centers, the presence of financial institutions and the supply of logistics services have created favorable localization conditions for the post-industrial transition. It was driven by aggressive policies (high-tech and offensive clusters) that favored the formation of innovative clusters with strong direct interaction, often informal and face-to-face. It is highlight how the localization strategies of Kcs in the Munich metropolitan area have activated a sort of triple helix, an effective collaboration between private individuals, public institutions, universities and research centers, transforming the territory concerned into a powerful policy-making machine, with significant socio-spatial implications. This policy-making machine, at the basis of a strategic design that goes beyond the city and its metropolitan area, would favor the creation of significant structural conditions that can be interpreted differently by companies. Compared to the other tests, the data on Kcs (core, core related and collateral) have been enriched by information on annual turnover, an interesting proxy on the reactivity of the business system to the economic cycle The interest of the results does not only concern the spatial distribution of the most innovative clusters, but some collateral effects. As was to be expected, the Kcs cores are concentrated in an inner-city that is only apparently homogeneous from a physical-functional point of view, where type-morphological stratifications of historical interest overlap, dense and lively urban fabrics, with dynamic socio-economic relationships. In part counterbalanced by planning strategies, this localization pattern did not create social polarization, but new forms of stratification with demographic substitution and variation of the age pyramids. The presence of local capacity building atmosphere is also hypothesized, as in the case of neo-artisanal activities and the formation of new forms of local competition.