State restructuring, urban competitiveness policies and technopole building in Finland: a critical view on the glocal state thesis

Abstract

This article examines processes of state restructuring and technopole formation in Finland and in the Helsinki region and takes a critical stand towards the glocal state thesis. The relationship between the nation state and the capital region cities is analysed by focusing on the implications of recent national technology, regional and economic policy measures on the Helsinki region cities and on their responses to national policies. The characteristics of new urban competitiveness policies of the Helsinki region cities are scrutinized with particular attention to the efforts of constructing technopoles as new technology-based agglomerations of research and business activities. The article concludes that the glocal state thesis is inaccurate to describe the Finnish situation as it provides a picture of the nation state that is monolithic and too rigid. In some respects, the developments in Finland have moved in an almost opposite direction.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Marja Häyrinen-Alestalo, Seamus Grimes, Jari Kolehmainen, Juha Laurila, Aaro Tupasela, Petri Ylikoski and two anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Earlier versions of the paper have been presented at the 21st Nordic Sociological Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, 15–17 August 2002 and New Technologies and Regional Development Conference in Seinäjoki, Finland, 8–9 November 2002.

Notes

1. The Helsinki region consists of four autonomous municipalities: Helsinki (550,000 inhabitants, the capital of Finland), Espoo (210,000 inhabitants), Vantaa (180,000 inhabitants) and Kauniainen (9000 inhabitants). During the last decade, the region was the centre of economic growth in the country, became one of the fastest growing urban areas in Europe and was labelled as one of the ‘hot new tech cities’ in the world (Van den Berg et al., 1999; Levy, 1998).

2. The share of R&D expenditure of gross domestic product (GDP) in Finland was 3.5% in 2002 which is the second highest level in the world after Sweden (Statistics Finland, 2003).

3. Corporate taxes are collected and redistributed by the state.

4. The term ‘Ideopolis’ was adopted as a catchword by the Helsinki region authorities from Tom Cannon's and Will Hutton's writings. They define Ideopolis loosely as “the city/community, built around and driven by the creative search for and the application of ideas, thinking and knowledge” (Cannon, 2002) and as a twenty-first century metropolitan version of the Italian renaissance city states in which the key elements are the airport, the university and the capacity to create new ideas that buoyant demand, intellectual capital and business self confidence help to sustain (Hutton, 2002).

5. A technopole is here defined as a geographically limited area which comprises an important concentration of high technology firms and/or high level science-based research activities and which is explicitly developed by urban economic development policies as a new economic area.