The university and the city

Universities were originally urban institutions with a vocational mission, though later some of them lost these categories. The outstanding cases of university-industrial synergy are all American: Highway 128 around Boston, Silicon Valley in the San Francisco bay Area, and Los Angeles' Aerospace Alley. They display common features, notably their dependence on defence contracts during the Cold war, but there are differences in the subsequent history. Europe and Japan provide more negative examples: the English M4 corridor west of London, the French Cite Scientifique Ile-de-France Sud and the Japanese science town of Tsukuba have all been less successful than their American counterparts, though Cambridge seems to have been an exception; interestingly, its origins were different.