Currently such developments are happening in Europe - like the area of Donaufelder Straße in Vienna. It will host a lot of SMEs allowing them to cluster and cooperate.
This is the so called Homeworker complex, where people will live and work under agreable environmental circumstances. They will share facilities like secretary service, telecenter and of course a shopping mall. They will have studios and workshops in one minute distance from the appartment. Next block is the car free city, not to far away the ìwomens workshop complexî. So the mind returns back home, as the British-American Architect Tony Gwilliam states.
But what will these large complexes of SMEs produce? Which markets will they serve? There is a slight consensus in Vienna that there will be an attempt to cluster much of this potential around ìurban technologiesî, serving communities around Europes with special solutions for public transportation, energy efficiency and so on.
If cities narrow their focus on cities as customers, the path of growth is not sustainable. But cities can take into account that the enourmous gains in productivity will have deep effects on the demographic composition of the population. Even if the global urban service sectors are growing in size and in scope, this might not compensate for the simultanious loss of jobs and employment in traditional industrial and commercial service sectors and also for the net effects of centralisation.
Some authors like Jeremy Rifkin argue that we are facing
a globalized society where 20% of the people can produce 100% of goods
and services, which would mean that despite all political efforts to create
jobs we would have to look for entirely new solutions for sustaining 80%
of the population.