The rise and fall of industrial hubs is a topic that fascinates this blog and the excellent BBC and US National Public Radio series Six Routes to a Richer World discusses how countries as disparate as Germany, Brazil, China and the United States are carving their own paths to prosperity in the 21st Century.
In the US segment, the show looks at one of America’s industrial centres of last century – Dayton, Ohio.
The home of the Wright Brothers, Dayton also saw the invention of the cash register, air conditioner and even the self starting motor. In the early part of the Twentieth Century it held the most patents per capita of any US city and workers flocked to the region for high paying manufacturing job.
Manufacturing, and research, is largely gone from Dayton today and the question posed is could the successful cities of California’s Bay Area follow a similar path this Century.
Whether Silicon Valley and San Francisco fade will be a matter of historical forces that are difficult to see right now, but the likelihood can’t be underestimated.