Berkeley Planning Journal

As the final days of 1 997 tick away and we ready ourselves for the New Year and the approach of the 'millenium, we are struck by the coincidence of two important planning anniversaries. The Department of City and Regional Planning (DCRPI at the University of California, Berkeley, founded in 1948, commemorates its jubilee anniversary this year. DCRP celebrates a proud history of readily evolving and changing with the planning discipline as well as provoking changes to it.

This anicle documents the growing presence of highly educated and technically skilled Indian and Chinese immigrants in the Silicon Valle y workforce. These immigrants are employed in the high-tech sectors of the economy at greater rates than the general population, are more likely to work in manufacturing than services, and have a greater degree of professional employment than the norm. Census and corporate data suggest that Indian- and Chinese-run businesses are already a substan tial force in the Silicon Valley economy comprising almost one-quaner of high -tech firms. Finally this anicle provides examples of local networks that suppon en trepreneurial dynamism among these immigrant groups and explores the implications of this research for economic development policy.

The growth and change in high -tech industries in Silicon Valley over the last 20 years has produced a highly bifurcated society, with little social mobility between low and high stratums of the society. The highly unequal occupational structure of high-tech industries, combined with the rise in out-sourcing of rela ted service occupa tions, h a s contributed t o the growing inequality in the region. In this environment, traditional models of labor organizing in the electronics sectors have been ineffective in improving wages and working conditions for low-wage workers. Other, more inn o va tive organizing efforts, ho we ver, have had more success. These newer efforts link organizing in the community with organizing in the workplace, build links between en vironmental justice concerns and work­ place safety and health issues, help break down divisions between the public and private sphere, and bring greater public o versight of private sector employment practices. While these efforts have yet to have a major impact in improving emplo yment prospects for low-wage workers in high-tech industries, they do provide some important insights into potential new forms of labor organizing.

The apparel manufac turing industry in San Francisco has experienced considerable growth since the late 1980s, due to the increasing organizational flexibility of the industry, the influx of Asian immigrants, and the availability of an industrial district adjacent to the CBD. However, the continued growth of the industry is in jeopardy because of AFTA, the minimum wage increases, and new compe tition for space in the industrial district from muhimedia and residential uses. Economic development efforts are currently attempting to facilitate a transition to higher value-added manufac ture, using modular production. This article argues that more traditional supply-side initia tives to reduce land, labor, and capital costs may be necessary first to preserve the industry.

This paper examines the politics of place making in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, pan of an emerging network of production centers in South China. Rapidly developed from a border town to a major city through transnational linkages of capital and kinship, the zone is a desired destination for migrant youth from all over China searching for work and experiences in the city. Temporary workers make up 66 percent of the Shenzhen population, yet many lack the proper skills and cultural •capital• to compete in the transitional economy. Authorities ' attempts to forge a collective sense of place among its diverse immigrant groups have been largely unsuccessful, as Shenzhen is n o t one but many places shaped by differences of class, native place, and household registration status.

This article is an attempt to build an understanding of curren t interactions between land development and transportation infrastructure in the Jakarta Metropolitan Area. The in tention is to pro vide a basis for further research in transportation and land use planning in megacities in the developing world. Four issues are revealed by the discussion. First, transp orta tion infrastructure development has promoted urban sprawl in Jakarta 's peripheries. Second, the increased accessibility of suburbs, combined with poor land management and corrupt public servants have resulted in uncontrolled development in Jakarta's urban fringes. Third, the curren t situation o f Jakarta's organic growth has resulted from the informal development practices which dominate the land development in Jakarta's suburbs. Fourth, the government should be more consistent in following their own plans and regulations. Otherwise, the uncon trolled development which has reached an alarming position will be far more difficult to handle.

Simultaneous with the global urbanization of the Pacific Rim countries is a change in the age structure of these populations. This article discusses the aging of the Pacific Rim coun tries and the implica tions for planners b y exploring two concerns: housing and care giver supports.

Back in 1 948, when Jack Kent opened the door at DCRP, its context and mission were pretty clear. World War II was over. Infrastructure backlogs were huge, following nearly twenty depression-and-war years of deferred construction. Cities everywhere were attempting to replan and rebuild, creating new fervor for city planning. With the hard years behind and bright horizons ahead, the new department was being organized to lead the way by bringing planning to California's cities. At about the same time David Riesman was reminding his readers·that city planning was the last stronghold of utopianism. The optimistic new Berkeley department set out to prove it.

In the spring of 1 929 when I first entered this Old Ark - the original architecture building - never could I have imagined receiving such a tribute on this September day of 1997 for my role in launching the DCRP. I was then a young man of eighteen fresh from Lowell High School in crowded San Francisco. This inviting shingled building, designed by Bernard Maybeck only a few years before, stood as a product of the Arts and Crafts movement. Breaking with the rigid confines of the Parisian Beaux Arts doctrine, it became for me a pivotal point for understanding the campus as a whole and thus shaping my identity as a person. In developing my own thinking about local environmental planning, I learned how relating the built environment to its own unique native landscape served as an invaluable context for nurturing creativity in the minds of young people. The social and physical environment of the Bay Area at the time provided an invaluable context for those of us building the DCRP in those early years.

We are living in a moment of historical transformation, characterized by the bipolar opposition between techno­ economic globalization and socio-cultural identity. As in all major processes of social change, the new paradigm is characterized by new forms of time and space. The compression of time in electronic circuits leads to the emergence of timeless time, in a relentless effort to annihilate time in human practice. The de­ localization of communication and exchanges leads to the space of flows as the spatial dimension of instrumentality in .the Information Age. However, against the logic of the space of flows and of timeless time, the roots of culture and the search for meaning continue to emphasize the space of places, biological time, and clock time as the lasting categories of most human experience.

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